Homelessness in the US is not a housing issue. Simply walk through a typical homeless encampment or walk through the Financial District of San Francisco and it will be clear as day: it is a drugs and mental illness issue, and ultimately, a family issue. Good families will take care of their mentally ill members and get them the care that they need. If you don't have a family, it's easy to end up out in the street on drugs. Nobody wants to talk about families, though.
I travel to many off the beaten path neighborhoods (mostly) all over the west coast and the homeless encampments I see in places like LA and the Bay Area are just people who can’t afford housing but have cars and RVs to live in.
Kind of annoying because the places where 20 years ago you could park a truck are full of urban campers. Last week I was driving around in Fremont, a couple miles from where I grew up, and every square foot of road around the place I was delivering to was occupied by people living on the streets. When I last lived there in the 80s Fremont was just your average boring suburban hell where there’s no way they wouldn’t have cleared out these encampments. Pretty sure that’s where they had a bunch of signs basically saying “no camping” which they obviously don’t bother enforcing.
So you're saying that if there were homes available to purchase in San Francisco for 200k, that the drug addicts and mentally ill people wandering the street would all be gone?
Until very recently, there were condos and houses available in that exact price range in downtown Austin. Yet ask anyone who lives there, there are and were tons of homeless everywhere you went in the city.
There are other cities that are way more affordable than SF, with the same homelessness problem. The thing they share in common with SF are the "compassionate" policing policies.
No, I'm saying it's a complicated confluence of factors, it's not just a San Francisco problem and we need to address our affordable housing deficit nationwide if we really want a few key areas inundated with homeless "crazies" to be able to successfully wrangle their problems at the local level and stop being held responsible for the failures of decades-long and nationwide policies.
Being homeless can cause mental illness and addiction, as they are illnesses that occur to vulnerable people in tenuous living circumstances such as homelessness.
It's an all of the above issue, but housing prices surely have a role. Why do cities in the midwest and South have lower rates of homelessness? I don't think of Detroit as a paragon of "good families" but they have relatively lower rates of homelessness. Not to say I disagree with you overall, I think the U.S. often lacks strong family and community networks, but even with family there is a stronger push for independence here than I've seen in Europe where I lived for a few years. It's often quite positive -- people go and build startups, they move to new cities for work, older people stay active and remain in their houses... but it flips in the same way that you also have those same independent elderly people who end up in nursing homes far from family and family with kids away from parents who could be built in babysitters/childcare.
There is some truth to weather. But also those areas are less likely to get queasy about cracking down on vagabonds. Police will hassle beggars in nice areas to keep respectable folks safe.
On the coasts that is now considered horrible tyranny. So you gotta deal with the downsides of that.
That feels logical but I'm not sure it's true. Ex. freezing to death in winter - anecdotal but I visit my folks often and there are plenty of homeless people in Reno NV where you could absolutely freeze if you're exposed to the elements for too long.
My spouse told me a story once about when she was living in her car in North Dakota and there was a winter storm and all she had was a blanket someone gave her. Long story short if you don’t have anything you can easily freeze to death in your sleep there.
You're 100% wrong about this. My mother is a mentally ill drug addict who has been homeless. We forced her into care when it was clear that she could no longer take care of herself. It took help from Adult Protective Services and lots of attempts before they were finally able to make it happen. She would hide from them when they showed up. Finally, she got kicked out of the place she was living and APS saw the conditions and committed her.
What you describe is technically possible, but extremely rare. Even when someone is involuntarily admitted, the stay is typically capped.
Generally, as long as an individual isn't harming other people, "the system" doesn't have a reason to pursue a judgement. Many of these people are isolated from family/support systems or have nobody to actually care or advocate for them.
Further, many of them have complex cases. While treatment may be effective temporarily, it's hard to sustain the level of care after an admission.
This became a "right" thing when the Democratic Party--or more succinctly, the people they put on the ballots in liberal cities--have moved so hard to the left that they are unrecognizable to normal classically liberal Americans like myself. When these folks are running in the general election, they say all the right things to keep the votes from normal traditional Democrats who appear to have no idea who they're actually voting for. Once they're in, they go completely radical and do so relentlessly. Some of these DAs appear to be the worst, most evil, least-caring public officials I've ever observed in my life.
I'm familiar with that argument--but my suspicion is the whole "Dem cities are havens of crime" trope, is masking the true issue--in effect creating partisan polarization that distracts and outrages folks, in place of actual clarity, and results that shift the status quo in a more favorable direction (which, by virtue of such change not occuring, seems reasonable to conclude that said change must be imposing on some powerful interest--but what interest that could be, that wants there to be crime, I cannot fathom).
The data in SF is pretty clear (https://www.sfdistrictattorney.org/policy/data-dashboards/ , "District Attorney Actions on Arrests Presented" for example), and as the trend appears to be everywhere else, arrests are down and rates of charges filed are similar or even higher. In the SF case rates have been higher in the last two years than all of the previous data there back to 2011. Similar story in LA where filing rates did not appreciably change.
It's partisan but only because of the state of the parties. Democrat-run Austin Texas used to be heaven in the 1970s and 80s. Then radicals took over and somehow got elected and now you have a total sh*tshow.
So then you are aware that what passes for “left wing” in US politics is considered moderate in the rest of the developed world, i.e. Western Europe, Scandinavia, Canada.
Yet virtually all these countries have far better outcomes than us on most social issues, including violent crime and rehabilitation.
On the specific issue of policing, the left wing of American politics, takes an extremely strong stance on the minimalization of the role of police. Yes, this is in spite of generally being more economically right than most European countries left wing parties.
I hope against hope that you aren't acting in bad faith, because I'd hate to see discussion on HN further degrade into oversimplified sound bites.
The Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story and was temporarily deplatformed for it. The DC left called it a fabrication, as did "mainstream" media. Eventually, even the NY Times admitted it was real. Who is the reliable and respected newspaper here?
I did this back in the early 2000s, when Asterisk first became really popular. My plan was to create an Asterisk PBX in my house and hook the payphone to that and be able to use it to receive and make VoIP calls. Unfortunately, the project never got off the ground because I bought a phone 1) without any keys to the locks and 2) without the proper software and interface cables to be able to program it. I ended up selling it again on eBay for what I paid for it.
The bicycle industry is rapidly moving to factory stores. The big brands are buying out their more-successful dealers and turning them into branded stores, locking out any other brands that the dealer sold in the process. For example, Specialized will buy a store from a retiring dealer, get rid of the Cannondale inventory, and re-brand it as "Specialized Bikes". This strengthens their brand and creates consistency, while simultaneously shutting out their manufacturer competition from the market.
The smaller dealers in little towns are completely screwed. They'll probably perish and be replaced by the manufacturer's online presence. Perhaps local "mobile bike repair" outfits will pop up to do local assembly and support.
Imagine being able to play this and then just belting it out when you come across a piano at the mall or in a subway station.
I never learned to play piano; as a kid, I learned other instruments instead. This will always be a regret for me because I wish I could play. There's something so satisfying about playing and singing a song with such a strong chord progression right before the chorus. It makes you feel warm inside to play stuff like this. I have to substitute with acoustic guitar but piano would be so much better.
You can get a shiny new budget digital piano for ~$500 (I have a Roland FP-10) and get to a point where you can comfortably accompany your singing in a single year. I got my piano a year ago, as an adult with no prior knowledge or experience (I could play the guitar a little), and it's been great. It's not even that difficult, and every bit of progress is so rewarding, the feedback loop between doing things right and hearing the beautiful tones come out of the thing is very tight.
I can't really stress this enough, if you have ANY desire to play the piano and you can spare a bit of space and a bit of time, go for it. It's a good idea. It is all you imagine it to be.
As someone who has played guitar at a beginner-intermediate level for 15+ years and started learning piano within the last few months, why don't you start now?
My extremely limited guitar knowledge has still given me a head start, and I've found that the common advice - that music theory is simply much easier on piano - is very true.
For any decent employee, those are refreshed annually with a new grant that has a new four-year runway. If you're a good employee, the grants grow in size.
Yeah, I'll pass. Can you imagine how hopeless it must feel for kids here?