Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
1. "It shouldn't have been reported on. It violated all the standards for publication... "...The AAPOR, AP, CNN guidelines etc require -- rightly so -- release of all findings, release of who did the poll and who paid for it, release of question wording."
2: "The questions were unbelievably biased and the cherrypicking of results even more so.... ...We know from other polling: Half of Americans don't know what socialism is. What would results have been if you asked a question which is standard wording -- do you have a favorable rating, an unfavorable rating of socialism or don't you know."
It's just so transparent that it's a leaked poll to throw shade at "the squad".
It is just meat to throw to their base. This is just tribalism101. Remember how people on the left said the tea party would finally be the nail in the GOP coffin? How those crazy fucks would end up alienating so many purple republicans that we'd have a lockdown of the intellectually lazy "center"? Well here we are, Sarah Palin is significantly more reasonable than what we have now.
People like vision, direction and confidence in a new approach to long-existing problems. People like hearing leaders get angry at the things we are angry at. It is true for both the right and the left. The masses like to cheer and hear bold things.
I take issue with a lot of the shit Mohdoo is getting for his proposed solution to CURRENT extremely mentally ill homeless. Not that I personally think it’s the best, but everyone else just jumped on top of him for its dystopian qualities and, more importantly, only provided preventative solutions. This basically implies “there’s nothing we can do for the current crop of extremely mentally ill homeless, but it’s better to let them continue their current existence than hypothetically putting them in a facility with trained individuals that care for them.”
Especially GH, stating that it depraves them of their humanity. If you want me to take you seriously, please provide an alternative solution for this group that results in their rehabilitation. And I don’t mean capitalist version of rehabilitation.
1) Able to form meaningful relationships with other human beings. 2) Able to sustain themselves in a way that they live to at least 60 years old without diet-related complications (diabetes, heart attacks, etc.). 3) No longer engages in self-injury.
Not a super high bar, I hope we can agree. Before coming up with solutions, keep in mind the premises...
1) Some of these individuals are non-verbal (not just that they can’t talk, but they have little to no understanding of written/spoken language of any kind). 2) Some of these individuals will completely ignore you when attempting to communicate with them. 3) Some of these individuals will attempt to get you to leave them alone by ANY means necessary. 4) Some of these individuals will refuse to trust anything you say. 5) Some of these individuals will have short-term and/or long-term memory deficits and won’t remember anything you do or say to them. 6) Some of these individuals are convinced self-harm is of their best interest. 7) When pressed, some of these individuals will become extraordinarily violent and require 4-5 linebacker-sized guys to handle one 180-pound man in a way that results in safety for everyone involved.
Please provide me a hypothetical REACTIVE (not preventative) rehabilitative solution that is more humane than Mohdoo’s alternative given these constraints.
As somewhat of an aside, in the field of autism there have been a bajillion different attempts at treatments with varying yet inconclusive levels of efficacy. One of (if not the) only empirically supported treatment for it is called applied behavior analysis. It consists of analyzing behaviors to determine the individual’s functional relationships with their environment, then selectively modifying the environment to alter their functional relations to motivate them to live their life in a way that at minimum satisfies my previous requirements for rehabilitation. This is always done as ethically as possible, consulting the individual and involving them as much as possible, but when the individual is too young or unable to communicate effectively it can involve doing things against the will of the individual. It can and has been critiqued as inhumane for this reason. It also has by far the highest rate of success in “curing” autism and self-reported quality of life assessments are typically much higher post-treatment (if only because they learn how to self-report and communicate).
On July 16 2019 22:32 brian wrote: only trump can have a whole party try to stop him from getting the nomination, rally the entire party around him afterwards, and in the end of his term turn the same party on him once again. after having half the party sell their soul to defend him no matter what depraved stupidity falls out his mouth or is enacted in his name.
i look forward to more blatantly racist tweets to create in fighting within the GOP after the strong bond they created in defending the aforementioned depravity. i appreciate though that we’ve once again found ‘the line,’ tho i find it odd that it’s here and not a few months back on some of the more insane shit.
i also appreciate Neb’s mentioning Trump’s lack of subtlety. dog whistle racism is all the rage. is trump just trying to cash in but not getting it? that would take the wind out of my sails.
Imo Trump largely won the GOP nomination because he doesn't try to dog whistle. He is open about it and the far right loves him for it. It doesn't feel like him not getting it, but more that he wants to appeal to the far right as much as he can because they are his biggest open supporters.
The rest of the GOP dog whistles because they like to still appeal to the center, turns out they don't have to because the right-center will still vote for a Republican no matter what.
On July 16 2019 22:32 brian wrote: only trump can have a whole party try to stop him from getting the nomination, rally the entire party around him afterwards, and in the end of his term turn the same party on him once again. after having half the party sell their soul to defend him no matter what depraved stupidity falls out his mouth or is enacted in his name.
i look forward to more blatantly racist tweets to create in fighting within the GOP after the strong bond they created in defending the aforementioned depravity. i appreciate though that we’ve once again found ‘the line,’ tho i find it odd that it’s here and not a few months back on some of the more insane shit.
i also appreciate Neb’s mentioning Trump’s lack of subtlety. dog whistle racism is all the rage. is trump just trying to cash in but not getting it? that would take the wind out of my sails.
Imo Trump largely won the GOP nomination because he doesn't try to dog whistle. He is open about it and the far right loves him for it. It doesn't feel like him not getting it, but more that he wants to appeal to the far right as much as he can because they are his biggest open supporters.
The rest of the GOP dog whistles because they like to still appeal to the center, turns out they don't have to because the right-center will still vote for a Republican no matter what.
Sorry, I know videos aren’t really allowed but I just wanted to share that this particular one discussed a lot of what’s being talked about in the thread with dog-whistling and the center-right voting with the far right instead of the other way around. The TLDR is that Barry Goldwater coined a lot of the common race/immigration dog-whistle tropes (and played a part in the creation of the partisan divide by race) in the ‘60s as a way to appeal to more voters and the current political climate doesn’t need to do that anymore to win elections.
On July 15 2019 11:13 JimmiC wrote: I’m thinking this was a bad move for Trump. I get his base will eat it up but the dems were starting to fight amongst themselves and this was a great reminder who the real enemy is. I think a big reason incumbent’s do so well is they don’t face the same fracture as their opponents do when picking who to run against them. If Trump keeps them focused on him that is a win for the Dems and I think Trump will since he needs to be the center of focus always.
I wish Serm was not so cryptic because I really struggle to see how this benefits Trump.
Dems never win when they get baited by Trump. This is just another distraction from Trump to draw attention away from Epstein or the Muller testimony this week.
Muller got postponed by a week I thought?
Yeah, its currently set for the 24th I believe.
Epstein connections make more sense anyway. Didn't realize that Mueller got pushed back.
Is epstein really that big though? These things tend to blow over.
Muller got postponed because they need to figure out how long the questions will be asked
A member of the government publicly admitted that he illegally conspired to release a child rapist. There aren’t many smaller scandals I can imagine.
Considering the people who could be implicated that we know about, this shit should be blowing up in fairly short order. The prevailing hypothesis is that Epstein wasn't running a legit investment business, rather, he was blackmailing the rich and powerful with videotaped encounters with underage girls. It has already been reported that authorities found his properties wired for surveillance, and they found a bunch of DVDs/pics in his safe. On top of that, he has a secret vault in his office on Little St. James island that no one can enter. This is reportedly where he keeps a trove of salacious material as well as "business documents". This all jives with what people who work on the island and Wall St. folks have said. There are a number of hedge fund managers and career finance guys who have no idea where Epstein gets his money, and based on what information they can find, it appears to be coming out of thin air.
This of course ignores the obvious pedophilia of people like Trump, Dershowitz, Clinton, and the whole host of rich and powerful. It also completely ignores Epstein's ties to intelligence services here, in Israel, and in Russia (among others).
The very reason Trump went on his racist tirades and talked about non-existent wide-ranging ICE raids was to distract from this story. It's arguably even worse than him working with Russia because it goes beyond politics and greed. Fuck Trump the pedophile rapist, and fuck everyone who supports him.
On July 16 2019 13:05 KwarK wrote: There are no secret radical open border policies that the Democrats are concealing. They exist only in your lunatic imagination.
To be fair, that could be said about 90% of the Democrat policy conservatives fear. Fox News and co. have been so far from reality for years now, when it comes to reporting policy substance, that in most cases the basic facts aren't even reported enough for there to be a basic conversation. Remember the "Obamacare Death Panels"?
This is why getting people out of the Fox News bubble is both incredibly difficult but also an important thing to work on. Fox News, Daily Caller, and all have a vested interest in misinforming people and spreading disinformation. Their entire business model is based around convincing people that everyone else is lying and that only they are telling the truth. This is all designed to keep people coming back. Of course, 15 years ago, Fox spun things but at least there was some semblance of reality in some of their reporting. That is no longer the case. They have shown they have no issue making up stories to push their agenda (or in recent years, explicitly push the Republican agenda).
Look at the migrant caravan narrative they pushed in the months leading up to the midterms. They were reporting on it non-stop, claiming outrageous things like there being ISIS terrorists within the caravan, and painting it as this grave threat to the US. I'll try and find it but there was a breakdown of Fox's reporting on this issue before and after the election. Before the election the topic was being brought up in the hundreds of times over a 24 hour period and they were giving status updates on supposedly where the caravan was and the happenings around it ("I found prayer blankets on my ranch" and other bullshit like that). Within a day or two of the election ending, they basically stopped reporting on the migrant caravan altogether. only mentioning it a handful of times over 24 hours and then not at all. How does this not ring as suspicious to people who watch Fox?
On July 16 2019 13:05 KwarK wrote: There are no secret radical open border policies that the Democrats are concealing. They exist only in your lunatic imagination.
To be fair, that could be said about 90% of the Democrat policy conservatives fear. Fox News and co. have been so far from reality for years now, when it comes to reporting policy substance, that in most cases the basic facts aren't even reported enough for there to be a basic conversation. Remember the "Obamacare Death Panels"?
This is why getting people out of the Fox News bubble is both incredibly difficult but also an important thing to work on. Fox News, Daily Caller, and all have a vested interest in misinforming people and spreading disinformation. Their entire business model is based around convincing people that everyone else is lying and that only they are telling the truth. This is all designed to keep people coming back. Of course, 15 years ago, Fox spun things but at least there was some semblance of reality in some of their reporting. That is no longer the case. They have shown they have no issue making up stories to push their agenda (or in recent years, explicitly push the Republican agenda).
Look at the migrant caravan narrative they pushed in the months leading up to the midterms. They were reporting on it non-stop, claiming outrageous things like there being ISIS terrorists within the caravan, and painting it as this grave threat to the US. I'll try and find it but there was a breakdown of Fox's reporting on this issue before and after the election. Before the election the topic was being brought up in the hundreds of times over a 24 hour period and they were giving status updates on supposedly where the caravan was and the happenings around it ("I found prayer blankets on my ranch" and other bullshit like that). Within a day or two of the election ending, they basically stopped reporting on the migrant caravan altogether. only mentioning it a handful of times over 24 hours and then not at all. How does this not ring as suspicious to people who watch Fox?
Survivorship bias. It’s like how the kind of people who fall for Nigerian 419 scams don’t ever get suspicious that they have to pay with iTunes gift cards. Normal people would, but normal people wouldn’t have replied to the first comically misspelled email. Most people know not to watch Fox, but those who do don’t question what they see on Fox.
When xDaunt reads about secret open border conspiracies that we’re all in on he’s too far gone to think “well that’s obviously nonsense” so instead he chooses to believe that when people assure him there is no such conspiracy they must know that he’s onto them.
On July 16 2019 13:05 KwarK wrote: There are no secret radical open border policies that the Democrats are concealing. They exist only in your lunatic imagination.
Perhaps you should educate yourself on what Democrats actually are advocating for before making ludicrously ignorant statements like this. This stuff isn't hard to figure out. When a political party goes out of its way to impede enforcement, decriminalize illegal immigration, and offer social welfare benefits to illegal immigrants, it is de facto the party of open borders. Even Mother Jones, of all places, is catching on:
Elizabeth Warren has an immigration plan. Here are the highlights:
Decriminalizes unauthorized immigration and returns to the civil enforcement we had before George Bush began Operation Streamline.
Eliminates abusive immigration enforcement and keeps law enforcement at arms length from CBP and ICE.
Reduces and reforms immigrant detention.
Reforms immigration courts.
Raises the refugee cap to 125,000 and affirms refugee protections.
Reforms legal immigration and creates a path to citizenship.
This is a curious plan. As near as I can tell, it recommends no actions to improve border law enforcement in any way. There’s nothing about either a wall or a “virtual wall.” There’s nothing about E-Verify. There’s nothing about “smarter” or “more efficient” enforcement. No one will ever be deported—except, presumably, for serious felons, though Warren doesn’t even say that explicitly. Expedited removal will be ended. The Border Patrol will be reshaped from “top to bottom,” and will focus their efforts on “homeland security efforts like screening cargo, identifying counterfeit goods, and preventing smuggling and trafficking.” The whole thing is very similar to Julian Castro’s plan.
I have previously criticized Republicans who accused liberals of wanting “open borders.” President Trump tweets about this endlessly. But I have to admit that it’s hard to see much daylight between Warren’s plan and de facto open borders. As near as I can tell, CBP will be retasked away from patrolling the border looking for illegal crossings; if border officers happen to apprehend someone, they’ll be released almost immediately; if they bother to show up for their court date, they’ll have a lawyer appointed for them; and employers will have no particular reason to fear giving them a job.
Am I missing something here? Does Warren’s plan explicitly make it vanishingly unlikely that anyone crossing our border will ever be caught and sent back?
"open borders" means literally anyone can walk in and be granted citizenship by simply asking, thus receiving all benefits of being a citizen.
Warren is suggesting more of a...open...entry? A bunch of people can be here without any legal reason to be, still get medical care and stuff, but also miss out on some other stuff. But the fact remains that her system does not turn anyone away. That's a problem for a lot of people.
The purpose of decriminalizing illegal immigrant status is to better address the problems caused and faced by illegal immigrants by allowing them to speak up. If an illegal immigrant is raped they may fear to go to the police due to police collaboration with ICE. Decriminalization isn’t legalization but it recognizes these are separate issues. It’s no different from the argument used for decriminalizing drug use, it allows a much better response to the root cause by decriminalizing the symptom. Just common sense policy.
Not providing money for wall or virtual wall (as I recall correctly this was the drone/camera surveillance wall proposed) isn’t helping illegals because those things do nothing to stop illegal immigrants. But even if they did, preventing immigrants from reentry is preventing them from returning home after migrant work. If you make it difficult to cross you don’t stop them coming (people still try to cross the Mediterranean in rowboats), you just make sure they only try it once and stay if they get in.
Too few courts is the problem. Asylum seekers have a legal right to have their case heard but the waiting list is years long. If you want their cases denied and then sent home then you need more courts. That’s a pro enforcement policy. By defunding the courts the government has manufactured a crisis. Process the waitlist and we can stop paying private companies $700/day to hold people for 2 years in the waitlist.
Nobody should be against reforming detention given the extremely obvious failures of the existing system. That’s easy.
Refugees have nothing to do with illegal immigration and most refugees are not from Central or South America. The refugee cap is distractory information, as well as just being a generally low number.
As long as emergency care is provided for all people in the US, which it is, preventative care should also be covered. It doesn’t make sense to have a policy where you only pay the expensive bills and deny the cheap ones that let you avoid the expensive ones. These aren’t open border policies, these are the rational responses to address the status quo that any pragmatist should agree with.
None of the policies have anything to do with open borders, it’s just more fearmongering. The real wall to immigrants is I9 verification for employees which none of the Democrats want to do anything about.
On July 17 2019 01:20 Jockmcplop wrote: As if the last 100 pages of this thread have dedicated to xDaunt not knowing what open borders means lol
When you can't publicly justify your opposition to your opponents idea's your only option is argue against fictional idea's that you can justify opposing.
Trump: says very racist thing Also Trump: I can't believe people think I say racist things, all I said was 'very racist thing' Trump again: oh no look at the language people use to talk about me
On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote: SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency.
On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote: Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness".
I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas.
You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly.
What is your proposed or preferential solution?
I'm not danglers but here's what I'd do: Liberalise zoning laws to increase supply of housing. Levy a land value tax to encourage development and raise money. Legalise drug use and levy a pigouvian tax on it. Use the proceeds of both these taxes to increase mental health coverage, fundprogrammes to reduce homelessness (such as getting them into permanent housing until they can get on their feet again) and to treat substance abuse.
This way you fight homelessness on multiple fronts. By increasing housing supply and development you make housing more affordable and by treating drug use, increasing mental health coverage and funding programmes you fix (some of) the root causes of homelessness.
Why do you think liberalized housing laws will increase the supply of the kind of cheap and accessible housing people need? You’ll just get another sea of McMansions because that’s what makes developers money. The market has no interest in supplying the kind of dense communities with public transport and nearby amenities that the poor need because they’re poor.
For the same reason there’s H&M and Gucci, Ferrari and Opel, etc. As long as markets aren’t too restricted and there’s money to be made the market will fill the gap. In fact the market is behaving exactly as you’d expect when you’re rationing supply. Take for example a shoe company which sold 10.000 shoes for 100$ and 100.000 for 50$ in a given year. If you limit production to 30.000 the shoe company would likely keep producing the more expensive shoes and drop the cheaper shoes even though the cheaper ones contribute more to the bottom line. This is what’s happening in the housing market as well. Developers are only building those McMansions because you’re restricting supply.
In addition it’s questionably that even if only McMansions were built it’s worse than the current situation. What happens if those McMansions don’t get built? The rich people who would fill those McMansions will instead bid on lower cost housing and price out said middle class. In addition as mr Sumner out:
The key point here is that by far the most effective way of providing “affordable housing” for average people is to get upper middle class people to vacate their existing homes, to free them up for middle class people to move in.
If high rise luxury buildings are built in a (low rise) gentrifying Seattle neighborhood, then it will become more difficult for lower middle class people to live in that particular neighborhood. However it will also reduce the overall price of housing at an aggregate level, and thus help working class people in aggregate.
Many non-economists make the mistake of thinking about living standards in terms of money and affordability. The correct way to think about these issues is in terms of output. If you build it they will come. We can “afford” whatever we can build. If America built 100 million McMansions, then almost all of America could afford to live in a McMansion.
The evidence to support that excessive zoning laws and regulation is actually overwhelming. I could link some of it if you’d like.
On July 17 2019 02:19 JimmiC wrote: XDaunt what do you think about punishing the businesses who are using illegal labour to increase their profits. With a penalty that was double their savings (from the lower wages and no benifits)? At least than instead of chanting fantasies about Mexico paying for things, the people taking advantage of the illegals would. This could fund the detention centres and so on. I feel like a bunch of people complaining are the same people happily taking advantage of these people as well. I mean your president was while he was campaigning about this. Shouldn’t you punish the Americans and not just the illegals?
I'm fully in favor of punishing employers/businesses that skirt immigration/labor laws. Your proposal isn't nearly punitive enough in my opinion. But punishing employers isn't a complete solution. Illegal immigration requires a comprehensive approach that tackles not only the incentives behind illegal immigration, but also border security broadly. There is no magic bullet solution. This is a problem that will require many, many changes to the status quo.
When illegals give employers SSNs that check out just fine, I have a hard time penalizing the employers. They did what they were supposed to do and the immigrant is being taxed. If the system of verification isn't robust enough, that is on the government to improve. So long as the employer is doing what they need to do, I see no reason to punish them.
On July 16 2019 00:17 Mohdoo wrote: SF Homeless issue stuff: Based on my time there, there is no way to half ass that problem. If you haven't been in some of the worst areas of SF's homeless stuff, you can't understand. I didn't either. There is an enormous number of people who are mentally not quite right. These shelters give people food and water, but the people remain fundamentally broken and wreak havoc on the surrounding area. These people do not have their qualities of life improved by these shelters. All it does is serve as a meeting ground for people who literally throw their own bloody shit at people walking by.
Consider this: When I was in SF, I was walking by a bus that shuttles people to Facebook's campus. In this area, where FB people work, there were multiple homeless people who were straight up bad. A couple of them would sexually harass anyone woman who got near him. One of the dude's *ENTIRE LEGS WERE BOTH BLOODY* because he was scratching all the skin off of it. He was just sitting there DESTROYING the skin on his legs and it looked like he'd been doing it for days. Imagine watching a dude aggressively scratching flesh that is already bloody. Then there was actual human shit on the sidewalks. You needed to look down as you walk because you will otherwise very likely walk on poop. actual human poop.
I forget the name, but there was this 1 street where it was like all the super messed up homeless people took over in some weird dystopian madmax scenario. It was entirely not safe to walk through that area.
In SF, it is like these 2 entirely distinct populations living side by side. And there are so, so, so many of these people I am describing. It is NOTTTTTTTT some people down on their luck who happened to not quite pay rent, but also had no friends nearby, so here they are sleeping on a bench. No. These people need to be committed to a mental facility. I can't emphasize enough how completely past the point of return a LARGE number of these people were.
You know how in most cities, you see homeless people just kinda mumble to themselves as they look through trash cans, sometimes asking for money? Not in SF. In SF, it is a totally different world. And again: there are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many.
In order for SF to solve their homeless issue, it will require full on billion dollar facilities to house these people, commit them to years of therapy/medication, on-site job training, on-site job counseling, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists...there's nothing you can do that is less than that while still doing anything at all. It is so hopeless.
If someone proposed a $100/year tax on me to spend $10M building homeless shelters, I would vote no. If they proposed a $1000/year tax on me to spend $1B on some super-shelter that expects each resident to spend at least 2 years recovering/coping with their mental illnesses, I would vote yes. The current approaches to homelessness do not come close to being sufficient for SF. It is a totally different world. If you have homeless people where you live, the situation looks nothing like SF. Portland is getting pretty bad lately too, but SF was like an actual state of emergency.
On July 16 2019 01:00 Mohdoo wrote: Right, there basically 2 different groups:
1. Homeless without mental illness or drug addiction
2. Homeless people WITH mental illness or drug addiction
They need entirely different solutions. If someone has advanced schizophrenia, a bed, a meal, a temporary address and some job leads won't help. We need to have a solution for the people who are downright broken as humans. In Portland and SF, there are a ton of support networks for people who are down on their luck. We don't have ANY method of dealing with the people who are fundamentally non-functional as humans. We just give them some bread, socks and say "nice, I defeated homelessness".
I think you're missing how your kind of "nice homeless" rummaging through trash cans without destructive or extremely noticeable mental illness aren't a separate creature from "SF and Portland homeless." It's social evolution and hard nights with the catalyst of their high population in certain inner cities. They're literally the same people at different stages of a growing homeless community, that you won't see transitioning unless the community gets large enough. I include access to drugs and development of a separate culture as more people stay away from the areas.
You can see it in the expanding Skid Row areas of Los Angeles. Two years ago, there were a couple trendy areas with studios to 2bedroom apartments running for $3-5,000 a month. Now, there's lines of tents and tarps on the sidewalk for a half mile surrounding. Stench in the air, needles on the ground, trash everywhere. This second area a little ways away you see regular disinfecting crews in white hazmat outfits trying to manage the growing typhus and Hep a by spraying the areas down and carting away trash. I'll probably see them and vermin control somewhere in the city while driving at work today. There isn't a SF poop-everywhere stage right now, but it's getting there quickly.
What is your proposed or preferential solution?
I'm not danglers but here's what I'd do: Liberalise zoning laws to increase supply of housing. Levy a land value tax to encourage development and raise money. Legalise drug use and levy a pigouvian tax on it. Use the proceeds of both these taxes to increase mental health coverage, fundprogrammes to reduce homelessness (such as getting them into permanent housing until they can get on their feet again) and to treat substance abuse.
This way you fight homelessness on multiple fronts. By increasing housing supply and development you make housing more affordable and by treating drug use, increasing mental health coverage and funding programmes you fix (some of) the root causes of homelessness.
Why do you think liberalized housing laws will increase the supply of the kind of cheap and accessible housing people need? You’ll just get another sea of McMansions because that’s what makes developers money. The market has no interest in supplying the kind of dense communities with public transport and nearby amenities that the poor need because they’re poor.
For the same reason there’s H&M and Gucci, Ferrari and Opel, etc. As long as markets aren’t too restricted and there’s money to be made the market will fill the gap. In fact the market is behaving exactly as you’d expect when you’re rationing supply. Take for example a shoe company which sold 10.000 shoes for 100$ and 100.000 for 50$ in a given year. If you limit production to 30.000 the shoe company would likely keep producing the more expensive shoes and drop the cheaper shoes even though the cheaper ones contribute more to the bottom line. This is what’s happening in the housing market as well. Developers are only building those McMansions because you’re restricting supply.
In addition it’s questionably that even if only McMansions were built it’s worse than the current situation. What happens if those McMansions don’t get built? The rich people who would fill those McMansions will instead bid on lower cost housing and price out said middle class. In addition as mr Sumner out:
The key point here is that by far the most effective way of providing “affordable housing” for average people is to get upper middle class people to vacate their existing homes, to free them up for middle class people to move in.
If high rise luxury buildings are built in a (low rise) gentrifying Seattle neighborhood, then it will become more difficult for lower middle class people to live in that particular neighborhood. However it will also reduce the overall price of housing at an aggregate level, and thus help working class people in aggregate.
Many non-economists make the mistake of thinking about living standards in terms of money and affordability. The correct way to think about these issues is in terms of output. If you build it they will come. We can “afford” whatever we can build. If America built 100 million McMansions, then almost all of America could afford to live in a McMansion.
The evidence to support that excessive zoning laws and regulation is actually overwhelming. I could link some of it if you’d like.
The land market isn’t a vacuum, use of land for one purpose necessarily reduces the availability for others. Urban sprawl makes the kind of high density blended use areas we need to build impossible.
On July 17 2019 03:13 Mohdoo wrote: When illegals give employers SSNs that check out just fine, I have a hard time penalizing the employers. They did what they were supposed to do and the immigrant is being taxed. If the system of verification isn't robust enough, that is on the government to improve. So long as the employer is doing what they need to do, I see no reason to punish them.
Government issued IDs with a modern approach to infosec and cryptography would resolve this and a hundred other problems. A biometric linked physical token that generates a code that can be matched to the identification provided would be easy enough to execute. SSNs are public info and only serve to identify the individual referred to, doing nothing to verify that the individual saying the SSN is that individual.
Half the country is afraid that the government wants to microchip them though so it’s hard to get done.
EPT
