Glad he is speaking up about this. Unfortunately the business model of the companies mentioned depends on their showing you what they think will keep you engaged. They necessarily have to curate what you see.
This is not a result of prohibitive housing prices or anything like that. Through my work in the homeless community I've seen and heard first hand that chronic homelessness is almost always a result of mental illness and/or drug use. Those two problems have always existed, but opiate abuse is much worse now than it has ever been.
Of course there are sad cases of people unable to find jobs who are otherwise 'normal', but these cases are in the minority. Many people unable to find jobs or hold down jobs beyond the most menial sort have mental illness that prevents them from doing so.
>This is not a result of prohibitive housing prices or anything like that
The counter example is in the article is one of a couple who receive $1500 a month and can't find a residence? You're argument is this is an anomaly?
I don't understand the mental gymnastics some people have to go through in order to convince themselves the problem in articles is not the problem. It happened in the Susan Fowler thread too.
There is also increasingly more evidence that drug use is more attributed to escapism or a learned behavior of happier times and should be treated as a societal issue and mental illness seems to be a catch all for all the societal ills we don't want to deal with. I'd probably be addicted to drugs and have mental illness too if I had to shit in a bucket everyday in my shit filled RV.
"receive $1500 a month and can't find a residence"
If they are receiving government assistance and not working, then the tie to the particular city isn't strong from a "needing to be there". There are communities in California where one can find two bedroom houses/apartments for $900/mo or less. Rooms, studios, etc. may be even cheaper. It may not be desirable to move to some of those communities, but there are options along the west coast that are affordable to the above situation.
Every day people make decisions of whether or not they can afford to live in a location and if not, move to where they can. A community I am quite familiar with have able bodied homeless people that prefer to live in said community and remain homeless. People working in the homeless services insist we need affordable housing for these people, it's never about whether or not affordable housing is available in other areas.
The area of drug use, mental illness and others is way more complicated. As adults, there is no way to involuntary commit someone to get them help, they will have to want to get help in order to change. It is a huge issue and outside my knowledge-base of how to best handle it.
Why should anyone value your opinion on this? The person you responded to cited personal experience in working with the homeless. I have a reason to give weight to their opinion.
They weren’t exactly sharing an opinion. They called to the claims of the article that contradict the other’s experience. They mentioned—admittedly un-cited—recent evidence that also contradicts the other’s claims of anecdotal experience.
That may be the case where you've done your work, but it's directly at odds with some of the information that's being presented in this article. For example:
> “I’ve got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” said Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien. “There’s nowhere for these folks to move to. Every time we open up a new place, it fills up.”
But, why don't they do what's done in China: Rent a room and share it with someone. Even if the cheapest rooms cost 1000$ a month, that would be 500$ per person, if there's 2 people per room. In the army, you share a bunk with nearly a dozen.
It certainly doesn't absolve us of having to build much more, but at least it's a short term solution.
What jobs are they working? How many jobs have they had in the past year? I can only speak to my own experience with the homeless I've come in contact with. Most are mentally ill or are struggling with drug addiction. Sure some of them have jobs, but jobs of the street sweeping, sign holding sort that can't afford them even the most meager housing.
Well, going back to the article, one of the examples they give is a university lecturer. Her income is over twice the current Federal Poverty Level, and she lives out of her car.
I realize I'm going for the ad hominem here, but I get the impression that you were so eager to start victim blaming that you haven't even taken the time to read the article before commenting on it.
I actually did read the article. The article mentions one or two examples of mentally typical people who are homeless. Ok. I've dealt with many many more than that who are most certainly not University lecturers.
But you could perhaps at least see the problem in a university lecturer not being able to afford to maintain a basic standard of living in the community where she teaches, right?
And if you can get that far, then perhaps you can see that the homelessness problem being described in this article goes well beyond the two causes you're trying to reduce the whole thing to?
I don't have much sympathy for the lecturer because it's probably safe to bet she has made a conscious decision to maintain her homeless lifestyle. I find it very hard to believe that someone with a PhD could not find extra work, or do something else entirely, to afford an apartment.
She presumably has other options given her education, unlike other psychologically disabled people who have no other option but to live on the street. Of course pathological stubbornness could be a disability.
The article has a quote that says exactly the opposite, btw.
> “Most homeless people I know aren’t homeless because they’re addicts,” said Tammy Stephen, 54, who lives at a homeless encampment in Seattle. “Most people are homeless because they can’t afford a place to live.”
That is extremely implausible. What fraction of them would be able to put together the $1000/month (in the scenario of extreme home buildout)?
It's only true in the trivial, unhelpful sense of "if we got housing costs down to $10/month or free, then all the people there could afford a place." But when we talk about housing costs in general and policy around it, we mean something like getting rents down from $3000/month to $1000/month (from vast expansion of building), not some artificial number that no amount of expansion would (scalably) get.
And I don't think you can really take one homeless person living at an encampment, making a self-serving statement, as a source.
I read the part of it that was cited as the definitive refutation of all evidence of mental illness driving homelessness and explained why a single self serving source isn’t good enough.
I understand the difference that a few hundred bucks makes to a grad student. I don’t think those are the same people that become homeless in significant numbers and that’s why I’m objecting to the narrative: the person that just needs housing prices a few hundred bucks less is not the person going homeless. Those are different problems.
Does that jibe with your intuition? Do you think if you made minimum wage (or some other very low wage) that you'd be homeless? Or do you think you'd find a way to live in a cheaper city? And if you don't think it would happen to you, then why do you think it's happening to other mentally normal, physically capable people?
If you have zero savings, and you lose your job, and you run out of money to pay rent, eventually get evicted, you will be homeless. It's really not a hard equation to understand. Once you're out on the streets, getting off them is very difficult. You need an address, and a phone number and a shower in order to apply for jobs. If you've been evicted before, landlords will be wary of you. You need support to get back on your feet, and this article is talking exactly about that: there is not enough support for the masses of homeless folks these days.
It's harder than it looks, apparently, because millions of low earners -- i.e. almost all of them -- manage to avoid this outcome. I feel like poor people are discussed in the abstract by people who have never actually been poor. Homelessness is still not a normal outcome. Mentally and physically able people are not routinely homeless.
You can try to reason through this from first principles, I guess. That's a fun thing to do on a nerd message board. But I'm telling you that this is not what happens in actual practice.
Really? My brother is helpless. He searches for any menial job he can find, and there aren't ANY. When he does get a job, it is paying far below the amount needed to pay for housing.
If it wasn't for my mom, he would definitely be homeless. These situations are not contrived.
Furthermore, what if the problem is mental or physical disability? That's not a valid concern of yours? Maybe the homeless population is spiking because of medical costs. What if you have a medical condition that requires medication or you lose your mind? You lose your job, you lose your medication? I honestly feel you're either a troll, or you're just... obtuse?
For the record, I actually have been poor. My family was one shocking expense away from homelessness for much of my life. Luckily we hung in there by a thread. Clearly our country is full of folks like you who think that anyone who's homeless is a useless and easily discarded piece of trash.
Keep in mind there are thousands of low income earners throughout the country that only afford their housing because of low-income subsidized housing programs. These programs are income-based to set monthly cost at an affordable level - sometimes only a couple hundred dollars per month. These people would not be able to afford housing even in low-cost cities without assistance. In areas where these programs are not available or not in sufficient numbers, homeless situations can easily arise.
Sure, and SSI/disability benefits play an enormous role here, too. But that actually bolsters my point, which is that homelessness isn't a routine outcome in the United States. A lot has to go wrong before you get there.
When you talk about poor people in the abstract, it's easy to contrive scenarios in which somebody loses their job at the gas station and is forced into homelessness. But in actual real life, that's rarely how it plays out.
Moving from San Francisco to New York is hard. Moving from San Francisco to a low-cost portion of the Central Valley is less hard (and an actual practical thing that lots of low earners probably do before they become homeless).
No. Moving from SF to NYC is not easier than moving to the Central Valley. The difficulties are different.
When I was six we moved to the easiest place to move to: early 90s greater Toronto Area. No crime. Lots of jobs. Lots of good will from the natives. It was tough.
The Central Valley is ravaged by unique social issues. To dismiss the issues because it’s cheap to live there is insane.
It would be interesting to get stats on homeless churn - the proportion of the homeless people who were homeless 3 months ago, or who will be homeless in 3 months - and then qualitative data on who those people are and why they're homeless.
The aphorism I've heard is that "People become homeless for all sorts of reasons. People stay homeless for just one: mental illness."
Note that it's not contradictory for a majority of the homeless (by the numbers) to have jobs and be homeless for reasons beyond their control, and yet for you (as someone who works with the homeless community) to see a majority of them as suffering from mental illness or drug use. This would happen if there's a large margin of people living on the edge: they're making it work one month, then they lose their job or their rent goes up and they're homeless, then they get another job or find a cheaper place and they're no longer homeless. From your perspective as a provider of services, these are transient folks who come in once and then you never see them again, and you wouldn't remember them. From the statistics on homelessness, they could very well make up a much larger fraction of the homeless than the chronic mental illness & drug abuse cases, particularly in times of great economic change like now.
I agree that mental health plays a huge role, but housing prices impact the healthy and sick, and if you're living on SSDI it can be hard to find a place to live in any city on the west coast. Section 8 waiting lists are miles long and the majority of new housing development is in the "luxury" segment. My dad had to leave Portland because he was living on social security and could no longer afford to live here and also eat.
Are you in the north east, if so then you're probably right because in the north east winter is so cold that being homeless is rarely a 'rational' choice, but on the west coast where things are a little milder the the calculus is different.
No worries, they won't put you in a self driving car that isn't perfectly safe. Considering Alphabet sold Boston Dynamics because of PR issues (remember kicking the robots) they won't allow any human losses.
> No worries, they won't put you in a self driving car that isn't perfectly safe.
That they think isn't perfectly safe.
It's not about what they will allow or not. It is about what will happen. Whether or not it will happen remains to be seen, even if Waymo does not allow it.
Agreed. Occam's razor is well applied here. Everyone else is investing in tech to get rich, I see no reason to suppose card carrying capitalist Saudi's wouldn't be driven by the allure of profit as well.
Don't fault corporations for exploiting legal loopholes to save money... They optimize what they must optimize as operating businesses, and if we the citizens want to compel them to do something we must pass the laws necessary to do so...
Stop moralizing the behavior of companies. They aren't humans.
If you choose not to buy apple products in reaction to their behavior, great. If you want to convince your friends to do the same, great. But legal repercussions are reserved for law breaking entities. Loophole exploitation is not law breaking.
I disagree with this whole heartedly. Laws like this are not deterministic procedures, they are more like best practices. Can you seriously argue that Apple is not a functioning member of society? For many its a daily companion.
It should be held accountable to behave like a good citizen within society like everyone else and not find ways to sidestep the law.
If society can oust an individual like Weinstein and hold them accountable for their actions why not a company? A company consists simply of a group of individuals making decisions with moral implications no different than an individual. Demoralizing companies is the most irrational proposal I've ever heard. Capitalism is not a computer program, it is a set of guiding principles meant to operate within a society of well intentioned and reasonable individuals that are held accountable for their actions.
But they are doing what's best for them without breaking the law. You cannot reasonably expect anything more from any actor in a society. In personal relationships we expect more (lying is legal but frowned upon), or else we break off that relationship, but the functioning of a business in society does not amount to a personal relationship.
This is why we have laws. Expecting people to be 'nice' is naive. They must be coerced.
If you choose not to buy apple products as a result of their behavior, fine. If you want to convince your friends to do the same, fine. But legal repercussions are reserved for law breaking entities. Loophole exploitation is not law breaking.
The entire and only purpose of laws and regulations is to dictate behaviors and punishments in a theoretically fair manner.
If a law is not broken, then any punishment would very likely be unfair as it would not be evenhanded in application.
I feel American political problems are rooted in having a professional political class, and a system in which politicians can enrich themselves by legislating.
If I were king, I would enact short term limits and regulation preventing any politician from increasing their networth while in office and for a period thereafter. Not applicable to myself of course.
> If I were king, I would enact short term limits and regulation preventing any politician from increasing their networth while in office and for a period thereafter
As an aside... I can't see this ever working, it wouldn't prevent monetary bribery, it would just arbitrarily defer it. I suppose it would at least make it less attractive, but that is subjective.
Would you accept that everyone in a community be sent a speeding ticket for prior behavior if a road's speed limit was reduced from 45MPH to 35MPH? In spirit, the first speed limit was set for a safety reason right? Clearly everyone disobeyed the spirit of that limit by going faster than 35MPH and necessitating the limit be reduced. Pay up.
Law is not just a set of confining rules like a programming language, exploiting loop holes has moral consequences.
Corporations are run by humans, some of those humans must ultimately answer for crimes of tax evasion. Just like the VW executive who is currently doing prison time for other corporate crimes (technically their vehicles passed the required tests).
Some people would prefer more than this to prevent scapegoating. i.e corporate death penalty... liquidation selling off the assets to the competition, dividing the result between the parties (government, citizens etc) defrauded or harmed. Unfortunately this will never happen with this size of company due to the impact it would have on the economy. The best we can hope for is government intervention, i.e impede company freedoms in proportion to it's crimes, much like a criminal record hurts an individual's job prospects. This would also make strategically immoral profit less attractive (Think of the Fight Club car recall equation).
Agree. But that should not stop us from beeing upset. We must of course focus on the law an closing loopholes. However, this discussion is much broader. A year ago i read a piece by tim cook lamenting about the eu demanding tax. He adressed the public and pointed out that most of the revenue is generated by apples devs in california not the people in irland therefore apples revenues should not be taxed in ireland. This is outrageous- tax is to be paid where money is made.
Every human being in that company should be held accountable for their actions. Someone, somewhere said "Yes let's do it this way", and they committed an (arguably) immoral act by doing so.
Be careful, you're rejecting the rule of law if you advocate for legal repercussions. What you judge to be immoral may not be judged to be immoral by others. When outrage of the masses is the sufficient condition for legal punishment, we have mob rule.
Apple should be held accountable by whom? The government? The consumer? Apple did not break a law, so law enforcement cannot hold them accountable. The consumer can decide not to buy Apple products though, that is a reasonable response.
[EDIT]
My incorrect interpretation of parent comment who means accountability on an individual basis (see children).
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I know where you are coming from but this level of extremely inclusive accountability would result in either: Everyone from the janitors to the legal team being held accountable for corporate tax evasion or: a company wide democracy on every decision that could potentially result in legally or morally grey outcomes.
IMO, in addition to individual accountability investigations, the company should be impeded somehow to make scapegoating a less attractive route (the hidden decision makers pushing other peoples buttons still get hurt by proxy).
Why would it be extremely inclusive? The janitor didn't choose to place the money in Ireland. As you go up in management, you typically see pay scale up, and the normal justification for this is that they hold more accountability. You expect more pay to offset the higher risk that a mistake or poor choice will hurt you. If the CFO approves the choice to do X, Y, and Z with the company's money, he should be held accountable on a moral level.
Why are we not allowed to have a minimum level of moral expectations for people just because they paid a small fee and registered under an LLC?
Hmm, I think I've misinterpreted your meaning of "Every human being in that company should be held accountable for their actions" I mistakenly related "their" to the company in the context of the article, but in light of your followup you clearly mean the individual. Anyway, we appear to agree :)
Be interesting to have a head count of those who following current tax rules, do not seek to minimize their tax bill. Tax authorities whereever, are certainly vigilant in maximizing it.
Be interested to see a head count of those who's income rivals that of a small country. In fact, id wager that the average middle income individual is held to a greater level of scrutiny and is called out on its attempts to minimize their tax bill than most mega large corporations like Apple due to its ability to hire lobbyists and lawyers to make the problem go away.
Trust is an important aspect. Especially at scale. If you were designing a large scale energy trading platform for example, that is trading hundreds of million or billions of dollars a day, a centralised database controlled by a third party is prone to corruption - when you get to that level of wealth, it’s basically guaranteed.
Or what about recording tax documents, or political promises, storing them on an immutable chain that’s unhackable (to the point that once it’s on chain the only way to modify it is to hack every copy on every node)
These are very large scale problems, and there’s lots of uses where databases will do just fine, but I see the key benefits as decentralised trust
Today I participated in voting (put your energy in the system!) in local elections and I must say, voting is something that would benefit immensely from blockchain ideas. Cryptographically secured ballots that are verifiable but also don't expose individual's voting preferences, it's very possible! Very intriguing.
Anything that needs immutability and decentralization. You're asking for non-financial examples, which are not immediately apparent to me. Say, for example, you wish to make an online encyclopedia but you don't want to have any main server, instead you want lots of nodes that mirror one another, and that way if one fails the others work. However, you want to make sure that the edits are cohesive and people don't just delete articles or put their own on, so you add a protocol (like a cryptographic hashing function and consensus algorithm) so that additions to the articles happen together across all nodes, and every node has an easy way to make sure that the "fingerprint" of the latest edits matches the ones from all the other nodes. I must admit, blockchains are good for this sort of project, but the need is particular and creative. It would be like making a fully transparent application where the database is visible by all. Not every application wants or needs this, but some things, like scientific journals, online encylopedic archives, ledgers, research that is timestamped, copies of financial reports, many things can benefit from living in blocks that are cryptographically hashed to ensure their consistency across mirrors and also ensure their cohesiveness between changes.
Ultimately, you can have something like github be a completely decentralized blockchain based service, but it's not exactly necessary, and although it may be more elegant, it's not easier to debug, but it does make additive collections of human knowledge easier to condense, branch off, extend, and reason about.
It's not about one being infeasible to make and the other being feasible, it's about eliminating points of failure. If I have one long cylindrical vertebrae and I break my spine, I'm Effed. If I have many vertebrae, each can take its own shock without really compromising the rest. Can you think of anything that needs decentralized points of failure and impeccable record keeping? Again, the only things that really come to mind are things humans are trying to tabulate or keep adding to (knowledge and research, transaction ledgers, what else?). Most of these characteristics are fully attainable with standard databases that do atomic writes and have append-only architectures. It's an overloaded term because people think blockchains solve problems databases don't. It seems to be a very specific use-case but in the future it is likely we will use such tech to note our "observations" and ensure that they are cryptographically inconvenient to alter. For example, we could take all of twitter, hash it, store it, use it as a starting point, and years from now (assuming Quantum Computing doesn't destroy all encryption right out the gate) we can positively assert that some specific thing was said at some specific time on twitter because the past events in the twitter blockchain we just made would be increasingly difficult to alter. I guess that took me a long time to bring to words: anything you need the historical data to be unalterable for is a good use for blockchain.
