Those policies, if they include means testing, need rational means testing.
For example, it can't be all or nothing. You shouldn't be kicked out/lose all support by getting a job or a raise. Assistance can be reduced, but it should be something like pulling back $.5 for every dollar earned over since level.
Whatever limit should also be index to inflation.
An example of how to do everything wrong is what we did with SSI and Medicare for people with disabilities. Means test set in the 70s, no inflation adjustment, and all or nothing.
This is functionally equivalent to voting to reduce the value of investor property portfolios. Building enough housing for everybody = building new supply = reducing the value of existing homes.
Since American political parties are utterly financially reliant upon donations from investors with property portfolios, you're rarely if ever able to vote against their interests as a group.
If the US were democratic like Finland rather than being an oligarchy then it might be possible, but at the moment, 60-70% of US voters craving single payer healthcare isn't enough to make that happen and that would only hit a specific group of investors. A finland style "housing for everybody program" is a political pipe dream given the damage it would do to donor portfolios.
The financialization of housing has been an unmitigated disaster and must be rolled back at all costs. The responsible individuals are unfortunately long dead and we will never be able to hold them to account - the next best thing we can do is to reverse it.
The currently in-vogue answer is "give them houses", but your answer is more attainable. When someone asks me for money I take it as a reminder to donate to organizations that help the homeless and near-homeless.
The best homeless shelters have programs targeted at helping people graduate into apartments. They have social workers and counselors that try to help people overcome addictions. They partner with charities that collect donated home goods and turn them into a "free store" so that when someone graduates into an apartment they are able to furnish it. This is how the shelters in my area operate, but many shelters do not have the resources to offer this many resources.
The best food banks do not question your level of need, but offer food and hygiene supplies to anyone who asks. If someone owns a car and home but has run across hard times, these no-questions-asked resources help them make do without losing their car or their home.
Giving to homeless shelters and food banks helps us to have better homeless shelters and food banks. Shelters that have more resources are able to offer more to those in need, including helping people graduate to stable living conditions.
It's also just institutionalizing homelessness rather than trying to address the cause of the problem: refusing to give (or subsidize sufficiently) people who need houses.
> The best homeless shelters have programs targeted at helping people graduate into apartments.
The capacity and cost of this is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the problem with homelessness we face today. It's nice, it's good that there are some resources available, but it's not going to lessen the overall problem of homelessness.
I don't believe that is the root cause of homelessness. Rather, the root cause is actually lower-level and is a fundamental flaw of capitalism.
For all of time, there will always be a subset of people unable to work. Homeless people aren't just homeless, they're jobless, many permanently so. Due to mental illness, disabilities, drugs, etc.
Ultimately giving these people houses does not solve the problem, because they will still be very unsuccessful in a capitalist system. You need a job to survive. What happens if you don't have work?
We don't have a solution for this. Typically, we do bandaids. Retirement funds for those who can't work, medicare, social security. That helps a bit for those people who did work but no longer can.
SOME homeless people can be "trained" to be ideal capitalistic laborers. Most can't, and never will be, because of physical limitations of their person. We don't know what to do with them. Previously, we just institutionalized them. Disqualified them from society. That was awful, so now we let them participate. But they fail, and always will fail.
Ultimately, there is no way around it regardless of the solution you choose. There will always be a subset of people that cannot work and will never work.
If I give to a charity, I get a tax deduction. If I give directly to a homeless person, I don't.
Let's say my marginal tax rate is 50%. That means I could give $10 to a homeless person, or $20 to a homeless shelter, both costing me the same amount.
If someone has highly appreciated stock that is going to be sold, can donate it (e.g. through a DAF), and has the highest possible marginal tax rate in California, that person has the choice to donate $10 to a homeless person or ~$80 to a homeless shelter, both costing the same amount.
I'd believe that people were serious about this if every time they said "well, they'll just spend it on booze" then also went home and donated an equivalent amount to such programs.
I think the author agrees but is dismayed that these organizations don't "solve" homelessness. I'll offer the suggestion that it might be _even better_ to donate that money towards somehow providing housing.
I don't mean temporary shelter. But I agree there is a subset of the homeless population that have more problems than just homelessness. It may be impossible to solve their homelessness without solving other problems first.
Many homeless shelters are worse than sleeping rough because the security situation is so dire. At worst you can be locked in (yes, some lock you in for the night) with violent and rapey men but an averagely bad night might still mean having your phone stolen.
Too add further stress to overwhelming anxiety, many people who work in homeless shelters are also, unfortunately, narcissistic bullies on a power trip.
Nobody gives a fuck about the security situation of homeless people though and their reluctance to use shelters is usually chalked up to them being drug addicts unwilling to deal with the no drug mandates.
It was the books in my Dad's library that first got me to read for pleasure. I remember him suggesting The Lord of the Rings but it would be several years before I read it. 50 years later I can't actually remember what I read first but over the course of my late childhood, the one that sticks out the most is:
The Magus by John Fowles
I was maybe 14 at the time. You just never know because kids are weird.
If you look at sports, it used to be that people looked at basic stats for hiring. Then came the age of money-ball where people started looking at group success. Turns out that those people are often quite valuable even though their metrics might not be as sexy.
An unfortunate consequence of the highly metric driven world we live in is that the big picture people seem to only have a big picture with respect to the metrics.
I worked in Apple retail way back when, and had a co-worker who was the absolute best "customer service" person I have ever worked with. They had an unnatural ability to make anyone both calm and if not happy, then at least open to talking. Our store was 45 feet from front to back and on multiple occasions I watched them intercept an angry customer who had practically torn the door from its hinges walking in and by the time they'd reached the back where the "Genius Bar" was, they'd gotten the customer cooled down and in many cases actually smiling and laughing. As the retail management became more and more metric focused, they were constantly in the lower rankings for metrics, and yet I argued to anyone I could that they were an essential part of what made our store work and we needed to keep them around regardless of their metrics. Eventually I left because of the ever increasing focus on metrics, and a few months later I heard from them that they'd also been let go for failing to meet metric targets. The few occasions I've been back to my old store, the lack of happy or at least content people waiting around for their turn for service has been noticeable (at least to me in comparison).
I've seen things similar to this play out multiple times over my career. Too strong a focus on numbers and "objective" measurements, and not enough focus on soft skills and overall cohesion and how people fit into their teams. A team of 3 10x developers that don't mesh well on their own with a 1x developer who keeps them all working together smoothly by being a "glue" person is worth more than a team of 4 10x developers that only mesh ok. Everyone I've ever talked to in life understands this concept, and can easily think of examples from their own life. Yet somehow the lesson flies out the window anytime it comes to making hiring / promotion / firing decisions. I think people are afraid to make decisions like that which they can't back up with cold hard numbers, and while there's good reasons to want objective numbers for these decisions and avoid appearances of bias and favoritism, we lose a lot if we only ever focus on the tiny slivers of things which we are currently objectively measuring.
Like other posters, I read the whole thing and couldn't think of a reason for this device. I have experienced the many people cell issue but I am old enough to remember a time before cell phones at concerts.
This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem.
> This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem.
My friends and I independently came up with this exact idea at the most recent regional burn event, specifically to better coordinate meeting back up after wandering, and then discovered this device, so it's very much a real problem in need of solving.
Concerts are usually pretty easy to find your friends after splitting up. They are usually at the bar, restrooms, or a handful of viewing spots or seats. Big raves, music festies, burns, and other large gatherings are spread over a much wider area.
I get what you're saying, however, after attending Austin City limits Music Festival, where at any given time there can he 70K or more people in attendance, trying to find my wife, who was watching a different band at a different stage then me, can be a struggle to meet back up. (Especially after the band is finished and people start shuffling to the next stage for another band.)
It's also very confusing for a person who isn't very direction savvy. For this reason alone, I'm definitely going to look into these compasses.
Think of it as "Find My" but without having to rely on random people's iPhones to detect your tracker. There are pros & cons to each. In general, I think it boils down to this:
1. Find My networks are great when you're trying to find a thing
2. Totem-style GPS-based devices are great when you're trying to find a person who might be able to react to a ping
The problem I think Totem has is that the use case is pretty limited and the cost per unit is probably pretty high. It's basically the inverse product of Yondr[1], which also has a pretty high cost for what it does. As a parent of three, and also as a dad who regularly travels with tween/teen soccer teams, have an easy way to interactively track kids would be very helpful sometimes. I see Totem as a highly feature-reduced Garmin InReach but with a much more intuitive UX for the singular use case it serves.
Safety guys always ruin the fun. I was in the Marine Corps and every time we got to test some new piece of gear the safety officer was like "No, you can't live fire it off the flight deck of the ship" or "No, not here, that village is down wind of the dust you will kick up when it goes off." No, that has a kill distance of 6 miles, you have to fire it into a hill." Blah, blah, blah.
I may or may not be aware of hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship. My point being, your safety officer had a point.
> hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship
How did that happen? Our MarDet would occasionally do live-fire training off the flight deck (CVN-65); they naturally pointed their weapons away from the ship ....
Or are you talking about hitting the hull of a different ship, e.g., one of the tin cans in plane guard, or alongside during an UNREP? Seems like that would ... get noticed by a lot of folks.
Hypothetically, someone could have left a guest (like say an engineer from the shipyard doing sea acceptance testing) fire a rifle and an unlucky wave reflection might have bounced a round back towards the bow.
Really? To me, it is a very clear instance. Amongst my cohort, saying "The safety officer won't let us do anything fun" is going to generally always be sarcastic, unless the point is that some rules seem excessively and obviously pointless, which these aren't. It's more a backhanded way of saying "thank goodness the safety office stopped us / those boneheads from doing something that would have been incredibly stupid."
It depends totally on how you read it. In this case, my first thought after reading that was "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". There are plenty of people (especially on the internet) who actually do think that way -- by which I mean people that are serious when they respond with "you guys ruin all the fun" to others who bring up genuine concerns that will most likely have wide-sweeping ramifications.
> There are plenty of people (especially on the internet) who actually do think that way
Sure. That's why these safety officers exist. I think some other funranium posts state.that (paraphrased) "safety rules are written in blood."
That said, I suspect folks like that would tend to phrase the rule in a way to diminish the implied impact/likelihood, rather than enhance it or state as-is, as (afaict) the original did.
OK, you have a bunch of kids, who, under different circumstances, might be playing grabass on campus, instead, are in charge of incredibly deadly stuff.
Most US insurance will cover this at 100% even if you haven't met your deductible. Something about how babies cost more than a 3 digit outpatient procedure....
Yeah, but one that immediately make you sterile will likely burn out your eyes and cook the brain. In any case I was just pointing out this is urban legend of sorts.
> that village is down wind of the dust you will kick up when it goes off.
I'm always happy to hear that there are people saying these sorts of things in the military. I'm sorry it wasn't fun at the time, but the Safety Officer really was looking out for you. You really don't want to be the unexpected cautionary tale, like Bob.
> I was in the Marine Corps and every time we got to test some new piece of gear the safety officer was like "No, you can't live fire...
I thought the whole point of the Marines was to cause maximal amounts of damage. Are you implying there is a constraint on that?
But now I understand why the marines hate the navy: I had a buddy who'd been in the navy and he said they kept the kids busy by cleaning and painting everything but frequently they'd let 'em blow off steam by tossing cardboard boxes and stuff off the end the flight deck and shooting at them with the 50 cal machine guns.
We were good friends, attended MIT together, but if I thought the Navy would take many people like him I'd doubt their ability to fight a war. He was only in the navy because it would pay for school and AFAIK he managed to avoid getting any rank advancement at all. MIT requires, or used to, a lot of all nighters and he once said "I'm probably only sane with these all nighters because I did so much extra sleeping in the navy"
> I thought their point was to expose themselves to maximal amounts of damage.
I hate to be pedantic, but technically the whole point is to expose the enemy to maximal amounts of damage. Whoever that is. Anything else is incidental.
> But now I understand why the marines hate the navy: I had a buddy who'd been in the navy and he said they kept the kids busy by cleaning and painting everything but frequently they'd let 'em blow off steam by tossing cardboard boxes and stuff off the end the flight deck and shooting at them with the 50 cal machine guns.
If anything this should be why the taxpayer doesn't like the navy.
Everything is free now
That's what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we're gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn't pay
I did the same thing and it was also a great learning aid. Now I run my own my own set of plugins but this got me past that initial learning curve. I think it says something that it finally happened to me after 4 decades of software development.
Microsoft has a long history of fracturing programming language markets. It's not so much that it is a bad idea, more that it divides an already healthy market. There is MicroPython, Arduino, and Node-RED not to mention all of the C/C++ based systems out there: mBed, Zephyr, and RIOT OS. Another addition is not helpful.
