There is some evidence that increasing minimum wage increases the prices of goods for minimum wage workers so that their rising wages don't actually give them more buying power, also we can just not make it illegal to build new housing in places where there is already housing but ymmv.
>There is some evidence that increasing minimum wage increases the prices of goods for minimum wage workers so that their rising wages don't actually give them more buying power
I've heard this before, but I've never actually seen that "evidence." Can you point me in the right direction?
I don't see how it can be true that rising wages results in no net gain if vendors aren't increasing costs disproportionally to their inputs. A simple model of product cost is labor costs + "other things" like materials, retail overhead, etc, multiplied by some profit margin. If worker wages double, only the labor costs have doubled. The non-zero "other things" have not doubled (they may increase, but you can apply this argument recursively until you get to the base case), so the ultimate price cannot have increased by the same proportion. Thus, all workers should have a net gain.
Yes, I mentioned that already. The argument applies recursively, and the total increase is always less than the wage increase as long as there is some cost somewhere in the supply chain that is not responsive to wage increase. This could be land, or raw materials cost, or fixed tariffs, or fuel costs, compute, infrastructure, doesn't matter. The whole thing is a linear function, so doubling is the max increase that can occur, and any costs that don't respond must lower the ultimate increase.
Exactly we must have a workers revolution, where the buregious is overthrown and the streets run red with the blood of capitalists. Then when we have no more of those parasitic capitalists sucking out the blood of the working man we will establish a glorious dictatorship of the proletariat wherein all will care for and love one another equally, where profit will be no more and the goods and services will flow through the streets without end for every person to be able to do whatever they want.
Then not long after the organs of the state will wither away as they will no longer be needed as tools of exploitation by those who own the means of production.
Come comrade join me in this glorious future, for this time we will have REAL communism that will REALLY work, unlike all others that came before us.
I don't think this is super true, I think people become the random guy yelling at trees rather than some guy who works at the Duane Reade because homelessness causes you to go insane
I'm no expert on homelessness, but I've spent a number of years assembling and distributing care packages for the homeless population in my area (not in California). I started doing this after seeing the body of a person who had died on the sidewalk from hypothermia one winter.
I've learned a whole lot of things from talking with these people over the years.
My first observation is that about half of them are homeless because they have serious mental or emotional problems that prevent them from functioning in society.
About half have serious drug or alcohol problems. There is an enormous overlap between this group and the mentally/emotionally ill group.
A smaller percentage are young people who have, basically, dropped out of "the rat race". They have chosen that life.
And the smallest percentage are people who suffered a serious blow in their life and were unable to recover. Most often, this was a serious illness of some sort. Sometimes it was the death of a loved one, a terrible divorce, that sort of thing.
I have developed a kind of "sixth sense" for telling if someone is homeless or not (you very often can't tell just by a casual look). I remember making my rounds one evening and spotting a 30something guy, clean, clean clothes, etc. But my sense told me he was homeless.
I approached him and offered a care package. He was exceptionally grateful. He told me that he'd been homeless for about a week, as a result of a horrific divorces in which he lost everything, followed by losing his job because he couldn't function as a result of his marital trouble.
I knew, and told him, that if he stayed on the street for very long, he would become trapped, and become one of the grizzled people yelling at trees sooner or later.
One of the things that makes this issue so hard is that there isn't just one cause of homelessness. It's a complicated problem. But one thing is very clear to me -- as a society, we are failing these people. The US is the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the planet. That we allow people to live like this is criminally negligent and inhumane.
And, another thing I learned because I've seen it first-hand, is that no matter how comfortable, established, or well-off you are -- it's possible for you to become homeless far faster than you would ever think.
So I think your observations can be broadly true and also that if you caught the people who are chronically homeless as they were falling out of being homed they would seem way less insane and their problems would be far more tractable
When you can't afford your place anymore; you live in your car and join a cheap gym with showers or sleep on the sofa of friends and family. Most people don't remain homeless, and aid spent for this group of homeless are super effective at getting them out of homelessness faster. The person that is driven to yelling at trees caused the stress of being homeless with no other underlying conditions, is the ultra-rare.
The people you see shouting on the street are usually suffering from schizophrenia, which has a base rate of 1% in the general population but exceeds 20% among the homelessness. Untreated schizophrenia will lead someone to homelessness, almost inevitably.
Yes, homelessness absolutely causes people to go insane. I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.
But some people end up homeless because their mental health issues weren't treated (or weren't treated well) while they were still housed and functional. It can only take a few bad episodes to lose your job, and the next job, and then your home, and then you're screaming at the pigeons at 2pm in SOMA.
That's certainly true. When I was homeless (nearly 40 years ago, and thankfully only for seven months or so), I absolutely self-medicated to deal with the hopelessness, isolation and fear I felt not having any place to go.
Interestingly (and yes, I know I'm an outlier), about nine months after getting off the streets, it was not wanting that again that got me to stop self-medicating (cocaine) when I found myself getting ready to spend my rent money on drugs, and haven't touched cocaine since.
Sadly, many folks are unable to get off that particular hamster wheel without lots of help.
All that said, as others have pointed out, those with mental health and substance abuse issues are a tiny minority of the homeless population. In fact, a majority of Americans are just one unexpected $600 emergency from becoming homeless themselves.
> All that said, as others have pointed out, those with mental health and substance abuse issues are a tiny minority of the homeless population. In fact, a majority of Americans are just one unexpected $600 emergency from becoming homeless themselves.
They are a tiny amount of the homeless population but not a tiny amount of the chronic homeless population. That is an important distinction: people who are homeless for a couple of weeks vs. people who are homeless for years. The sad case occurs when temporary homelessness converts into chronic homelessness, which often corresponds with substance abuse (i.e. someone became homeless, but rather than having that problem fixed, it just became much worse). IMHO, we should dump a lot of resources in making sure easy cases of homelessness (just need a house) don't become hard cases (need drug rehab, lots of additional social resources).
A lot of mental illness is simply drug/substance abuse related, which...yes, you might start going for cheap street drugs after becoming homeless, but it is also likely your parents kicked you out because you wouldn't stop doing drugs.
The vast majority of people who experience homelessness are on the streets for 1 night before getting their act together and finding a place to live. That means the people who are on chronically on the street are dealing with more issues.
Some states (montana Minnisota although the later is less likely to succeed imo) have started doing this at a state wide level, I think Cali has a particularly uphill battle since the housing situation is already bad and the headwind that we really will never be able to change: prop-13. (I think all the other things that are preventing new housing CEQA, SFZ poor public infrastructure can all be changed if we do it right but I don't see prop-13 ever changing even if we get these taken care of)
The malign thing about prop 13 is is basically means that for muni's property tax doesn't cover required services. It also distorts prices driving them higher.
They invested a lot of money which is good and all of the programs they put it into seem like they will help, but I think their zoning reforms wern't strong enough to truely increase supply enough
Other people have linked good articles, but a good way to think about it is in Japan and West Virginia they have almost no homelessness and in both those places its very easy to rent a studio for under 300$ a month. Even for someone addicted to drugs you can see how its possible to manage 300$ a month (or for say a charity or city organization to come up with the money) without solving the underlying issues.
You don't understand Nevermind wasn't actually all that good Bandwagonesque BY Teenage Fanclub was actually better and more instrumental into turning the early 90s into an audio experience.
That is I think you are trying to defend someone indefensible position (a google engineer taking a kinda normal ai chatbot conversation and claiming that the AI is alive) by ignoring the core issue and focusing on instead an ansilary issue. I find the misdirection uncompelling.
I obviously could be wrong here and you could genuinely be wondering why this person would be mad.
The magic the gathering subreddit has to moderate out the word "proxy" or risk getting banned. seems plausable like there are just a lot of speicfic rules you gotta follow to be a subreddit
I can track down the actualy post if you want
I don't recall there being a specific announcment, but the logic goes something like this most people who use proxy are referring to fake magic cards printed to look like real ones and therefore talking about proxies how to make copies etc will lead to people cheating or stealing.
For what its worth i used the term proxy for a decade almost exclusively to mean a cheap paper copy of a magic card (or even just writing the word on a sheet of paper and sticking it in a sleeve over a land) and I find this restriction wrong-headed.
I wonder if there are other things we'd do with land if the price of land came down
Maybe we'd see more communes (or charter cities)?
I know for a fact there are people constantly looking for places to buy and if things were cheap enough they'd jump on it.
There are still swaths of cheap land, even in California. They also sometimes have water issues and often have a rather disagreeable climate to many. Plus meth and illegal marijuana grow ops, the latter of which are so endemic and use so much water that local authorities have just removed fire hydrants from entire areas.
Available land is not the limiting factor on new cities or communes. Look at the chart in the article and compare the amount of land used for urban development.
Starting a new city or commune is the same as starting a new social media platform, why should I move from my current platform/city to your new one? How do you get your first 1000 subscribers/residents? What do you offer that other places don't already have 10x of? I'm not going to move to your commune/app unless all of my friends and family do too. etc.
