MeDotOrg wrote:So how are we to think of the homeless? As vermin, who must be exterminated before an outbreak of disease threatens the rest of society? Should they be quarantined? Do we say the homeless are them and we are us?
You can read statistics about how much garbage is collected, conveniently forgetting that the non-homeless world has garbage pickup.
I think one of the problems is that we take videos of homeless, we read statistics about garbage pickup, and we look at the macro without looking at the micro. Each homeless person is a human being, that for whatever reason, has fallen from the ability to house themselves. Drugs, mental illness, the unequal distribution of wealth in our economy, they all are contributing factors. It is a big problem, and a complicated one. I think one of the most important thing we can do as a society is to help those who are in danger of being homeless. Once you ARE homeless, the road back is a lot tougher.
One idea that is beginning to take hold is universal basic income. In the next 20 years, millions of jobs will be lost due to automation. We are at a point where our economy may not provide jobs for everyone, and we are going to have to deal with that.
Why isn't welfare considered UBI?
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
Markk wrote:You are a liar...I never said generally they are lazy and incompetent. I said there are lazy ones and very good ones "just like anyone else." ....
I was referring to what you said when you said, "it is a myth that immigrants are all skilled and hard working...that is a joke."
If you feel I misunderstood what you meant, I appreciate the clarification.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:Wouldn't that have eased the pressure on the real estate market? When you have no room to realistically grow, you must build upward, or real estate becomes virtually unattainable for most. When you inject millions of people into an already developed area prices are going to skyrocket....
That is definitely part of the picture, but I think there might be more to it.
If LA is full of homeless people, Adam Smith would say that means there is a market demand for homes. If these homeless people are poor, there is a market demand for inexpensive homes.
The people you refer to as "cheap labor" is what Adam Smith would call highly productive people. People who can work hard building homes and are willing to do so relatively cheaply should be an important free-market component of fixing the problem. If LA needs more homes, why would an army of inexpensive laborors ready and willing to build homes be a bad thing?
Clearly there is a problem. I just don't think ambitious people who come to America because they want to work is a very big part of it. We need more people who want to work--not fewer.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
...restructuring the welfare state bureaucracy to give everyone the same entitlement would almost certainly not give people enough money to shirk work. It would avoid people starving on the streets, but it wouldn’t enable them to do much more. The truly indolent would not be able to “benefit shop” to collect the levels of income that really annoy people (see the UK’s Benefits Street for a great example of how this is a western world problem). Anyone who wants some creature comforts, which most of poor do (see The Road to Wigan Pier, for example) would be encouraged to work rather than the reverse.
Secondly, the evidence I’ve seen from unconditional cash transfer payments suggests that the worries about them being squandered are not realized. Most people will use money to make their lives better. Indeed, there is some evidence that most poor people suddenly presented with what amounts to capital will become capitalists. This is surely a good thing.
The lack of a welfare bureaucracy will also encourage charity and mutual aid for the really hard cases. Charity has, all over the world where welfare states rule, been crowded out by bureaucracy. Mutual aid (see Section II of the linked PDF), which probably provided better outcomes for the poor than its welfare state replacements, is all but unknown today. They will have a chance to bloom in a UBI world.
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization." - Will Durant "We've kept more promises than we've even made" - Donald Trump "Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist." - Edwin Land
Markk wrote:You are a liar...I never said generally they are lazy and incompetent. I said there are lazy ones and very good ones "just like anyone else." ....
I was referring to what you said when you said, "it is a myth that immigrants are all skilled and hard working...that is a joke."
If you feel I misunderstood what you meant, I appreciate the clarification.
Yes...and the key word is 'all'...and you left out what else I said.
Also, it is a myth that immigrants are all skilled and hard working...that is a joke. I help manage a company full of immigrants and huge percentage are lazy, unreliable, and most are not skilled at all beyond general labor. I have to tell them to put their phones down all the time. Some are very hard workers and some are very skilled...but most milk the system and the turnover rate is probably 25% or more after 3 or 4 months. I can't begin to tell you how far off you are on this, not even in the ball park.
Like I said, you are picking out what you want to here.
How many illegal immigrants, from south of the border, do you know and manage in a work environment?
Don't take life so seriously in that " sooner or later we are just old men in funny clothes" "Tom 'T-Bone' Wolk"
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:Gee, I made the observation on a couple threads now that limited geography, combined with a ____ load of people, combined with a strong economy driving up housing, combined with flooding the labor market with cheap labor has factored strongly in the increase of homeless in SoCal.
Are we back to that point, or are we sticking with drugs?
- Doc
You said something like that, but I don't recall any data that says that flooding the market with cheap labor is a factor. Nothing in the papers or articles I looked at listed that as a factor.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Wouldn't that have eased the pressure on the real estate market? When you have no room to realistically grow, you must build upward, or real estate becomes virtually unattainable for most. When you inject millions of people into an already developed area prices are going to skyrocket.
I don't know why people are so scared of looking at real market factors. Everyone is terrified of being called a racist when the fact of the matter is everywhere in CA once you hit critical mass with a city the rents and purchase prices for homes and apartments blow up. Allowing an inflow of cheap labor, relatively uneducated and unacculturated people, into a metroplex is going to cause issues and they're going to have a hard time adapting.
As I've stated before you have multiple factors that if you talk honestly about them you're just going to offend someone on either side of the spectrum. In one of the links I read LA county passed a $4.7 billion bond to build affordable housing and increase homeless services. We'll see if they can't turn it around down there.
- Doc
In my opinion, we can talk honestly about a factor only if we have data showing that it is a factor. To the extent the articles I've read talk about housing pressure, the pressure is coming from the upper end of the market, dragging up prices overall and throwing the folks at the bottom out of housing. Immigration into an area has effects beyond increasing demand -- it affects the overall economy of the region.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
MeDotOrg wrote:So how are we to think of the homeless? As vermin, who must be exterminated before an outbreak of disease threatens the rest of society? Should they be quarantined? Do we say the homeless are them and we are us?
You can read statistics about how much garbage is collected, conveniently forgetting that the non-homeless world has garbage pickup.
I think one of the problems is that we take videos of homeless, we read statistics about garbage pickup, and we look at the macro without looking at the micro. Each homeless person is a human being, that for whatever reason, has fallen from the ability to house themselves. Drugs, mental illness, the unequal distribution of wealth in our economy, they all are contributing factors. It is a big problem, and a complicated one. I think one of the most important thing we can do as a society is to help those who are in danger of being homeless. Once you ARE homeless, the road back is a lot tougher.
One idea that is beginning to take hold is universal basic income. In the next 20 years, millions of jobs will be lost due to automation. We are at a point where our economy may not provide jobs for everyone, and we are going to have to deal with that.
No we do not think of them as vermin...we do what we can, but we don't ignore that many of them are really bad people and beyond practical help....How can you help a person if you are in denial of who they are and what their problems are. Would you just pick up a lice infected person who has not showered in a year and take him in without first taking precautions? Or would you take in a homeless drug addict with tattoos on their face? Or do you take in a nice homeless old lady who is losing her mind? Would you take in a lady on crack who passes her way around the encampments for drugs? These are real scenarios, and who many if not most of these street people are. How many of these people have you taken in or helped lately.
I struggled with this big time. I was not about to take these types in my home. What i did do is a went and converted a old boat trailer into a BBQ trailer with 3 BBQ's and burners to make chili and soup. And the last Sunday of every month, or more, I would go out and feed as many as I could. We could feed about 150-200 people for around $200.00. or so.
It grew a bit and people started dropping off food, blankets and clothing on my porch. and I bought about 7 eight foot tables and were able fill them up with clothing and hygiene items at least once a month.
I did this for years until my wife and I just got burned out. And I am convicted as I write this that I should start it up again.
Don't take life so seriously in that " sooner or later we are just old men in funny clothes" "Tom 'T-Bone' Wolk"
I can't speak for everywhere but in the Phoenix housing market there is a construction labor shortage such that builders are not able to keep up with the housing demand. Since the demand is high for housing, builders are focusing on mid- and upper-tier products over starter homes and low-income housing options because economics does what economics does. The labor pool in Phoenix dropped heavily during the recession due to lack of demand, but aggressive anti-illegal immigrant legislation such as SB 1070 and raids on businesses also had an effect.
It suggests that the idea the gap in the labor market filled by immigrant labor gets filled magically by low-skilled native worker to keep up with demand is flawed. And definitely not in a way that would lead to builders taking on projects that ease a gap in very low rent housing.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
