Breakdown In Civil Order

[Shadowy Man]

Not what I said. If you are going to quote me you should get it right and quote the whole thing. I said in the grand scheme of things, for California, the fact homelessness is less than the national trend doesn’t really mean much. If you think differently, that’s cool. I could rephrase and say it doesn’t really tell us much

The point is that you had “no doubt” that California’s increase was because of decrease elsewhere.

For an opinion that apparently does not conform with reality you seemed quite sure of it.

Perhaps it’s worth investigating things before forming final opinions on them.

Do you think all the homeless in California are California native? The out of state homeless population in California is significant. That is a reality.

Citation please.

When looking this up and providing the link before I found ones that said at least 90% of California’s homeless became homeless in California. So while there may be some increase due to homeless people traveling to California from out of state, it’s a quite small portion.

If you have a source that has a much larger number, as you imply, please link to it.

Sure, if you want to believe what drug addled mental patients tell survey takers. Even at the low end of these surveys, out of state homeless are still a significant number. They do exist.

I didn’t say they didn’t exist. What fraction do you think they are? And on what basis do you know that fraction? That’s all I’m asking.

 

[TSwizzle]

What fraction do you think they are? And on what basis do you know that fraction? That’s all I’m asking.

Why is it so important to you about how precise I am? It’s not important to me where they come from but I do know they are not all California native. And this is based on various articles I have read about it over the years. If my perception is wrong it doesn’t matter, it makes no difference to what I see on the streets of Los Angeles every day. It’s getting worse, I see it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

MSN

Machine guns for self defense.
What could possible go wrong?

Extremely few people are hurt by machine guns. It’s hardly worth our attention and certainly not worth the political capital to seek a ban.

And I mean come on... It's been decades since anyone has been hurt at all by a nuclear weapon. Hardly worth the political capital to keep them under control either (I know yours was sarcasm; so was mine. Or it better have been.)

How in the world would we know?

If there was some handling accident where a bomb got dropped on somebody or the like it would be classified and we would never hear of it. And you're confident nobody was hurt in the North Korea nuclear tests??

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That's fucking crazy.

I want my Howitzer. Where's my Howitzer?

Up at the ski lodge.

Although I believe ours uses recoilless rifles, not howitzers. Artillery is the tool of choice for avalanche control. And, yes, they are in private hands. (Admittedly, though, always handled by ex soldiers who were trained on artillery by the Army.)

Alaska DOT used to use an old 105. Now I think they use sonic blaster hung from a helicopter.

My understanding that most places have settled on artillery in some form because a shell doesn't give a hoot about the weather.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The W87 mostly uses fusion for its yield; It is fueled by tritium. Nuclear reactors run on uranium (of which the W87 has none), although they can run on plutonium (of which the W87 has a very small amount, in far too pure a form to be useful in a reactor). Fusion reactors are at least forty years in the future (and always will be).

Disagree. A reactor won't care whether the plutonium is weapons grade or not.

 

[bilby]

The W87 mostly uses fusion for its yield; It is fueled by tritium. Nuclear reactors run on uranium (of which the W87 has none), although they can run on plutonium (of which the W87 has a very small amount, in far too pure a form to be useful in a reactor). Fusion reactors are at least forty years in the future (and always will be).

Disagree.

Oh, don't worry, I am going to.

A reactor won't care whether the plutonium is weapons grade or not.

Reactors are designed to run on specific fuel, with specific mechanical properties, in specific assemblies, and enriched to specific grade (if they require enriched fuel at all - heavy water moderated reactors can run just fine on natural uranium).

You can fairly easily turn weapons grade Pu into fuel you could put into a reactor; But having done so, it is no longer weapons grade Pu, and it becomes very difficult indeed to turn it back in to weapons grade material.

Dilution is fairly simple; (re-)concentration is very hard.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Fundamentally, the root cause of homelessness is a lack of homes, and the government does need to step in on this front, not by suddenly taking on a fundamental restructuring of home ownership but doing what it already can to expand both availabilty and accessibility to permanent shelter.

Most “homeless” people are homeless through their own life choices. A lot of them are mental cases who should probably be institutionalized. No doubt there is a shortage of housing but generally speaking, when government gets involved they are ineffective. California being a case in point. So if there is such a chronic shortage of affordable housing, why would the government let 10m+ people into the country? If government needs to step in then I would have them get a grip of corporations that are holding single family homes.

The thing is most of those mental cases are not sufficiently a problem to warrant institutionalization.

And there's no good answer to affordability. Fundamentally, land is expensive. Our county assessor pretends land is 35% of total in our neighborhood, while it's clearly not right (we have 50% more house than the building next door--we have slightly more land but nowhere near 50% more) I would assume it represents a reasonable approximation for the area.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Interesting article from Stanford with stats about California's homeless problem. It is truly horrific and considerably worse than other states:

Homelessness in California: Causes and Policy Considerations

For decades, California has had one of the country’s largest populations of unhoused people. In recent years, however, the challenges have severely worsened for the Golden State. The homelessness counts in California rose by 42 percent between 2014 and 2020, while the rest of the country had a 9 percent decrease. On any given night, the state has more than 160,000 homeless persons

About 70 percent of California’s homeless live outside a shelter system, sleeping in tents, public open spaces, or vehicles. That’s a stark contrast with New York, where only 5 percent of the homeless population are unsheltered.

Of course--it's much more possible to sleep unsheltered in California than in New York. If you want to spend the night outdoors in a New York winter with gear that you can reasonably carry around it's expen$ive.

Also, this:

California fails to track its homelessness spending or results, a new audit says

The state doesn’t have current information on the ongoing costs and results of its homelessness programs because the agency tasked with gathering that data — the California Interagency Council on Homelessness — has analyzed no spending past 2021, according to the report by State Auditor Grant Parks. Three of the five state programs the audit analyzed — including the state’s main homelessness funding source — didn’t even produce enough data for Parks to determine whether they were effective or not.

As the homelessness crisis has intensified, California under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leadership allocated an unprecedented $24 billion to address homelessness and housing during the last five fiscal years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Nine state agencies administered more than 30 programs aimed at preventing or reducing homelessness. Some of those programs did such a poor job tracking their outcomes that it’s impossible to tell if they’ve been successful, according to the audit, which marks the first such large-scale accounting of the state’s homelessness spending.

And when we have 30 programs to address a problem we have politics, not the end objective in mind. America has far too many welfare programs. More programs means more overhead, more hoops to jump through, more chances for people to fall out of the system. Organize it, more money to the people who need help, less to the bureaucrats. But the people who are helped don't make campaign contributions, the companies hired to administer things do...

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The W87 mostly uses fusion for its yield; It is fueled by tritium. Nuclear reactors run on uranium (of which the W87 has none), although they can run on plutonium (of which the W87 has a very small amount, in far too pure a form to be useful in a reactor). Fusion reactors are at least forty years in the future (and always will be).

Disagree.

Oh, don't worry, I am going to.

A reactor won't care whether the plutonium is weapons grade or not.

Reactors are designed to run on specific fuel, with specific mechanical properties, in specific assemblies, and enriched to specific grade (if they require enriched fuel at all - heavy water moderated reactors can run just fine on natural uranium).

You can fairly easily turn weapons grade Pu into fuel you could put into a reactor; But having done so, it is no longer weapons grade Pu, and it becomes very difficult indeed to turn it back in to weapons grade material.

Dilution is fairly simple; (re-)concentration is very hard.

You would need to put it in a reactor meant to use plutonium. But there would be no reason to dilute it--it's not like a uranium reactor where the U-238 is basically inert so the level of enrichment matters. Both Pu-239 and Pu-240 will produce energy.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Homeless encampments have largely vanished from San Francisco.
Glory be!
Mayor London Breed Issues Journey Home Executive Directive To Reunite More People With Family Outside of San Francisco
See, when liberals export their homeless, they make it sound all pretty.

 

[TSwizzle]

Gee, a cynical person might think there must be an election coming soon.

 

[Politesse]

They haven't solved any actual problems... the encampments will reform over the next few months.

 

[Gospel]

They haven't solved any actual problems... the encampments will reform over the next few months.

You're ruining their high.

 

[Emily Lake]

I want people to have homes, dude. Not jail cells. If there were enough shelters, we wouldn't have encampments, but shelters are not a good end goal either. Have you ever spent time in one? Can you imagine living the rest of your life there? Shelters are a start, and we should certainly building them, more and better, but a homeless American is in need of more than just a shelter for tomorrow night. The United States has, in failing to meaningfully regulate the housing market or otherwise prevent it from becoming a casino, failed to provide sufficient housing for all of its citizens on a catastrophic scale. Your solutions aren't solutions, because they do not address the problem.

What do you believe actually DOES address the problem? What do you think would actually fix this, in a way that is reasonable and feasible, and doesn't massively detriment other people?

I add the last requirement because hypothetically, the problem could be "solved" by the government taking everyone's income, redistributing it so that everyone gets the exact same amount, building cookie-cutter homes, and assigning everyone to them... but I don't think anyone would accept that as a reasonable solution, and a whole lot of people would see that as a massive detriment to a huge number of people.

Emily, we've discussed a lot of solutions to homelessness in this thread, and none of them were the ridiculous and impractical solution outlined in your post. Fundamentally, the root cause of homelessness is a lack of homes, and the government does need to step in on this front, not by suddenly taking on a fundamental restructuring of home ownership but doing what it already can to expand both availabilty and accessibility to permanent shelter. That said, there is no one size fits all approach to a problem as complex as homelessness. While there are some factors that link homelessness in various cities in states, they are not homogeneous, and indeed many towns and cities either have no homelessness problem or are adequately managing the problems they have. Where there are crises, the stories tend to be particular to those regions. So I can't give you a simple The Answer, only point to some strategies and iniatives that have been proven as effective in some communities and nations around the world:

1. "Shelter" is not enough
People often believe that there "aren't enough shelters" or "aren't enough soup kitchens" in their communities, and sometimes this is demonstrably true. But whether it is or not, simply having a shelter for the night does not solve the problems of a homeless family. If spending the night in a substandard shelter is obviously worse than spending it on the street, people won't go at all. There are many reasons why unhomed people avoid shelters: they don't want their family split up, they know drugs are pushed at a certain shelter, they know a shelter has a reputation for theft or assault, they object to forced religious worship services, many other reasons. If they do go, having a roof for the night isn't helping them afford rent. The most effective civic programs are those that treat intake into a homeless shelter as an important first step toward addressing the root causes of homelessness, an approach known as coordinated entry. That means that while you absolutely do strive to provide enough itinerant shelter, the process of seeking out that shelter also enrolls individuals and families in an ongoing system of care that paves the way for them between the various service providers that they will need to seek out in order to get back on their feet. In an effective system of coordinated entry, a person may enter the shelter with no one on their side, but they leave it with a social worker and some numbers to call.

2. The importance of having a plan
A common problem is that although services are technically available, they are scattered piecemeal across a constellation of public and private agencies, often at odds over the very purpose of their organizations. A city with an acute crisis of homelessness cannot afford to let squabbling between stakeholders undercut every solution they advance. They need a single master plan for their community, democratically arrived at and published in a forum that all players have equal access to. When the police, the prisons, county mental health, the state courts, the shelters, job placement services, and whoever else all have a single document and forum to refer back to when it comes to policy and placement, and a number to call if they have questions.

3. Human empathy
If those involved in "solving homelessness" do not regard or treat their clients as human beings worthy of respect in consideration, whose rights to freedom of choice, family, and personal property are respected, initiatives will fail no matter how well they are structured.

4. Funding
Often, poorly designed master plans fail because the city or state was unwilling to provide a realistic budget to staff and supply them. Especially common is a situation in which a program is initiated with the best of intentions and adequately funded at the start, but defunded two or three years later. The subsequent failure of the program to meet demand is then taken as proof of its inadequacy on a more basic level, and it is either abolished entirely or subject to further rounds of defunding until it is. Funny how calls to defund the police create a panic, but defunding county mental services or elementary ed so often gets a yawn from the public! Addressing homelessness realistically is not cheap, nor is it a one time investment. If we truly desire a long term solution to homelessness, it needs to come with a long-term plan for funding, that has some form of armor against the vicissitudes of civic politics.

5. Data Collection
There is very often more myth than reality when it comes to a community's understanding of homelessness, which lends itself to a situation of tilting at windmills while giants overrun the countryside. Every city is different, and every city needs to set up a perennial system of data collection to ensure that labor and resources are being sent toward where they will be most effective. Often, public perception and calls for action are aimed at the most visible signs of homelessness, while the more pervasive causes go unaddressed. A common example is targeting homeless encampments in a polity where the majority of homeless people do not live in them. People like Derec and yourself get a strong sense of emotional satisfaction when you see an encampment "cleaned" but then are surprised when another encampment springs up a few blocks away three months later. Because clearing an encampment, arresting the inhabitants, and stealing what little capital they've managed to accumulate "ends homelessness" much in the same way that putting a facial tissue in front of your nose when you sneeze cures your cold. If you really want to address homelessness, your city needs to know how many homeless citizens they have, where they live, and what has caused their situation to develop. A heavy police presence becomes a huge problem here, as if homeless people believe that talking to any civic worker for any reason is putting them at risk of arrest, deportation, or other abuses, they will quite sensibly conceal their situation from as many people as possible.

5. Data Sharing
Often times that same constellation of agencies that bungle services are also bungling data collection. If every stakeholder has a set of data but no centralized system for disseminating and comparing those data sets, all of them are impaired. Those master plans I mentioned? Should always include plans for where to share and store such data as have been collected.

6. Housing Affordability
All of this is for nothing if there simply are no homes available that a working person at minimum wage can reliably afford, or that a retired or disabled person can somehow access. Unfortunately, in the United States, talking about housing affordability at all is a "leftist" issue that only the most "progressive" politicians are willing to bring up at all. Nevertheless, projects to end homelessness are meaningless in the absence of this particular avenue of progress. I note that it is the only one of these points that your post is trying to address. Although your goal seems to be to break housing reform through hyperbole, you do instinctively recognize that housing availablility is the true root of the problem, and about this you are correct.

So I'm going to break this one down into some further, more specific policies and initiatives need to be addressed:

1. The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program has been gutted to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars at the federal level, despite having been one of the single most effective legislative initiatives on homelessness in American history. This has resulted a waiting list that is stretching years into the future when to used to be weeks, just eight years ago. Of the families that apply for assistance, now only one in four receive it by the end of their application year. It needs to be re-funded in the next appropriations bill.
2. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants program has also been wildly successful, and continues to be, but we cannot afford to let political forces destroy it, so likewise when it comes to appropriations, it needs guardians and defenders. Also, many towns and cities are unaware of these grants or lack the political will to seek them out, so some publicity is warranted.
3. HUD's Housing First policy initiative is under serious legislative attack despite being, once again, an extremely successful program to date. The Trump cabal must be opposed on this matter, and Housing First must be protected meaningfully from these assaults. This is not the time to be cutting off support of individual home ownership at the knees.
4. In general we need to combat false narratives about housing reform. Often programs that exceeded their goals by enormous margins - Emergency Housing Vouchers (EHVs), HUD's "House America Project", the VA's internal version of "Housing First", the WH-led Continuum of Care program - are falsely described as "failures" in the popular press, in stark contrast to the realities of their success. In cases where housing inequality is already being meaningfully addressed, there needs to be a stronger counter-narrative advanced against dishonest and disingenuous attacks by a mass media market that makes more money off of perceived crises than real and lasting solutions. Otherwise, you get mass defunding and refusal to participate in programs that are not only known to work, but indeed have been working for a decade or more.
5. Power to the cities. Ultimately, these national level solutions can only go so far. Cities and metropolitan regions need to be proactive in their efforts to address housing inequality, and state governments need to adopt the humility necessary to support these civic level initiatives without attempting to control them. There needs to be a lot more trust exercised here, because San Francisco's housing market does not resemble San Bernardino's, does not resemble Fresno's, does not resemble Topeka's, does not resemble Baltimore's. Local agencies and polities that DO possess data and a plan need to be lifted up by state and federal agencies, not ignored or actively undercut in furtherance of some other political goal. This is a problem across the board, and constitutes one of my consistent personal frustrations with the Democratic Party, which engages in crisis vote merchanting almost as fervently as the Republicans traffic in crisis creation.

I would like to re-iterate that the above are not intended as a smoking gun solution to end all homelessness in all places. That isn't possible or realistic, and cities, regions, and countries vary considerably in the specific problems and barriers they face. The single best thing you can do if you wish to address homelessness in your community is to get involved at the civic level, and approach the problem with enough humility to listen to the advice of those who are already in the trenches rather than assuming that your favorite news agencies have told you all you need to know about the homeless.

I appreciate the thought you put into this post, Poli.

I have a quibble and it's a rather large quibble. You start out with the premise that "Fundamentally, the root cause of homelessness is a lack of homes". I disagree.

Not having a home is the definition of homelessness, not the cause. Not having a home - being homeless - is a symptom.

There is not a lack of homes in the US - houses and apartments exist, more and more are being built constantly. It's not a lack of homes that causes homelessness.

In some cases, cost is absolutely a factor. And right now the cost of an apartment in many places is absurd. To that end, subsidization may be a reasonable way to provide a bridge to the problem - but it doesn't actually reduce the cost, it just subsidizes the cost. For a long term solution to the cost of housing, we need to actually address the cost.

In other cases, cost isn't the driver - cost isn't why the person became homeless in the first place. Severe mental health issues, particularly those presenting with hallucination and/or delusion are overrepresented in the homeless population compared to the housed, by a material amount. The same is true for drug addiction. Being without a home doesn't cause people to become schizophrenic or to turn into a vet with severe PTSD, it's the other way around. Being without a home doesn't (in most cases) cause a person to become an opioid/heroin or a meth addict... but being an addict can absolutely cause a person to lose their home (along with job and loved ones).

The specific few policies that you mention will certainly help bridge the gap for people who have a cost barrier, but it's a short-term band-aid. None of what you've proposed appears to actually address the causes of homelessness: cost of housing, severe mental health disorders, substance abuse.

 

[Emily Lake]

You think native american tribal lands are lawless areas

The have their own laws and legal systems.
So do Hells Angels.

I find your implied analogy to be both tasteless and borderline racist.

How do you find it racist??

I read it as simply giving an example of a separate legal system that most everyone would agree is not good.

Jarhyn was making the recommendation that we as a society should have areas designated for people who want to be lawless anarchists, but still be supported by society and have their needs seen to. So basically, an enclave for antisocial outlaws to be supported at everyone else's expense.

You implied that tribal lands are like that - lawless areas of antisocial people being supported by the fruit of other people's labor. Then you went on to further compare native americans to a biker gang that has a history of being associated with violence, drug trafficking, and general criminality.

And you double down by saying that "most everyone agrees" that granting the original inhabitants of the country rights to their own lands and own autonomous governance is "not good".

You're mixing up Loren and Elixir.

My apologies, and thank you for catching that.

 

[Emily Lake]

The homelessness counts in California rose by 42 percent between 2014 and 2020, while the rest of the country had a 9 percent decrease. On any given night, the state has more than 160,000 homeless persons

No doubt the increase in homelessness in California is linked with the decrease in homelessness in other states.

According to this link, from the non partisan Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) California’s homelessness has risen less than the national average.

All well and good but it doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things. Homelessness in California is continuing to rise.

What do you mean "it really doesn't mean much"? Either your source is telling truth or it is telling lies, and if that testimony is the basis of political action, it matters a lot which is the case.

The source that thebeave provided is Stanford University. Maybe take a moment to look into the sources, compare where their differences are coming from, and evaluate them from an unbiased perspective instead of just assuming that because you don't like the poster there must be lies involved.

 

[Politesse]

The homelessness counts in California rose by 42 percent between 2014 and 2020, while the rest of the country had a 9 percent decrease. On any given night, the state has more than 160,000 homeless persons

No doubt the increase in homelessness in California is linked with the decrease in homelessness in other states.

According to this link, from the non partisan Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) California’s homelessness has risen less than the national average.

All well and good but it doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things. Homelessness in California is continuing to rise.

What do you mean "it really doesn't mean much"? Either your source is telling truth or it is telling lies, and if that testimony is the basis of political action, it matters a lot which is the case.

The source that thebeave provided is Stanford University. Maybe take a moment to look into the sources, compare where their differences are coming from, and evaluate them from an unbiased perspective instead of just assuming that because you don't like the poster there must be lies involved.

"It doesn't matter much" is untrue whether I "like the poster" or not.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The homelessness counts in California rose by 42 percent between 2014 and 2020, while the rest of the country had a 9 percent decrease. On any given night, the state has more than 160,000 homeless persons

No doubt the increase in homelessness in California is linked with the decrease in homelessness in other states.

According to this link, from the non partisan Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) California’s homelessness has risen less than the national average.

All well and good but it doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things. Homelessness in California is continuing to rise.

What do you mean "it really doesn't mean much"? Either your source is telling truth or it is telling lies, and if that testimony is the basis of political action, it matters a lot which is the case.

The source that thebeave provided is Stanford University. Maybe take a moment to look into the sources, compare where their differences are coming from, and evaluate them from an unbiased perspective instead of just assuming that because you don't like the poster there must be lies involved.

It seems upon a cursory glance that the major difference between thebeave’s source and mine is that the former covers a time period ending in 2020, whereas the latter has more recent figures.

I may have time later to peruse it.

But the major issue was that TSwizzle had “no doubt” about something that appears inconsistent with facts.

 

[TSwizzle]

But the major issue was that TSwizzle had “no doubt” about something that appears inconsistent with facts.

Appearances can be deceiving.

 

[Shadowy Man]

But the major issue was that TSwizzle had “no doubt” about something that appears inconsistent with facts.

Appearances can be deceiving.

And when that’s the case the right thing to do is to show how that’s the case.

No one is convinced by assertions. They’ll be convinced by good arguments backed by facts and solid logic.

If you can explain the discrepancy between your assertion and the facts, I’m open to hearing a good faith argument. But based on our interactions regarding the subject climate change, I won’t expect such.