No worries! We just install our own oil wells and refineries for energy independence to take advantage of those sweet federal subsidies that have shifted back to fossil fuels.
Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers.
Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?
No, I'm using Web3 as an argument against "tech solutions" and named Curtis Yarvin, a figurehead of technofeudalism, as a representative of technofeudalism.
I think Curtis Yarvin(And indeed Davis) are not a representative example of any particular idea. Pathologies perhaps, but while the symptoms of such things have enough similarities to identify them, they do not manifest in a way that can characterise a typical expression of the phenomenon. To do so can be dangerous, and result in management of a set of symptoms rather than the cause.
Put into the context of Terry Davis. Terry was not racist because he was Christian, and neither is it true to say that people with schizophrenia will be racist. It was a complex and unique manifestation. I think Curtis Yarvin has a similar level of incomparability
I was commenting about "cyberlibertarianism" -- which is actively embraced and promoted by SV technocrats. Yarvin very much is a public figure in this area, but it's not about him specifically, it's the Web3 gang that wants to replace democracy with their shiny toys. Put it on the blockchain, problem solved!
Jeffery Epstein was a very prominent financier, but if you pointed to him as an example of a financier I would suspect you are doing so due to properties that are not intrinsic to being a financier. I think you are doing this with Yarvin, unless you truly believe that cyber libertarianism can only ever be supported by far-right racists.
SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?
I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc).
And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing.
There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else.
> SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?
I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals.
If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.”
Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails.
YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed.
A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail.
Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons.
Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.
You are talking about a country with one of highest incarceration rates in the world, certainly western world.
A country with so expensive legal defense that most simply cant afford it. And a country that punishes even attempt to go to court to defend oneself with years and years of additional prison time if you loose.
A country where it is near impossible to convince a cop or prosecutor of wrongdoing, a country that goes really out of its way to rationalize what would be a clear murder elsewhere. A country with qualified immunity too.
Oh, and a country willing to incarcerate on any quack pseudo science.
But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.
> But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.
I'm not sure how you get that from what I wrote. My solution is (like many, many places in the world): "treatment or jail, but we will not tolerate a destruction of the commons". PDX/SF could do this with the police they have, and it might even imply force reduction as getting those people off the streets would reduce A LOT of crime.
Yes, the U.S. has many significant problems. I agree. Is your suggestion that we have to address them sequentially, prioritized according to your preferences... or else do nothing?
Spending money doesn't get results. Spending money is often a prerequisite to getting results, but you have to be results-minded to begin with, or you just spend money without results. Large bureaucracies are especially good at spending money in ways that don't generate results.
SF spending on homelessness has actually created a homeless industrial complex that thrives off of the enhancement and continuation of the "community" they serve.
The current solutions, while all well meaning or nice sounding, are essentially incentives and akin to figuring out all kinds of accelerants to throw on a fire.
The more money they spend on their current approaches the greater the homeless population they can and need to accommodate, and then even more money becomes "needed".
The problem is just about every well meaning "provide for a specific need" program creates a dependency and all of the deterrent solutions look like non solutions to all of the short term empathic people.
Homelessness and visible homelessness need to be distinguished here. The large majority of homeless people are not the ones you notice on the streets. Most try to be discreet. Some have jobs. A person who lives in their car is considered homeless.
The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London.
The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.
The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.
You know oddly enough, if you just put someone up in a real place to live for like a year, that's enough for the majority of people to get back on their feet.
There's a local charity I donate to that does this, they've got I think 10 or 15 apartments they put people up in for 3 months, and offer them various forms of placement assistance while they're there. In the last annual report they had I believe a 95% success rate with people they checked in with a year later.
Unfortunately this is pretty selective evidence, but I know for a fact they don't exclude people on the basis of having mental illness or addiction problems, I've worked with them personally.
That wouldn't be enough to do the job but it would be a great start if it was done right. My point was we've flushed $50B (and likely far far more) and what do we get for it? High gas prices. So hurray for the push for renewables and EVs, but there's nicer ways to do it.
> And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum
Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.
The "fix everything" button is abolishing zoning laws, and its aggregate cost is negative. Aggregate cost is not the issue preventing problems from being solved.
Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more.
This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.
The way to fix it is to have the right incentives and also the right deterrent. If you simply enable a drug addict lifestyle or corrupt nonprofit grift, that isn’t the right incentive. And yet that’s the reality in west coast cities.
It's been understood for quite some time that we only experience a small part of brain activity. Unfortunately that small part is where everything useful happens.
No, definitely not. Our consciousness is honestly an afterthought, as the brain processes mountains of information that does not even get to out conscious level yet is arguably more useful than anything we primitive primates can think of.
Or is the small part the bit where the least useful stuff happens? ;-)
A bit more seriously, the brain actually uses a significant chunk of the body's energy budget (no matter how efficient it is relative to human made equipment). So evolutionarily, it doesn't make sense unless it's doing something exceptionally useful.
It's the part that makes everything useful happen but most of everything useful happens in unconscious parts of the brain and even outside of the brain.
Do they? Japanese clean up after themselves when they fill the parks at cherry blossom season or a fireworks festival. Seems like you just need to feel responsible for yourself
Could be because people growing up in Japan are taught that they're an intrinsic part of any place, event, or group of people that includes their presence. Kids in classrooms in Japan are helping clean up together with everyone else at age 4.
It's kinda the opposite of "responsible for yourself," it's a civic sense that extends to include everyone and everything around you - including things that weren't directly caused by you-as-individal.
In the case of the cherry blossoms, they were planted for the enjoyment of the people, and thus the people who come to enjoy them are a part of that system. The cherry blossom viewing events where thousands of people come to picnic, only is a "thing" because thousands of people come - everyone there is a participant by virtue of attending. Thus they hold part of the responsibility for the outcome of the event and the aftermath.
no my experience. Go see a public park in Japan on weekend at the beginning of April. Every portion of the park will be covered in people. At the end of the day they'll all go home and the park will be mostly clean except for the garbage collection area.
Compare that to USA, Go to the National Mall (the grass in DC) on the 4th of July. See it's covered in people. Check on the 5th of July. The entire place will be covered in trash and refuse.
I don't believe in Zeus, Pan, Santa or the Easter Bunny. Is that faith on my part?
And as to the parent comment about "militant atheists", it glosses over the fact that we are outnumbered by militant theocrats who are actively trying to get their interpretation of their faith as law for all.
And one doesn't have to dig deep into those communities to see that they don't see atheists as worthy of existing in "their world".
So yes, more militant atheism please. I'd love to not care about the follies of faith but that requires not being threatened by those that claim to be doing god's work.
Waste happens any time people are spending other people's money (and it happens in corporate land all the time too).
Any time people bring up concerns about fraud and waste in social problems only, I dismiss them out of hand as using that fear to justify their selfishness.
If one isn't calling out waste and abuse in their favorite programs too, then their concern is insincere and should be treated as such. Pro tip: audit the DOD.
That's true, but not so dire that they are motivated to act, besides, they are too gullible to even properly register how far they've been duped to act against their own interests. I used to have some kind of delusion about how democracy was 'good enough' because of my implicit assumption that people on average were smart enough, educated enough and in general wise enough to realize when they're being played. That seems to have been a pretty serious mistake on my part.
I'm right there with you. Prior to 2016 I assumed that most people would "do the right thing" when it was made clear that it was the right thing to do.
But now it literally feels like a bad horror flick where there's a zombie mind-control virus that turns people into passive drones that can no longer have independent thought.
And while I used the word "stupid", there's plenty of otherwise intelligent people that have fallen prey to this and there's literally nothing one can say or do to have them reconsider their stance.
reply