Blows my mind how you operate under the notion that we should give houses to homeless people.
I assumed you were purely a satire account, that you couldn’t be that daft as to miss the sarcasm dripping from many of the replies, or your complete lack of human decency. Turns out you are a bot/miscreant that joined less than a day ago to spread your vitriol and muddy the water. Maybe one day the tin man will find his heart.
Ouch, that hurts. Fuck you.
I guarantee you, you’re a lot closer to being homeless than you think. And if ever you will be in a situation like that, I hope you only meet people like yourself. Scum.
You’re scum. You’re the one who wants take property of common successful people and give it to some hobo drug addicts. I have the moral high ground here.
Define “successful”
That’s all. Then I’ll make fun of you in a more accurate way.
In this context, successful - wealthy enough to own a house, or maybe a few.
I would help you if you’re beaten down, and you would accept it too.
I am in a position of giving freely without losing much of anything too.
It’s sad to see what you are, but you’ll figure it out eventually. Life has its way’s.
How do you give up a house without loosing too much? Are you a billionaire or something?
Give food to the hungry. Give medicine to the sick. Why would you not give homes to the homeless? Unless you’re wicked.
You should be explaining why we should be giving homes to the homeless. I don’t need a justification for doing nothing. If I wanted to go out of my way and give my stuff to other people, then I’d need to find a justification. Not the other way around.
Because we’re humans with empathy for other members of our species ?
I feel more empathy for my friends and family than for hobos. I bet most people do. So if I have spare funds to help others, I’d rather support people close to me. To support homeless ppl instead is a psychopathic behavior.
Ugh, we’ll be bloody feeding them next!
Exactly. Why tf should we do it? They die of starvation or something?
Should we… not?
They’re obviously a troll.
Why should we?
Why should we not?
Justification is needed for action, not inaction. I don’t need a reason to do nothing.
Because we’re humans with empathy and don’t want to see others suffer?
Hmm, ok. Let’s say you can afford to spend some of your wealth to help others. Why tf should you spend it on fucking hobos? Isn’t it more reasonable to help your friends and family?
they need it more? hobos are humans? (watch “invisible people” on YouTube)
CONSOOOOOOOM
REDUSTRIBUUUUTE
OBEY CONFORM SUBMIT
We operate under the depression-era assumption that per-capita GDP is some kinda gold-standard metric for evaluating how well a country is doing economically. In reality per-capita GDP is just tracking the trash changing hands. We also overemphasize transactionality because of this. It’s somehow much better from an “economic perspective” to have everyone buying new shirts every week even if it’s the same people buying and then tossing the same fast fashion junk in the trash.
When you consider other metrics we could be judged by such as the OP is kinda pointing at here, our country looks way fucking worse on the leaderboard.
We ought to use the measures of the material conditions of our population to drive policy rather than how much currency has changed hands and how many worthless transactions have occurred.
Yeah that’s how Canada is pretending it’s not been in a recession for years. Out of control housing market has inflated the GDP on paper, when everyone else can basically go fuck themselves I guess according to the government
I keep wondering if we have reached or are on the cusp of a post-scarcity society.
Scarcity isn’t just about how much stuff there is, it’s also about how much access people have to stuff. So no, we sadly haven’t got there yet in my opinion
No I agree with the logistics of it. I meant to say the manufacturing and agricultural capacity we already have seems like more than enough.
Oh yeah, almost certainly. Apparently 1/3rd of food produced globally is wasted.
Title
I volunteer with a food suplus redistribution organisation and that’s the figure we use so although I don’t have a specific source, I’m inclined to believe it
It is true that there will never be enough to satisfy the greediest among us. Unless there’s some kind of global revolution this will continue until the end
Wow, I didn’t like billionaires very much, but if the alternative is a global revolution, then I guess I can put up with billionaires.
We all lie to ourselves in various ways - like thinking we need a supercomputer in our pocket so we can see what’s trending while we sit on the toilet.
“The problem with the American economy is too many pocket computers”, I say while sitting on the toilet in the Bigger Bombs factory at Raytheon.
Yeah if somebody actually said that it would be dumb, and so is pretending they did.
Lots of less expensive housing in the suburbs and country, go live in them. The reduced noise and air pollution is great.
Yea not in cali
A house in the suburb for both norcal and socal is about 1.5m, unless you’re looking at the ghetto
Hell even washington is like 1m ish for a house in the suburb
Crazy to talk about “cheap housing” and look to the suburbs in the year 2025. That ship sailed decades ago.
That’s before you start pricing in the time-value of an hour or more a workday trapped in traffic.
Air pollution can be just as bad if you live near big farms in a poorly regulated air quality state.
Also you’ll socially rot.
This concept has a name. Artificial Scarcity.
Yeah, scarcity is created artificially by people who don’t want to give their stuff for free to complete strangers.
or maybe by not taxing people who have made much more than they can consume (and deserve) in 10 lifetimes?
Ah, so it’s not that people should willingly give up their belongings. It’s that people with guns don’t forcefully seize their belongings from them.
Shout-out to too good to go - an app that aims to minimize food waste by letting restaurants and grocery stores sell “surprise bags” of food at 1/3 to 1/2 off!
Good mythical morning has a few episodes featuring these!
First, I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are some devilish details.
Take a look at some pictures of Gary, Indiana. It’s an entire city that’s been mostly abandoned since the collapse of the industry that built it. There are entire boarded up neighborhoods, and some quite fine large, brick houses where wealthy people used to live. It’s all just sitting there. I’m sure that Gary would love to have people start moving back in, and revive the city.
So, say Gary just eminent-domained all those properties, and said to America: you want a house? All you have to do is come, pick one, and move in. You live in it for 5 years, it’s your’s.
The problem is that it costs money to keep up a home. Home maintenance is stupid expensive, and most of these abandoned homes need repairs: new windows, new roofs, new water heaters, plumbing repairs, electrical repairs. Do you have any idea what a new window costs? And even if it’s sweat equity, and you’re able to repair a roof yourself, you still need materials. Where does this money come from?
Are the homeless in California going to move to Gary, IN? Are the homeless in Alabama? There are homeless employed folks, but they’re tied to their locations by their jobs. They’re not moving to Gary.
Finally, it’s a truism that it’s often less expensive to tear down a house in poor condition and build a new one than it is to renovate. If these people don’t have the money to build a new house, how are they going to afford to renovate a vacant one.
The problem is that people need jobs to live in a house (unless someone else is paying for taxes, insurance, and maintenance). And the places with jobs aren’t the places like Gary, that have a abundance of empty homes. All of those empty homes are in inconvenient places, where the industry and jobs they created dried up.
It may be that a well-funded organization could artificially construct a self-sustaining community built on the bones of a dead one. But I think it’s oversimplifying to suggest that you can just take an empty home away from the owner (let’s assume you can) and just stick homeless people in it and assume it’ll work - that, even given a house, they’ll be able to afford to keep it heated, maintained, powered, insured. Shit, even if you given them a complete tax exemption, just keeping a house is expensive.
I’m sure there are some minority of homeless for whom giving an abandoned home in the area they live would solve their problems. And I’m sure that, for a while at least, having a bigger box to live in would be an improvement for many, even if the box is slowly falling apart around them. But I think it’s naive to be angry about the number of empty homes, and that homelessness could be solved by relocating the homeless to where these places are and assigning them a house - whatever state it’s in.
The problem is that people need jobs to live
QFT
Don’t get me started on that one.
We don’t need to move them, there are vacant homes everywhere. Even in San francisco the residential vacancy rate is 6%. The unhoused in San francisco make up about 1% of the population, so assuming the unhoused population takes up the same amount of housing per person as the housed population, we could house every unhoused person here and still have 5% left over.
That’s the worst case too, the rest of the country has a higher vacancy rate and a proportionally lower unhoused population.
To compound matters, the US is currently moving all the new manufacturing jobs into southern red states, which will be interesting. Red staters are pissed because they are experiencing major cost of living adjustments, particularly in housing prices. Which is partly why they voted maga.
so, the biggest reasons why the california unhoused population is so big are because social workers from the rest of the country send their high needs people our way. it’s called ‘greyhound therapy’-california is warm enough you won’t freeze in winter, nobody thinks about heat stroke, and a bus ticket is better than a month of shelter beds. we also get all the children they throw away for being queer, at least the ones who don’t just join the military, which isn’t going to be a thing anymore, for pretty similar reasons.
so the opposite of that actually happens. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would like to go home.
except… even in los angeles, there are so many empty units. I don’t just mean for turnover-the half dozen or so big landlording companies make more money keeping a unit empty and recursively leveraging it like tesla stock than renting it out to a tenant with good income and dubious credit. so we are being stared at by a thousand blind windows at all times. many of them in large buildings that are partially occupied, and even the single family residences are well maintained, because they exist as financial instruments. I doubt it’s enough, but not everybody actually wants to live in los angeles-the food is great, the culture is good, I adore the mild winters, and so much else, but the hills, the traffic, the spicy geology, the fact one of our seasons is just ‘fire’ and the smoke sometimes drops the temperature by a degree or two so it’s not even a net negative every time, the amount of funding we give to the gangs, and the fact it’s just so fucking big and so fucking city. I’m sure there are people who miss snow.
the concept is more sound than you would think.
called ‘greyhound therapy’-california is warm enough you won’t freeze in winter,
I live in Minneapolis, where we regularly have winter days that reach -30°F. Not frequently that bad, but rarely a winter without one of those, and in the past 7 years I’ve lived here, we’ve had a couple of days where it’s hit -50°. You don’t survive that very long, even with a lot of good clothes; any exposed skin gets frostbite within minutes. It’s not been as bad the past couple of years, what with global warming, but the winters here can well be described as “brutal.” I can’t imagine being homeless here, and if I was, and someone offered me a free trip to California, I’d take it. I grew up in Santa Cruz, and while LA is rather hotter than I prefer, I’d still rather face that than a Minnesota winter.
We have family in Dana Point. Everything around there is stupid expensive. I don’t know about LA housing prices, but I haven’t heard it’s cheap. And you still have to maintain, if you own, especially in apartments, where your problems can trivially become your neighbors’, too.
like I said. warm enough you won’t freeze in the winter. because a ticket to california is cheaper than a shelter bed
that’s the thing. you live there. so clearly a person can live there, but sending their surplus population to us, half compassionately, half throwing them away, is cheaper. it’s cool. we can just be an externality, and at least nod at having a society so you don’t have to. or at least we could til we got a san francisco guy in sacramento.
yeah rent is the problem. too many empty units while people are dying on the streets, and landlords are squeezing us all, trying to drive us to slavery.
I am not defending the practice; I was just saying I wouldn’t be in a rush to come back. I love the cold, I like having seasons, but I would hate it here if I had to live in a drafty house and couldn’t afford to heat it.
so you help them out with that. maybe provide insulation or some shit. I dunno. everything needs a little scaffolding to make it work. this seems like less than most stuff.
I agree.
Economic growth on Earth is coming to an end, and it’s important to recognize it and deal with it properly. It doesn’t make sense to scare people into work by telling them “otherwise we don’t produce enough”. We do. Whether people work 60 hours a week or 20 hours. We should just recognize what we really need. Which is the right to self-determination.
Related: the idea that everyone needs to work all the time isn’t really true anymore. If we were in like 3000 bce in a small farming village outside Ur, yeah, people gotta pitch in so we don’t get eaten by wildlife, the neighboring tribe, or whatever.
But in 2025ce, where so many jobs have so much filler nonsense? And when the rich can just live on investment income? No, the whole “work or starve” thing isn’t needed anymore.
We should have basic income for all and public housing. Let people pursue what they want. Maybe it’s art. Maybe they just want to take care of the local library. Maybe they just want to be a local barfly that keeps the tavern interesting. Who knows? But wage slavery needs to go.
Man that’s bullshit and you know it. Yeah a rich class is not exactly directly subject to work or starve, but people who write stuff like this don’t realize they are in that rich class. I guarantee you’ve never met or heard of anyone starving ain’t an anorexic or lost in the barrens. There has to be people doing the actual work, and people like you doing what amounts to fancy book keeping and service industries for the next class of people it’s very plain you’re envious of.
Cost of living differs across the world. While you may think that someone living in the US is “rich”, and that might be true compared to the rest of the world, within the US it may mean middle class or borderline lower class depending on the living context.
Say you make $60,000 USD per year as a single adult with no dependents. You’d do ok in Chicago, but would be scraping by in New York City.
Compare that same $60,000 to somewhere outside the US like Rio de Janiero in Brazil, and you’ll see that the you’ll make over 12 times the average living wage there. Conversely, if you took Brazil’s yearly living wage of ~$4,700 and applied it to the US, then you’d be below the average poverty line.
It does us no good to debate how good we have it vs you, or vice versa. (Almost) all of us live under capitalism, and although costs of living vary across the world, this isn’t an argument against UBI. The same issues the US experiences likely are also felt by citizens of many other countries, unless you live somewhere that has already introduced these sorts of safety nets.
Your point about “hard” labor (work done with body) vs “soft” labor (work done with mind and/or little body) doesn’t argue against this either. The economy is greatly stratified. We all don’t have to do the agriculture anymore, like when humans first transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers. There are many other things to do and things we can provide for each other, some good some bad. And this also isn’t to say that hard labor is worse than soft labor, or vice versa. They are mainly different kinds of experiences. No judgement need be applied, although many cultures tend to do so. This is one of many reasons why you see and have seen across history labor unions stick up for hard laborers against the “soft laboring” wealthy. This prejudice needs to be uprooted across the world imo.
I 100% agree with you that many formulations of “rich countries” depends on colonizing and extracting wealth from “poor countries”. That is not right. Every country should be able to produce for its own, with help offered in the form of imports/exports of goods & labor to every country. It is not fair that the Global South essentially funds the Global North.
Instead of pointing that out and blaming an entire hemisphere of people for that, we should instead be looking to those in our countries that wield power and make this system the way it is. A farmer in the US Is no different than a farmer in Brazil, at least in terms of the class struggle. It would all benefit us if we see that class divide everywhere in the world, and join together to try to defeat it.
I’m not sure I follow. What do you think is bullshit?
Someone still needs to do work, but not everyone needs to work all the time.
If not everyone needs to work, then who needs it? Why should you work while others don’t?
We would probably be fine if people who wanted to work just kept working. Or if we had universal basic income, so people could more freely choose if they wanted to trade their time+labor for something else.
Like, if absolutely no one wants to tend the fields then that’s going to be a problem for food. I think there are enough people who would do it because they want to, especially for jobs that are local. But even if not, you could still offer money. Having basic income (or some other mechanism to assure basic needs are met) in place means it’s much less coercive, because it’s no longer a question of labor or suffer
We would probably be fine if people who wanted to work just kept working
And what if we wouldn’t? Is there a statistics on how many people work just for the sake of work?
But even if not, you could still offer money
Not a lot of money, bc taxes are gonna be hella high to sustain universal income.
because it’s no longer a question of labor or suffer
Yeah, it’s a question of labor or just chilling. Who tf is gonna choose labor? Seems like your ideal society’s gonna be supported by useful idiots.
Most people like to be productive.
There is enough money and resources. It’s mostly just consolidated in the hands of the rich. You’ve probably seen https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ . If you spread that around, you get more economic activity.
Lots of people choose to do stuff instead of just chilling. Go look at all the open source projects that are just made by hobbyists, or community gardens, or any number of other self organized projects. Capitalism with all the profit is theft bits isn’t the only way.
Recommendation: the book Bullshit Jobs
Also Graeber’s Debt.
So many of Graeber’s ideas are right on the dot. Those two books helped me understand economics better than fucking Milton Friedman ever could.
I’ve heard of this one. Maybe I’ll check it out.
The downside of reading a lot of depressing non fiction is I increasingly feel like I’m living in a cuckoo clock, and get frustrated with how everyone else seems oblivious and uncaring.
If you want an understanding of the cuckoo clock and how it came to be, I highly recommend you watch the BBC documentary HyperNormalisation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
I want the inside of my house to look like the outside of an insane asylum
We haven’t needed to work since the early 1900s. The labor movement was all about getting people to work less and ensuring everyone is taken care of. Consumerism was invented to fight back.
when the rich can just live on investment income
How do you think they make that money? Primarily off of consumerism. If we all collectively decided to share what we have and stop buying what we don’t need, there could be no passive income, not at the scale it exists today, anyways.
We also need to outlaw landlords. Owning land is not a job and it’s certainly not a business.
I think landlords make a lot of sense for commercially-zoned property, and for residentially there needs to be some way to live somewhere even if you can’t afford the mortgage deposit. So there’s nuance here that needs addressing IMO.
We could just… give everyone a place to live. Then there’s no such thing as “can’t afford a mortgage.”
Do people get to choose where they live in this scenario, or do we just allocate housing based on where’s currently unoccupied?
I think under a UBI scenario, people should get to pick the city they want to reside in, then get assigned a public housing unit(s) for their immediate family. They can also be provided free public transport, and a basic UBI vehicle with free fuel.
Ideally, people would have a bedrock of UBI services to rely upon for their wellbeing, and money is turned into something solely used for lifestyle upgrades: Buying a house of the quality, size, and location you want, a fancier non-UBI car, brand-name food or supplies, private school, ect.
People don’t really get to choose where they live now. If you mean choosing from a list of vacancies, then sure, I don’t see why not.
People do kinda pick where they are though? If there’s some unoccupied housing in Denver, but you’re living in Austin it’s not necessarily useful, that’s what I meant. I agree in principle on social housing, but there would probably need to be some kind of associated projects – either new construction or housing where ppl live but there isn’t enough accommodation, or new jobs created in areas with surplus, or both… And then you also need to think about local amenities (shops, hospitals, parks, schools, that sort of SimCity thing)
Sorry, I might have come across as if I fully disagreed with the notion, but I really don’t - I just think that the idea only works with a more integrated policy.
Hard Agree.
Only raccoons could be owners of land :D
Consumerism is used for wealth redistribution.
Real wealth production occurs when machines create work, saving time. Work = money.
I guess? With enough money you can just buy bonds, which sort of depend on consumerism but indirectly. Some municipal bonds return like 5%. 5% of a shit load of money is enough to live on.
this
that
away
empty
people
clothing
this…Blows
That’s a good typographic river. Nice find!
Ahhhh I couldn’t remember the term, thank you!
D33P
pfff. wrong.
1 third of all ppl have access to a washingmachine. there not enough resources to build one for everyone. or cars etc…
Couldn’t we just share laundromats and busses?
good question in an otherwise delusional sub.
ofcourse your question has been asked and from what i remember not even the reddist leftwinger in the first world would give up on a washingmachine.
so im theory yes, but with real humans sharing does not work out.
If I give up my washing machine for a laundromat, does that mean we get to live in a utopia where that’s my biggest problem?
Well if we stopped building useless shit…
How much washing machines can you build for an average yacht’s worth of ressources time and energy?
Probably not enough but it’s not like there wasn’t other useless shit being made nor like a lot of households would not do just fine sharing a washing machine.
no doubt. but claiming there enough resources for a rising number of ppl is wrong and keeps points out of the discussion that might come in handy for humanity later. sure eat the rich, but ppl will still be hungry.
We don’t have a resource problem, we have a distribution problem.
Resources are constantly being wasted to accelerate the wealth transfer up the chain.
The first thing you say is absolutely correct but I have no idea what you mean by the second
Food being wasted instead of given out. Clothing slashed and tossed away. Housing boarded up and left vacant in the name of investing.
All in the name of maximizing sales and profit. Resources hoarded and wasted.
30% of the worlds resources would be sufficient to meet everyone’s needs if properly distributed.
But it’s not because corporations see a homeless man taking a sandwich out of the trash as a lost sale.
The problem is even if you do give away excess food, next growing cycle, you’ll still adjust to grow less. And there won’t be excess. So donating food is good, but it’s not a long term solution to the distribution problem. Same with houses and clothes and whatnot
Or in a resource based economy, production would be decided by the needs of the community at various scales and not driven by sales or profits.
I think the ideal is a system that provides UBI, Nutritious food distribution, needs based housing, universal healthcare, and job services that provide aptitude testing, training and placement.
If 30% can meet our needs, the other 70% should be sufficient to provide the system and framework and enough left over for consumption, luxury and still have room for meritocracy advancement.
What’s the current wealth distribution? 10% holding 85% leaving the rest of us 15% only half of the 30 we need.
I think that UBI and capitalism can be combined, in a specific way: UBI gives everything a person ever needs for survival and general wellbeing, but is boring. Money isn’t used for survival, but instead to purchase goods that are more suited to an individual’s interests. Instead of the Generic Dress #2 that everyone may order for free, you can spend money on getting a dress with polka dots, made of silk, and so forth.
Capitalism is really good at producing entertaining items, such as music, branded foods with a twist, or Pokemon cards. However, it utterly sucks at ensuring the wellbeing of people. Thus, we should separate the concepts of survival and luxury.
