Most public K-12 teachers teach 9 months out of the year. So annualizing that salary gets you to $64,149. Supposing a two income household of two teachers earning that amount ($128,299), the household would be earning a good bit above the median household income of $83,730.
Now, add in the pre-tax earnings that would be necessary to emulate a teacher's risk-free pension. One would need post-tax investments which must be turned into an annuity on retirement. It's not a small sum.
Perhaps you could share what this person's history of unethical behavior is? Lasker is called a eugenicist by the GP and in the Wikipedia article, but when I read the cited sources, they look a lot more like opinion pieces pushing a viewpoint rather than hard news.
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.
> an astounding 90% of chemical feedstocks are derived from oil or gas
What I often wonder is, as the demand for oil declines, the economies of scale in oil production should, too. If that is the case, will not the price of everything with oil byproduct inputs go up? In other words, will the transition to other energy sources actually be highly inflationary?
Maybe. It might also require not using as much disposable stuff in favor of reusable things. The culture we’ve built around disposable plastics and such is less than 100 years old. Our great grandparents lived considerably differently.
I don't follow this stuff too closely, but Cloud growing by 63% seems astounding. It'd be interesting to know how much of that is converting AWS and Azure workloads to GCP.
Oh sure but I meant in their case they might be their own biggest customer. Companies shuffle money from one pocket to another often for tax/financial reasons.
> The only real solution is to make AI a public good/utility which should be regulated on an international level and overseen by trustworthy institutions.
There is a precedent for this in nuclear weapons. It did not work. All it takes is a sufficiently resourced nation-state to defect from whatever agreements there are and the whole thing collapses. If the incentives point toward doing so, it is an inevitable outcome.
There was no nuclear weapon used in warfare anymore since WW II. I think the regulation and oversight worked incredibly well over the past 70-80 years, despite the game-theoretic challenge you mention.
I'm referring specifically to preventing additional countries from becoming nuclear powers. There was massive effort and coordination expended to this end. It failed repeatedly. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1968. 5 more countries armed themselves thereafter.
> Whether it was fraudulent or just incorrect is a different question.
And probably the more important question. How badly is the machine that does science broken? If we don’t focus here and fix it, there will be further decades without progress, all while wasting further billions.
Mandatory public service is fascism? Deporting illegal immigrants is fascism?
There are ~68 countries with mandatory military service in the world [1]. To say nothing of countries with some other form of mandatory public service. How many of them are fascist?
The U.S., with the backing of widespread public support, passed bipartisan immigration enforcement laws in 1996 with an aim of rapid and mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and it was not viewed as "fascism". Those laws remained on the books since that time and were only recently under enforced with dramatic consequences.
I honestly feel like we're increasingly living in separate realities driven by media bubbles and wanton historical illiteracy and dishonesty.
I agree; I don't see how anyone can read that manifesto as plainly fascistic. I am guessing most people didn't read it. I'm also guessing of those who did, they interpret every point as a dog whistle with secret double meaning, as they would with absolutely anything written by their "enemies".
The term “fascist” has been watered down to the point it doesn’t really mean anything the way many people use it now
I think the real standard for “fascist” has to be - how similar is what someone is doing to what Mussolini did? If there’s a genuine similarity there, the term “fascist” may be appropriate; otherwise, it isn’t
