It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly less humane.
If drugs are strongly intertwined I wonder if an opportunity to voluntarily seperate from familiar drug triggers and sources might provide some balancing to the downsides.
Drugs & alcohol is the majority of why they are homeless from San Francisco to Grand Junction, CO (drove through & saw they have an unofficial homeless park) to Portland to Seattle to Calgary, etc, etc.
"A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults."
That’s not actually what you want to ask: Drug use is an additional risk factor for becoming homeless, which tells you that the people who are homeless are likely to be drug users - but that really just sorts out who is likely to become homeless, not how many people. If drug use caused homelessness then places with higher substance abuse rates would have higher homelessness rates. But they don’t! The rate of homelessness is driven most clearly by the difference between area income and area housing cost, and does not correlate well to any measures of drug use in the area.
A nice pair of contrasting data points here is WA and West Virginia. Drug usage and addiction, as well as mental health problems, in West Virginia far outstrips Washington - see https://www.kff.org/statedata/mental-health-and-substance-us... However homelessness in Washington is far, far worse than in West Virginia. West Virginia had almost the lowest rate of homelessness in the country.
You do when you subset the homeless population from couch surfers and people living in their car to the people actually finding a wink of sleep under some tarps under a noisy overpass
No you don’t. If 50% of society uses drugs, 5% of society is homeless, and 100% of homeless people uses drugs - then you’d see that all homeless people use drugs, but most drug users are not homeless, so it’s not well correlated at all.
Yes it is harder, but it's also harder for society to offer you the services like free room and board, help getting a job, and the thousand other services we offer in a high cost of living area.
Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.
Genuine question: is a social darwinist society something folks (perhaps you?) feel like they would survive in? Suppose your community decide it hates people who post online and wanted to ship them to Alaska. You cool with that?
No, but I could see why that is where your mind started.
You have a deep, implicit assumption of a social contract in your statement here:
> Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.
Some people can't. I know several schizophrenia sufferers who would never be able to hit an expected checklist. Some are brilliant. Some think they talk to an esoteric God and babble prophecy. None are functional.
We used to lock those folks up in sanitoriums for their safety, but due to systemic abuse this ended. Go back further, and the folks were tribal shamans, village jesters, and other elements of society which were supported by others until their (often untimely) deaths.
The latter support more or less ended when we as a species started settling down out of nomadic lives.
As a society, we dramatically underfund infrastructure (crumbling bridges and suburbs), healthcare (exploding costs without quality improvement), education (teachers salary is uncompetitive), government action (court systems aren't expedient, legislators xna be bought).
If we don't want these things, we should have the society decide so. This would be through legislation. But we haven't. We ignore these friction instead of addressing them.
Resolving friction takes effort, and effort has costs.
You have a deep implicit assumption that throwing money at the problem solves it. That's rarely true. In the case of schizophrenics, we have solved it a long time ago, but they refuse to take their meds. No amount of money in social programs will change that. It just shifts the "systemic abuse" (which I agree with you on) from (asylums abusing the ill) to the (the mentally ill abusing the general public). I think abuse is a great way to phrase it. We all get abused by the public excrement, petty crime, needles and trash, loss of use of common areas, etc. We all are being abused by that population.
I didn't wok on one of the US government systems, but much of my career was in COBOL compilers (writing run time systems, and checking against the ANSI standards). COBOL would not default to 1875 for a corrupt date.
I think navigating code definitely has a relationship to navigating meatspace, and the ability to internalize a view of the code space makes for a good programmer.
I'm long retired now, but attribute a lot of my programming ability to having had very poor sight in early childhood thus having to keep a mental map of my surroundings.
Yes! Many of the responses here are intellectual, missing something more earthy. In particular, hearing Lombardo reading from his translation of the Iliad [0] stirred me deeply. For sure I'm going to find a print of his version.
"Breakthroughs depend on access to knowledge. Together, member institutions, individual librarians, partners, and staff believe in that mission to share knowledge. And we believe that, together, we can do more.
> everything around me was built with human hands and engineers
Same when your plan comes in for a landing over a city .. it's all been made by us, every big and tiny piece down to the screws holding the bits together.
> you have to keep maintaining and adjusting the pressure chamber to get the right pressure for the correct operation of the two check valves.
That may have been true of the pumps you made, but it's not correct in all cases. There was a ram pump where I grew up (in the 1950s) which worked year round to lift water from the spring line to a house higher up; it never needed adjustment and got almost no maintenance, it just worked and kept on working.
About a year ago I had the same attitude to antibiotics as you, but a basic antibiotic prescription led me to develop a Clostridiodes difficile [0] infection. People need to be aware that C. diff is AWFUL, and can easily occur after antibiotic treatment. It's totally debilitating, can even kill you, and is difficult and expensive to treat, often recurring after treatment.
I'm very fortunate in having a daughter who's a doctor, but had to use a $5,000 antibiotic to get cured.
Antibiotics can be really awful for your body. So many very important things are done for us by our bacterial microbiome but some doctors give out these dangerous medications like candy even for viral infections with no indication of secondary bacterial infections. [0]
The body is like a hotel for bacteria. Under good conditions the rooms are filled with bacteria that don't harm us and may provide useful services. But take a broad spectrum antibiotic and suddenly all the rooms are empty and ready for colonization by nasty bugs like C. diff.
Antibiotics have also been a wonderful invention for preventing death but they should be used much more sparingly in humans and much more sparingly for agriculture.
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