This issue is very relevant for me since I have been homeless since May. It's been a bad run of being a target of criminal activity, unemployment and just running out of money during my job search. I cope with a mix of volunteering, overpriced housing (think $1200/month for a room in a rural area before I ran out of money for that), catsitting, house-sitting, staying with family and sleeping in my ancient car. Although I'm a citizen I don't qualify for any government support or programs, even though we have employment insurance here which I paid into for years.
I'm from Ottawa where the cold is obviously deadly, as it is in Finland. I do feel that we need to take shelter more seriously in public policy compared to warm areas because of that. Last week someone froze to death overnight a few blocks away from where I was crashing on a couch with family. Walking through downtown Ottawa and seeing the huge empty, lit, warm buildings with people freezing to death right outside is striking. Any practically minded person can see the problem is political and philosophical, not practical.
I can tell all the posters who think people choose to be homeless that I'm certainly not one of them. The comments about the importance of avoiding a downward spiral are certainly correct. Searching for work is hard enough normally and becomes increasingly difficult without access to things like a kitchen and toilet.
What I see in this Finnish policy is the starting assumption that doing nothing is not a good option. After reaching that point there can a rational discussion about what to do with whatever money is being spent - do you pay more people to hand out blankets and conduct surveys or just use it to buy housing units? As a homeless person I would really like to see Canada have a policy like I'm reading in this article instead of what we are doing now. The crappy temporary shelters and bureaucratic spending strategy obviously isn't working.
Even just economically, to have a government pay for years of schooling and subsidize advanced degrees then just be ready to let that person die on the street when they are ready to work but can't happen to find something seems like a waste. I'd rather see a functioning "social safety net" as described in this article.
The housing situation in Canada is insane and is so obviously due to not building enough housing and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural area is incredibly damning.
I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, college towns and they have a river flowing through them.
A major difference is that Austin has a new development with 200-400 unites on every block it seems. Cranes are everywhere downtown, and even in random neighborhoods they have huge new developments. Ottawa has no shortage of land, there's a huge amount of available land to develop in either direction, but they evidently aren't building nearly as much.
The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for 800$ now!
>and bringing too many people into the country via immigration.
In a functioning economy, more immigration will just result in more housing being built, as long as the immigrants are working. Especially since the cost of housing construction is largely the cost of labor. Immigration is a distraction from the core inability to build more housing.
In a functioning economy, people won't be feeling pressure to move into a handful of population centers.
Canada has PLENTY of free space for construction, and modern construction is pretty cheap and efficient. But economic forces are concentrating the growth in a few areas. Well-intentioned efforts to force "affordable housing" and "walkable neighborhoods" make these forces even worse.
The root cause fix is to stop the economic forces that pack people into ever smaller areas.
Yep. One might ask what happens if you don't have a functioning economy? Well, this kind of state. A massive failure for anyone but those who don't have theirs.
Why is a drive for growth bad? Seems like the double-speak of saying growth is bad while happily profiting off of and simultaneously restricting it is whats bad.
Growing up in a prairie city I heard this sentiment from people who simply don't like other people constantly, and I'm like "When did you try growing, you stagnant deteriorated shithole!?", and sprawl doesn't count. They hate ambition, they hate people, they hate taxes, and have no interesting ideas. They hate traffic, but refuse to do anything but drive. Their healthcare system and infrastructure is failing, there is no new economic activity happening; get busy growing or get busy dying. It doesn't work though if you stop for 70 years and then try to catch up.
There is a concerted disinformation campaign out there to prop up homeowner and landlord property values by denying the housing shortage. Not just in Canada, but throughout the Anglosphere.
> bringing too many people into the country via immigration
The housing situation has clearly severely declined post pandemic at the same time that immigration was restarted and increased, but I gotta point out that Vancouver has had a severe homeless crisis my entire life, long, long before this recent government changed immigration rates or even came to power.
As far back as 2007 I was reading articles about how Vancouver was net losing the sort of affordable housing that those most at risk of homelessness depended on. Unsurprisingly the amount of homeless in Vancouver has continued to increase.
But you're absolutely correct that the core of this problem is a severe lack of building. Both a lack of construction of market product and below market publicly owned housing. Building more homes is the solution to get our way out of this crisis and end homelessness.
If there is any real villain here to blame IMO it is Jean Chretien, who with the severe austerity budget of 1993 completely got the Federal government out of all social housing development and building of housing plunged to near nil for decades.
True, on all points, but it wasn't just him, it's been a decades long process of multiple parts of the economy failing imo. One does wonder though how things would be if we simply cancelled zoning and other needlessly bureaucratic development restrictions in the 80s, and enabled automatically correcting policy that was outside the hands of both property owners and politicians. Every time I see an anti tower sign in east van it makes me want to throw a rock through that person's window, and the fact this tension exists on a local level is ridiculous.
> The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for 800$ now!
That's not a result of new construction. It's a result of the Austin population declining in absolute numbers: 978,763 in 2019, 975,418 in 2022. It bounced back a bit to 979,882 in 2023.
Travis County grew a little bit, but all the growth is in the suburban areas.
That 2023 number is roughly a thousand larger than that 2019 number. The changes to all of the numbers you're quoting are in the noise as far as considering changes to the cost of housing.
Honey, please leave math to experts. Go play with your crayons.
Austin population started to recover only a year ago, and prices are a trailing indicator. So the reason for the lower rent prices is not the new construction, but actual population decrease.
The same happened in San Francisco with almost no new construction, rent prices dropped by 30% following the the pandemic-caused outmigration.
Prediction for the future: the prices will catch up if/when the population starts recovering.
At least some of the difference is that building codes can be a lot more lax in Texas as compared to Canada. It rarely gets as cold, and certainly not for as long.
I look after a citizen science-driven phytochemistry research activity and would be interested to understand more about your background. My email is in my HN user page.
With all due respect, why volunteer? I notice this with a lot of homeless people I chat with (there's a lot here in Boulder) - many of them volunteer their time at various charities while being homeless.
Wouldn't it be better devoting 100% of your spare time to getting back on your feet, and then volunteer, or donate?
Volunteer work can come with benefits other than payment, such as food, access to facilities, etc. It can also provide a support network and contacts for finding work.
With that knowledge (despite not knowing specific circumstances), it sounds like a highly effective way to cope with the situation as an individual.
When I was unemployed in Boulder during the last recession, I wasn’t homeless but spent a lot of time in the library applying for jobs and browsing the internet around homeless people. I think volunteering helps people have a sense of community and keep sane during an isolating period.
From my experience you can’t devote 100% of your time to getting back on your feet and search for jobs. If you have trouble finding a job it gets too depressing after a while and you need something positive where you actually see results.
I think the point is that one can only devote a finite amount of time and energy searching for a job each day before they hit diminishing returns, due to both mental fatigue and physical limitations. Though as another commenter pointed out, volunteer work is a common resume-building and networking tactic.
While I'm not homeless, the existence of USB(powerbank) heated clothes have been a very comfy discovery of mine recently. A bit fiddly at times sure but having hours of comfy warmth available at the press of a button is worth it.
I've wondered if this is something adopted by the homeless already? and if not, look into it.
You still need proper insulating layers on top of the heating ones, and many of the cheapest chinese varieties might have undersized heat pads that might not use the quick charge ability and merely provide warmth as opposed to heat. But I'm welcoming every extra watt of heat whenever cold.
Where I went to college there was a local homeless guy who was friendly and well known enough that the coffee shops wouldn't bother him if he came in and plugged in his electric blanket to warm up.
Interesting topic, but the agronomy/plant science assumption that the article is based on is lacking.
Rice doesn't require complex irrigation - dryland rice farming is common. Rice and wheat both give more yield when irrigated properly using complex irrigation systems. I don't see any reason to claim that growing wheat is just generally easier than growing rice.
The authors have published this theory in Science, and this one is in Nature Communications. Probably any criticism we can come up with was provided during the review process.
I'm also unconvinced, but it is very difficult to criticize this theory fairly and from the internet at the moment.
Peer review does not critique the plausibility of hypothesis, just the structure and quality of the paper's argument. At best, reviewers might say that the section on alternative explanations might be lacking.
Sure, but gatekeeping ideas you disagree with is not the purpose of peer review, and distorts its true purpose of ensuring the research and it's presentation passes some minimal quality threshold such that the community can understand and debate it.
According to Braudel (in Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, vol. 1), without irrigation rice farming depletes the soil much, much more than wheat. If I remember correctly, he states that if one waits for natural soil regeneration (fallowing and/or crop rotation) wheat can be grown at the same place every 2 to 3 years, whereas for rice it is only every 10 to 30 years.
Haha, nice timing that this appears after the "why are airplanes so hard to build?" article! Putting the engines to radiate sound upwards does make a lot of sense.
I was intrigued, but acoustically it doesn’t make a lot of sense really…the thrust exhaust where all the fast moving air comes out, also happens to be where all the loud comes out too. Their renderings don’t look like the engines are far enough forward for the fuselage to provide any significant obstructions to the path of sound from the exhaust down to the ground.
There's also the issue of ingesting the turbulent/detached boundary layer of the fuselage at high angles of attack, causing inlet distortions and the corresponding risk of compressor stall.
Also safety. Uncontained engine failures shouldn’t ever happen (and maybe happen less as technology gets better), but when they do happen, it’s better for them to be under the wing away from the fuselage rather than right in the path of critical control systems.
Since this is a blended wing with no vertical stabilizer, it might be different, but it does still look like there are control surfaces right next to the engines..
Yes! Equifax has very lax security. Last year they leaked my social insurance number to a fraudster. When they were describing this on the phone they didn't seem to think they did anything wrong. What makes it worse is I never even gave it to them - they just get it straight from the government I guess?
A durometer, acoustic impulse-response and special UV-VIS spectrophotometer are all instruments used to detect avocado ripeness and usually work well.
A durometer is the cheapest at about $40. If you're right that it's impossible to tell by hardness then it wouldn't work. But you might find that it's more sensitive than your fingers and so it can work?
I would be interested to know the result of a durometer test on your fruits because about 85% of consumers report firmness as a useful measure - a lot but certainly not everyone. So yes maybe there is some granularity to discover there: specific situations where firmness just doesn't work well?
I'm from Ottawa where the cold is obviously deadly, as it is in Finland. I do feel that we need to take shelter more seriously in public policy compared to warm areas because of that. Last week someone froze to death overnight a few blocks away from where I was crashing on a couch with family. Walking through downtown Ottawa and seeing the huge empty, lit, warm buildings with people freezing to death right outside is striking. Any practically minded person can see the problem is political and philosophical, not practical.
I can tell all the posters who think people choose to be homeless that I'm certainly not one of them. The comments about the importance of avoiding a downward spiral are certainly correct. Searching for work is hard enough normally and becomes increasingly difficult without access to things like a kitchen and toilet.
What I see in this Finnish policy is the starting assumption that doing nothing is not a good option. After reaching that point there can a rational discussion about what to do with whatever money is being spent - do you pay more people to hand out blankets and conduct surveys or just use it to buy housing units? As a homeless person I would really like to see Canada have a policy like I'm reading in this article instead of what we are doing now. The crappy temporary shelters and bureaucratic spending strategy obviously isn't working.
Even just economically, to have a government pay for years of schooling and subsidize advanced degrees then just be ready to let that person die on the street when they are ready to work but can't happen to find something seems like a waste. I'd rather see a functioning "social safety net" as described in this article.
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