The solution is easy and has been mathematically proven for literally hundreds of years: use a Condorcet method to count ballots and strategic voting is a thing of the past.
The much harder followup problem, however, is how to get the people in power, who benefit from the broken system we have now, to implement that easy solution to something they consider a feature, not a bug.
The company that owns that investment is in your country.
Think as if it were people: a given American citizen might $X invested domestically, or $2X invested internationally. In the latter case, the American citizen has twice as much money invested somewhere earning him more money, which is better for him, the American, even though that money isn't invested in other Americans.
You realize they said the same thing about Obama curbing Bush's then-decried use of Executive Orders, don't you?
The ACLU had this huge list of things that Obama could and should have done on day one, using Executive Orders, to reverse bad things that Bush had done before, and the Democrat narrative in response to that was "he can't do those things because Executive Orders are bad and Bush was bad to use them and we shouldn't use them or else the next Republican president will feel even more emboldened to use them". And then they went and used them anyway -- on things other than fixing the problems Bush caused -- and yeah, almost certainly emboldened Trump to use them even though he decries Obama's use of them every bit as much as Obama decried Bush's.
Yeah, IF ther isn't already a pile of work queued up overnight or before I even got to my desk in the morning that's good new, but it's the panicked thought that there likely is all that which drives me to check my email first thing I wake up in the desperate hope that it might not be and I can stop freaking out about it.
today is my day off, in theory. woke up when i'm supposed to for work anyway and panicked checked work email to make sure they actually are giving me a day off and not just backlogging a day's work for me while i'm already off.
Person I replied to said they wake up whenever they wake up, implying they dont HAVE to arrive at the office at any particular time at all, not just that they wait until they get there to start work. You're talking about different things.
And if I did have time for it (and to maintain a 'social support network', whatever the fuck that is, in the first place) a few work emails first thing in the morning wouldn't be enough to bring me down.
I check work email first thing when I wake up hoping to see confirmation that I am not already half a day's work behind schedule. If I just didn't check it, I would instead just be constantly worried that I probably was until I got to my desk and THEN maybe found out I wasn't.
You are absolutely right that there are degrees of homelessness, and I would argue that the only people who are 0% homeless, not homeless at all, are people who own their homes outright. Which, yes, means that almost everybody besides the richest of the rich, since at least feudalism onward, has been homeless to some degree. If you're mortgaging your home, the lender has an interest in it and can take it from you so you don't really own a home, you're borrowing someone else's. If you're a tenant renting the land -- whether in cash as renters today or in kind as tenant farmers in the feudal era -- then you are explicitly borrowing someone else's land, and don't have a home of your own. In a sense, even people who "own their homes outright" in the usual way (fee simple) are still technically, legally, tenants on the State's land, which is how property taxes are justified.
And in a very real and intuitive way, unless you really explicitly own something outright, you don't really "have" it. Say you drive a beaten up old clunker normally, and it's broken down again, and your rich friendly neighbor lets you drive his fancy Ferrari to the store for groceries. While there, you run into an old friend you haven't seen in years, who sees the car you're driving and say "Whoa, man! You have a Ferrari now!?" Is the correct answer to his question "yes" or "no"? If you say "yes", he will think that you own the Ferrari, so "you have a Ferrari" means "you own a Ferrari". If you don't own it, the answer he will expects will be "no" and an explanation of why you're driving one anyway.
In that same sense, "do you have a home?" means "do you own a home?", so if you don't own a home, you don't have a home, and not having a home makes you homeless. Homeless people can borrow other people's homes, to various degrees -- a friend letting you sleep on his apartment floor is different from a richer friend letting you sleep in his summer house, and renting or mortgaging something is just yet another degree of borrowing someone else's home -- but they're still essentially homeless.
While true and sad, eminent domain seizing one little house in the middle of a whole bunch of houses (or punishment for failing to pay the comparatively trivial cost of property taxes, which if absent would have to be replaced with comparable use fees for infrastructure connectivity anyway) is much, much less of a practical threat than foreclosure for failure to pay your mortgage or eviction for failure to pay rent or just because the landlord doesn't want you there anymore.
Shitty states of affairs where most people suffer terribly are generally stable, inasmuch as they stick around and don't change much.
Better states of affairs are unstable, and without constant effort tend to fall apart... back into the shittier, stabler states of affairs.
The danger we face with the collapse of the "liberal welfare state" is a return to feudalism. There's not much further danger once you're there; it's just the shit that it is.
As someone myself too poor to afford kids without them ending up in statistics like this article is about, and yet making more money than 75% of Americans, most of us really can't afford to be having kids.
And that is a terrible fucking tragedy and an indictment of our society, but it's true. Most of us oughtn't have kids in the circumstances we're in. Those circumstances ought to change, but unless they do, we'd best not have kids.
And that would actually fuck over the rich and help to change the circumstances, too. At a terrible cost, but still. If you're likely to spend the rest of your life poor, like almost all of us today, then please don't subject a future generation to the same thing. Those who're never born won't be around to regret it, and those who are born anyway will be the better for it.
As the child of parents far poorer than even I am, I sometimes wish they had thought that through themselves.
A full 3bd 2ba house may be $3000-4000 to rent, but the cheapest possible rent (say a bedroom in someone else's house) is way less than that, like 15-20% of it. There are no buy options comparable to the low end of rent options, so if you can't afford the high end rent options, you can't afford to buy either.
And as $3000/mo is basically my entire take-home income, and more than half of Americans make less than half of what I make), most people can't afford those high-end rent options, or consequently a mortgage. And with almost all of that as interest initially, it makes much more financial sense to keep renting the land my trailer is on for a sixth of that until I can put enough down that the interest portion of the subsequent mortgage is less than my rent. Which means saving and saving for decades before I can start buying.
Even just saving up for that 20% down payment is about a decade's savings. Starting in your early 30s when your career really starts to take off enough to even contemplate it, then saving for a decade, then taking on a 30 year mortgage that will drain every last drop of your income assuming you can keep that kind of income up without interruption and don't lose it all in a foreclosure somewhere along the way, means you end up in your early 70s just finishing paying off a house and now finally, in your 70s, able to put money toward something else like, say, the retirement you're already half a decade late to.
And if I was happy living with strangers (like renting a room out would be, not like sharing the house with my wife), I'd have continued to rent a bedroom in someone else's house for myself, which was by far the cheapest option as far as not throwing away money on rent and interest goes, but meant putting up with a bunch of other fuck heads I couldn't get rid of out of financial necessity. Most of the point of owning my own home is for it to be my home; a space that's not anyone else's. With this trailer I finally have most of that as far as privacy goes (living on shared land so close to other people still isn't great, but inside my front door it's all my space), but being on rented land I still have almost none of it as far as security goes; I own basically a large vehicle that looks like a house, and I still have to pay someone else to park it at their place, at their pleasure, on their terms.
Where is the state going to stick the kids they take away from their parents? It's not a case of a few parents failing to bother adequately providing for their children, it's a case of the whole goddamn state being priced out of existence. Section 8 housing has years-long waitlists, elderly and disabled people who can't make the rent on their social security incomes just go homeless or at best end up crammed 3-4 people to a bedroom in "room and board" houses that take almost the entirety of their income for the privilege. It's not like the state has a bunch of fucking spare housing somewhere it can stick the kids; it would stick them in some overcrowded foster family situation barely any better than where the kids already are
You don't have to be the first people there to have been there long before it got so unreasonably expensive to live there that you can't even make the rent and end up homeless like these families. These kids likely belong to families who could once afford to rent there, who were perhaps born from families who also rented there, as families too poor to buy houses tend to have children who are also too poor to buy houses and over generations spend way, way more money on housing than it would have cost to buy a house (if they had been able to apply that money to the cost of a house, and hadn't had to pay it to rent instead), without ever getting any house for their efforts. Rent is a travesty that traps generations into... well, homelessness, albeit not the kind the poor kids in this article are suffering. Not always at least, but obviously sometimes, like these kids.
And even without that generation-over generation rent trap, home owners having more than one kid subject the next generation of native-born locals to the same housing challenges as newcomers. If the great-grandparents (dying off about now) owned a house there, had several kids, at most one of whom inherited an entire house to themselves, the rest (if not all) of whom maybe couldn't afford to buy (even with a fractional-house-value of inheritance, which probably went first to offsetting existing debts), but were already there and tried to make it, but just couldn't, and meanwhile those kids who spent their lives renting while trying to make it gave birth to a new generation who had only ever known renting and never homeownership (we're talking now-grown millennials), and those kids now have kids of their own, and the cost of housing keeps rising, and they've been there for generations, and now they're homeless and their kids are in these schools... it's not like these were some stupid people who decided to pack up and try living beyond their means in a place they couldn't afford. These are people trying their damnedest not to be forced out of the places their families have lived for generations.
I'm 34 and I live elsewhere in California somewhere not quite as expensive as SV but still subject to the same effects. My grandparents all moved out here when there was next to nothing (hell one of my grandparents' construction company build virtually half the nearest city), and they were filthy stinking rich by my standards. Most of my parents and their siblings are struggling to get by, some more successfully than others (mine are among the 'others'), but most of them don't own houses yet, though some are well on their way, and others like my parents aren't (between them they've paid nearly half a million dollars in housing expenses over their lives; where is the house for them?). I have never lived in a house that anyone in my family owned. I make more than 75% of Americans now, live in a tiny trailer to save on rent costs, save almost every other paycheck, get regularly scheduled raises, and when I run the numbers I am still not sure if I will ever be able to own a home in the place where my family has lived for three generations, or if I will eventually be forced to abandon everyone and everything I've ever known and move to what may as well be a different country to retire in lonely misery but at least not abject poverty. I'm not having kids, partly because the woman I want to be my wife doesn't want them, partly because even between the two of us we can't afford even a fucking 2br apartment without it destroying any ability to save for retirement or a real house so we can't get married or raise a family if we wanted to, and partly -- or I guess consequentially -- because if I did have kids, they'd probably end up in the kind of statistics this article is about.
By the time robots are capable of replacing humans are romantic/sexual partners, they will have also put all humans out of jobs, and nobody will be able to live off of anybody but the robots anyway.
You obviously don't know many millennials, and haven't looked at any numbers regarding home ownership. Look at how rapidly housing prices have escalated compared to how slowly wages have, note the order of magnitude difference, and then realize the difference between "hard but doable" and "impossible for most no matter how hard they try". And then maybe actually listen to the people all over the goddamn internet constantly complaining about how much they wish they could buy a house and stop renting, but can't.
Suggest to the women who do so that they too can have perfect robot boyfriends to love and cherish and serve them better and more slavishly than any human man ever would. And all the gross creepy men who keep perving on them will disappear into their basements with their sexbots and never bother them again.
Perfectly realistic robot lovers would be a godsend to people of all sexes and, properly distributed, would drastically transform society for the better.
In a reversal of the usual trend of law having trouble keeping up with technology: 35 years ago people maybe thought gay marriage was ridiculous, but they also thought that fully sapient general artificial intelligence was 20 years away. The law has progressed faster than their expectations... and fully sapient general artificial intelligence is still "20 years away", and will be for the foreseeable future. Until we get over that hurdle and actually have robots even capable of wanting to marry, we can't start the "35 years" timer for the law to catch up and allow it.
And even that timer is still too short, because 35 years ago not only did homosexuals exist but they were fully recognized as people, not property, capable of legal and moral responsibility and competent to enter into contracts and so on. We'd need a robot Emancipation Proclamation first (and sapient robots to be emancipated zeroth), and then a robot Civil Rights Movement, and then maybe when we get to the point that sapient robots exists and are recognized as persons we can start wondering whether 35 years later robot marriage will be a thing.
You think millennials proudly live in small rented boxes? It's all they can afford thanks to the previous generations wildly inflating land prices to the point that today's young adults will likely never be able to own their own real homes.
I know this is me because for however crap I knowingly feel normally, in the majority of cases having to be around other people makes me feel even worse, because I don't get nearly enough time to relax and be myself and not have to do the performance that is interacting with most other people.
There are a few people whose company I really enjoy, though even they can be too much sometimes. The problem is not being around people in the abstract, the problem is that most people are not people whose company impacts me positively rather than negatively.
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The solution is easy and has been mathematically proven for literally hundreds of years: use a Condorcet method to count ballots and strategic voting is a thing of the past.
The much harder followup problem, however, is how to get the people in power, who benefit from the broken system we have now, to implement that easy solution to something they consider a feature, not a bug.
The company that owns that investment is in your country.
Think as if it were people: a given American citizen might $X invested domestically, or $2X invested internationally. In the latter case, the American citizen has twice as much money invested somewhere earning him more money, which is better for him, the American, even though that money isn't invested in other Americans.
You realize they said the same thing about Obama curbing Bush's then-decried use of Executive Orders, don't you?
The ACLU had this huge list of things that Obama could and should have done on day one, using Executive Orders, to reverse bad things that Bush had done before, and the Democrat narrative in response to that was "he can't do those things because Executive Orders are bad and Bush was bad to use them and we shouldn't use them or else the next Republican president will feel even more emboldened to use them". And then they went and used them anyway -- on things other than fixing the problems Bush caused -- and yeah, almost certainly emboldened Trump to use them even though he decries Obama's use of them every bit as much as Obama decried Bush's.
Exactly this. I have an alarm to wake me enough to check work email to see if i actually need to be awake yet or can go back to sleep again.
Oh and fwiw it is a special holiday day off not my regular weekend schedule, and they were in fact queueing up work for me to do anyway.
Yes i could certainly use the time to get coffee before work in the morning unfortunately I don't have it so straight to email it is.
Yeah, IF ther isn't already a pile of work queued up overnight or before I even got to my desk in the morning that's good new, but it's the panicked thought that there likely is all that which drives me to check my email first thing I wake up in the desperate hope that it might not be and I can stop freaking out about it.
today is my day off, in theory. woke up when i'm supposed to for work anyway and panicked checked work email to make sure they actually are giving me a day off and not just backlogging a day's work for me while i'm already off.
who has time for friends i don't even have time to spend on myself by the time work is through i'm not wasting my precious time on anyone else
Person I replied to said they wake up whenever they wake up, implying they dont HAVE to arrive at the office at any particular time at all, not just that they wait until they get there to start work. You're talking about different things.
Must be nice to be independently wealthy and not have to have a job you have to report to in the morning.
And if I did have time for it (and to maintain a 'social support network', whatever the fuck that is, in the first place) a few work emails first thing in the morning wouldn't be enough to bring me down.
I check work email first thing when I wake up hoping to see confirmation that I am not already half a day's work behind schedule. If I just didn't check it, I would instead just be constantly worried that I probably was until I got to my desk and THEN maybe found out I wasn't.
You are absolutely right that there are degrees of homelessness, and I would argue that the only people who are 0% homeless, not homeless at all, are people who own their homes outright. Which, yes, means that almost everybody besides the richest of the rich, since at least feudalism onward, has been homeless to some degree. If you're mortgaging your home, the lender has an interest in it and can take it from you so you don't really own a home, you're borrowing someone else's. If you're a tenant renting the land -- whether in cash as renters today or in kind as tenant farmers in the feudal era -- then you are explicitly borrowing someone else's land, and don't have a home of your own. In a sense, even people who "own their homes outright" in the usual way (fee simple) are still technically, legally, tenants on the State's land, which is how property taxes are justified.
And in a very real and intuitive way, unless you really explicitly own something outright, you don't really "have" it. Say you drive a beaten up old clunker normally, and it's broken down again, and your rich friendly neighbor lets you drive his fancy Ferrari to the store for groceries. While there, you run into an old friend you haven't seen in years, who sees the car you're driving and say "Whoa, man! You have a Ferrari now!?" Is the correct answer to his question "yes" or "no"? If you say "yes", he will think that you own the Ferrari, so "you have a Ferrari" means "you own a Ferrari". If you don't own it, the answer he will expects will be "no" and an explanation of why you're driving one anyway.
In that same sense, "do you have a home?" means "do you own a home?", so if you don't own a home, you don't have a home, and not having a home makes you homeless. Homeless people can borrow other people's homes, to various degrees -- a friend letting you sleep on his apartment floor is different from a richer friend letting you sleep in his summer house, and renting or mortgaging something is just yet another degree of borrowing someone else's home -- but they're still essentially homeless.
While true and sad, eminent domain seizing one little house in the middle of a whole bunch of houses (or punishment for failing to pay the comparatively trivial cost of property taxes, which if absent would have to be replaced with comparable use fees for infrastructure connectivity anyway) is much, much less of a practical threat than foreclosure for failure to pay your mortgage or eviction for failure to pay rent or just because the landlord doesn't want you there anymore.
Shitty states of affairs where most people suffer terribly are generally stable, inasmuch as they stick around and don't change much.
Better states of affairs are unstable, and without constant effort tend to fall apart... back into the shittier, stabler states of affairs.
The danger we face with the collapse of the "liberal welfare state" is a return to feudalism. There's not much further danger once you're there; it's just the shit that it is.
As someone myself too poor to afford kids without them ending up in statistics like this article is about, and yet making more money than 75% of Americans, most of us really can't afford to be having kids.
And that is a terrible fucking tragedy and an indictment of our society, but it's true. Most of us oughtn't have kids in the circumstances we're in. Those circumstances ought to change, but unless they do, we'd best not have kids.
And that would actually fuck over the rich and help to change the circumstances, too. At a terrible cost, but still. If you're likely to spend the rest of your life poor, like almost all of us today, then please don't subject a future generation to the same thing. Those who're never born won't be around to regret it, and those who are born anyway will be the better for it.
As the child of parents far poorer than even I am, I sometimes wish they had thought that through themselves.
A full 3bd 2ba house may be $3000-4000 to rent, but the cheapest possible rent (say a bedroom in someone else's house) is way less than that, like 15-20% of it. There are no buy options comparable to the low end of rent options, so if you can't afford the high end rent options, you can't afford to buy either.
And as $3000/mo is basically my entire take-home income, and more than half of Americans make less than half of what I make), most people can't afford those high-end rent options, or consequently a mortgage. And with almost all of that as interest initially, it makes much more financial sense to keep renting the land my trailer is on for a sixth of that until I can put enough down that the interest portion of the subsequent mortgage is less than my rent. Which means saving and saving for decades before I can start buying.
Even just saving up for that 20% down payment is about a decade's savings. Starting in your early 30s when your career really starts to take off enough to even contemplate it, then saving for a decade, then taking on a 30 year mortgage that will drain every last drop of your income assuming you can keep that kind of income up without interruption and don't lose it all in a foreclosure somewhere along the way, means you end up in your early 70s just finishing paying off a house and now finally, in your 70s, able to put money toward something else like, say, the retirement you're already half a decade late to.
And if I was happy living with strangers (like renting a room out would be, not like sharing the house with my wife), I'd have continued to rent a bedroom in someone else's house for myself, which was by far the cheapest option as far as not throwing away money on rent and interest goes, but meant putting up with a bunch of other fuck heads I couldn't get rid of out of financial necessity. Most of the point of owning my own home is for it to be my home; a space that's not anyone else's. With this trailer I finally have most of that as far as privacy goes (living on shared land so close to other people still isn't great, but inside my front door it's all my space), but being on rented land I still have almost none of it as far as security goes; I own basically a large vehicle that looks like a house, and I still have to pay someone else to park it at their place, at their pleasure, on their terms.
Where is the state going to stick the kids they take away from their parents? It's not a case of a few parents failing to bother adequately providing for their children, it's a case of the whole goddamn state being priced out of existence. Section 8 housing has years-long waitlists, elderly and disabled people who can't make the rent on their social security incomes just go homeless or at best end up crammed 3-4 people to a bedroom in "room and board" houses that take almost the entirety of their income for the privilege. It's not like the state has a bunch of fucking spare housing somewhere it can stick the kids; it would stick them in some overcrowded foster family situation barely any better than where the kids already are
You don't have to be the first people there to have been there long before it got so unreasonably expensive to live there that you can't even make the rent and end up homeless like these families. These kids likely belong to families who could once afford to rent there, who were perhaps born from families who also rented there, as families too poor to buy houses tend to have children who are also too poor to buy houses and over generations spend way, way more money on housing than it would have cost to buy a house (if they had been able to apply that money to the cost of a house, and hadn't had to pay it to rent instead), without ever getting any house for their efforts. Rent is a travesty that traps generations into... well, homelessness, albeit not the kind the poor kids in this article are suffering. Not always at least, but obviously sometimes, like these kids.
And even without that generation-over generation rent trap, home owners having more than one kid subject the next generation of native-born locals to the same housing challenges as newcomers. If the great-grandparents (dying off about now) owned a house there, had several kids, at most one of whom inherited an entire house to themselves, the rest (if not all) of whom maybe couldn't afford to buy (even with a fractional-house-value of inheritance, which probably went first to offsetting existing debts), but were already there and tried to make it, but just couldn't, and meanwhile those kids who spent their lives renting while trying to make it gave birth to a new generation who had only ever known renting and never homeownership (we're talking now-grown millennials), and those kids now have kids of their own, and the cost of housing keeps rising, and they've been there for generations, and now they're homeless and their kids are in these schools... it's not like these were some stupid people who decided to pack up and try living beyond their means in a place they couldn't afford. These are people trying their damnedest not to be forced out of the places their families have lived for generations.
I'm 34 and I live elsewhere in California somewhere not quite as expensive as SV but still subject to the same effects. My grandparents all moved out here when there was next to nothing (hell one of my grandparents' construction company build virtually half the nearest city), and they were filthy stinking rich by my standards. Most of my parents and their siblings are struggling to get by, some more successfully than others (mine are among the 'others'), but most of them don't own houses yet, though some are well on their way, and others like my parents aren't (between them they've paid nearly half a million dollars in housing expenses over their lives; where is the house for them?). I have never lived in a house that anyone in my family owned. I make more than 75% of Americans now, live in a tiny trailer to save on rent costs, save almost every other paycheck, get regularly scheduled raises, and when I run the numbers I am still not sure if I will ever be able to own a home in the place where my family has lived for three generations, or if I will eventually be forced to abandon everyone and everything I've ever known and move to what may as well be a different country to retire in lonely misery but at least not abject poverty. I'm not having kids, partly because the woman I want to be my wife doesn't want them, partly because even between the two of us we can't afford even a fucking 2br apartment without it destroying any ability to save for retirement or a real house so we can't get married or raise a family if we wanted to, and partly -- or I guess consequentially -- because if I did have kids, they'd probably end up in the kind of statistics this article is about.
By the time robots are capable of replacing humans are romantic/sexual partners, they will have also put all humans out of jobs, and nobody will be able to live off of anybody but the robots anyway.
You obviously don't know many millennials, and haven't looked at any numbers regarding home ownership. Look at how rapidly housing prices have escalated compared to how slowly wages have, note the order of magnitude difference, and then realize the difference between "hard but doable" and "impossible for most no matter how hard they try". And then maybe actually listen to the people all over the goddamn internet constantly complaining about how much they wish they could buy a house and stop renting, but can't.
Suggest to the women who do so that they too can have perfect robot boyfriends to love and cherish and serve them better and more slavishly than any human man ever would. And all the gross creepy men who keep perving on them will disappear into their basements with their sexbots and never bother them again.
Perfectly realistic robot lovers would be a godsend to people of all sexes and, properly distributed, would drastically transform society for the better.
In a reversal of the usual trend of law having trouble keeping up with technology: 35 years ago people maybe thought gay marriage was ridiculous, but they also thought that fully sapient general artificial intelligence was 20 years away. The law has progressed faster than their expectations... and fully sapient general artificial intelligence is still "20 years away", and will be for the foreseeable future. Until we get over that hurdle and actually have robots even capable of wanting to marry, we can't start the "35 years" timer for the law to catch up and allow it.
And even that timer is still too short, because 35 years ago not only did homosexuals exist but they were fully recognized as people, not property, capable of legal and moral responsibility and competent to enter into contracts and so on. We'd need a robot Emancipation Proclamation first (and sapient robots to be emancipated zeroth), and then a robot Civil Rights Movement, and then maybe when we get to the point that sapient robots exists and are recognized as persons we can start wondering whether 35 years later robot marriage will be a thing.
You think millennials proudly live in small rented boxes? It's all they can afford thanks to the previous generations wildly inflating land prices to the point that today's young adults will likely never be able to own their own real homes.
I know this is me because for however crap I knowingly feel normally, in the majority of cases having to be around other people makes me feel even worse, because I don't get nearly enough time to relax and be myself and not have to do the performance that is interacting with most other people.
There are a few people whose company I really enjoy, though even they can be too much sometimes. The problem is not being around people in the abstract, the problem is that most people are not people whose company impacts me positively rather than negatively.