In all honesty, I'm unfamiliar with those shelters. For these reasons:
Travel fare to Watsonville is unavailable, I would be uncertain whether soup kitchens would be providing reliably, thre travel time via bus is long enough to place it effectively out of reach in terms of keeping the other basic needs met, and the Salinas / Watsonville area is notorious for its gang violence. The only homeless shelter users I know that have talked about being there have been the violent, drug-oriented jailhouse jocks. It didn't make sense for me to ever make the trip. Once you know the resources in an area, you tend not to want to chance not having them if you're somewhere new.
A site like RateMyCop for homeless shelters might be pretty cool, though it's unlikely that homeless people would ever get on the internet and use it effectively.
The church-provided soup kitchens in Santa Cruz, I can provide objective feedback. Nearly always, they're predominated by awesome, caring people with a minor proportion of power-trippers. Roughly half the time, the power-trippers will have the official authority in the place, which makes things difficult. We've had churches permanently ban people from the feeds based on nothing more than personal whimsy or dislike. A lesbian couple was banned from the Elm Street Mission permanently, for example. I've encountered that personally from two church soup kitchens, the Elm Street and the St. Francis. As a result, the HSC is the only remaining daily feed within accessible distance that I have access to, and they only serve dinner and breakfast. When they claimed not to have the funds to keep the awesome kitchen staff on to make dinners (despite simultaneously creating a brand-new $30k a year managerial position), local churches came in to take up a significant amount of the load.
Well, people can't solve a problem if they don't know it's happening. In our case the management tried to keep it quiet by threatening the homeless clients in a plausibly-deniable way by creating reasons to cut off their access to food for weeks, months, or with a permanent ban.
I had to route around them to get in contact with the Board of Directors. I'm not sure how prevalent this is in other shelters and homeless services around the country, but it seems to be a modern approximate equivalent to what used to go on in insane asylums, and still goes on in jails and some orphanages.
When I went to the police about it, I got funny looks and a lot of disinterest. That's prone to happening a lot when you're homeless, simply because there's a high incidence of mental instability (and feigned mental instability... lots of them are faking it to get a crazy-check). And housies have too much to worry about already to be concerned with this - not that most of them are at a community-conscious level at all yet.
When you're part of a marginalized minority, it's tough to be heard and that perpetuates abuse. Most housies don't even want to think about the homeless for longer than they have to, because ending up on the street themselves someday is one of the major bugaboos that are used to keep them psychologically "in their place" by the commercial and political spheres.
I try to let people know, and those I talk to locally know me and are typically amazed at the sort of behavior I'd gotten from management because I'm obviously pretty stable and level-headed. That facilitated action. Most homeless people wouldn't get that, or even have the minimum level of computer skills necessary to Google the Board of Directors' email addresses. Heck, many are functionally incapable of even filling out a form. And most are struggling their whole day just to keep up with basic food, sleep and hygiene requirements to be able to worry about larger stuff - most of those who've gotten chapped by the shelter's management have just drifted on, into another county or state. That doesn't help sort it out.
Ideally, we'd have people spot-checking for corruption by showing up at the homeless shelters as clients for a few weeks apiece. If actual homeless people were used, it's what some of them would have already been doing anyway, and it wouldn't take much financially. Most shelters are at least privately-run (if partially publicly-funded), so there isn't much of a network going on between them. Each is more or less like its own desert isle, and information about what happens in there tends to stay in there. Fortunately, most homeless clients are bored, fed up and tend to gossip endlessly - it's an open secret among the regulars that the corruption is going on, but they don't feel there's anything they can do about it.
Say! Are there any new prescription drugs out there that I'm not taking, but should be? Those seem pretty safe.
Perhaps they'll soon come out with glossy color catalogs for the new ones each season. They'll be full of loads of bikini-clad women draped over cars, popping pills.
Those are valid concerns. Government regulation might be unnecessary - not to mention untrustworthy as well. But getting third-party certified and/or audited might make a lot of sense. Gambling sites do it to ensure players that the software isn't rigged. Penny auction sites ought to do it. And it would make total sense for something like this. Even having third-party bookkeeping from an outsourced company might be able to do it.
The big supposed value behind this is supposed to be that it will cut down on paper use. But it would be far more efficient to use e-paper for that. Not to mention less time-consuming, and regular paper suffers from wear and tear.
It's nice to see people researching conservation technologies, but unless this has other applications as well I really can't see much value in it compared to what we already have. Perhaps it could be used to scan-and-remove graffiti? (amusing visual of someone with a portable device scanning an advertisement QR code... and removing it)
At the risk of sounding like a trendy PR firm, crowdfunding is huge. I'm glad you stopped to think about it.
Basically, it can accomplish a lot of what's lacking in industry at present: accomplishing what many people, rather than a few CEOs, want.
The typical model for it would work like this: Anything, from books to inventions to R&D to political accountability to getting something (like a pharmaceutical) manufactured can effectively use crowdfunding. Someone creates a site for it - which is happening frequently now - and someone else makes a post about what they'd like to see materialize in the world. Typical average people throw in a modest amount each, and the fund presumably fills up. The Whatever It Is uses the money to get researched and/or manufactured. When it goes to market, a percentage of the profits would be returned to the people who invested, in whatever proportion they invested. It becomes a small investment opportunity for average-type people, and things they actually want start to happen.
This would enable pharmaceuticals to not only get R&D'd (even into the public domain) but then also manufactured as well. You could have things in the public domain manufactured and sold, with no problem. You'd just happen to be one of the few interests who were actually manufacturing it. This seems likely, in the case of unconventional pharma.
I was quite serious about using BitCoins. They're often joked about on Slashdot, but then again so is racism. That doesn't make either one particularly funny. There are a lot of interests out there who have a vested interest in people abandoning BitCoin, and talk - particularly internet talk - is a cheap tool to make that happen. There are also a lot of people out there who are disgruntled that the value of BitCoins haven't made it the market speculation commodity they had hoped it would be. But it wasn't designed to be that - instead, it's a convenient, accessible, anonymous, encrypted and perhaps most importantly Peer-to-Peer-based currency that can't be inflated.
I'd suggest using it precisely because it's decentralized like that, with the added bonuses that it's becoming easier to use (and people are more likely to spend BitCoins once they've already acquired some), and that allows anonymous transactions. That last point is always important when you're dealing with ideas that the current power structure is predisposed to take exception to.
And of course, they're not under the control of Amazon or anyone else. So there's nobody who could arbitrarily freeze accounts just because they're feeling contrary. Additionally, lots of website Content Management Systems like Drupal are starting to have capabilities for using BitCoins, and building those has been much easier in a lot of ways than using proprietary APIs for Amazon or PayPal. That means it's easier and quicker - and therefor cheaper - to code for.
There is a lot already implemented for building the majority of a Kickstarter clone in Drupal, and for using BitCoin with it. What little is left could be implemented very cheaply with manhours from India and other low-cost, IT-aware countries using sites like Freelancer.com. It wouldn't be very difficult to put together. Myself, I would make a site that would be a Kickstarter for everything from inventions to creative projects to R&D to actual manufacturing and distribution, and then just put each of those in a separate listing on the site. It wouldn't be that difficult, or take a lot of money. It would take a fair amount of time to oversee the coders and get the thing put together and working properly. If you have an inclination, I have the time and could do that part of it.
Incidentally, while I've been noticing a lot of listings on sites like Freelancer for "Build me a Kickstarter clone website", what I haven't seen is people afterward putting the software and code they've paid to get developed up for digital resale. If people did that, they'd be able to recoup the money they'd put into ha
Fair enough! In the U.S., attorneys can't openly solicit for new clients. I'm not sure why it should be any different for Pharma.
Then again, the People used to have a system that represented them, and which hadn't legalized limitless bribes -er, lobbying contributions, to politicians.
Assessment: The political system is corrupt, the People have been lax and inattentive, and this is literally killing people.
I notice that you still have a blank placeholder page. I've done a lot of research into Kickstarter-like options in Drupal. If you're interested, perhaps we should confer privately.
I'd suggest a few add-ons to your idea as well.
- Use BitCoins
- Give the people who invested a percentage of the profits, in something resembling the proportion to which they've invested.
That would give people a whole lot of incentive to throw in capital. The result would be a lot more capital, and thus a lot more research.
What corrects the problem isn't outrage - at least, not until the majority of the public are torches-and-pitchforks outraged by it - but rather presenting viable alternative approaches. This is why I suggested investments in things like crowdfunded R&D and crowdfunded on-internet-demand manufacturing. So that investors can throw capital into the market in ways that don't contribute to the problem.
If you don't like that I'm afraid universities will need more public funding and that means higher taxes.
I sometimes think our society is filled with either (a) very gullible people, or (2) extremely unimaginative people. Where did the spirit of innovation we had in yesteryear go?
Universities are a broken model. Mortgaging the rest of your working life just to get a diploma that is recognized by a job market, so that you can have a career to mortgage in the first place. In the U.S., people who have mortgaged their working lifetime just to get that diploma are finding out not only that it's nearly worthless, but also that the job market hasn't enabled it to make much of a difference for them anyway.
With the internet, we have the greatest information distribution medium in history. I'm not aware of any reason in the world why we can't use gamification to make learning games happen on a prevalent basis, and use them to form full and complete curricula that are (a) thoroughly free or very nearly so, and (2) thoroughly enjoyable as well. In fact, keeping track of who got what high score rankings would tell a prospective employer far more than the standard university diploma would anyway.
I sometimes think the human race is just not very bright, or enjoys doing things in the most grueling and inefficient ways possible.
Spoken like a guy who doesn't own stocks. Scare investment capital from drug companies, and it won't go elsewhere in the market - it will go to Exxon and Apple! Buh-bye, private R&D!
You make a good point. Why have we not heard of whoever's doing internet crowd-funded R&D? And if no-one is yet, why not?
Crowd-funded R&D, crowd-funded manufacturing... seems to me the public would fund what it actually wanted, and you'd thus have a market demand for the resulting product. Shareholder revenues don't get much better than that, I would think.
Giving jobs to those people in need instead of just some spare change is exactly the thing that can help them.
Agreed!
However, as these people are essentially selling WiFi to earn money for their shelter, the idea needs revision.
Alternatively, we could just re-categorize pimps as "small-business entrepreneurs who are making significant contributions to reduce the nation's unemployment rate".
So, I'm homeless, and I'm actually conflicted on this issue. I can see the good points of it, and I'm kind of interested to do this myself. But as an entrepreneurial business, rather than a way to subsidize my local corrupt-as-hell shelter.
The problems, realistically, are two-fold:
- The increasing unavailability of jobs in the U.S. (and it's abating now, actually) has been something companies have been using to shovel the workload of two or more people on one employee, and gradually use to rewind the working conditions in this country back in the direction of Industrial Revolution era standards. Hiring people for less than minimum wage like this would eventually do just that. It affects the whole job market if people tolerate it, and I'm mildly surprised nobody else has mentioned that yet.
- Like any other job, the problem would be getting into - and staying in - the system in order to have it. State-issued ID, SS#, income taxes, etc.. That's not only a barrier for a lot of people trying to work, but it also accounts for a slim demographic of people who are homeless because they're political protestors who "choose" to live off-the-grid simply because feeding into a system that's doing things which harm them and other people would self-evidently be treason. (If everybody thought like this, and did what was necessary to avoid subsidizing the government until it got back into shape, they'd find it would do so of necessity pretty darn quickly. There'd be no need for all this sill "Occupy This" and "Protest That". But most people just don't have the gumption enough to do it, or are too addicted to their Comfort Level.)
On the plus side, finding informal ways to navigate around the paperwork requirement would open up the opportunity for a lot of home-based businesses that made use of the ample homeless man-hours that are out there. Possibly, doing it with BitCoin rather than Federal Reserve Notes. There's a formula that would enable a lot of new home-based businesses to thrive. It's a wonder more people aren't yet doing that. Mind you, one perquisite would be needing to get to know the homeless people in your area to know who was reliable and trustworthy, not to mention high-functioning. Homeless and High-Functioning Slashdotter Like Myself, you'd probably want to hire. Shrieking Colorful-Rag-Wearing Cat Lady, probably not.
To clarify, there is a Board of Directors at our shelter, and though it's technically a non-profit organization there's certainly a profit to management when you close the shelter for most of the day - making the job a cake-walk - and when funding that's been allocated to services has been mysteriously disappearing.
Theres a difference between being able earn a living that supports your internet use, and having a drug addiction that you cannot financially support and is actually keeping you in poverty.
Can you really not see the difference, or are you just trying for humor?
I know the difference just fine, and I'm only half-kidding here.
Point being that people are quick to make a moral judgement on homeless drug us, but everyone has a need for recreation and/or escapism, particularly when the circumstances are more grueling. That doesn't change simply because someone doesn't have an income. These people don't get cable or internet, and those have arguably worse effects on a moral level anyway. If people were half as quick to morally judge their own habits, they wouldn't be so hypocritical in judging others'.
It's the hypocrisy inherent in the mindset that I was challenging, not the poverty - that was a given in this conversation. It's not funny if I have to explain it.
All this, while one is expected to be looking for work and permanent housing.
So, in order to get charity housing, board, care, etc, the "clientele" is expected to put forth a good-faith effort to try to rebuild their life? OH THE HORROR.
No, you miscontextualize me disingenuously. Increasing demands are created out of thin air while services diminish, and the unspoken text given by the management is the demand to knuckle under to an ego-trip of corruption. Rights are disregarded, shelter policies tossed upside down, abusive staff are kept so long as they serve the interests of the management rather than the rights or needs of the clients, and it goes on and on. You sort of have to be there to get an idea of what it's like. That's the point. It doesn't look like corruption to the casual observer, it looks just fine. That's how it perpetuates.
Thats EXACTLY why I want private entities doing shelters: because after a while, limited funding means that you cant let yourself get taken advantage of by people who truly dont care; you need to try to limit your services to those who will use them.
I assume you mean clients who don't care, rather than staff and management.
Interestingly, they don't limit their services other than the shelter itself. For the rest of the vital services, clients are given the run of the facilities - although the hours are diminishing, and the excuse is that budget cuts prevent them from having "enough staff". What they mean is enough staff to handle crowd control, which is bizarre. It wouldn't be necessary if they'd enforce their policies evenly and uniformly, but any and every crazy-check-scamming behavioral nutcase is provided just as much free run of the place as a legitimately needy, respectful homeless client. If they'd actually implement the shelter's policies they'd weed out so many of the abusive behavioral headcases that the legitimately needy would have better access to the services. But management don't, because (a) it's easier to just moderate whenever a fight or outburst breaks out, and (b) they have a vested interest in selectively applying the policies according to their mood and preferences, misusing the rules as yet another opportunity to play favorites and prompt the clients to begin informally swearing fealty to the management en masse. It's just another means of holding sway over a crowd of people, by controlling access to resources in a very partial and domineering way. But to outsiders, it appears to be pretty much as you've described it. A few of the people in management are out-and-out pirhanas. They play brutally together, stick together, hunt in packs, edify each other, and remain in their positions until accountability is successfully invoked.
The point of charity like that isnt to give someone a free ride through life just because they are unwilling to put any effort forth; its to provide relief to those in NEED.
Absolutely correct.
If Joe wants to keep coming to the shelter as a hideout after selling drugs and shows no indication that he wants to get cleaned up, I absolutely think the time has to come where he is denied entry; charity is unfortunately not an unlimited resource.
Right on the money, but this doesn't happen at our shelter. Joe, and we have quite a predominance of them here, is tolerated even as he's being loud, abusive and belligerent on a constant basis, provided he doesn't have outbursts with the staff. When other clients complain, their complaints are discounted and they're told that "everyone needs to get along", or that action will be taken and almost never is. Joe will remain using the services for years and years, provided he satisfies the "volunteer" hours mandated and sucks up to management sufficiently. He will only leave when he's banned for fighting, stealing other clients' property, or is jailed off-site for using
The shelter in my area is approaching that. In addition to mandatory weekly "volunteer hours", clients are now also required to attend workshops - about whatever, really - that the management have required the staff to form in their off-hours. The result is an increasingly-structured day that is required in order to have a stay at the shelter. All this, while one is expected to be looking for work and permanent housing. Meanwhile, as the expectations and demands increase, the access to services has been decreasing - and not simply due to budget cuts. Managerial decisions are often arbitrary and serve the pleasure and convenience of the management, simply because there is no accountability.
Theoretically, management are accountable to the Board of Directors. When clients ask the staff when the next Board of Directors meeting is, they are told, "Oh, I can't tell you or I'll get fired." Clients who report managerial corruption are confronted with "anonymous reports" they claim to have received about the client, involving incidents that never happened. The client is then told that if they continue to receive complaints, the client will be denied access to services including shelter, hygiene, laundry and food. The clients typically quit complaining at that point, and the corruption continues.
For their part, the Board of Directors seldom hear about the corruption for reasons which are probably obvious by now. The solution in our case was to Google the names of the Board of Directors and get their e-mail addresses. Once they form an inquiry and start getting feedback from clients directly, all sorts of problems start to come out - including services that have received funding, but don't seem to actually be yielding services. Clients are typically given loads of paperwork to fill out, and when they've completed them, more loads again in a never-ending cycle that doesn't lead to the advertised services. In our case, the corruption in the shelter is currently being looked into. The other important part involves getting a sufficient paper trail of documentation established - clients are often reluctant to using the very system that's been emplaced to assist them, because out on the street there's a very different pseudo-moral code that's enforced with violence, much like jail. And many clients are illiterate and incapable of filling out paperwork, let alone using the internet. The overall situation has been creating problems at many shelters around the country where, like everywhere else, a lack of accountability leads to white-collar corruption. At a shelter where access to services is an outright necessity, this has increasingly been leading to a situation of informal serfdom in a country where people are all supposed to have equal access to rights.
They're not, all else being equal. And a lot of them would be a lot better off if they'd recognize that.
That being said, society used to place more of an emphasis on charity to those who couldn't look after themselves. Not out of a sense of obligation, and certainly not as a political model. But rather, people collectively used to realize that they have a duty to themselves to live as upstanding people by living according to their conscience, to live as better people. They used to not live strictly according to Mammon, and had an appreciation that living in a civilized, humane way was a perquisite for having a civilized society. By contrast, society these days has gotten a lot more mercenary. It's the worse for it.
Ironically, there would be a lot more budgetable for private - not government - charity if white-collar corruption weren't squeezing the middle-class out of existence. What used to go to soup kitchens now sits gathering interest in the offshore accounts of CEOs who never use it. And typically, the middle-class is too busy working itself to the nub, and then coming home and collapsing in front of the television, to sort out the corruption. They just don't have the time or energy, after their long day.
Which has always made me wonder why homeless people couldn't work online to put in the time and effort the middle-class lack, to take care of the corruption. All they'd need would be online access, a website easily done in Drupal or something, and crowdsourced financing from the weary army of the middle-class. Homeless people certainly have the time, and a rare few are motivated and high-functioning enough. At that point, you'd have them becoming the true representatives of the Will of the People - a job which our politicians were supposed to be doing all this time, and have refused to.
Slashdot Mirror
In all honesty, I'm unfamiliar with those shelters. For these reasons:
Travel fare to Watsonville is unavailable, I would be uncertain whether soup kitchens would be providing reliably, thre travel time via bus is long enough to place it effectively out of reach in terms of keeping the other basic needs met, and the Salinas / Watsonville area is notorious for its gang violence. The only homeless shelter users I know that have talked about being there have been the violent, drug-oriented jailhouse jocks. It didn't make sense for me to ever make the trip. Once you know the resources in an area, you tend not to want to chance not having them if you're somewhere new.
A site like RateMyCop for homeless shelters might be pretty cool, though it's unlikely that homeless people would ever get on the internet and use it effectively.
The church-provided soup kitchens in Santa Cruz, I can provide objective feedback. Nearly always, they're predominated by awesome, caring people with a minor proportion of power-trippers. Roughly half the time, the power-trippers will have the official authority in the place, which makes things difficult. We've had churches permanently ban people from the feeds based on nothing more than personal whimsy or dislike. A lesbian couple was banned from the Elm Street Mission permanently, for example. I've encountered that personally from two church soup kitchens, the Elm Street and the St. Francis. As a result, the HSC is the only remaining daily feed within accessible distance that I have access to, and they only serve dinner and breakfast. When they claimed not to have the funds to keep the awesome kitchen staff on to make dinners (despite simultaneously creating a brand-new $30k a year managerial position), local churches came in to take up a significant amount of the load.
Well, people can't solve a problem if they don't know it's happening. In our case the management tried to keep it quiet by threatening the homeless clients in a plausibly-deniable way by creating reasons to cut off their access to food for weeks, months, or with a permanent ban.
I had to route around them to get in contact with the Board of Directors. I'm not sure how prevalent this is in other shelters and homeless services around the country, but it seems to be a modern approximate equivalent to what used to go on in insane asylums, and still goes on in jails and some orphanages.
When I went to the police about it, I got funny looks and a lot of disinterest. That's prone to happening a lot when you're homeless, simply because there's a high incidence of mental instability (and feigned mental instability... lots of them are faking it to get a crazy-check). And housies have too much to worry about already to be concerned with this - not that most of them are at a community-conscious level at all yet.
When you're part of a marginalized minority, it's tough to be heard and that perpetuates abuse. Most housies don't even want to think about the homeless for longer than they have to, because ending up on the street themselves someday is one of the major bugaboos that are used to keep them psychologically "in their place" by the commercial and political spheres.
I try to let people know, and those I talk to locally know me and are typically amazed at the sort of behavior I'd gotten from management because I'm obviously pretty stable and level-headed. That facilitated action. Most homeless people wouldn't get that, or even have the minimum level of computer skills necessary to Google the Board of Directors' email addresses. Heck, many are functionally incapable of even filling out a form. And most are struggling their whole day just to keep up with basic food, sleep and hygiene requirements to be able to worry about larger stuff - most of those who've gotten chapped by the shelter's management have just drifted on, into another county or state. That doesn't help sort it out.
Ideally, we'd have people spot-checking for corruption by showing up at the homeless shelters as clients for a few weeks apiece. If actual homeless people were used, it's what some of them would have already been doing anyway, and it wouldn't take much financially. Most shelters are at least privately-run (if partially publicly-funded), so there isn't much of a network going on between them. Each is more or less like its own desert isle, and information about what happens in there tends to stay in there. Fortunately, most homeless clients are bored, fed up and tend to gossip endlessly - it's an open secret among the regulars that the corruption is going on, but they don't feel there's anything they can do about it.
Say! Are there any new prescription drugs out there that I'm not taking, but should be? Those seem pretty safe.
Perhaps they'll soon come out with glossy color catalogs for the new ones each season. They'll be full of loads of bikini-clad women draped over cars, popping pills.
Those are valid concerns. Government regulation might be unnecessary - not to mention untrustworthy as well. But getting third-party certified and/or audited might make a lot of sense. Gambling sites do it to ensure players that the software isn't rigged. Penny auction sites ought to do it. And it would make total sense for something like this. Even having third-party bookkeeping from an outsourced company might be able to do it.
Thanks for the idea!
Because yeah, that's the stuff you'd want to vaporize in your home.
I can, actually.
The big supposed value behind this is supposed to be that it will cut down on paper use. But it would be far more efficient to use e-paper for that. Not to mention less time-consuming, and regular paper suffers from wear and tear.
It's nice to see people researching conservation technologies, but unless this has other applications as well I really can't see much value in it compared to what we already have. Perhaps it could be used to scan-and-remove graffiti? (amusing visual of someone with a portable device scanning an advertisement QR code... and removing it)
At the risk of sounding like a trendy PR firm, crowdfunding is huge. I'm glad you stopped to think about it.
Basically, it can accomplish a lot of what's lacking in industry at present: accomplishing what many people, rather than a few CEOs, want.
The typical model for it would work like this: Anything, from books to inventions to R&D to political accountability to getting something (like a pharmaceutical) manufactured can effectively use crowdfunding. Someone creates a site for it - which is happening frequently now - and someone else makes a post about what they'd like to see materialize in the world. Typical average people throw in a modest amount each, and the fund presumably fills up. The Whatever It Is uses the money to get researched and/or manufactured. When it goes to market, a percentage of the profits would be returned to the people who invested, in whatever proportion they invested. It becomes a small investment opportunity for average-type people, and things they actually want start to happen.
This would enable pharmaceuticals to not only get R&D'd (even into the public domain) but then also manufactured as well. You could have things in the public domain manufactured and sold, with no problem. You'd just happen to be one of the few interests who were actually manufacturing it. This seems likely, in the case of unconventional pharma.
I was quite serious about using BitCoins. They're often joked about on Slashdot, but then again so is racism. That doesn't make either one particularly funny. There are a lot of interests out there who have a vested interest in people abandoning BitCoin, and talk - particularly internet talk - is a cheap tool to make that happen. There are also a lot of people out there who are disgruntled that the value of BitCoins haven't made it the market speculation commodity they had hoped it would be. But it wasn't designed to be that - instead, it's a convenient, accessible, anonymous, encrypted and perhaps most importantly Peer-to-Peer-based currency that can't be inflated.
I'd suggest using it precisely because it's decentralized like that, with the added bonuses that it's becoming easier to use (and people are more likely to spend BitCoins once they've already acquired some), and that allows anonymous transactions. That last point is always important when you're dealing with ideas that the current power structure is predisposed to take exception to.
And of course, they're not under the control of Amazon or anyone else. So there's nobody who could arbitrarily freeze accounts just because they're feeling contrary. Additionally, lots of website Content Management Systems like Drupal are starting to have capabilities for using BitCoins, and building those has been much easier in a lot of ways than using proprietary APIs for Amazon or PayPal. That means it's easier and quicker - and therefor cheaper - to code for.
There is a lot already implemented for building the majority of a Kickstarter clone in Drupal, and for using BitCoin with it. What little is left could be implemented very cheaply with manhours from India and other low-cost, IT-aware countries using sites like Freelancer.com. It wouldn't be very difficult to put together. Myself, I would make a site that would be a Kickstarter for everything from inventions to creative projects to R&D to actual manufacturing and distribution, and then just put each of those in a separate listing on the site. It wouldn't be that difficult, or take a lot of money. It would take a fair amount of time to oversee the coders and get the thing put together and working properly. If you have an inclination, I have the time and could do that part of it.
Incidentally, while I've been noticing a lot of listings on sites like Freelancer for "Build me a Kickstarter clone website", what I haven't seen is people afterward putting the software and code they've paid to get developed up for digital resale. If people did that, they'd be able to recoup the money they'd put into ha
Awesome. Hope to Möbius you guys never think of accepting contracts from rival companies on the side.
Fair enough! In the U.S., attorneys can't openly solicit for new clients. I'm not sure why it should be any different for Pharma.
Then again, the People used to have a system that represented them, and which hadn't legalized limitless bribes -er, lobbying contributions, to politicians.
Assessment: The political system is corrupt, the People have been lax and inattentive, and this is literally killing people.
Very nice concept.
I notice that you still have a blank placeholder page. I've done a lot of research into Kickstarter-like options in Drupal. If you're interested, perhaps we should confer privately.
I'd suggest a few add-ons to your idea as well.
- Use BitCoins
- Give the people who invested a percentage of the profits, in something resembling the proportion to which they've invested.
That would give people a whole lot of incentive to throw in capital. The result would be a lot more capital, and thus a lot more research.
This is absolutely correct, in my experience.
What corrects the problem isn't outrage - at least, not until the majority of the public are torches-and-pitchforks outraged by it - but rather presenting viable alternative approaches. This is why I suggested investments in things like crowdfunded R&D and crowdfunded on-internet-demand manufacturing. So that investors can throw capital into the market in ways that don't contribute to the problem.
Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives ...
Considering the sort of people who are using these machines, it seems almost appropriate somehow.
Maybe keeping them technologically underpowered is actually a good thing. Those crafty, crafty White House IT gurus.
TFA indicates clearly not only that there's no urgent need for IT geeks to unionize, but also what havoc they could wreak if they ever did.
If you don't like that I'm afraid universities will need more public funding and that means higher taxes.
I sometimes think our society is filled with either (a) very gullible people, or (2) extremely unimaginative people. Where did the spirit of innovation we had in yesteryear go?
Universities are a broken model. Mortgaging the rest of your working life just to get a diploma that is recognized by a job market, so that you can have a career to mortgage in the first place. In the U.S., people who have mortgaged their working lifetime just to get that diploma are finding out not only that it's nearly worthless, but also that the job market hasn't enabled it to make much of a difference for them anyway.
With the internet, we have the greatest information distribution medium in history. I'm not aware of any reason in the world why we can't use gamification to make learning games happen on a prevalent basis, and use them to form full and complete curricula that are (a) thoroughly free or very nearly so, and (2) thoroughly enjoyable as well. In fact, keeping track of who got what high score rankings would tell a prospective employer far more than the standard university diploma would anyway.
I sometimes think the human race is just not very bright, or enjoys doing things in the most grueling and inefficient ways possible.
Spoken like a guy who doesn't own stocks. Scare investment capital from drug companies, and it won't go elsewhere in the market - it will go to Exxon and Apple! Buh-bye, private R&D!
You make a good point. Why have we not heard of whoever's doing internet crowd-funded R&D? And if no-one is yet, why not?
Crowd-funded R&D, crowd-funded manufacturing... seems to me the public would fund what it actually wanted, and you'd thus have a market demand for the resulting product. Shareholder revenues don't get much better than that, I would think.
It may be politically popular, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
Niggling idiom correction of the day: The idiom is, "You can't eat your cake, and have it too."
Anyone can have a cake and then eat it. (Well most anyone in my country, I suppose.)
Correction: You feed the monster that bites you and other people as well.
Okay, your turn again. Ooh! Now insult me for being poor.
Giving jobs to those people in need instead of just some spare change is exactly the thing that can help them.
Agreed!
However, as these people are essentially selling WiFi to earn money for their shelter, the idea needs revision.
Alternatively, we could just re-categorize pimps as "small-business entrepreneurs who are making significant contributions to reduce the nation's unemployment rate".
So, I'm homeless, and I'm actually conflicted on this issue. I can see the good points of it, and I'm kind of interested to do this myself. But as an entrepreneurial business, rather than a way to subsidize my local corrupt-as-hell shelter.
The problems, realistically, are two-fold:
- The increasing unavailability of jobs in the U.S. (and it's abating now, actually) has been something companies have been using to shovel the workload of two or more people on one employee, and gradually use to rewind the working conditions in this country back in the direction of Industrial Revolution era standards. Hiring people for less than minimum wage like this would eventually do just that. It affects the whole job market if people tolerate it, and I'm mildly surprised nobody else has mentioned that yet.
- Like any other job, the problem would be getting into - and staying in - the system in order to have it. State-issued ID, SS#, income taxes, etc.. That's not only a barrier for a lot of people trying to work, but it also accounts for a slim demographic of people who are homeless because they're political protestors who "choose" to live off-the-grid simply because feeding into a system that's doing things which harm them and other people would self-evidently be treason. (If everybody thought like this, and did what was necessary to avoid subsidizing the government until it got back into shape, they'd find it would do so of necessity pretty darn quickly. There'd be no need for all this sill "Occupy This" and "Protest That". But most people just don't have the gumption enough to do it, or are too addicted to their Comfort Level.)
On the plus side, finding informal ways to navigate around the paperwork requirement would open up the opportunity for a lot of home-based businesses that made use of the ample homeless man-hours that are out there. Possibly, doing it with BitCoin rather than Federal Reserve Notes. There's a formula that would enable a lot of new home-based businesses to thrive. It's a wonder more people aren't yet doing that. Mind you, one perquisite would be needing to get to know the homeless people in your area to know who was reliable and trustworthy, not to mention high-functioning. Homeless and High-Functioning Slashdotter Like Myself, you'd probably want to hire. Shrieking Colorful-Rag-Wearing Cat Lady, probably not.
To clarify, there is a Board of Directors at our shelter, and though it's technically a non-profit organization there's certainly a profit to management when you close the shelter for most of the day - making the job a cake-walk - and when funding that's been allocated to services has been mysteriously disappearing.
Theres a difference between being able earn a living that supports your internet use, and having a drug addiction that you cannot financially support and is actually keeping you in poverty.
Can you really not see the difference, or are you just trying for humor?
I know the difference just fine, and I'm only half-kidding here.
Point being that people are quick to make a moral judgement on homeless drug us, but everyone has a need for recreation and/or escapism, particularly when the circumstances are more grueling. That doesn't change simply because someone doesn't have an income. These people don't get cable or internet, and those have arguably worse effects on a moral level anyway. If people were half as quick to morally judge their own habits, they wouldn't be so hypocritical in judging others'.
It's the hypocrisy inherent in the mindset that I was challenging, not the poverty - that was a given in this conversation. It's not funny if I have to explain it.
All this, while one is expected to be looking for work and permanent housing.
So, in order to get charity housing, board, care, etc, the "clientele" is expected to put forth a good-faith effort to try to rebuild their life? OH THE HORROR.
No, you miscontextualize me disingenuously. Increasing demands are created out of thin air while services diminish, and the unspoken text given by the management is the demand to knuckle under to an ego-trip of corruption. Rights are disregarded, shelter policies tossed upside down, abusive staff are kept so long as they serve the interests of the management rather than the rights or needs of the clients, and it goes on and on. You sort of have to be there to get an idea of what it's like. That's the point. It doesn't look like corruption to the casual observer, it looks just fine. That's how it perpetuates.
Thats EXACTLY why I want private entities doing shelters: because after a while, limited funding means that you cant let yourself get taken advantage of by people who truly dont care; you need to try to limit your services to those who will use them.
I assume you mean clients who don't care, rather than staff and management.
Interestingly, they don't limit their services other than the shelter itself. For the rest of the vital services, clients are given the run of the facilities - although the hours are diminishing, and the excuse is that budget cuts prevent them from having "enough staff". What they mean is enough staff to handle crowd control, which is bizarre. It wouldn't be necessary if they'd enforce their policies evenly and uniformly, but any and every crazy-check-scamming behavioral nutcase is provided just as much free run of the place as a legitimately needy, respectful homeless client. If they'd actually implement the shelter's policies they'd weed out so many of the abusive behavioral headcases that the legitimately needy would have better access to the services. But management don't, because (a) it's easier to just moderate whenever a fight or outburst breaks out, and (b) they have a vested interest in selectively applying the policies according to their mood and preferences, misusing the rules as yet another opportunity to play favorites and prompt the clients to begin informally swearing fealty to the management en masse. It's just another means of holding sway over a crowd of people, by controlling access to resources in a very partial and domineering way. But to outsiders, it appears to be pretty much as you've described it. A few of the people in management are out-and-out pirhanas. They play brutally together, stick together, hunt in packs, edify each other, and remain in their positions until accountability is successfully invoked.
The point of charity like that isnt to give someone a free ride through life just because they are unwilling to put any effort forth; its to provide relief to those in NEED.
Absolutely correct.
If Joe wants to keep coming to the shelter as a hideout after selling drugs and shows no indication that he wants to get cleaned up, I absolutely think the time has to come where he is denied entry; charity is unfortunately not an unlimited resource.
Right on the money, but this doesn't happen at our shelter. Joe, and we have quite a predominance of them here, is tolerated even as he's being loud, abusive and belligerent on a constant basis, provided he doesn't have outbursts with the staff. When other clients complain, their complaints are discounted and they're told that "everyone needs to get along", or that action will be taken and almost never is. Joe will remain using the services for years and years, provided he satisfies the "volunteer" hours mandated and sucks up to management sufficiently. He will only leave when he's banned for fighting, stealing other clients' property, or is jailed off-site for using
* it cannot be ignored that there are many homeless people who are homeless because of drugs; in that case you would only be worsening the problem
This is why I don't give money to my housed friends. They'd probably just blow it on cable TV and internet access.
The shelter in my area is approaching that. In addition to mandatory weekly "volunteer hours", clients are now also required to attend workshops - about whatever, really - that the management have required the staff to form in their off-hours. The result is an increasingly-structured day that is required in order to have a stay at the shelter. All this, while one is expected to be looking for work and permanent housing. Meanwhile, as the expectations and demands increase, the access to services has been decreasing - and not simply due to budget cuts. Managerial decisions are often arbitrary and serve the pleasure and convenience of the management, simply because there is no accountability.
Theoretically, management are accountable to the Board of Directors. When clients ask the staff when the next Board of Directors meeting is, they are told, "Oh, I can't tell you or I'll get fired." Clients who report managerial corruption are confronted with "anonymous reports" they claim to have received about the client, involving incidents that never happened. The client is then told that if they continue to receive complaints, the client will be denied access to services including shelter, hygiene, laundry and food. The clients typically quit complaining at that point, and the corruption continues.
For their part, the Board of Directors seldom hear about the corruption for reasons which are probably obvious by now. The solution in our case was to Google the names of the Board of Directors and get their e-mail addresses. Once they form an inquiry and start getting feedback from clients directly, all sorts of problems start to come out - including services that have received funding, but don't seem to actually be yielding services. Clients are typically given loads of paperwork to fill out, and when they've completed them, more loads again in a never-ending cycle that doesn't lead to the advertised services. In our case, the corruption in the shelter is currently being looked into. The other important part involves getting a sufficient paper trail of documentation established - clients are often reluctant to using the very system that's been emplaced to assist them, because out on the street there's a very different pseudo-moral code that's enforced with violence, much like jail. And many clients are illiterate and incapable of filling out paperwork, let alone using the internet. The overall situation has been creating problems at many shelters around the country where, like everywhere else, a lack of accountability leads to white-collar corruption. At a shelter where access to services is an outright necessity, this has increasingly been leading to a situation of informal serfdom in a country where people are all supposed to have equal access to rights.
Why are the infirmed and aged owed anything?
They're not, all else being equal. And a lot of them would be a lot better off if they'd recognize that.
That being said, society used to place more of an emphasis on charity to those who couldn't look after themselves. Not out of a sense of obligation, and certainly not as a political model. But rather, people collectively used to realize that they have a duty to themselves to live as upstanding people by living according to their conscience, to live as better people. They used to not live strictly according to Mammon, and had an appreciation that living in a civilized, humane way was a perquisite for having a civilized society. By contrast, society these days has gotten a lot more mercenary. It's the worse for it.
Ironically, there would be a lot more budgetable for private - not government - charity if white-collar corruption weren't squeezing the middle-class out of existence. What used to go to soup kitchens now sits gathering interest in the offshore accounts of CEOs who never use it. And typically, the middle-class is too busy working itself to the nub, and then coming home and collapsing in front of the television, to sort out the corruption. They just don't have the time or energy, after their long day.
Which has always made me wonder why homeless people couldn't work online to put in the time and effort the middle-class lack, to take care of the corruption. All they'd need would be online access, a website easily done in Drupal or something, and crowdsourced financing from the weary army of the middle-class. Homeless people certainly have the time, and a rare few are motivated and high-functioning enough. At that point, you'd have them becoming the true representatives of the Will of the People - a job which our politicians were supposed to be doing all this time, and have refused to.