I have successfully bootstrapped several online business and absolutely, 100% this.
It'll either fail, stay a side project forever ($1k/mo isn't bad if you only need to put in 30 mins work per week on maintenance!), or reach the point where quitting your job becomes brain-dead obvious (for me, it was when the one day a week side hustle was pulling in 33% of the income as the 50 hour a week day job).
If you already have a decent job, there's no real need to risk everything and eat shit for years so you can have a crack at the big time.
Your idea is either good or bad, and part of business savvy is evaluating the idea without dumping millions of dollars/thousands of hours into a pit.
I've written a device and driver side USB stack, not even bare metal and it took several weeks of attempts and hundreds of pages of reading (mostly USB complete by Jan Axelson, this site is also good but just not as in-depth) to get right and there are still parts of it I don't fully understand.
Call it 15 hours to get a "ping" signal across, and another 15 to get data travelling at full speed with proper SOF handling.
Nowhere near as simple as something like I2C that you can get a complete understanding of in an afternoon.
Its even more complicated now. USB4 has a lot of timing related things that the system has to do before you can even start sending data. More complicated, much of it is done in hardware, which might be nice for quickly slapping USB capabilities, buttttt is a bear if you're trying to build something thats not a computer. Theres cases where the device wont even power on unless you do everything just right hardware side. Gone are the days of simple signals and connections.
>$28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness"
Do you have a source for that number, or similar numbers for other cities? I believe you, just wondering if there's a breakdown or something. It's absolutely bonkers to imagine.
The problem with those silly numbers represented by bad faith actors is they’re akin to counting your bugs at the end of the year, dividing those into your annual budget and claiming you spent $/bug.
Think about what they’re claiming and how it would change if they were more successful - e.g. if by some breakthrough at the same budget level, they cut the number of homeless people in half —- their cost/person would look much worse…
That 57k would provide a huge runway for people to get their footing. Say 5 months of expenses, where they can maintain their address, phone, shower regularly, have a safe place to keep food, etc.
Once you lose your residence, those things snowball. How do you apply for a job without a permanent mailing address? Where do you keep your nice interview clothes? How can you be contacted when your phone was stolen from your locker at the shelter for the second time that month?
It's never that easy. You'd be surprised the number of homeless folks being in that situation because of things like addiction, mental health issues, etc. Just giving them the money is mostly not helpful.
Even if a percentage just burned through it on drugs, it definitely would be that easy for most of the situational homeless. It would also help to prevent others from falling down the addiction/mental health rabbit hole. Being homeless on the street is a highly stressful endeavor, that constant stress exacerbates the mental health issues, motivates drug use, etc.
Just handing over that money to people about to be homeless would do far more than paying administrators to badly run a shelter that homeless avoid because they get all their shit stolen regularly.
If today you give every homeless person in SF 50k, tomorrow we'll have even more homeless because tomorrow a new batch of homeless people will come to collect their 50k.
It's more or less the same in NYC. DHS budget is about $2.2 billion to serve 90K people in shelters, and that doesn't count all of the service spending from agencies not directly responsible for housing and feeding them.
Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the most efficient thing, giving people money to go find housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in the idea of how our society works. Why should someone grind away barely surviving when they could become homeless and get UBI instead? Now you need to pay UBI for way more than just 90k people.
Not that I think we shouldn't try to solve the problem, shouldn't work towards UBI, etc. Just saying the shortest path from status quo to the ideal will break the system.
> Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the most efficient thing, giving people money to go find housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in the idea of how our society works.
This is a cultural thing that is harder to change - but it does not result in this.
I live in Finland and the only reason someone is actually homeless here is because they refuse to take the aid that's given to them.
I can assure you, that no one who doesn't have severe mental issues WANT to live on social wellfare.
In the US, the homeless commonly refused aid too. Mark Laita, who runs the large yt channel where he talks to the homeless, has spoken at length about this.
Because of policies mandating to stop using drugs, follow a specific religion or give up their possessions and live in bunks without private spaces or storage for personal items.
Mark is intimately aware of those programs and the hurdles they can create, he works directly with many of them. However he has repeatedly had people who come to him begging for help, and then they do nothing to actually realize that help. Even the most basic "Be outside your motel room I bought you at 11am to get in the car I will send that will take you to the counselor I'll pay for" and then they ghost it.
At the end of the day, they would in fact rather live on the street doing dope rather than live in a (paid for) motel room (or even apartment) and work a job.
A lot of Americans think they want to sit around doing nothing all day, but having done that on medical leave, and observed other people, my remark is, people hate ennui.
And most people can't get enough stimulation just from social media or TV, so given infinite leisure time, a lot of them are going to go stir-crazy and want to do _something_.
Look at all the elderly people who are constantly craving _some_ stimulus in their lives.
People think that the natural state of others if given no challenge in their lives is indolence, but having met a number of people looking for social safety nets, most of them just want the ability to get out of the pit they're in...and even the ones who think they want to just not care forever, everyone I've ever met who ended up in situations like that, had to find _something_ to stimulate themselves, sometimes including developing crippling addictions to feel _something_ for a moment.
I don’t know how many people that is. Understanding the quantity would be very useful for shaping policy.
I do think in the US there could be much more multi-generational trauma from our cold heartless system. Honestly some people are owed a lifetime of relaxation.
I think some studies have refuted this and found that most often if you house people they become productive. But those are very small studies and I am skeptical they could scale that well or persevere long-term, it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it, and people will find ways to manipulate the system and steal from it. But UBI is inevitable, we will have to figure it out or watch our civilization fail.
> it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it
The bit this comment misses is that the people who are not getting anything from it would be the people who pay for it. You can’t create such a strong incentive for failure and not expect failure to increase.
The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets. This leads to more sustainable street-level businesses (because there's more foot traffic), which leads to more choice and better prices. Overall it's just a higher quality of living.
Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.
The basis of your premise is correct. If people are sufficiently deprived, some non-trivial portion of them will become highly anti-social, often violent, often criminal, and otherwise just disruptive to society. Even if it’s entirely their own fault for ending up that way. But you’re missing a couple of things.
Firstly, if you reward people for failing, you’re incentivising more people to fail. So the problem isn’t that a poorly conceived welfare program wouldn’t manage the anti-social aspect of society properly, it’s that it would create more of it.
Secondly, the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
So yes, managing depravation at the bottom has a benefit for society. But the threat of “give us money or we’ll just rob you all the time and otherwise ruin society as much as possible” isn’t specifically a good argument for the type of policy you’re advocating.
> Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
I feel like you are conflating two things here that are not related. These places can take the heavy handed law and order approach they have because they are some of the safest places in the world. Unsurprisingly, at least in Japan, it’s nearly impossible to not have some form of housing if you want it. Even the lowest convenience store job will give you enough income to pay for the rent on a one-room apartment.
This just seems like a completely insane take to me. Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime approach with an actually effective police force has incredibly low crime rates.
Singapore is the most expensive city in the world, has no minimum wage, and doesn’t have a universal welfare program. It also routinely hands out prison time and caning (which is rather gruesome if you weren’t familiar with it) as punishments for crimes as minor as graffiti. That combined with an effective police force, a very high police to resident ratio, very low corruption, and there’s no question at all why their country is so clean and safe.
> Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime approach with an actually effective police force has incredibly low crime rates.
You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?
Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
> You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?
Out of the top 10 lowest crime countries in the world, you have two micro states, Armenia (which has its own unique problems), and 7 rich countries that are either overtly authoritarian and very hard on crime, or are far more authoritarian than most westerners would be comfortable with (especially with regards to their justice system) and also very hard on crime (those being UAE, Qatar, Taiwan, Oman, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore).
What is the cause and effect? If people think they are likely to be caught for committing a crime, and that the punishment will likely be severe, then they are less likely to commit crime. This is simply common sense.
> Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
I’ll just directly quote my parent comment.
> the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach
Though I will add that the social safety net approach seems to only work in rather limited circumstances. I doubt Singapore for instance would be able to implement such an approach, even if they wanted to.
I have a pet theory which says wealth and political stability over long periods of time and cultural homogeneity together lead to lower crime rates and this doesn't indicate anything about how law-abiding these countries citizens are or how big their social safety net is. And those countries still remain higher crime rate than countries who are both hard on crime, have an effective police force and have citizens who believe someone is watching them and will severely punish them even when they are out of the FOV of a CCTV camera (God in Islam. Christianity doesn't count, you won't be punished cause Jesus died for your sins).
Cultural, religious and ethnic homogeny are all obviously very beneficial for social stability, and I think the homogeny of Scandinavia is one of the main reasons that its social approach to managing crime has been so successful up until now. With the other major difference being that involuntary institutionalisation is rather high in those countries, where a lot of the anglo-sphere has instead opted to just release those people to live on the streets. These are however massively controversial ideas to a lot of people.
Singapore also proves that you can establish an incredibly high level of social stability without that homogeny though (and even with massive inequality), as the composition of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity they have has been a source of instability and violent confrontation for nearly every other country in the region.
I haven't seen anybody in this thread suggesting that there are only two variables involved in managing crime rates. This discussion is about two different general approaches to the problem, each of which have their own complex set of variable to manage.
It's your suggestion that the low-crime jurisdictions that take the "hard on crime" approach can do so because they are just naturally low-crime jurisdictions and they have the luxury of being able to implement any policy they want that I consider to be rather insane, and completely in conflict with all of the data on the topic.
> The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets.
At what price? What alternatives exist to them?
As I have gotten older I have slowly been getting tired of supporting people who not only do not pull their weight, but also whine and demand even more from those of us paying for the services they receive. Not only they are not grateful for receiving social services that their taxes are unable to fund, they also have the stones to blame those of us paying for everything for all their problems.
I think we already allocate enough money to solve the problem. Spending more will likely just reinforce the industrial homelessness complex. We need to change how the money is spent.
But also, clearly what we spend money on isn’t fixing the problems. The homeless know that better than we do. They’re right to complain.
The government cleans the streets regularly, so relocating unclean people into places the city doesn't clean isn't going to make the city any cleaner. You probably haven't had much experience being around people who can't take of themselves and haven't got anyone caring for them. Whatever properties they inhabit will become blighted and swarms of insects like cockroaches will infest everything nearby.
You'd first need to help them live with dignity. For the genuinely homeless the only social environment that's equipped to care for them are mental hospitals. Secondly you'd have to recalibrate your expectations for what productivity means. A person who isn't functional enough to to work with a manager to help a corporation achieve its goals, can still make meaningful contributions to society. Even if it's simply by helping their own self and then telling their story. Like the stories of the people with encephalitis lethargica who came back to life by taking the drug l-dopa. It didn't exactly help them rejoin the workforce, but it brought hope to humanity.
You don’t have to house the people in very desireable locations. If becoming homeless means that you instead get relegated to a massive concrete block, most productive members of society would do their hardest to leave as soon as possible. Those that don’t (for a variety of reasons) are at least off the streets.
That situation would be significantly better then a temporary bunk in a warehouse which is the best case scenario given all the problems with way homeless people are provided with shelter in the US.
In SF at least it is the same problem; charities (housing associations, homeless shelters, etc) tasked with reducing the problem don't effectively solve it as it would mean those organisations would get less funding.
Fixing the problem and "fixing" the way you feel about the problem aren't the same thing.
Never watched Fox News, so I'll take your word for it.
I live in SF and consider myself fairly left-leaning. I see individual homeless people. I see large encampments. I see drug-addicted people on the street screaming at and being aggressive with people, or at best mumbling nonsense to themselves. We spend $57k per homeless person per year, and the problem does not seem to be getting better.
I don't see how we can blame Republicans for SF's failure to house people, when Democrats and progressives dominate city politics. I'm not going to accuse our leadership of intentionally spending more to do less, lest some "undeserving" person gets a free handout, because I don't think that's what's happening.
Maybe instead of sliding down the path to Godwin's Law and making weak rebuttals, you actually explain how Republicans are at fault for SF's homeless problems?
What would I rebut? I never blamed SF on Republicans. The other poster did. I was implying there is a strong 'US Christian' attitude to be more outraged by accidentally helping someone that doesn't need it, that outweighs being 'Christian' and helping those that do need help. I'm not sure Christians are even glossing over this anymore. And this does lead to more bureaucracy to ensure this doesn't happen, and that is done by the legislatures when they create the organizations.
Then the other guy brought up "SF". A single word argument as if that was a 'rebuttal'. His 'rebuttal' was actually three words, "SF", "New York".
What are they implying by their one word argument?
I say something about Christians/Republican's, they just respond "SF". As if "SF" is in itself an entire argument against anything liberal or progressive and hence why we need to return to 'Old Testament' Bible values. "SF" is just another dog whistle for them, that we shouldn't be 'soft' on people.
You are bringing up actual problems. But what Republicans 'hear', is 'be more harsh on people'. Don't solve those problems, put them in jail.
And that despite Godwin's Law, this seemed very much in line with how Republicans argue (debate, market), they repeat the same short slogans over and over again. For so many years people have over used calling each other 'Nazi', that now we can't make any comparisons or someone brings up 'Godwin'. When there are actual real parallels that we should be pointing out.
So. My error is maybe lumping all Republicans in as Evangelical Christians.
I guess the problem is you listed a lot of different problems, and they all combine into something bad. But the article was about each individual program/organization trying to maintain itself. So I'd say this is one of those 'multi-polar' problems where each organization is trying their best, but they solve for a local minimum that is not optimal.
Is it really a single program spending $57K per person? Or is that number from adding up a number of programs? And it is all these different organizations, each solving part of the problem in-efficiently. And never solving the root problem, because that is out of the scope of any one program.
And, even if someone just handed me $57K in cash, could I afford to live in SF?
Isn't SF somewhat landlocked? hard to expand housing? And isn't housing somewhat geared towards the rich that skew right? Is it really progressives trying to keep away housing?
This is a bit all over place.
We could talk details about:
1. real world SF problems,
2. or how Republican Marketing techniques really do follow the Nasi playbook Goodwin or not,
3. or how organizations in general get stuck in some local minimum of bad incentives.
There is no one rebuttal to this thread. It is complex, and Republicans boil it down to a slogan, that is exactly what that nasi quote says to do.
Yes. Guess that is the problem. You try to cover the host of issues brought up, then you look scatter brained. One side just throws a lot of BS out there, it takes energy to try and respond, and the responder looks confused.
It becomes a question of what you count as spending and who you count as homeless so it gets difficult to pin down something everyone will agree on. A couple of posters already linked the Hoover study but obviously not everybody is going to run with Hoover. San Francisco's annual budget includes (these are all approximate) $420m for permanent housing, $60m for immediate shelter, and $120m for homelessness prevention, so we're talking roughly $600m plus a large chunk of the $250m that's budgeted for mental health interventions. So we're talking close to a billion dollars a year out of a $14 billion city budget.
The denominator becomes tricky too, in that SFO has an estimated given-night homeless population of about 8000, about half of whom are rough sleepers (people literally camped out on the street/under bridges). Note that this is a high proportion of rough sleepers compared to most cities where it's about a quarter of the homeless population. That translates into about 32000 people experiencing homelessness at some point in a given year (at least that's the rule of thumb I remember from -- wait for it -- working at a homelessness NGO years ago). So the most naive calculation shakes out to $850m spent on 32000 people, or just north of $27K.
Obviously this has some problems, in that at least some of the homelessness prevention money is hopefully preventing a non-zero number of people from becoming homeless (though in my more cynical moments I wonder). But then again somebody who's only homeless for a month shouldn't need a full year's spending.
TL;DR: it's complicated and there's not a single answer everybody agrees on, but in terms of orders of magnitude it's "tens of thousands of dollars per person per year" in most large US cities, with SF as an outlier on the high end.
(If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.)
> (If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.)
Could you please provide some links to those figures? The last figures about homelessness in Berlin I know were below 2000 individuals [1], which does not strike me as shockingly high. But things might have changed.
2000 is the population of the city's shelters; the rough sleeping population was about 10K the last time they counted (right before the pandemic). And remember that's a much narrower definition of "homeless" than the US uses.
(look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures)
I live in Berlin and this is highly misleading. Amsterdam and Berlin are major drug centers and people move specifically for the supply and public services. Half of the Berlin homeless are from Eastern Europe and moved here for this reason. Other areas make up most of the rest. The number of homeless Germans in Berlin is very low. This has been widely reported and confirmed by recent census and interviews. The expenditures also include refugee (unplaced or unhoused) spending for people from Ukraine, Syria, and many other areas. Here are the real numbers: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=abr...
I take it you have not been to Amsterdam or Berlin. I live in the latter and, while there certainly are homeless people, it is absolutely nowhere even close to SF per capita.
I've lived in both, I just don't have the blinders towards the homeless population that native Europeans seem to.
Amsterdam has basically the same population as San Francisco (~820K) but 10K homeless people as opposed to 7K.
Berlin is of course much larger (3.6m), but is literally called "the capital of homelessness" in NGO circles because the homeless population is so absurdly large, 10K rough sleepers (which is the only population the city bothers to count) and another 30K homeless by the US definition.
In novel free market and democratic ways. That was extremely bitter realization. The reward for hardships so far was a new wave of MLMs, cults, sects, scams, and whatnot.
We do still have them right here in the US-of-A but they tend to be more clever in packaging... Mary Kay, Amway [0], people working IT at state colleges known for IT but paid for a weird 'stock tip' ponzi email thing, heck I know between 2007ish-2013ish a couple close friends bought into this weird "I'm a cellular reseller" MLM thing...
[0] - Still remember when some otherwise very bright folks got wrapped up in 'Team of Destiny' which was basically Amway over the internet back in 2001-2002ish times.
Absolutely - or if the check clearing process made it more obvious to customers that a check hasn't cleared yet, possibly even by not making funds available for checks drawn on dubious banks until the check has fully cleared.
The "money agent" acts as a cut-out and delay tactic.
Usually it's combined with a parcel re-shipping scam.
It works like this:
"Sell" high-priced items on eBay, use the local bank account of the mule to collect the money. The victims will trust this process because a local bank account is involved. The mule now transfers that money through irrevocable money orders into a non-extraditory country.
The victims will go after the mule, but the police will take some time, so you get 2-4 months out of a mile until he is arrested.
At the same time, you order high-priced items using stolen credit cards and have them delivered to the mule. The mule repackages them and sends them to the scammers. The shops will go after the mule.
Until bank-to-bank 0% fee services like Zelle become more popular, checks are still the best way to pay someone a significant amount without a chunk getting taken out as debit/credit fees.
Thankfully people these days know that checks that aren't cashier's checks are nearly worthless. I wish more people verified the check over the phone before accepting it but it's a start.
You could make a similar argument about capitalism. We _should_ have grown past it by now, but we haven't, and every time we try to invent a replacement system we end up making things worse.
You can see the ethical decay unfolding in real-time as societies turn replaced the old, rigorously tested system of religion with shiny new secular ethics.
The Nordic countries are all among the least religious countries in the world, yet they seem to have some of the most ethical societies on the planet if you consider human rights, democracy and low violence to be the result of an ethical society.
The most religious countries in the world are all at the very bottom of rankings taking into consideration any of those factors.
I think your example is not a good one. Nordic countries have the concept of Jante law. If you can verbalize such a concept and also recognize that it exists in your society, by definition it makes your society more intolerant than a culture that has no such concept (such as the USA).
In fact, I would argue the open-ness and tolerance of nordic culture is specifically exploitative of the cultural expectation that you do not raise concern or object and are expected to be in agreeance with everyone else that "this here is a tolerant society". It's a valid theory that the fastest culture to adopt any philosophy will be the one that has the population with the greatest number of people who don't disagree.
I think a case could be made (although I'm struggling to do so myself) that the growth of mercantilism, and then capitalism, could be understood as direct challenges to Abrahamic-religion-based ethics, especially as capitalism directly discourages altruism.
I think this is a thesis I need to do some work on to either reject it or let it mature, but I think this is an interesting starting place. It is worth noting that the early Christians frequently practiced collectivism and rejected the concept of individual property rights, although that was ~2000 years ago, the faith has evolved sine then.
All of this to say, I do not believe its that secular ethics per se are the cause of the decay, but rather that the religions of the world have not made a compelling enough case to sway people away from rejecting altruism in the name of personal enrichment. The situation is made considerably worse by the fact that a fair number of the global religions see the spoils of personal enrichment as evidence of righteousness, and altruism as at least adjacent to sin.
I can't read the link but we've the same thing in Ireland. I've always assumed it stemed from shops being family owned. e.g. We have a stationary store that was originally called Eason and Sons which when said quickly sounds like Easons.
There'a s few other examples but that's the one that always stood out to me
I have successfully bootstrapped several online business and absolutely, 100% this.
It'll either fail, stay a side project forever ($1k/mo isn't bad if you only need to put in 30 mins work per week on maintenance!), or reach the point where quitting your job becomes brain-dead obvious (for me, it was when the one day a week side hustle was pulling in 33% of the income as the 50 hour a week day job).
If you already have a decent job, there's no real need to risk everything and eat shit for years so you can have a crack at the big time.
Your idea is either good or bad, and part of business savvy is evaluating the idea without dumping millions of dollars/thousands of hours into a pit.