Peterkin

Aha! It's the straight branch! https://wpi.digication.com/honey-stealing-moths-BB2050-D20/home The death's head hawkmoth doesn't just look like bees; it smells like a bee. I just saw it today in a beautiful documentary (middle-school level) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10JTbfSecC4

Yes.... they're just too expensive. After a gall-bladder operation you're expected to recover and go home in 3-5 days. After a schizophrenic break, you might need a month or longer. So, back on the street you go. Whatever treatment option is offered, secure housing is key to its success.

It will for addicts who want to recover and people with mild emotional impairments, if an appropriate medical regimen comes with the tiny village placement. A support group is readily available on site, but without the intimidating, relapse-inducing barbed wire and guard towers. People with severe mental illness should be hospitalized and treated, not imprisoned.

The topic was closed before I could follow this up. Decided it was interesting enough anyway, so here we are: article https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/21/04/effect-spanking-brain paper https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.13565

Bread was the first thing my brother mastered after leaving home. Then soup. He already had pork chops and apple pie down cold before he left home. That's as far as he ever got: when invited to dinner at his place, you knew exactly what to expect. Like many restaurants. I used to like going out, maybe once a month for dinner, and more often in summer to someplace with a patio for lunch, a nice way to celebrate special occasions, a nice way to spend leisure time, people-watching. We had some favourite places and favourite dishes. During the pandemic, we tried ordering takeout from two of them and didn't enjoy it at all. It was never about the food.... I do sometimes watch cooking shows for ideas. I leave out about about half the ingredients: they tend to overcomplicate. My best friend is a slow cooker, but there is a bread machine on the way, which I intend to place right next to her, so they can make each other jealous while cooking bread and soup, just like my brother used to make.

Seriously? You pay $6 for a bowl of oatmeal with fruit on top? Nice berries, but it's still oatmeal! If you don't like oatmeal, just eat some fruit. Buy whole grain bread and put jam on your toast. Nobody has to eat oatmeal (though I suddenly feel like making some, with brown sugar and allspice); there are other wholesome grains, and other ways to incorporate oats into your diet. No, restaurant food doesn't tell you anything about healthy food. The point of going to a restaurant is to step out of routine, indulge yourself and let somebody else do the work. (Unless you fall for the meal-kit scam, where you overpay for the ingredients and still do the work.) If you want to eat well, buy wholesome groceries, get recipes off the internet, like this https://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/ and just do it. You might even try piling different fruits and nuts on your oatmeal. I think you'd better take her out pretty soon.

They may be happy with apartment in theory, but who can afford an apartment anymore? Even if they can find one anywhere close to their job, people near the low end of the pay-scale spend half or more of their earnings on basic shelter, which leaves barely enough for necessities and no possibility of saving. One down-sizing, serious injury or family crisis from eviction. All the time. And so did the price of everything else.

On the flip-side, some people own more residences than they can occupy. While depriving the unrich of even one identity.... and also: Seems, like the Italian villages, they're just in the wrong place.

That got me thinking back on trailer parks. Used to be where you went when you couldn't afford a house or apartment, but still had a job. Some of those communities became completely immobile self-contained villages, with additions and gardens and fences. They still exist, but they're endangered. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/03/owning-trailer-parks-mobile-home-university-investment https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/12/22/five-reasons-why-mobile-home-parks-in-the-united-states-are-disappearing/?sh=50e550354b64 Will that happen to the tiny villages? One possibility: When/if Canadian and US cities get smart enough to imitate the Europeans and ban cars from their downtown, replacing them with clean, efficient, cheap public transit, there will be a lot of vacant municipal parking lots. City services readily available, just arrange the prefabs (recycled plastic; lightweight and weatherproof) in a pleasing configuration, add some deep bins of earth for vegetable gardening and move in the people. The multi-level ones can be turned into apartments; the underground ones into hydroponic gardens and mushroom cellars. Nothing will improve as long the jillionnaires abscond offshore without paying taxes.

There is something to learned from that incident, if we put it next to many other comments. There is a general aversion in NA public discourse - and policy? - to what is called 'enabling'. The attitude, I think, is based on the pioneer mentality, the mythos of rugged individualism and personal responsibility, standing on your own two bootstraps, etc.. This is a quintessentially settler-American attitude and it runs counter to community effort, social responsibility, brother's keeper, which is also embedded in the culture through its Christian heritage. So, the economic organization has a lot of casualties, who are seen as weak, defective, substandard in some way. But they ought to be helped. And the social organization tends to offer heavy-handed, authoritarian, blame-splashing help, which does very little for the morale of the victims. This problem will just keep growing, unless there is a change in attitude that's translated to votes for better policy and political action. Sorry you read it that way. (ED: I mean sincerely regretful of the ambiguity.) I agreed with you that some people refuse the help that is offered, cited an article in support of that observation, then went on to elaborate how this fact is used by the advocated of punitive police action. The agreement and citation was a response to your post; the indictment was general, and not directed at you. (I should have separated them better.)

How about logical and moral factors? I was 12 and didn't care a jot about science when I read that bit in the NT where Jesus ends a bunch of demons into an innocent herd of pigs, which stampede over a cliff as a result. As a moral child, brought up in the christian tradition, I considered that action profoundly wrong. I don't think I was the only one put off by christians contradicting themselves and breaking their own rules, or disbelieving in a perfect being who contradicts himself and breaks his own rules. The religious narrative needs a much stricter editor!

Okay, I concede that. One charitable option has been put forward. Others, including religious ones, are already operating emergency and temporary shelters. Perhaps you can recommend a comprehensive plan to co-ordinate the efforts of all these agencies, public and private, for a permanent solution.

Probably won't. Information is hard to sort out. There are plenty of arrests on drug charges, vagrancy, trespassing; lots of stats on alcohol-related violence, but it's hard to find any linking violent crime to homelessness and/or addiction. There is a record in Portland, London and Vancouver of increased crime in areas where homeless people camp, but it's unclear whether the homeless are the perpetrators, or the rising crime is concentrated in the same neighbourhoods where homeless people are able to camp. There is evidence that they're more often victims. There ought to be an exhaustive study somewhere, but i haven't found it. Even if Habitat for Humanity did consist of you and me, I don't think they have the capability to house Portland's, or Toronto's, or Manchester's homeless population. They may be able to help with a scheme that was worked out with the community in which they operate.

What? I was neither cherry-picking nor contradicting; I was responding. This isn't a brand new argument: we've all heard before all the reasons homeless people, poor people, people with all kinds of chronic societal problems, have nobody to blame but themselves. No; I have no personal interest in the UK. I picked out some articles about various cities in different places were trying to do about a problem that appears to be world-wide, and that I don't see how can possibly be independent of the increasing concentration of wealth and escalating cost of living - particularly of housing, since the surge in international real estate speculation that started in the 1990's. I have never in way said you or anyone else said anything of the kind. I've just been tossing out random information that seems to be relevant to the topic - none of it aimed at you.

I've mentioned a few familiar ones. Finland's mentioned, too. Here are some more: https://caufsociety.com/cities-solving-homelessness/

Yes, that's a phenomenon - not the biggest problem, but one that's easy to cite by people who want to prove it's 'their choice; their fault'. Here's an article on the subject: This is mainly about emergency shelters, not long-term housing solutions. The long-terms ones obviously need to have a number of different options for different needs. I should think one of the most urgent - families or single parents with children - would also be the easiest. Mental health issues are more complicated.

I guess, but I'm willing to hope a kinder, if less articulate police officer in my neighbourhood.

Nothing. One incident in which each character, speech, act and circumstance might be judged on insufficient evidence, and I won't judge them, because they shed no light whatever on all the other incidents taking place in all the places with all the other participants.

Not exactly. You don't build them; I don't build them; we don't build them - either a developer or a city government does. Either choice has its problems. The developer prefers to put up low-density luxury housing for maximum profit. Where will he do it? On expensive downtown real estate he has to buy from another profit-seeker, or on the greenbelt that had hitherto served all the citizens? Well, he can't do the latter without the collusion of some level of government. Will/has it cost him substantial campaign contributions? that will be added to the price of the homes. Very likely, no vagrants allowed in there. If the city does it, it has to build on lands already owned by the city and designated for some other purpose, or else buy land at market value. It has to plan high-density, low cost housing and contract out the actual construction, using public funds, and make plans, and if necessary pass bylaws, to keep down the cost of owning or renting those units. City councils are not all just sitting on their night-sticks, ignoring the problem of homelessness; they're trying to solve it, in various ways, according to their budgets, their political clout, their level of corruption and the extent of their constituents' concern. https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/community-partners/affordable-housing-partners/housingto-2020-2030-action-plan/ https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2013/nov/26/london-council-house-sale-southwark-colley https://www.citybureau.org/newswire/2023/2/3/how-chicagos-2023-mayoral-candidates-plan-to-address-the-affordable-housing-crisis No, it was seriously misrepresented in the OP, and several people have made attempts to clarify the issues of homelessness and substance dependency and crime - which do not necessarily come as a nasty, disposable package. A great variety of people are involved - real, live, human citizens - for a great variety of reasons. There cannot and should not be a single, simple, final solution. Governments and voters have to acknowledge, identify and address the causes of this problem before they can begin to solve any part of it.

And the few people who have a lot more work no hours at all, just own the housing other people can't afford. Oh, yes, here I agree. And so should letting people off paying their share be treated seriously. It's very expensive and complicated to do properly and fairly; much cheaper and easier to do it brutally and unjustly. Whom would you put in charge? I think so, too. But then, of course, if working people can't afford the next rent hike and become homeless, it's harder and harder to keep their job, and having been arrested for vagrancy and held in custody, they lose the job, run out of money, have no transportation to get to their hearing on time, get re-arrested on outstanding warrants and lose in a police sweep even the little property they were able to rescue from the eviction, so now they haven't got a change of clothes to go to a job interview, or anyplace to shower and shave. He's easy prey for the dealer who hands out free samples of oblivion or relief, gets addicted, and now last month's working person is a menace to society, worth no tax dollars to save, but lots and lots of tax dollars to punish. FTR I didn't say anything about Nazis. There are many concentration camps under various government regimes. However, I don't see voluntary enrollment in the OP proposal to which I responded. Which was this: Not unlike operations on strikers, political dissidents, protesting natives, university students and Japanese-American communities by previous US administrations. Not a nazi in sight - just police boots and guns!

it's unfortunate that the more palatable alternatives pretty much require that money be collected from those who have possession of it. People do not like to relinquish possession of money.

re's also this, for background: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/new-study-housing-market-root-cause-homelessness/283-819457a7-9606-42c6-9cb3-62bd25661d2b https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-beach-becomes-makeshift-campground-amid-affordability-and-housing-crisis-1.6097983 https://wacities.org/data-resources/state-of-the-cities/affordable-housing-homelessness IOW - people can't afford to live in houses.

Portland seems to be another city in contradiction. It seems from this article that the homeless are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violence. There is also this self-fulfilling aspect. If you criminalize what people are, or have done, they become criminals, and thus targets for police to "sweep" - basically, terrorize, simply for being in somebody's way - the encampments or arrest, more or less at random So, yes, the editorial comments are exaggerated; the causes and consequences are difficult to disentangle, and there is at least one other side to every scare story.

I don't. But that was the proposal in the OP. Which part of those cost analyses is incorrect, and what particulars? Alex_Krycek was not talking about one extra prisoner in the existing prison system; he was talking about incarcerating all the thousands of homeless drug addicts in specially constructed concentration camps.

It's a lot more expensive to criminalize people than to help them. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/economics_of_incarceration/