No, I doubt they are. Most people who are on the streets chronically are there because they’ve burned every bridge. Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks if they had a job loss that put them at risk of hard times — on the other hand those who mysteriously have zero friends or family usually got that way by the same antisocial behaviors that contributed to their problems in the first place, until every last person that once cared said “don’t come around here anymore.”
Not saying anyone’s a Bad Person for this, but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything. You can’t fix people without at least their partnership, and generally it’s substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation. “Bitter pills to swallow” as the meme goes but anyone who doesn’t admit this is kidding themself.
> who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.
That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.
Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."
And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.
I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.
I can tell your income bracket from this phrase alone:
> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.
No, most people do not.
I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.
But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.
Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.
The friends and family route works the first time around. You couch surf until you find a job, as you go through your contact list people are happy to host at first, but there comes the awkward "so... it's been a couple weeks... how's that job search going?". Then you have to put your job search on pause until you find a new place to live.
Eventually your job search keeps turning up "no" because they don't like the answers to "can you explain this gap on your resume?" and they really don't like the answer to "do you have a permanent residence" or "do you have any drug-related convictions?"
Hopefully you find a job before you've exhausted the good will of all your friends. And pray to GOD it doesn't happen again because the next time around, each one will have an excuse as to why they can't host you. "Oh sorry, we've got our inlaws, try X, Y, Z"... who are also "unable" to host.
So then your car is your home. If you're lucky enough to have one. But the point is "just have friends" isn't a solution.
I wouldn't say so. A large percentage of the population - double digits - have never had any job security in their lives, or any guarantees whatsoever. We've learnt to adapt and know we can do it again. People aren't allocated 1 job per person for life and if we loose that job we're in the shit for life. Most people know they can get another job.
Poverty is a funnel with slippery sides and no bottom. You can struggle your entire life just not to slide downwards even further. The post's author understands this and so do I.
That is it. When you become very aware of just how amazingly far away everything else is, fighting over a speak of dust and the only home we have seems absolutely ridiculous.
A great long form video on this is "Shouting at stars : A history of interstellar messages". It really highlights just how empty it all is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFI5WpK2sgg
If mankind exists in 1000 years time and hasn’t regressed then we’ll be able to build fusion powered self sustaining asteroids. Those can be used as airships to colonise every system in the Milky Way in a few million years.
600M years is enough time for Earth to try two or three attempts at intelegence, with full blown fossil fuel replenishment cycles. It won’t be humans - whether we leave for the stars tomorrow or blow ourselves to bits we’ll have evolved to something unrecognisable by then, but there’s very few things which could end life on earth in the next 200 million years (mainly very large out of system asteroids/rogue planets)
My understanding is that ISS is not self-sustaining even in principle. It consistently needs to be resupplied with water and breathable air as the station continuously leaks it. These resupplies happen about once every month or two. This article goes into quite a few details about what would be needed for actual self-sustainable human space exploration and it looks like there's quite a few engineering challenges to work out.
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