The problem is that we’ve wound up in an unhappy place due to the weird perverse incentives of ideology. Taking homeless people off the street, whether to a hospital or jail, costs a lot of money; so we lack something to do in a climate where a good chunk of the populace is rabidly against paying more money for anything.

LA collectively spends about $3 billion on various things for homeless people, who number around 70-80,000. That’s $40,000 per person per year.

What level of spending would you like to see?

The problem is to stop spending money we need to spend some money to set up something like a mental institution.

Prison, which was being used for that purpose, costs California $127k a year https://www.lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

Just the bed at a Californian state hospital for mental health treatment costs at minimum $150k+ a year. https://www.dsh.ca.gov/Hospitals/

And both systems are already overcapacity

There isn’t currently the political will to start putting people in institutions against their will.

I think you're right that people are against these things, but wrong about the reasons.

Taking homeless people to jail because they're homeless just seems stupid and pointless, not to mention harmful to the person going to jail.

Shelters have the issue where people don't want them near where they live (for often justifiable reasons) but obviously they have to go somewhere.

I say this because this country has a history of dismantling systems and then not paying for replacements.

We did it with state institutions, which were supposed to be replaced by community mental health centers but that never happened. And then we did it with jail overcrowding reduction, where we didn’t set up adequate recidivism reduction programs.

Before the recent pivot to tough on crime, a lot of sentencing reform was started by Republican led states, simply because jail costs a lot of money.

Don't we already have rehabilitation centers? I definitely think that you have to take homeless people being a nuisance off the streets against their will.

There's already plenty of invisible homeless people living out of a car that shower in the gym. They aren't a public nuisance and there should be structures where someone like that can get help from.

But the actual homeless problem are the drug addicts and beggars that are a public nuisance. There's no solution to that problem other than moving them against their will, is there?

Modernist architecture certainly has its fair share of misfires, particularly where the postwar architects were attempting social engineering to be “cleaner” or more “rational.” The schools were often teaching ideals based in no empirical evidence.

It's hard to build something new based on empirical evidence because the thing you are building might be such a radical departure from previous experience the data you have simply does not apply.

The problem is that a core group of modernists kept doggedly insisting on it after it was proven to not work.

For example, we know now that pedestrian skyways only work in limited contexts and have plenty of downsides; or that a large, concrete windswept plaza is pretty to look at but pretty antisocial and unusable space, and yet you still see this kind of thing in the latest from say Zaha Hadid et al.

It’s why a next wave of architects and planners have coined terms like “bird-shit architecture” that only looks good completely devoid of context and landed from the sky.

Also there is survivorship bias.

The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.

I had to scroll way too far to find this comment!

All the terribly kept tenements that housed 10 families on two floors were also "traditional," but you can't even find them now. Even in places where there are some left, the ones still standing were probably the best of the bunch AND have been extensively repaired since.

But how would you enforce that, particularly against bad actors in countries that care less about enforcing laws and norms?

Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.

This is also solvable through regulation though.

For example, NYC now requires all sold e bikes to be UL certified because of too many apartment lithium battery fires.

IIRC this dilemma was one of the things that was driving the Google antitrust case that unfortunately will not result in divorcing search from ads.

Tbh as someone who does not drive or own a car regularly, I get by renting those U Haul vans (not trucks). It’s not expensive and it’s a hell of a lot more useful than a truck for doing the random heavy odd job.

I think people have now become extremely wary of VC, startup and Silicon Valley because at some point there was a boiling frog shift from helping people and enabling new things to viciously eating anyone not participating.

"at some point the water shifted from cold to hot"

The vast majority of pickups are not actually used for workmen like purposes.

In fact, as carmakers have started pivoting more towards selling them to affluent suburban households, the usable cargo volume has decreased over time despite increasing size.

it also could be one of those things where in this specific context or dialect of English, plasma was generalized away from the term strictly being a technology to a generic term for that general shape and form factor.

after all none of us have used floppies to save for over a decade or two at this point.