I think the title should read "most family farmers have second jobs to stay afloat", as that appears to be the statistic the article asserts. This leaves out large-scale factory farming, obviously; the statement might still be true when large-scale factory farming is taken into account, but that's not what the article seems to assert?
To me this is as inflammatory and concerning as a title which might read "most woodworkers have second jobs to stay afloat" or "most cobblers have second jobs to stay afloat".
I think it’s rightly and plainly frustrating for the sole reason that the e.g. parks, sidewalks, bridges, etc that the homeless live on (and, are now directly christened by the government to do so in Halifax) are quite literally funded by taxpayers for public (read: taxpayer) use. Rightly or wrongly (but let’s be real: often rightly) parents (read: taxpayers) don’t feel safe bringing their children into these areas; young women (read: taxpayers) don’t feel safe walking in these areas. Crime is higher, drug use is higher, broken window theory, etc.
Here’s my unpopular opinion: I fully support making homelessness a jailable offense. A bed, meals, and heat in the winter; we’re not talking about the end of the world here, and I’m comfortable with my tax dollars funding that because I _do_ have some empathy for the homeless. But, not infinite empathy. We need better social programs, we need to work with the charities and churches as you say, I’m also very supportive of some kind of jail-adjacent jobs program that houses and feeds the homeless in exchange for employment.
Jail is too expensive. What we need is actually very close to what halifax is doing. We need to legalize encampments, we just have to do it in very limited areas. The city buys a large empty field on the outskirts of town and makes the homeless to go there. Clear any other encampments routinely. This also makes it much easier for charities to help the homeless since theyre all in one place. 24/7 police presence at the new encampment. Will be tough for the people who live close to the field but its the best way to minimize the impact.
Functionally; like skid row? Certainly, that hasn't worked out well for LA; because it literally just doesn't work. Even many homeless don't want to live in places like this, because they inevitably become extremely unsafe, because the idea that a 24/7 police presence has a significant positive impact or is even possible is a fantasy. Police become jaded overnight, like trying to mop up the ocean. No one in the public (read: voters, taxpayers) would support a place like this in their backyard, for good reason. A person pitches a tent ten blocks away; what does the city do? Forcibly move them? They're back ten blocks away the next day. Repeat.
Prison being too expensive is, to be fair, true, but a problem local to only some states, and a different problem that we should be motived to solve independent of whether its a tool in the solution of this problem.
But, beyond that, maybe my point is more generally (and contentiously) stated as: I believe homelessness should be a crime whose punishment involves the forfeiture of the person's freedom of movement and work. That's a general way of saying "prison" and that's fine, but I'm comfortable stating that governments need to think about building a (undesirable, forced) path toward finding a home for these people, and making them work to earn it.
If a homeless person walks this path, gets to their freedom, and reverts back to being homeless again; well, its a revolving door, but at least its one which rotates over a span of years instead of days, and its one that makes a good faith attempt toward rehabilitation.
Skid row doesn’t work in LA because there is no organization and it’s set up right in the heart of town. I’m talking something like skid row but set it up out in the desert by Palm Springs or Palmdale. Anyone encamping anywhere else gets bussed out there. Repeat offenders would have to be jailed yea. Obviously they’re not going to like it but I don’t really care tbh
the emotional part of my brain is aligned with you, but the pragmatic part knows this is an extremely expensive way to solve the need. Aside from the massive operating costs, what happens come spring - release them back into the wild?
My general take is: Finding an empathic solution to the problem is surfacing increasingly end-to-end solutions; government subsidized/paid housing, subsidizing food banks, etc. Homelessness is a bigger problem in urban areas with high density, where all of these components to a solution (e.g. the land upon which a shelter can be built) are very expensive and difficult. The first step toward finding a better life for many of these people is actually to get them into areas where the cost of living is lower.
This angles into, any solution to this problem has to happen at the state level. It can't happen at the city level because cities are usually homogenous; they don't have the right levers to pull. It also can't happen at the federal level because homeless problems are definitely regional and local. This is, I think, actually the root of many of America's homeless problems: Cities are usually blue but states are usually red, so any suggestion that the rural areas need to help with city problems, despite the fact that cities are massive economic subsidies on rural areas, is rejected.
One angle around this is, I suggest, to leverage the prison system. Most large prisons are built in more rural areas; or at the very least, most cities have a rural prison nearby. All of the real costs should be lower than even partial-end-to-end costs of caring for the homeless inside the bounds of a city; housing is more dense and lower quality, meals are cheaper, land is cheaper, prison labor recoups some costs, etc. Rural populations will be more accepting of a migration of homeless through the prison system versus just bussing them out of the city and leaving them (an extremely untenable solution).
But, obviously beyond this, there needs to be support beyond just dropping them in a prison in a cornfield somewhere. This gets into: States should seriously think about a New Deal-ish jobs program utilizing outgoing prison labor. Many of these rural areas are short on hands for hard labor. Housing is cheap to build in these areas. We should have a paved path to tell people migrated like this: "We aren't going to stop you from going back to the city. But, if you stay here and commit to two years, here's an apartment, its free as long as you work this job, and you'll also make minimum wage."
For the red-leaning rural areas, this is a great opportunity for private-public partnership. Lots of private farms would love a source of labor like this (in fact, the idea mirrors a very real source of labor for many farms in the west historically; farms provide a bunk house and food, and recruiting happens when people walk out of prison, this is a very Americana solution).
I don't think a solution like this works for the major-major hyper-blue cities like NYC/SF/LA; their homeless problem is just too big. But, Halifax is a city of ~400,000 people. I've spent many years in American cities in the ~500k pop range; obviously something might be structurally different in Halifax that I'm not aware of, but the homeless problem in these cities is far more tractable. Most of these cities are in states which lean red; the biggest problem up to this point is usually just getting state government on-board; telling the red state government that they can jail the homeless? They love that. Then its just a matter of the second half, which becomes the new hard part.
I am 100% sure that the author of this post has never "built a kubernetes", holds at least one kubernetes cert, and maybe even works for a company that sells kubernetes products and services. Never been more certain of anything in my life. You could go point by point but its just so tiring arguing with these people. Like, the whole "who will maintain these scripts when you go on vacation" my brother in christ have you seen the kubernetes setups some of these people invent? They are not easier to be read into, this much is absolute. At least a shell script has a chance of encoding all of its behavior in the one file, versus putting a third of its behavior in helm variables, a third in poorly-named and documented YAML keys, and a third in some "manifest orchestrator reconciler service deployment system" that's six major versions behind an open source project that no one knows who maintains anymore because their critical developer was a Belarusian 10x'er who got mad about a code of conduct that asked him to stop mispronouning contributors.
The reason social media apps use more complex global discovery algorithms (over a chronological feed) is because chronological feeds always run out of content. That's literally the only reason. At some point, some team at some gigacorporation invented the "hours spent with us" KPI, and tasked their hundred reports to increase it. It turns out, it doesn't matter how many people complain, if the "hours spent with us" KPI keeps going up.
"But users prefer algorithmic feeds": There's no evidence of this. The KPI is measuring an increase in hours spent with the app; it is not scientific-method A/B testing a preference between two options. Even if an app could do this, what does "preference" mean? You could measure how many users pick one experience versus another, but I've never found an app that, if it offers both experiences, durably and reliably saves your choice for a chronological feed between re-launches. Also: Maybe I want both experiences, at will. Hours spent in one experience versus the other? This is not communicating a preference; if I choose spending an hour driving during my commute to one job, versus ten minutes walking to another, have I revealed a preference for a longer driving commute? Obviously not.
You can ask users directly: And users may actually reveal their preference that social media never existed at all because your company isn't actually delivering value to the world [1]. Oops. Uh, don't run that survey again, bury it, make sure shareholders don't find out.
All social media is trash, and should not be consumed by anyone who has even an ounce of self-respect. Honestly: HackerNews is in that bucket, but at least its not as bad as most platforms.
Meth producers need users, and they need users to return and re-engage. The data is clear that even a small amount of meth introduced into a community generates higher return on investment, presumably by giving its users a high that's better than not being high.
You can't possibly do anything to "put an end to this".
Well, its a department that literally does not exist yet because the regime that wants to build it isn't in power yet. So, maybe have a bit of patience before breaking out the name-calling.
I think DOGE does exist, it just is a non-government entity advising the incoming administration with a deceptive name that makes it sound like a government agency rather than a privileged private lobbying group.
Most of them aren't named like government entities, given a verified-government-entity greycheck on Twitter, have their leadership announced by the incoming President elect, recruit on the explicit premise of being part of Administration policy, and have public confusion as to whether they are a government department or something else.
You’ve listed indicators that suggests it has a higher probability of becoming a formalized office of some kind, higher likelihood that key decision makers truly believe in establishing it, etc.
Owning the domain name isn't a singularly valid way to assert trademark control; it has to be used. Elon had an "X" company way back when, but it became Paypal; they didn't really use the X name in a public fashion for very long at all.
The reason is probably more-so that Google's "X" isn't apparently a legal entity; its a division within Google. So, it doesn't have consumer sentiment around it, its not a product name they're selling, its not a registered entity, etc. In other words: "Skunkworks" as a term originated from a division at Lockheed, now its a term many companies use, oftentimes in legal & public ways, but Lockheed really doesn't have grounds to stop them from doing so.
Funny you should pick “Skunkworks”. The way that Lockheed Martin uses it, “Skunk Works”, is trademarked and all rights reserved. Even when Lockheed talks about it on their website[0] they put the all rights reserved symbol by it. They go to court to try and protect it - as was the case in Australia, which they lost.
There's only one reason why US cars are more expensive than CN cars: People will pay it. All that other stuff is window dressing. The US is way, way better at financial engineering than China; we can sell an $80,000 Tahoe to a single mom between jobs on zero down and 10% APR, somehow she'll take that deal, and somehow the system doesn't explode into a fiery deathball; so you get $80,000 Tahoes. That's it.
Short-term vs long-term focus means nothing. Government subsidies run out. Rapid development is easy when its a first generation product with no customers. Lower wages means fewer of your own people can afford it (though it does help with export pricing to richer first world countries... what's that word I'm looking for... it starts with a T, I heard an orange man say it recently. eh probably nothing)
The 2008-2023 US economy was basically the strongest national economy in the history of humanity; but, obviously, that's changing. And no, I'm not doomering about a mother-of-all-crashes. The world is just getting more realistic, as it should.
Manufacturing, generally? Solar? Batteries? Semiconductors? Cyber espionage/warfare? I think those are more than nothing that China has had a demonstrable long term strategy in which benefits them at our expense.
Also, great point about financialization in the US. Do you think if that dam breaks, US auto makers come back to planet Earth instead of chasing what seems to be exclusively high-margin cars only affordable by credit?
Maybe their strategy will pan out, but generally any economy which critically depends on a restless and despondent class of basically slave labor (and, in some cases, actual slave labor) isn't going to sustain itself. As they said in Silicon Valley (the HBO show) like 8 years ago: "There's no New Bangladesh; there's just Bangladesh."; China's population wants upward social mobility in a way that's basically just westernization. On the flip side, they have a government that wants the economic benefits of a cheap labor pool, they want to be a cheap western manufacturing destination, and they have the surveillance and police state to push the issue further than western democracies would; a scary combo.
The other unrelated point I try to impress on people: You can assert that China's lead in manufacturing solar panels, batteries, etc is indicative that they're "ahead" of us, or whatever. You sure? I don't know what job you have right now, but the US was a destination for high tech manufacturing many decades ago. We largely moved past that. We make poorer countries do that for us now. How is it desirable that America become better at, I don't know, mining lithium? Are those jobs that we want our population to have? Versus what are clearly higher-margin email jobs? China manufacturing solar panels to sell us is our benefit, their expense; their economy is built on attaching a 2% margin on physical goods, ours is attaching a 200% margin on services, software, and financialization we build on top of those physical goods. Every economist on the planet would agree, you want to live in the second one. Lithium mines suck. Assembly lines suck.
But even looking beyond that: The US has an unemployment rate of like 3% right now. You can open the world's biggest solar factory out in Iowa; good luck finding workers to staff it. The US is not "behind" on manufacturing; we LEFT it behind, for good reason.
> Do you think if that dam breaks, US auto makers come back to planet Earth instead of chasing what seems to be exclusively high-margin cars only affordable by credit?
It doesn't seem to me like the problems that the automotive world are going to face over the next five years will be isolated to US manufacturers; its going to be global. Its going to get harder to financially-engineer your way to higher margins and revenue. That means prices need to come down. But, prices are higher because consumers want these nicer cars, nicer materials, there's a lot of cost in mandated safety features and safety engineering as well, not to mention all the export controls and tariffs Trump is threatening. So, how do they get cost down? That's the challenge.
With the size of American vehicles these days and the reduced visibility inherent, I'm all for mandatory backup cameras. Some trucks even have forward cameras now because their front-ends are so tall that they have a large front blind-spot.
While he did say that, its worth pointing out that Tesla also said that more affordable options will be available in 2025H1 [1]. Given Musk's statement, what I think Tesla means by this is more affordable trims of existing models.
I don't think its reasonable to read Musk's statement as "the Model 2 isn't happening". Its more accurate to read it as "it might cost more than $25,000".
Absolutely; but it is at least indicative of the direction Tesla is taking. It might be the end of 2025, 2026, whenever; but they've said they're working on lower cost models. That's all I'm asserting.
It's still the company that trots out humans in spandex to simulate robots and a self-driving taxi that was actually remotely operated by a guy on his phone.
Elon did not say that. Tesla The Company said that.
Ask yourself this: I bet you a thousand dollars that Tesla will release either a lower cost model or a lower cost trim of an existing model before the end of 2026. Would you take the other side of that bet?
That's directionality. Deadlines might get missed. I'm talking about directionality.
I think the disconnect is maybe just in the title: Lucid is obviously just trying to be the next Mercedes. Duh, of course they don't make a cheap car (how much did Lucid pay for this ad in the WSJ?); but their competitors kind of do. Tesla literally told their shareholders during the most recent earnings call that "more affordable models are coming in the first half of 2025". Jim Farley has spoken on how one of the reasons Ford's EVs are still rather expensive is because they clean-roomed much of the assembly for them to better compete with Tesla, so while ICE cars have a century of process optimization behind them, their EVs aren't at that same level... yet.
Its just clickbait paid by Lucid to make their $90,000 cars seem reasonable because, well geeze, no one is making cheap EVs anyone. Wrong: Everyone is trying to, and its very obvious that this is direction the market needs to go in (just look at the depreciation on modern Teslas, new cars cannot compete with what is happening in the used market).
I'm pretty sure they do, though. Lucid owns Atieva, the company supplying the batteries for Formula E. What they've learned through the many seasons directly goes back into the vehicle's battery.
I am a bit skeptical of Lucid's ability to grow into profitability, but they do have excellent engineering. Their EVs have some of the best efficiency and range on the market.
To me this is as inflammatory and concerning as a title which might read "most woodworkers have second jobs to stay afloat" or "most cobblers have second jobs to stay afloat".
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