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Your point about being held hostage by a relatively small number is so spot on and is what drives me the most nuts about the homeless situation. There really are not that many problem homeless people out there as a % of the population. If we could just figure out a solution for the very worst hundred to a thousand that would make a massive difference.
The solution is institutionalizing the indigent homeless population. Not all of them, not the outlier hobo wandering-workers, the homeless who are principally unable to work. The state running such institutions, or paying for private administration, does open the door to abuses. One is financial, with taxpayer money footing the bill they're incentivizing bad actors who will profit in their delivery of a poor service. Bigger is employment, hiring caring or at least competent staff who aren't sociopaths, something we see facilities in the US failing at pretty regularly. Still, some significant number of the homeless should be institutionalized because they need a level of hard support the church and private charity is no longer equipped to handle, and really it's the domain of the state anyway.
I'm not the first to bring this up, but I don't think I've seen anyone explain why it will be possible in our generation. Changing political sentiment will help, it'll probably be necessary so that people who shouldn't be on the streets stay off them, but technology in that of the human automata, the simulacra, will be the lever. By 2035, wide-production probably 2040, simulacra will exist that are capable of acting as orderlies in healthcare settings. Some successor to GPT or whatever, after direction from the human overseer they are accountable to, will run their scheduling, their pathing, their tasks, the conversing with and monitoring of patients that they can then provide to those human physicians and overseers.
These simulacra will be perfect orderlies: they don't need to sleep, they don't need to fear (in once high-risk settings) a patient sneaking something sharp to shiv them, they won't make mistakes, or they will but certainly fewer by-the-day and more minor than humans make. Patients meanwhile won't have to be afraid of simulacra verbally abusing them or stealing from them or beating them or raping them or killing them. They won't have to fear and suffer from the petty tyrannies of spite, or even just a bad interaction as the brunt of annoyance on a bad day. With time, simulacra will be integral to the delivery of an undeviatingly high standard of care.
I've always assumed Japan will use them first because of their inverse population pyramid. Lots of old people, not enough people to care for them: okay, robots. The success, the quality, the savings, these will see varyingly immediate success and that will spread. Private healthcare in the US first, but there will be policymakers who will be aware of the applications of simulacra in facilities like psychiatric institutions. When it is a guarantee those institutions' patients will be free from the debasing of their humanity (beyond that from being institutionalized) the philosophic argument against becomes very difficult, and then financials get their say. Massive savings for effectiveness in care humans will quickly be incapable of providing, at least in multi-patient environments, will be the big push.
You don't think a determined crazy patient, or bunch of them, couldn't wreck a robot orderly? At the very least knock it over on the ground so it can't get up?
Oh yeah, definitely private healthcare providers will be very interested in that. Problem is, once we have robot health workers on the grounds of cost, big institutions for the dregs of society - be they government or private run - will be nasty places. Cheap foodstuffs, lack of anything like education and stimulation, cheapest of everything from clothes to bedding to all the things you need to run a facility, pack in as many as possible, and not even the chance of a human worker who might be sympathetic to one person or help them or whistle blow, because it's all done by robots who won't deviate from their programming. And we the public won't care, because it will be the dregs, the criminals, the junkies, the hopelessly crazy. Do it cheap, why waste our tax money? Already public services are not of good repute, so I understand - nobody wants to end up in the state home because it's cheap, untrained labour and terrible conditions and nobody cares.
I don't object to locking up the hopelessly crazy, but you can't just shove them into crates and feed them on crushed bugs.
The nice nursing homes and hospitals and asylums may have robot workers, but they'll also have the presence of humans on the staff for interacting with the patients and nice living conditions, as long as the family can pay through the nose for all that.
From "The Ball and the Cross", about special cells in a modern, model lunatic asylum:
Determined patients could break a robot, but it's just a robot. Better that than maiming or killing a human. As for the humans currently working in those environments, some are in places where they have a prudent fear of injury or death and I'm sure that informs their interactions with some patients. Simulacras won't fear anything, so their interactions won't be tinged by fear.
More than 90% of labor will be automated in our lifetime. Simulacra will improve, the human facsimile will become seamless and their fine articulation and strength will first match and then permanently exceed humans, or at least those non-cybernetically-augmented. They will be tremendously cost-superior as their minimum effort in work will be better than many humans giving their utmost. So while fears of institutions being black pits for the dregs is valid today, in 30 years a largely simulacra-staffed institution will have patients receiving a higher standard of care than what premium specialized multi-patient care facilities deliver right now.
Some homeless need the hard support of institutions right now. The problem I have with mass institutionalizing advocacy today is I don't trust such institutions to not become abyssal places bereft of human dignity. The government could probably run a non-terrible pilot, but it would be a handful of the homeless and so not solve anything, but run in mass, and especially if turned to privatization, they will become hellish. And some might say, these people are already making cities hellish; they might argue their lives are already hellish, a warm place to sleep, food, and the removal of narcotics would be better; or they might argue the institutions would be hellish because such people inhabit them. To all of these, yeah maybe. But if the perception is these places are worse than prison there will be powerful opposition from the lowest of the individual homeless who fights at being sent, up to well-funded, organized actors working against it.
With the mass automation of labor and comparable-in-impact breakthroughs in other industries, costs of many products will spiral downward. Inflation is a motherfucker but things will either stabilize by the end of the decade or the country will start burning. I choose to believe the former will happen. The robots will look like humans, they sound like humans, they will feel like humans. The reason it will work so well when it's implemented is because that obstacle of "this thing isn't human" will be brief; we can't help but humanize that which isn't human. Look at the affinity for animals. The simulacra will be capable, they will be pleasant, they will remember everything but not hold to particular memories in spite for later cruelty. They will just be better. Not in the transcendent, infinite worth of the human, but as the continued demonstration of the spirit of man in improving the human condition. They are the next great step. On a long enough timeline, a healthy capitalism will compete itself into being socialism. Costs will be so cheap, quality will be so high, so many industries will just cease to exist as some breakthrough renders them entirely obsolete. Food, healthcare and pharma, energy, housing and construction, clothing, entertainment, automation comes for it all. Eventually these institutions will be able to provide what the patients need at the highest quality for a pittance of what it once cost and this is why I know I will eventually support such measures.
I don't see dregs being shoved in capsules and fed bugs. I see the indigent being, yes forcefully, put in institutions where not their wants but their true needs are addressed. Where they eat good food, where they have good rooms, where they have access to education and entertainment, where they receive the medical care they need. Where they have interactions with simulacra that are in the meaningful sense absolutely real, real relationships with simulacra who might be programmed to care but do it so well the patients feel truly cared for, which they will be.
It's utopian, so it's naive and dumb. What future is the alternative? Throw them all in a pit? Might as well send vans around for them to be shot and taken to crematoriums. I know that's reductive, there's an adequate middle ground, but why stop at hoping for a solution that's only adequate? The technology for the best swiftly approaches, why not hope for it in everything? I don't ascribe an unreasonable negativity to you, the concerns you raise of terrible conditions are entirely valid, and if that were the proposal or what ended up actually happening after the ostensibly good proposal, I'd oppose them. But at a certain point in the endless march of technological progress it will take more effort to poorly deliver such a service, it will take actual malice rather than simple avarice, because the avaricious option will so fortunately be the best option for the patients.
...Do you remember the optimism of the early internet? The realization that what we had here was a truly transformative technology with the potential to penetrate into every aspect of our lives and our society, and that seemed to be very near to entirely positive in its effects? The internet was my go-to example to make the case for techno-optimism as late as 2014.
And look at it now. That's your answer: because humans will always, always, always human. You can see the bright future just over the horizon, and the sad part is it might not even be a mirage, but there's still something cheaper, nastier, easier and more available just around the next corner, and the people around you are going to go for that instead, because that's what humans do.
Hasn't it been? Online commerce has improved the lives of millions of citizens. I can call my family in different places around the world with full video capability. I can remotely attend weddings and funerals ,that I never would have been able to before. I can debate with people all around the world. And I can access hundreds of thousands of words written on just about any topic I want from best Dungeons and Dragons feats for a Rogue to how to cook an Olive Garden style deep fried lasagna to web novels spanning millions of words, or how to best fix a shelving unit or replace a bulb in my car. I can download 3d printing specs for gaming terrain or miniatures.
Any business can now scale customers with a cheap website and I can order trinkets from a shop in California that I would never have seen otherwise. I can watch and listen to pretty much any music I want to and then read about the background of the album. I can play video games with unparalleled speed and connectivity and help my nephew tame sheep in Minecraft while being able to see him giggle.
I can submit test results to my doctor without having to call them or go in to the office, then he can create and fill a prescription for me at a pharmacy of my choosing, who will then email or text me when it is ready. When I switch dentists they email copies of my charts to my new dentist who has them immediately. I can carry out many of the functions of the DMV online and I can do the same for many government agencies.
I can research people I am about to meet in a professional context and I can check out the boys my daughter wants to date. Right now I can have an AI write me code that has a good chance of working to do all kinds of random things. Or create images for my roleplay characters or backstories. I can stalk prices of plane tickets over time to buy at the best time rather having to call and check or go to a travel agent. I can check reviews of hundreds of restaurants and make and cancel reservations much more quickly than ever before. I can use web chats to deal with issues that would have required a phone call or a physical visit before.
The sheer amount of time that the internet saves me in routine tasks compared to the olden days is astonishing.
If you had offered all that to 80s computer geek me, I would have bitten both your hands off to have it! And I can do most of it from a tiny handheld computer!
Sure the internet has negatives as well, but I would say the positives outweigh them significantly. I would suggest for most people in the West the internet is much more positive than negative.
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This is also not really all that much of a puzzle. It's not that we've failed to figure out a solution, it's that there are malevolent attorneys that fight to keep these parasites on the streets and camping in parks.
I think the wider justice reform movement has some more harm than this judgement, along with long term tolerance of this behavior in some places.
I mean, what this really is just the Skid Rowization of every West Coast downtown. But LA has been like this for decades. It can’t just be this one law. If cities cared they still have a lot of levers they can use even with this law, like just defunding all homeless shelters and homeless funding to starve them out and drive them elsewhere, or having cops use laws against drug use and dealing on the books.
Oh, I don't mean just the one ruling, that was intended as an example of the sort of malicious actor that I think can't really be negotiated with and just needs to be defeated if you're going to attempt cleaning things up. That there are people that make their living fighting to prevent towns from preventing vagrants from camping in parks highlights that this is a difficult problem because of those bad actors.
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It's not just this one ruling, but this ruling is tying the hands of anyone who tries to fix the problem: letting those who prefer not to fix it free reign to make things worse.
The ruling doesn’t stop DAs from enforcing existing state drug law in a way that would rapidly clean up a large proportion of the homeless population. I agree the ruling is a bad thing and I’m hopeful it’ll get struck down later this year. But I don’t think it’s the main thing preventing major change.
Yes, true: however, I think the ruling must be having a strong effect because you are not seeing the same street people crises in very left wing cities outside of the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction. The East Coast doesn't have this problem, even though they have quite a few activist DAs.
The East Coast has much harsher weather, I think it’s largely that simple. You see the worst homeless problem in San Diego (it’s just slightly less visible because the city is more suburban), even though SD is more ‘moderate’ than a lot of blue cities in at least some ways, because of the weather. If NYC had Seattle’s climate the crisis would be much worse, but NYC’s politics are also arguably hardened by reverence for the police in some places and a memory of the retaking of the city in the 80s and 90s from a violent crime epidemic. NYC also has a larger black population that tends to vote for more establishment/moderate democrats.
New York has 5 times as many homeless people as Washington: even if weather is harsher in NYC, they still have an enormous population of homeless and manage them better than any city in the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction. 39% of the total number of homeless people in America live in the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction, despite those states making up only 19% of the United States by population.
I don't deny that local politics can make the situation much better or much worse despite the 9th Circuit: but it is clear to me that the 9th Circuit has had a powerful effect on making the problem worse.
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What about the coastal cities of the Southeastern US then? I suppose the weather there is also mild.
The Gulf Coast has much stronger storms than the West Coast. Seattle has a lot of rainy days half the year but on those rainy days it's cloudy all day and they get a 1/4" of rain. The Gulf Coast gets a storm once a week that drops many times more rain, possibly some hail, and gale or worse winds. It's also far less pleasant to be outside all day in the hot, muggy summer.
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I'm praying the Supreme Court will strike Martin down. If they don't, I see no solution to the problem.
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We have solutions, and it's not the good people of the city being held hostage by the homeless, it's order-desiring people being held hostage by leftist political power.
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