To provide an edgy answer, we live in a rather peaceful time...
We haven't had a good old fashioned War to accelerate our technological advancements. As humans were rather adept at finding new and creative ways to kill each other and then ultimately repurposing it for good later on...
Im going to go against the grain here but I think it might be good to be able to get good data on homeless populations. Much data now is not accurate. At the very least this will provide key data points that could help resolve and better serve these populations
One major issue with counting the number of people who are homeless is that most of them are not on the street, but are instead relying on friends and family for shelter. The people who live on the street are the spear tip of a much larger and broader group of people who are facing various degrees of crisis in finding housing. It is difficult to come up with a method that captures data about all the people who, for example, were evicted and spent several months living on couches and in their car.
Right, this is because the homelessness industry needs to justify its existence with ever inflated numbers. Someone down on their luck and staying with parents or siblings is not homeless and does not need intervention for shelter. In general, we should encourage extended family living as its economically easy and socially good. These 'homeless' need economic help, not shelter, and its likely that, due to their proximity to family or friends, this help can be provided in large part by the private sector as long as government policy encouraged the creation of jobs. Really, when civilians say homeless they mean what researchers call unsheltered, the subset of homeless living on the street. This group has much higher needs, typically around mental health and drugs
Why is that a major issue? The regular Census can capture information like "did you provide transient housing in the past year" , and "if you hae had a transient resident living with you, please contact XXXXX so we can directly include that person in the Census"
There's a small portion of chronically homeless that don't want to be in any systems though; whether it's because they are paranoid, have a criminal history, have a debt or potential of, etc.
I believe a focus the whys would be helpful in this discussion. Most comments seem to accept the status quo rather than asking
Why do we have bullies?
Why is being smart "not cool"?
I stopped reading after the author mentioned that Yang thinks that Ubi will solve issues. Have you actually read into some of the things he said, Ying explicitly says he does not think it will solve everything. Rather it gives people a bit of leeway in the short-term to focus on other things. With the hope that it will lead to more entrepreneurial things, but knows more likely it will go towards random things in each individual's life
I think the best summary of Yang's view of UBI comes from his own FAQ [1]:
> We are experiencing the greatest economic and technological shift in human history, and our institutions can’t keep up. Without the Freedom Dividend, we will see opportunities shrink as more and more work gets performed by software, AI, and robots. Markets don’t work well when people don’t have any money to spend. The Freedom Dividend is a vital step to helping society transform through the greatest automation wave in human history.
Definitely. I'm by no means saying "Do nothing, let them die." But I'm also saying "We have to rehabilitate them" is not a good enough idea either - you can't make people want help.
You can make people receive help. We just don't do that anymore because we've adopted a principle of radical autonomy, which apparently includes the "freedom" for the mentally ill and addicted to literally rot on the streets.
Many homeless advocates seem to have similar fears as gun rights advocate. Whereas some people vociferously oppose gun restrictions because of an irrational fear of helplessness in the face of crime if they couldn't carry a gun anywhere and everywhere, some homeless advocates vociferously oppose forced psychiatric and drug abuse treatment because of an irrational fear--obscured by a simplistic, self-serving sense of empathy--that they'll somehow be forced into such treatment or otherwise lose their own autonomy.
The boogey man of big government out to get you isn't just a motivating fear of the right, it's also a motivating fear of the left.
Honestly I don't understand the complaints.. For almost any technical career you will need to do some form of self study.. Also this program is aiming to compete with 4 year comp sci students. So yes you're going to need to grind to make up in <1 year what took someone 4.
However I do think they could do better with diversity.
"If it takes 50 weeks to become advanced at any skill, you can learn about 44 new skills during your career or 64 if you include retirement. Might as well pick something for this week"
This last statement really stood out to me. Especially as someone who has been feeling like theyre are late to the career phase of life.
50 weeks seems too low. Even if you're going all-in "do nothing but this" I have hard time believing you can go from "no idea" to mastery in less than a year in most subjects.
Advanced, not master. The low hanging fruit is going from novice to intermediate, progressing to advanced requires more effort, and mastering is the really difficult part.
This fell short, I was looking for something edgy.
For example: It pay$ to change jobs early in ones career. If you stay longer than 2 years out of some missplaced loyalty youll miss out of some quick dollars. Tons of caveats but in general it works. Now caveat it seems to peak around your 5 or 6th switch.
Source: All my mates and I have switched at the cadence and weve averaged a 15% increase in salary
I agree, switching often is kind of a self correcting phenomenon - if you are always switching to places that pay significantly more, once switching often starts to hurt you, you will just stay at your current place until you’ve been there long enough for it to not hurt you.
However, in terms of leveling/promotions, I think this stops pretty early. And it’s also possible to end up somewhere like Netflix where there may not be a place paying better for your experience/level. In particular it seems you need to grind out more than 2 years to get promoted to a managerial position or for any n>4, go from Ln to Ln+1 (except for maybe at a fast growing startup). So once you have 5 years experience you might be able to keep getting pay increases, unless you’re already near the top of market, but probably won’t get title promotions
We haven't had a good old fashioned War to accelerate our technological advancements. As humans were rather adept at finding new and creative ways to kill each other and then ultimately repurposing it for good later on...