lol, yes Millennials and Gen Z are trying so much harder to fix the situation by voting for change… ohhh wait

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019

I mean your tequila, la cocaína and siesta tech is pretty dope.

Shame they never leveled up the tech tree farther than that. It only took a handful of drunk conquistadors to wipe out the Aztec empire.

No problem, been doing it since we introduced the world to indoor plumbing, penicillin, electricity and space travel.

I love how non-Americans trash our MIC until some big bad shows up like Russia or China. When it’s their countrymen, fathers, brothers, sons and daughters who will be fighting bleeding and dying suddenly we become pretty popular…

Much of Russian oil production is going offline and is never coming back anyways. Since the fall of the USSR they haven’t been training engineers at a rate to maintain their own infrastructure. Many of the engineers they do have are nearing retirement age.

As a result don’t have the technical expertise to maintain their own infrastructure oil fields in Siberia. Those fields require oil to flow constantly otherwise the oil will freeze and expand and burst the pipes. The last time this happened was during the fall of the USSR and those well heads took 20 years to come back online and required Western expertise to repair.

They’ve depended on Western companies to build out and maintain those tracts ever since. When those go well heads go offline either through lack of maintenance or through Ukraine attacking storage centers where this oil is kept before its shipped, they won’t come back on again. They will still have tracts of oil fields in the Western part of the country that they can pump, but they will permanently loose a lot of capacity. Your likely to see a Venezuela style gradual drop off in production over the next ten years if they don’t change course and bring back Western expertise.

It doesn’t really matter to the US, we produce a ton of oil domestically and have been switching over our refineries to process it. Europe, China and India will be the ones to really feel the squeeze when Russian oil goes offline.

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Naw homie, this had nothing to do with the USA. This is just some good Ol’ Mossad hijinks.

Sounds like a lot more opportunities to put some spicy batteries in Mid East bound electronic shipments.

You do realize those pagers were made in Taiwan right?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/israel-planted-explosives-in-hezbollahs-taiwan-made-pagers-say-sources/ar-AA1qKfX1?ocid=BingNewsSerp

I played it on game pass. It was a pretty good experience until I used up all the side quests. The main quest held no interest for me. I had no interest in becoming starborn.

Trying to load the game on busy days was probably the biggest negative I can think of.

Obviously city budgets are a whole other can of worms, but to be clear, shelter beds are almost always cheaper than jail beds. The cheapest option would be not to put people in jail.

Sounds great, feel free to advocate for that solution within your community. Your keyboard warrior skills are sharp, I’m sure the community will rally around your idea of spending money on homeless over schools and other services!

This isn’t a question of legality or ability! Obviously in the US it is now legal to fine and imprison people for sleeping in public spaces. This is a question of morality: is that law moral? Should we fine and imprison people for not being able to afford a roof over their heads?

Moral? Yes, yes it is. We should not expect a handful of communities\states to bear the social and financial cost of housing homeless from other parts of the country just because they are attractive destinations. They have every right to dissuade further immigration of homeless to their community.

If the majority that you respect gets together and votes to, idk, enslave a group of people and have them work on sugar plantations. That doesn’t mean their laws aren’t violating basic human rights, just because it’s legal.

Classic example of a false equivalency fallacy. No one is violating the constitution or advocating for enslavement. Comparing the two is the same as when people start comparing modern groups in the US to WW2 Nazis. Sorry there is no comparison.

As stated before the community has a right to regulate the public commons. You don’t have a right to sleep, eat, litter and shit on the street in front of a families house for years on end. It is a public health and safety hazard.

What are you talking about? Unhoused people aren’t tourists. We’re talking about citizens of a country, the vast majority of whom were born and raised there.

You seemed to have missed or are being intentionally obtuse about the last part of that statement. I pointed out that this is an example of a precedent for similar laws at the state level.

How kind of you to respect the will of the people denying the humanity of their fellow citizens… Are you saying you personally don’t have an opinion on the matter? Does homelessness not affect you?

How elitist of you to ignore the will of the people. You seem to want to impose your morality at the cost of other people’s communities.

Yes homelessness affects me. My kids went to a school with the largest percentage of homeless children in attendance in the country. I’ve had to pull my kid out of a class because of a homeless child with mental issues who would violently attack teacher’s, students and even my own kid. In one class there wasn’t a day for two weeks straight when the class had to stand outside while the teachers and admins tried to deal with the kid.

I can sympathize with the homeless kid and hope they get help. But I will not put their welfare over the safety and education of my own.

There is a social cost to what you are proposing. Those communities and the people affected within them have found that cost to be too high.

I apologize I thought you were being facetious. Generally speaking in the US most stores, gas stations and restaurants allow public access to restroom facilities. In some places (usually in downtown districts) you may be required to buy something or use their services but no one really enforces that rule unless their facilities are being abused.

There is no real restroom map, it’s just assumed you can use the restroom at a given store. There are “public” restrooms in parks, city halls, etc. but not nearly to the same scale as private facilities.

“Other people’s money” of the rich is most commonly the surplus value, i.e. our money that were taken away.

But without going into semantics, most people live in financial conditions that don’t allow them to be so generous, or else they risk losing everything themselves. Those holding billions will not suffer much spending large money supporting the poor. It’s just not correct to draw parralels.

If I’ll give enough money for someone to live through a week, I’ll be left broke and won’t be able to pay my rent and food. If Elon Musk would do the same, he wouldn’t even notice.

You seem to think that there are Elon Musks in every city that can be taxed and won’t be affected.

Homeless don’t just congregate in neighborhoods with the ultra wealthy who have lots of money to throw around. The reality is they live everywhere including blue collar and middle class cities and suburbs. Most of whom live paycheck to paycheck. When you talk about funding homeless shelters this is whom you are taking money from. Money that could go to their kids schools, the roads they drive on, the parks they visit.

Please feel free to throw yourself on the pyre of your own platitudes. But don’t expect others to follow.

Do you… actually think this solves anything? Like, at all? It’s short-sighted, pointless, and genuinely selfish. “I don’t like looking at the unhoused, so they need to go… elsewhere.”

No it’s a sanitation, public health and safety issue. Citizens who live there and experience the problem first hand feel the same way or they would not be passing vagrancy laws.

Housing is becoming unaffordable for the middle class, what are these people supposed to do!? We as a society have abandoned them, and it’s now costing more money to harass and bully them, and to get them some semblance of health care and remove their bodies when they die out in the streets than it would to house them. Look it up! We have enough housing for everyone, but investments in homes and AirBNB and time shares and tourist rentals and property management companies have to continue making rich assholes more money every year…

Yep, all of which are issues caused by low interest rates and the elevation of capital over labor. Raise rates, reshore jobs, make unions more powerful and housing will change.

The moment living on the streets is a choice for all the unhoused in this country is when I will join with you to regulate where they choose to slum it and not a second before.

If they were living in your back yard you may think differently.

This is about human rights vs. city spending

Feel free to campaign to spend your local funds on the homeless rather than schools, parks, etc. I don’t presume to impose my beliefs on another locality. I’m merely pointing out each city and state has the right to set their own respective laws regulating the public commons.

When someone posts about how unpleasant it is to see other humans sleeping/eating/pooping and concludes from that cities should be able to stop them (or throw them in jail) to make themselves feel better; the implication is that these people have alternatives and are just being rude or lazy.

I never stated or implied any indication that those people are rude or lazy. That is entirely of your own making. I’m merely making the point that they are occupying the public commons and the public has the right to regulate that space as they see fit. While sharing my first hand experience as to why they may seek to restrict vagrancy.

I’m pointing out that many of these people are stuck and have no alternative. By appealing this case to the supreme court, Grants Pass (an city) was admitting that these people had no alternative and they still wanted to punish them.

The one basic rule that was upheld by the ninth circuit was that cities must first give them an alternative. If they have no alternatives, then it is cruel and unusual punishment. I don’t know how anyone can argue that it is not cruel to throw someone in jail for sleeping in their car (one of the plaintiffs was sleeping in her car) when they have no where else to go. People need to sleep: it is not a choice.

If you travel to other countries you are often required to show that you have accommodations to stay and a return ticket. Otherwise they will not allow you to enter the country. So there is precedent for these types of laws.

However the United States is Federal Republic that has a number of states with a patchwork of laws. As a citizen you are guaranteed the right to travel freely but you are also subject to local laws. If the citizenry has freely elected politicians who have enacted laws deeming vagrancy illegal and that law stands up to judicial review then that is the law until the public is convinced to elect officials who will change that law.

The west coast is fairly liberal as compared to most of the rest of the country. The problem with vagrants has become such an issue that the public seeks a more restrictive approach. I prefer to respect the will of the public who live there annd experience the problem first hand over your sympathetic platitudes.

Additionally, large homeless encampments in other parts of the country has two main drivers:

1. In many cities, the majority of the homeless population is sheltered (there’s enough shelter beds). e.g. NYC

2. In other parts of the country (e.g. not any of the cities you mentioned) housing is more affordable, often because the population centers aren’t as large (see Wyoming)

Mostly true, you’re leaving out weather as a factor. Being homeless without shelter in Wyoming is much more difficult and life threatening in winter months than California or Florida. I’d much rather sleep on a sunny California beach than the cold wind swept plains.

I’m not the toilet police, if you want to map out all public toilets and distribute a map to the homeless, please be my guest.

Very brave of you risking other people’s money.

Cities in the US have always been able to police sleeping in public spaces GIVEN there was an alternative (e.g. a non-full shelter) where people could go to instead. What changed with the new US supreme court ruling is that they are now allowed to do this regardless of weather or not there is any alternatives.

Cities always had this right the Supreme Court just upheld it.

How narcissistic do you have to be to think that the person you witnessed wanted to be there?

I never stated that.

Homelessness is out of control on the west-coast of the US (and elsewhere) but fines and jail time aren’t going to make these people magically stop existing.

I don’t see homeless encampments out in the open by highways in other parts of the country. Yes there are homeless, but it is on a whole other level on the West Coast.

Side note: Multiple studies have shown that homelessness is directly correlated to housing affordability. If you want to help fight homelessness, support building more affordable housing (which usually equates to denser housing).

Cool idea sounds like something you should fight for in your community.

Yep, sure do hope those communities are wealthy enough to support housing the homeless. I wonder how that will play out with the local tax payer when they are deciding how to allocate money to local schools, the park system or a homeless shelter.

I wonder how they would like to see their tax dollars spent…🫤