A 10 year old child has spent 5 months sleeping on the bus at night with her father. She's getting off the public bus and onto a school bus each morning.
I'm not saying that the adults deserve to be homeless, but can't everyone agree that no child should be in this situation? I can't even imagine how 10 year old me would have done in such a situation. I know kids are resilient, but it sounds absolutely terrifying.
According to a quick search, it is claimed that there are 1.6 million homeless children in America, with 1.1 million enrolled in public schools. That is insane. I can only hope that this number counts mostly children who were homeless for very short stints, and that most of them aren't doing anything like sleeping on a bus for 5 weeks straight.
This is an anecdote, not data, but my wife spent six months of her time in high school living in the park. This wasn't in sunny California - she still has some medical problems from sleeping in the snow. Also, her pre-school aged step brother was also living under the same conditions.
To answer the obvious questions to follow, the family did try the two homeless shelters. The government ran homeless shelter was quickly abandoned, as it was a haven for rape. There was a non-profit, privately ran homeless shelter for women which did not have the same level of trouble, but they turned my mother-in-law away because she would not convert to their religious beliefs.
I'm not doing reporting this as some sort of pity party. My mother-in-law is a terrible human being and she made many poor decisions that resulted in her being in this situation. I just wanted to make it clear that five weeks on a bus is in no way an outlier among those 1.6 million homeless children.
As many as 3.5 million people experience homelessness in a given year (1% of the entire U.S. population or 10% of its poor), and about 842,000 people in any given week.[36][37] Most were homeless temporarily. The chronically homeless population (those with repeated episodes or who have been homeless for long periods) fell from 175,914 in 2005 to 123,833 in 2007.[38]
The people who put these statistics together seem to have an interest in bucking up the numbers. I'm guessing "homeless" could include all manner of things like switching jobs and so being without an apartment for a few days.
The problem is she's with her father. The system is skewed towards mothers and there is a high risk of the girl being separated from her dad (and potentially her school and extended support system) if he sought help.
IMO it's a disgrace that this situation exists, but if she has good grades and nobody has figured it out yet, her dad isn't some sort of nut and is taking care of her. They will get through it. She's better off on the bus that rolling the dice with some foster situation.
All sentient life is suffering. Individuals choose to create life in spite of this inevitability, and society perpetuates and encourages individuals making this decision.
We are the product of a mindless evolutionary process, and for the most part societies also take shape mindlessly.
> but can't everyone agree that no child should be in this situation?
Prioritising basic guarantees of well being, above people living in the absurdly precarious situation described, above endless growth and winner-take-all game playing, is actually asking a lot of this world.
> but can't everyone agree that no child should be in this situation?
The problem is that you'll never get everyone to agree that the government needs to be involved in fixing the situation, even though there is no other entity which can be relied upon to solve it.
It's gone from being politics to being religion: Socialism is Evil. It isn't just bad policy, it's Evil and therefore must not be compromised with, for all the same reasons you don't compromise with Satan Himself. The people who believe that will spin stories about how private groups will step up to solve all of the problems, even though they never have in the past, simply to prevent Evil, which they call Socialism.
> The government has shown that it, too, cannot be relied upon to solve it.
Except governments in other countries have a better solution for it than the US government does. Denmark, for example, has a very low homelessness rate:
Here's some more statistics on homelessness. You'll need to divide by population to get percentages, which are the only useful way to present this data:
As for the rest of your post: I'm not saying it's a majority yelling "Socialism". I'm saying it's a minority which has the power to, for example, shut down the government by blocking certain legislation because they think a health care plan created by the Heritage Foundation is Socialism.
So:
> When the government wants to spend money on something it seems to find a way.
Not if a minority within the government has found a way to rig the game such that it can make the rest of the party in control of the House of Representatives terrified of being primaried unless they back Ted Cruz.
Our system is full of checks and balances to prevent a majority from running roughshod over all of the minorities. The converse to that is that you do need broad (near-universal, by comparison to some other systems) support, or at least broad acquiescence, to institute major change. A well-positioned minority can halt things, even to the point of disaster, by digging in its heels far enough.
Except governments in other countries have a better solution for it than the US government does.
Sure. But they haven't solved it.
My main point being the the idea that government is the sole entity that can be relied upon to solve it, as claimed earlier post is false. At best they will play a role along with other entities.
I'm saying it's a minority which has the power to, for example, shut down the government by blocking certain legislation because they think a health care plan created by the Heritage Foundation is Socialism.
But what actually happened? The government was shut down briefly, then all went back to as it was. The GOP looked like even bigger fools. The AHCA is still the law of the land. What was blocked?
A well-positioned minority can halt things, even to the point of disaster, by digging in its heels far enough.
Yes, but my belief (clearly not argued well, I concede) is that many times things get halted because the majority has, for political reasons, decided to acquiesce, not because they lack the means to overcome the resistance of the minority.
This is not always a bad thing, but it suggests that even if the government, in the abstract, has the means to accomplish something in practice they cannot be relied on to do it, because of political self-interest (including, for example, being beholden to their campaign financial sources).
> the idea that government is the sole entity that can be relied upon to solve it, as claimed earlier post
I presented my argument wrong. My position is that the government is the only entity that can be relied upon to solve it entirely, not the only one that can be relied upon to help solve it. Private entities are too small to institute the broad changes needed to solve this, as has been demonstrated in the past, when they had the chance and failed.
My complaint was against the people who are convinced that the government must not be involved in any of this at all, because Socialism Is Evil.
> But what actually happened? The government was shut down briefly, then all went back to as it was. The GOP looked like even bigger fools.
The GOP only looks foolish to the people who were against it to begin with. They look like Brave Freedom Fighters to the people who voted them in, and will vote for them again in 2014, simply because they stood up to the Black Muslim Fascist Socialist (who is Black, by the way).
> Yes, but my belief (clearly not argued well, I concede) is that many times things get halted because the majority has, for political reasons, decided to acquiesce, not because they lack the means to overcome the resistance of the minority.
If the non-Tea-Party majority of the GOP in the House decided to risk being primaried en masse they could, indeed, kill the Ted Cruz contingent. I agree with you there, sure. But that's an extremely hard road to follow; it's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma, something right out of a game theory textbook, and politicians are trained to be risk-averse. (Which, in other scenarios, can be a good thing.)
> even if the government, in the abstract, has the means to accomplish something in practice they cannot be relied on to do it, because of political self-interest (including, for example, being beholden to their campaign financial sources)
And here is where I disagree with the Libertarians (including the Tea Party, which are Libertarian on this issue): The Libertarians say that if the government isn't perfect, it can never be part of the solution. I say that if the government isn't perfect, it's time to improve the government.
The problem is that you'll never get everyone to agree that the government needs to be involved in fixing the situation
We already did agree that the government needs to fix the situation. As a result we have the foster care system which will provides homeless children with housing and care. As far as I'm aware, no remotely mainstream politicians advocate ending this system.
I get that you want to bait people into a debate about socialism. But if you want to argue for a change in policy, you need to do more than just criticize your ideological opponents (who don't disagree with you on this matter); you need to actually delve into technical details.
I used to work swing shift, and would take the late night busses in Orange County home. I'd get on Line 60 in downtown Long Beach, taking it to the 57 line in Orange, then the 2 or so miles to home. The drivers of those late night busses usually having the interior lights off. They knew what their passenger load's like -- regular working people just wanting to nap before they got home, the homeless people who would sleep as the motors wound up, brakes hissed, and stops were announced -- so tiny bits of peace and quiet were appreciated.
I'd see the same faces night after night. Some were grumpy, years of living on the streets having turned their faces and attitudes to weathered stone. Some were friendly; willing to chatter, unbowed by what the fates had given them. I'd say hi, but not much else; we didn't have much in common -- my ipod and sidekick were very out of place for them.
There were routines, ways to keep their semi-warm, if bumpy, beds. People getting off at Harbor to transfer to the 43 bus. Long bus line there, could get lots of uninterrupted sleep. People getting on at Harbor; they'd done a round trip, needed to change to the 60 so they could get to the 57 for another good trip, another few hours of sleep.
It saddened me. Couldn't do much about it. I donated when I could to shelters, even when people in my social circle would question my sanity for it. "Fuck you, got mine" being the mantra of entirely too many. After all, this was a county where a light rail system was vetoed because of fears that "those" people would have too much mobility and become visible in areas where they obviously didn't belong.
Unfortunately, a few years back, the Powers that Be decided to cut even that most slim of safety nets. Budget cutbacks, no need for busses in those wee, cold hours. Regardless of the passengers inconvenienced, regardless of the people thrown even deeper into misery. Regardless of people working those late nights. Having a soul is too expensive in times of austerity.
Well, we need to stop trying to solve homelessness per se. We need to work on taking better care of people generally. That will shrink the numbers of homeless.
Yeah, I know that. I am homeless and people have told me I should not admit that online, they would not hire me..blah blah. But most homeless were not born that way. It isn't a trait like skin color. "The homeless" come from the rest of of the population. They aren't some distinct separate population that interbreed or something, geez. So you get homeless by failing all of your citizens in some important way.
Welfare in America was designed to "help poor single moms" at a time when most poor single moms were widows and intentionally having a baby out of wedlock was a huge taboo. The very framing of it changed the social contract and actively undermines the social fabric. It has helped foster an atmosphere actively hostile to fathers and has single handedly all but put an end to the practice of "shotgun weddings." In Europe, programs are more generally designed to help women (like maternity leave), help children, help families -- not POOR women, not POOR children, not POOR families.
America requires you to be a failure before you qualify for assistance. Therein lies the problem. It actively creates a culture of failure and too many broken, shamed people.
It's a terrible system. Just terrible.
But I don't really want to discuss this at length tonight.
No one should be homeless and freezing in this country.
I am really disgusted how we let people fall this far.
We should all be ashamed.
The comments on that article are even more disturbing but I am going to assume it is people trolling because they are in warm homes with computers so they feel comfortable being asses.
This to me points at the flaw of the startup model. Most of the problems startups are solving are not real problems, they don't need solving - but there is money to be made in solving them, so they get solved. This is a problem (lack of jobs/affordable housing) that does need solving, but there isn't much money to be made in it.
And because there isn't much money to be made in it, you really can't make it scale on the back of its own business-model. So there's really nothing a startup can do to help with these problems.
However, I think there's a case to be made that startups can become an important part of solving these problems: they rake in money from wealthy sectors of the population, they're usually quite high-margin, and they are headed by small, smart, effective groups of people, who could make the decision to engage in Effective Altruism with their proceeds.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing more for the world's problems than any little start-up aiming to help people track their dogs' sleep-cycles--but it could have been started way earlier, when Microsoft was way smaller, and still be having just as much of an impact--if it had been the whole organization on-board, instead of just a private hobby of the founder.
(Really, any company could join in on this at any point, but the more bureaucratic and self-sustaining the business culture has become--which usually happens proportionally to scale--the less likely it is to happen. Far easier to convince a few guys in their garage that this is their end-goal-after-the-end-goal, rather than to convince a company already making big money that they should reorganize their corporate vision to doing good.)
And because there isn't much money to be made in it, you really can't make it scale on the back of its own business-model. So there's really nothing a startup can do to help with these problems.
Well, there are outfits like YC's Watsi which, while small, are looking to make a difference. And just yesterday the guy behind this said he'd be sending his profits to Watsi:
buy.startupnotes.org
So perhaps there are ways of using the startup mindset to create outfits that can help with social problems.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine a Watsi-esque startup that was an AirBnB for (rigorously screened) homeless people and/or families, i.e. trying to scale what this LA lawyer did (giving his house to a homeless family for a year):
It's not just startups -- businesses tend to focus on earning money. I don't know if we can realistically expect private industry to take an interest in social or economic problems. At the lowest level, there are founders trying to choose a niche that gets them from debt to break-even as quickly as possible; at the highest level, you get into transnational corporations which act only in their own interest.
I would be happy if Apple or Google were to dump their excess billions into social welfare or government reform, but it is vanishingly unlikely.
Many companies choose to make marginally more profit by moving production to 'low cost markets' rather than manufacture here. I believe firmly if you make your product overseas it should cost some amount of money in duty to bring your product back to the United States, ideally about (or maybe more than) the difference in cost between what it would cost to make your product here and what it costs to make it there - is it an easy to implement solution? no. But its the right thing to do.
That said, I believe that rising transport costs will eventually solve this problem for many types of goods, probably within the next 10-15 years or so.
Because I'm selfish. I'm an American, my countrymen are hungry, homeless, and cant find jobs, in a country that is not well accommodating for the poor. I hardly think I can be blamed for wanted to help my countrymen first.
Selfishness is caring about yourself. Caring about people who share your nationality at the expense of others is nationalism, in much the same way that caring about people who share your race at the expense of others is racism.
Give me a break -- that's some nonsense PC excuse to mask a decision purely driven by profit.
If choice of production locations is driven by concern for our brothers and sisters in the developing world, why aren't we making stuff in India? Or Liberia? Or Bolivia? And why are we generally operating in a model that shifts liability for things like pollution and labor problems to local partners?
Choice of production locations is generally driven by actual selfishness rather than nationalism or racism. But actual selfishness can produce good results if things are set up properly. Not so for nationalism or racism.
In short, I believe I need to solve problems near to home before I worry about the rest of the world. There are hundreds of NGO's who worry about Africa and development in the developing world, there isn't really anyone working on poverty here, at home, not with any resources. So I want to work on creating jobs here, here where there are real environmental rules, protections for workers, occupational health and safety rules.
I think it's natural to care about people who are closer to you or more similar to you. But that doesn't make it right, because that exact same tendency is what drives racism. And it's hard to say the moral effects are any different when you compare what poverty looks like in China or Bangladesh to what poverty looks like in America. If you start with the premise that all human life has the same value, then the difference between subsistence farming and a sweatshop job in East Asia is a much bigger improvement than you could ever create in the United States.
This kind of selective altruism, where you care about other Americans so much that you'd make comparatively marginal improvements to their lives instead of making drastic improvements to the life of a foreigner, is the moral equivalent of racism.
This points to the need for less restrictive zoning. There are cheaper ways to house people than in a moving bus. They are willing to pay, maybe not the full rate, but they are paying something. Build army barracks style residences (which I guess is what homeless shelters are).
Which is not a good way to live, but much much better than riding a bus.
Zoning and fire codes and whatnot means this may be illegal here. But really I think people here are more comfortable with homelessness than allowing uncomfortably affordable housing to be built.
it is what "we the people" through our elected representatives use to keep unwanted (i.e. weak/ill/less fortunate ones) out. Shame.
>fire codes
this obviously a necessary and what is most important - pure technically solvable thing for minimum amount of money.
We don't have to go for extreme HK approach. A city like PA, MV, Sunnyvale could easy build on a single-family size lot a shelter that would take a busload of homeless. Considering that MV (San Antonio/El Camino) and Sunnyvale (near downtown) have just had huge redevelopment projects going so fitting a couple of 10-20 bdrm appartments somewhere on the back alley (so it wouldn't offend eyes and noses of our sensitive citizens) would be noise for the projects' cost.
>Zoning it is what "we the people" through our elected representatives use to keep unwanted (i.e. weak/ill/less fortunate ones) out. Shame.
Or it's what we the people, through our elected representatives, use to keep the strip club and petroleum refinery from opening across the street from the elementary school.
It's not black and white. Zoning laws are a way for the people in an area to have a say about how their community is developed. That's both good and bad.
The influx of money into silicon valley has many side effects; not all of them are good. People outside the tech industry are becoming relatively poorer across the board, including those at the bottom in this article. What bothers me the most is that none of this is planned. It's just happening and everyone is observing. I would be more comfortable if this 'relatively poorer' effect was part of a plan since it would imply that someone had considered the consequences.
I would argue that it's difficult to determine if the problem is worse, better or the same. The best intentioned efforts sometimes go off the rails -- homeless people might prefer buses, because they are safer, cleaner and more comfortable than shelters.
There are 2 problems that I can see here that need to be tackled: shelter, and safety. It is _relatively_ easier to provide shelter: just 4 walls and a roof, basically. The more difficult part is the safety. City-run shelters are a haven for criminals, who are much better than the homeless in working 'the system'. And then there's the problem of amenities: showers, toilets, etc. Who will build them? Who will maintain them? And finally: homeless come with assorted mental/physical/drug issues. It's very rare to find a homeless person who does not have serious issues.
SF is doing a massive underground dig for a subway line. I often wonder: how difficult would it be to create some more room down there, and let the homeless just pitch a tent or crash for the night? But that would solve the shelter problem, which isn't that hard. It's the other facilities that are needed, which make the problem intractable.
Safety really isn't an intractable problem. There is absolutely no reason, apart from lack of money and will, that the city run homeless shelters have to be oversubscribed and unsafe. A few security guards keeping an eye out and throwing out anyone unruly, and better facilities with lockable single/family rooms would make them a far safer and a reliable option.
With a little bit of money, this problem of secure safe sheltered housing could be solved, even if all the other problems leading to homelessness could not. As you say there are often other issues leading to the lack of a stable life which cannot be easily solved.
Just as an example, we have sheltered housing round the corner from me in London for the homeless in a normal house - people have their own rooms, and it works, even if it doesn't solve their other issues. People seem to stay a few years then hopefully move on to a more stable life, I think that's the idea anyway. The provision here is inadequate as in the states, but it can be done with more money.
> A few security guards keeping an eye out and throwing out anyone unruly, ...
... and therein lies the problem. I know my evidence is anecdotal, but: there have been many cases here (in SF) of such security guards actually running protection rackets for drug dealers and participating in associated criminal activities.
Look: I know that if you throw _enough_ money on a problem, you can mostly solve it (or mitigate it). If we had $1MM to spend per homeless person, I'm sure we could put them up in top-notch places with full care. But then the ~7000 homeless people in SF would eat up the entire budget, leaving $0 for the rest of the city.
The mental picture of these people, huddled on a bumpy bus, in the middle of the night, being the only regular thing they can look forward to is incredibly saddening.
Volunteer your time, give of your resources, open your home up to a family in need. This list of things we could do to make a difference in someones life is bounded only by our own selfishness.
Just to build homes for the homeless. Provide food, water, soap, security. It can't be much more expensive then the millions the government wastes on other things.
Not quite that simple. Homeless shelters, per resident-wise, are much more expensive to run than an equivalent place housing, well, people like us.
Some homeless people avoid shelters even if there are space because they are frequently giant nests of disease and violence. Besides catching some rather unpleasant diseases and pests, your odds of getting stabbed increase dramatically.
So you'd have to pay for hygiene, health, and security expenses well above and beyond the norm. And that's just if you want to pursue the "containment" side of housing the chronically homeless.
If you want to pursue the "rehabilitation" side it gets even crazier. A large portion of the population suffer from severe mental health problems that prevent them from any meaningful integration into mainstream society, and mental health care ain't cheap.
That said I do believe it should be done, but it isn't "oh yeah just levy a tiny tax" territory.
I wish it were this simple. Having witnessed two different relatives go through the cycle of homelessness, addiction, and other assorted legal and health problems I can only say that it isn't at all straightforward. I'm not saying that the homeless deserve to be homeless - but there is often a long history of many friends and family members attempting to help to no positive effect. The folks at "Hotel 22" have no lack of truly tragic stories, but the unfortunate truth is that only a subset of them can really be helped, at least helped in a way that we technocrats standing on the street corner with our touch-sensitive radio-linked supercomputers and $6 coffees can be comfortable with. More unfortunate is that those who can be helped look the same as those who can't (to "our" eyes), and including the latter in any blanket scheme to alleviate the suffering of the former can actually exacerbate it - see the history of public housing.
I don't think there is any architecture that coders or startups can bring to help this problem overall. I would suggest private charity and learning to identify those who need and truly want help in your personal spheres to be a greater benefit than concocting a grand plan to save everyone.
They did that for one of the migratory groups in Europe (Irish Travelers, Roma...don't remember which one it was). The result was that the houses were found abandoned, but with the copper wire stripped out.
It solves the immediate problem, but doesn't come anywhere near actually solving the reason why people end up using hotel 22. To do so means doing things like destigmatizing mental health issues so that people are willing to get help before the problems spiral out of control.
You also need to work on outreach -- letting people on the streets know that there is a place they can go to get help. Social services departments tend to not be nearly explicit enough in helping get people to the right sorts of help they need; additionally, a lot of social workers are overworked and underpaid, which leads to a good amount of burnout which further exacerbates the problem.
Saying we need more housing shows a misunderstanding as to why this problem exists. There are a lot of things that need to be done before, and concurrent with, housing in order to fix this problem. Otherwise, you'll end up just whitewashing the situation.
>Otherwise, you'll end up just whitewashing the situation.
no, what you end up with is homeless people having a chance to sleep under the roof whenever they want and for whatever long they want (why shelters kick people out on the street every morning? At least why not provide the homeless with a fixed guaranteed bed every night and a locker to keep her/his stuff?)
And there are programs like that, focusing on getting people housed first, as people finally realize that this could be more helpful than shelters, etc.:
Most long term homeless Americans are severely mentally ill. That makes them eligible for Supplemental Security Income ($950/month), Section 8 (subsidized housing), Medicaid (free health care), and a variety of local grants and subsidies.
But if they could keep their shit together well enough to navigate that system, they would probably just get a job.
I hope my YC application gets approved for BusBNB: disrupting traditional fixed shelter in favor of housing that is simultaneously mobile, social, AND local. Extensions to the bus add food truck capability, washroom/shower facilities, dedicated hacker spaces, and more.
This happens on the Red Line as well. 1:20 each way.
The nice thing about the Blue Line is they generally don't make you get off at O'Hare. You can doze until the train goes back downtown. That means you can get a 2+ hour sleep in a round-trip between Forest Park and O'Hare.
I just remember picking up the Blue Line in Forest Park, the southern terminus of the line, at 8:30AM, and the train always having several sleeping homeless people on it.
I already know how to code. What do I code that will make me money? It's not like a person can just code anything at all and get paid by the line.
Getting a programming job is nice in theory until nobody will hire you. Programming freelance is a nice idea in theory until people on Odesk take your work and disappear. Bootstrapping a startup is a nice idea until you realize you don't have a good idea for one.
I'm ill, got fired from a tech support job I loved because of it, and have tried several times to support myself with coding from home. If I didn't have a loving wife who works hard to provide barely enough to pay rent and have decent health insurance, I might be homeless now. If I didn't have a home or own my own computer I would have even less of a chance.
There's a disconnect between the imagined reality where skill and effort instant translates into wealth and the actual reality where luck or the generosity of others is required.
I was 30 when I started teaching myself to code. Had a music degree and a good amount of success in the music business. I spent the first 18 months or so wandering all over the internet just trying to figure out what I was trying to figure out. Now I'm 35. I have a good job, a family, a house, basically all the support structure you would want in your life to help you along. This stuff is still, to me, incredibly hard, and I have an insane work ethic and a decent amount of intelligence and everything I need to learn.
Most of the formally homeless people I know are now in the food industry. That is because at the shelter I worked at they would rotate who cooks the meal, so all homeless 'in the program' learned to cook, and now they all work at the cheesecake factory.
Which pays enough to live comfortably in my hometown. Don't know how viable it is here in the valley, though, with both higher expenses and more competition.
Remember you will need to start from the ground up. "To start the computer -- that machine in front of you -- press the button that is right there"... then, in about a year, perhaps you could teach them to code.
Only a fraction of homeless are like that, there a good chunk of just regular people who have worked in middle class environments and used to have jobs, but had shitty savings & a combination of not being able to get another one led them to the streets. There are people who have decided to be itterant homeless by their own choice, many young homeless people have email addresses.
That's a pretty condescending reply. Homeless in no way implies stupid or ignorant. To state that a homeless person wouldn't know how to turn on a computer is insulting.
Is it? I managed convicts on work-release recently. Some of them had quite a bit of trouble clocking in and out. I'm talking basic "fill out this form" stuff.
Also, many employers will balk at employing people with criminal records. Many are legally prohibited from hiring them too (banks, etc).
Want to help? Make a company, hire people at the bottom who need help getting their sons and daughters out of shelters and to school on time at 7:48 am with a full breakfast in them after a good night's sleep. Keep your company going by providing excellent and valuable service to your customers. And when your janitor invites you to his daughter's middle school graduation, put on your best suit and go. Just because a man has darker skin, tattoos, a shaved head, doesn't want to talk about his past, and clams up with a frown and a thousand-yard stare when discussions get heated at the office, doesn't mean he's spending his pay on drugs and hookers. He's probably thinking that his girlfriend needs him to keep his job so he can make the car payment and the rent and buy groceries so he can feed the three year old at home that's watching Curious George right now.
There are many who could also benefit from adult literacy teaching. See if you can volunteer at your local library. Many of them have programs to help people read and read better.
I am in no way implying that they are stupid. Did you ever go out and shown computers to people who are not used to them? Not everyone in the world had access to one growing up. Some people are simply too old and never picked up on it.
I am actually saying to this person: "go ahead and help out there". I have shown computers to people who couldn't figure out how the damn mouse work!
This is such a rude comment. This comment is basically like putting salt on the injury. You are talking about coding when these people don't actually have a place to stay and/or good food to eat. You have spoken like a true 'born with a silver spoon and never knew what poverty really is like' guy.
I'm fairly sure it was sarcasm, since that's sort of a kneejerk reaction that coders have to people with issues, and in this case it's completely absurd.
I've noticed that techies have a tendency to drift into absolutist thinking, probably because we're so isolated from mainstream society, so our brains, being the wonderful bayesian-esque learning machines they are have relatively a relatively small sample of non-diverse data on the subject. And the abstract world we work in is artificially absolute. And maybe it's partly the type of person that's drawn to this field.
Which is just a complicated way of saying that we're often really crappy at modeling the real world in our heads unless we've forced ourselves to get out there and gather some experience.
I'm not saying that the adults deserve to be homeless, but can't everyone agree that no child should be in this situation? I can't even imagine how 10 year old me would have done in such a situation. I know kids are resilient, but it sounds absolutely terrifying.
According to a quick search, it is claimed that there are 1.6 million homeless children in America, with 1.1 million enrolled in public schools. That is insane. I can only hope that this number counts mostly children who were homeless for very short stints, and that most of them aren't doing anything like sleeping on a bus for 5 weeks straight.