Not just time, but cost also. As my wife also works from home we've been able to scale back to a single car for 2 years now. Since owning, insuring, fueling, repairing, and maintaining a car typically runs $6k-$10k/year (depending on your tastes and mileage) I've gotten a substantial financial benefit from being remote.
> Everyone commutes through traffic/crowded public transport and risk catching the latest novel virus, to arrive at work at the same time. Everyone has lunch at the same time so it’s crowded as heck and we get even more mortal danger.
> We can easily look at that chart and guess what it's going to look like over the next 10 years.
That's why all the past predictions have been so accurate, right? "But we know more now." We do not. Some intellectual humility by those wanting tyranical control over our lives would be fantastic.
Certain areas are inherently easier to be homeless in, regardless of local programs.
Try sleeping outside for a year in Phoenix or in Minneapolis. Try getting resources in a sprawling suburb without access to a car. It seems clear that SF, with its dense, walkable layout, access to public transit, and year round moderate climate, would be vastly preferable to most areas of the US.
Yes, I agree. Despite Houston being one of the top cities in the US for homelessness, they have a slightly lower rate of homelessness than the US average.
However, their homelessness rate is higher than the Texas average.
Because certain areas of the country have better services for homeless people, because certain areas are livable/hospitable year-round, because some places bus homeless people to other areas? Probably mostly the first 2 reasons but the third doesn't help.
> we clearly have better answers to questions of race
Do we? It seems like racial tensions are higher than they've been during my lifetime because there's a grievance culture explicitly focused on race instead of treating people as individuals based on their merits. By the standards of today, MLK's request to treat people based not on the color of their skin but the content of their character is rejected as racist.
Racial tensions being higher doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the wrong answers. Certainly racial tensions went up in the lead up to the civil war. They also went up during the civil rights movement
Civil rights movement -> equality under the law of all Americans (with later protections under affirmative action actually giving minorities a modest advantage in some situtions)
What hoped for outcome is being sought now? "Give me money because things aren't fair" isn't a change in law or status, it's grievance politics that has no logical end.
Disparate outcomes aren't proof of social injustice; disparate outcomes are proof of disparate behavior.
> The is primarily due to the conservative party's realization half a century ago that they could motivate their base with rage and grievance politics instead of with good policy, and win doing so
Democrats are mayors of 31 of the nation's 34 largest cities, most of which are places I certainly would not care to live. Is it "good policy" that lead to the reason for this article, or are all of San Francisco's 8 Republicans to blame for this tragedy?
> The GOP is all about anger and, honestly, hate.
Ahhh yes. Supporting school choice to get inner city kids out of crap schools is hate based. Not wanting children who aren't even able to consent to going on school field trips to make permanent, life altering decisions by destroying their bodies? Clearly an anger thing.
> It's easier to sell "hey, just get more cops" than to explain that crime is often driven by economics
Yep, people are stealing iPhones because they're starving. That's 100% a thing that is happening. And violent crime surely has economic advantage attached to it, right? The guy who killed Bob is now richer thanks to his actions?
You appear to be completely unable to engage on the issues in good faith while whining that "the other side" is doing exactly the same thing.
For comparison, the murder rate in two Republican cities: Nashville (100+/annually), Dallas (200+ annually, 1.3m pop) vs San Francisco (<60 annually, 800k pop).
On a per capita basis (i.e., per 100k pop), almost all of the 50 most dangerous metro areas for violent crime are Republican strongholds, the only exception being Detroit at #5.
Elections don't decide which policies will work, only which will be implemented. It's quite simple to see what worked elsewhere and in the past if people would care to look.
> Could someone please enlighten me on why we don't treat governing like we do software solutions?
Because half the country doesn't like the answers that experience produces. Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime (broken windows policing). The formula works but because evenly applying the rules produces disparate outcomes among various groups it's evidently racist and it's preferable to just allow violent criminals to run unchecked on the streets.
> Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime
Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).
On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.
Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."
Exhibit A. It works, but it seems like it shouldn't work, so we should reject it and do something that keeps not working.
America is a more violent place; it has been for its entire history. Things that work in places with incredible cultural homogeneity don't work here, no matter how many happy images they conjure. What actually works here is policing, and SF is an example of people who believe your post following it off a cliff.
> working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place
The conditions that prevent violent crime are simple: consequences for violence.
Many jurisdictions let people that commit violent crime walk again and again.
From my neck of the woods? The perpetrator of the Waukesha parada massacre had a long history of violent behavior and was out on bail for trying to run someone over with his car a few days prior. Aliyah Perez, the niece of a Milwaukee alderman, was killed in a domestic situation by a man that had previously committed "a brutal domestic attack in which he stomped on, choked, and punched the victim, pulling out clumps of her hair and knocking out a tooth." He was given a minimum sentence only to return to his previous behavior and kill his next victim.
I don't care how our prison population compares to the rest of the world if clearly dangerous and violent people are walking free. The purpose of prison is to separate such people from the rest of society.
If all 2 million people in prison in the US are violent criminals, then there's a _really_ big problem.
Clearly it's better to stop people from becoming violent criminals, then to wait (or push them, e.g. by increasing income inequality, reducing respect for "unskilled" professions, etc.) for them to become violent criminals and then punish them.
Countries with globally low crimes rates are racially homogeneous. (For the liberals: This doesn't mean that racially homogeneity implies low crime rates, of course.)
Sometimes one of the "windows" to fix, though, is the community-government relationship. And when the only viable way to catch every graffiti artist is to stop-and-frisk every teen in the area for months or years on end - is that truly the right way to fix that relationship? Is that the decent thing to do?
You need to go one level lower. Your proposed solution works in countries that have a working social system. Current state and history of the US prevents your proposal to improve anything.
If everyone in a country feels valuable and equitable coming up with solutions that benefit everyone is very easy. As it stands in the US there will always be someone that sees themselves losing something and prevents any improvement.
Can I correctly surmise that you're Canadian? If so, your leader declared a national emergency to squash free speech, banished handguns so you can no longer protect yourself, and cut off political opponents from the financial system. Trying to control the books children can view in an educational environment seems trivial by comparison.
"banished handguns so you can no longer protect yourself..."
I think this view has been quite comprehensively debunked by now. I for one do not want to live in a country where most people have access to handguns.
2A was intended to allow the populace to keep government in check. In the age of muskets that was probably good thinking, but try that now and see what happens.
Not that Canadian authoritarianism makes this FL issue any less ridiculous, but since you brought it up, I am kind of amazed that no one in a "modern democracy" (what I thought Canada was aiming for) had any problem with the alarming weaponization of the financial system against anyone who even donated to the trucker protests. In my mind, it was somewhat equivalent to a Republican-controlled US government freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated to Planned Parenthood and then was protesting the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade. It was an alarming abandonment by Trudeau's government of the principles that I would've assumed they were trying to uphold.
> Republican-controlled US government freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated to Planned Parenthood
I'm not familiar with this. Searches yield articles about freezing of Planned Parenthood funding. Could you point me in the right direction for more details?
