throwaway313313

SF spending on homelessness has actually created a homeless industrial complex that thrives off of the enhancement and continuation of the "community" they serve.

The current solutions, while all well meaning or nice sounding, are essentially incentives and akin to figuring out all kinds of accelerants to throw on a fire.

The more money they spend on their current approaches the greater the homeless population they can and need to accommodate, and then even more money becomes "needed".

The problem is just about every well meaning "provide for a specific need" program creates a dependency and all of the deterrent solutions look like non solutions to all of the short term empathic people.

It's more of a humorous situation to imagine, however with respect to the "oh it's normal comment".

No industry with a very limited number of suppliers and with a huge lead time, capex, and tech expertise moat to build a semiconductor fab would ever note that the price of their product has a demand curve that while not a delta function is very steep around fixed maximum production of themselves and all the other suppliers, and that being on one side of that threshold makes all the suppliers poor or just enough money to stay in business vs rich.

How many RAM suppliers are there? Obviously due to the situation we all are in not enough to make the supply curve a very smooth function in response to demand.

Haha, jokes on you: only the cultures of the world that think that or that have the values that cause that will eliminate themselves, to be survived by everybody else that didn't have which ever deadly thought viruses that cause their decline.

Ah well, in reality the utilities try to raise the rates as much as they think they can get away with each year (they are limited only by what the respective state public utilities commissions allow), and this provides a convenient justification.

RPKI plus ASPA does solve the hijack problem by securing both the origin of a prefix and the AS path of a route.

Yes ASPA is new. Reference implementations in open source routing daemons and RPKI tools are being developed and rolled out. If you want to be a pioneer you can run a bird routing daemon and secure the routes with ASPA. Only experimenters have created ASPA records at this point, however once upon a time we were in the same position with RPKI.

Health care professionals consult with their patients to explore their needs and suggest options regularly. This is expected and normal.

The professionals making suggestions naturally have biases. That behavior gets a bit interesting when one of the options is euthanasia.

Here's a few cases:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig...

"Last summer, Global News first reported a case where a veteran claimed to have been pressured by a veterans affairs case worker to consider medically assisted dying."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/canada-offered-assisted-sui...

"Canada offered assisted suicide to a Paralympian veteran who wanted a wheelchair lift installed"

https://care.org.uk/news/2023/07/canadian-army-veterans-diag...

"Canadian army-veterans diagnosed with PTSD offered euthanasia"

In a system of socialized medicine, is the goal of society to spend the money available to save the most people?

Taking into account that people have the greatest medical costs near the end of their life, should the system save others by limiting either the total available spend or the cost of any particular treatment according to some metric?

Should the system repeatedly and frequently remind people that are older and alone in the world without support from friends or family that euthanasia is an option?

How often reminding them would be considered coercive?

Is it coecerive if the system decides if you are over 70 years old that euthanasia is the only option you get offered when your condition is one of a long list of non trivial chronic conditions?

What if we find that in practice (as we almost certainly will if we dare to look honestly) people of certain genders, ages, ethnic groups, economic demographics, are more frequently told that killing themselves is an option they should seriously consider, compared to how often it is recommended to the general population?

Should the suicide prevention hotlines be shutdown and instead become suicide suggestion hotlines?

What about cases like chronic depression?

I'm just asking questions from a hacker perspective when people are busy considering offering euthanasia to everybody (sometimes advocating at every age) is some kind of virtuous undertaking.

People don't consider that throughout society in all walks of life and occupations some portion of people are sociopathic and pyschopathic (possibly with uneven distribution), and some plan administrators, whether that be socialized medicine, or large corporate insurance providers, will interpret their incentives to either their own benefit and/or the benefit of their organization, completely at odds with what you might consider the interests of the individual.

Normally one might consider the political spectrum to go from the liberal stance of "It's all society's fault that you are how you are" to the conservative stance "It's all your fault you are how you are", with the practical situation being somewhere in between on a case by case basis.

However, things like drug decriminalization bring out further extremes, with extreme liberals espousing you should be able to do anything you want (even if you become a hazard to your community) and extreme conservatives feeling you should do what you want and the weak should die and the strong should live.

Only centrists and perhaps realpolitik people see all highly profitable addictive drugs that destroy the lives of the users as not some kind of accident on an individual basis and instead a super successful subscription business model with negative externalities that they would rather not suffer the side effects of as a community. Alas this view seems to not get so much airtime, and just ends up being a matter of fact as things play out.

To all the it's been illegal for over 100 years and it hasn't got any better school of thought people, so has murder. Were we expecting the nature of people to evolve in 100 years?

Seriously wondering from the perspective of choices of how to do things. Do we want to try to get the best result for the most people? How many false positives or false negatives do we want?

More analysis here: https://x.com/bgptools

The parent's premise was "Why is it illegal to bribe an official to do their job?"

The thought experiment is "What if it was legal to bribe city officials for matters involving their job, explore what would happen."

Ok, thought experiment. The people that inspect buildings can condemn them.

How would you like a system to develop in the city that unless you bribe city officials they each year randomly choose some local owners with buildings to condemn and then hint that they should be bribed. Of course to make it plausible, they choose buildings that they can come up with some kind of justification for.

Naturally, since they are that creative, this would develop into a system where they make buildings develop all kinds of inspection problems that they wish to take for their crime ring. A very common super broad area is ADA compliant ramps, markings, entrances, bathrooms. The building code has changed over the years and within a building department and between cities what the inspectors expect you to do wildly varies. When you go to get totally unrelated work done an inspector or the planning department can require you to make ADA upgrades.

Over time it is natural for some portion of the building stock to require work in the form of maintenance for just about every aspect of the buildings. Think of all of the opportunities they have to get your generous endorsement in the form of money, since this in this world you've created city officials demanding money is totally fine.

Pray any building or business in the city doesn't attract their attention!

Just a like the saying "Fish don't know they're in water", people within different groups have cultural assumptions, in this case: The idea of "Permissionless innovation" vs what I like to call the idea of "Permissionful innovation'.

In the permission less school of thought, you don't need permission to use an existing API or data to do whatever you want as long as it isn't abusing the service or illegal.

In a permission full school of thought, you should always ask permission, from the authorities and whoever might have a vested interesting what you are doing.

It seems that in Europe it is far more common that many (most?) people expect you to get permission before you go off writing your random programs and putting them live on the Internet.

Where as in some other countries, people view pushing half baked ideas live as virtuous and artists manifest destiny and/or a existentially important economic function of startups.

When people from different cultures interact and they have completely different unspoken assumptions it can result in misunderstandings. In my case, the correct thing to do was apologize for the misunderstanding (definitely not arguing, you would never convince them to change their core cultural values!), and then not use the specific service or company involved (that had intractable permission issues due to any member being able to deny permission), and just work with other services that had no built in conflicts with the fundamental purpose of their service. (Organization names and the services involved redacted for courtesy.)

Ok, then do they need to be truthful about anything?

How about giving themselves credit for extra clicks based on the value of the word? (With the defense they are doing it for you!)

What about if they switch to a click tracking system that uses statistics (so they can use the defense that the method is just inaccurate and they aren't lying), which just happens to over counts clicks?

How about charging you based on very erroneously projected traffic (one further than the step above, basically projecting the future very genrously in their favor) and not actual traffic?

What about if they enable the same third parties to both participate in an ad exchange as a seller and a buyer, with real time bid information, such that they can place phantom bids to up advertisers spend, just like HFT dark pools?

I could go on, every thing is all good, right? No guarantees?

Which ways is it ok if they misrepresent, overcount, badly estimate, fail to deliver, bill based on future estimates, and otherwise enable third parties to steal from you are ok?

I live in the suburbs in SF Bay Area, and at night when I walk my dog, I never see cats roaming around. I see coyotes, foxes, skunks, and raccoons. My guess is if you don't kill the coyotes and foxes they control the cat population.

They typically do not want to disclose the full vulnerability details prior to you paying them.

For the few that we have engaged in back and forth conversation, they typically were just reporting warnings from various opensource website scanners, without completely understanding what they were talking about.

That's not to say somebody might discover a new unique vulnerability in the open source software and packages you might be using, except you wouldn't expect them to report it to your company, as some random user on the Internet, when the official projects are on github.

Alternatively if they reported a very specific issue regarding software you developed, I'm sure it would get your 100% attention. That's not been my experience so far (knock on wood).

Real estate investors make a bet that the rents they receive will cover the mortgage payments.

Markets are cyclical. The full reason why any particular system oscillates or is chaotic is complicated, however in this case the fact that there is a long lead time measured in years for any new supply to be created and the decision to build is partially based on prevailing interest rates and the supply of money.

Most cities lock the use type of any particular building in by the use of zoning and all kinds of regulation. That means the owners or potential owners aren't free to just change the building use to attempt to provide supply to match demand.

Should people be able to make predictions about future business and economic conditions and then undertake business based on those predictions? They are going to bet wrong a lot. In fact due to the nature of feedback systems, there will always be some investors that bet wrong.

Let's simplify this a little and just take one example of something the city and county of SF has control over, property tax. SF is a little unique by being both a city and county. In California the counties have control over lien tax sales for non payment of property tax. How quickly should the county of SF auction off properties that haven't paid their property tax?

https://sco.ca.gov/ardtax_public_auction.html

Tax-Defaulted Land Sales

Property becomes tax-defaulted land if the property taxes remain unpaid at 12:01 a.m. on July 1st. Property that has become tax-defaulted after five years (or three years in the case of property that is also subject to a nuisance abatement lien) becomes subject to the county tax collector’s power to sell in order to satisfy the defaulted property taxes. The county tax collector must attempt to sell the property within four years of becoming subject to sale. The county tax collector may offer the property for sale at public auction, a sealed bid sale, or a negotiated sale to a public agency or qualified nonprofit organization.

Should the County of San Fransisco increase the number of property tax delinquent properties that they slap with nuisance abatement (they could pick any kind of reason such as dirt and graffiti, squatters, crime incidents, etc) in order to expedite these properties being put on the market?

Consider the AI Sec Ops future in the EU where in the run up to an election a political operative makes all widely used AIs "forget" about the competition by submitting a flurry of fraudulent right to be forgotten requests.

This is no stretch of the imagination due to existence of fraudulent copyright takedown requests being submitted daily to Youtube against legitimate channels (with Youtube giving said legitimate channels very real copyright strikes against their accounts regularly, with only very visible cases having a chance of reversal)...

Please paste your prompt here if it isn't huge or paste a link to a pastebin.

The link you've provided shows nothing other than an article post.

Because people beating other people in your store looks bad and other customers don't like it. Ruins the ambiance.

Because the goal of a marketing manager is to extract more money from you not less, by creating an accepted practice of disabling functionality to optimize the money you are willing to commit to actually pay over the lifetime of owning the car.

The point is to find the most innocuous thing that you would accept at time of purchase and then make the majority of customers pay for that more often and longer than anybody at the time of purchase thinks about.

It's similar to the marketing for payday loans. People are not entirely rational actors.

If you could make double the normal sales price of the car in revenue, and the car stops working if the customer ceases to pay, then if you don't mind the occasional customer service public meltdown on social media, then as a car manufacturer you are welcome to scheme away.

As a smarter than average customer, you are wise to the scam, and hope that the scheming of the car companies is not effective on the general public.

Also subscriptions are awesome for car manufacturers for accelerating planned obsolescence. Why should there be any resale value to your car anyway, if they could figure out a way to either 1) make the new owner pay for the car again in subscriptions or 2) make your car near worthless after you initially own it, then from their perspective this is the most brilliant thing they have ever thought of! ;)

From the Wikipedia page: "The storm was not an unprecedented occurrence. Geologic evidence has been found that massive floods, of equal or greater magnitude to the 1861–1862 event, have occurred in California roughly every 100 to 200 years."

Large crowds in some kinds of shapes of open spaces randomly result in stampedes and people dying.

All shapes of spaces are not subject to this.

There are general designs that don't have this problem and there are people that have various practical guidelines to counteract the stampede problem.

Same with forums where people can say things.

For example a simple algorithm that does not suffer from as gross feedback effects, that facebook eliminated early on, was the timeline view of activity.

Timeline sorting did not use popularity or advertising promotion to sort items.

Would the service be usable like this, well yes, facebook was perfectly usable during the era it worked like this.

What is the hit to their bottom line if they changed their algorithm back to simple timeline sorting? Well we can guess it must be pretty big because their current algorithm seems to be pretty psychotic by comparison (in that it intentionally fans the flames of outrage with it's interaction seeking behavior) and they are willing to take all the negative PR for the sake of this interaction uplift.

The term homeless in California is mostly a politically expedient mislabeling.

Most of the homeless are drug addicts that are not able to maintain a job or pay for car insurance. They aren't going to be able to pay rent.

Recognizing this ends up turning this into a way harder problem, with extremely divergent suggested solutions.

Instead people work on the easier problem of housing people, that at least is solvable, and that most people can agree on, even if it absolutely doesn't solve the actual problems of the drug addicts (that are being called homeless because that's nicer to think about and easier to work on).

(Agreed about tax dollars should not be spent building in flood plains.)

More people died in San Francisco during the COVID pandemic due to drug overdoses than COVID, and yet SF residents supported the COVID lockdown to deal with COVID. Nothing of the sort is done to prevent more drug addicts killing themselves daily. In fact, the opposite is done.

The term "homeless" is a convenient ideological mislabeling of the problem that most homeless in San Francisco have, which is drug addiction.

Addictive drugs distributed on the street are big business. You can see it in person by walking the block long tent cities in San Francisco. (Probably walk with somebody else if you want to do this.)

Homeless addicts in San Francisco aren't all depressed philosophers that are self medicating. They are drug distribution network customers. A sort of subscription business if you will.

Cities are machines.

San Francisco is a machine that kills people by encouraging drug use by enabling illegal drug possession and street dealing in broad daylight. The SF police will not arrest for drug possession.

The supposed "compassionate" policies of San Francisco are euthanizing homeless people.

The results of this "compassion" kills more people than COVID at its peak did. Yet instead of doing anything about it, people behind these policies double down with policies to aid and abet the illegal drug business that is killing the very people they claim to be so piously advocating for.

What makes these pious advocates justify this in their minds? When people have enough money to satisfy most all of their material needs, their form of competition changes to zealous virtue signalling.

The extremely highly compensated white collar workers of FAANG companies that live in San Francisco cause these policies because they are so detached from reality, their concerns aren't the concerns of normal people, and so the political representatives they fund represent these impractical ideologies, that include things like not prosecuting shoplifters until the point it's not uncommon to be in a store like CVS or Walgreens and watch people sweep the items on a shelf into a black garbage bag and then walk out. (I've personally seen this and other bizarre theater.)

Use this as a key value store in memory if you are working in C for speed. I've used this to handle multiple 200+ million entry tables in memory, that were not able to be handled as effectively using SQL.

Consider using this if you need to intersect very large data sets that otherwise would take a prohibitive amount of time to even insert into an SQL database (with or without an index) or otherwise even handle in a script language.

Alooong time ago before this kind of same station exit fee existed, it was very widely know among teenagers that you could buy a ticket with the lowest amount required so that you could exit the station and so what would happen would a bunch of teenagers would buy cheap tickets and then do all kinds of money saving maneuvers such as tail gating their friend or a stranger through the exit gate while holding their ticket in their hand just above the machine etc, so that they did not consume any fare at the far side yet still had a ticket visible and weren't jumping over the gate. It was super widely know and many kids would tour the whole bay area for super cheap on weekends if they had nothing better to do.

I'm just saying this is why they came up with that fee.

Obviously any adult with a real job wouldn't stoop to such antics.

Get a TDAP shot. It's cheap, low risk, and might help:

SLU Study Finds Lower Dementia Risk in Adult Patients with Tdap Vaccinations

https://www.slu.edu/news/2021/may/dementia-risk-tdap-study.p...

If they are interested in computers, work with them to find an in-person (not online!) class at the local community college that they want to take and help them start taking classes they want to take.

If they are interested in taking easy college classes, open up the college course plan PDF and search for all the classes with the words "Introduction", "Beginning" etc in the name. They might like taking a "History through Film" class where they get to watch movies for general education credits. Make sure to pick in-person classes. Using the college name and professor name, look for easy teachers on https://www.ratemyprofessors.com

If they are in high school or want to go to college or are otherwise agreeable, sign them up for a tutor a few days week for math tutoring, English tutoring, general SAT or AP tutoring, whatever general subject they like or are willing to try, to get them out of the house and interacting with somebody. Find a tutor they like. Make sure they are happy with it and feel like they are learning something after a few classes.

Talk to them about what their life plans are. Do they plan on getting a job? Do they want to eventually get their own place? Do they want to possibly buy a house some day? What do they plan on doing when their parents are gone? Take it a little bit at a time. Lots of people can't handle discussing too much about these topics at once.

If you can get them active and out of the house, be happy about it, don't sweat them not having it all figured out, the vast majority of people don't. Discuss these subjects bit by bit as the opportunity arises.

Another item which depending on the household wildly varies, definitely make sure they don't have their parents credit card (for basically living worry free and buying all of their online subscriptions and games at their parents expense). Don't do an allowance. Pay for chores, work around the house, and finishing various tasks.

If your kids are high school age or ready to work on SAT math or AP Calculus then C2 is great.

If your kids are younger then Sylvan Learning Center or Kumon seem to be good.

It's good if the tutoring center is reasonable driving distance (i.e. near your house).

If there's no C2, Sylvan Learning Center, or Kumon, then by all means call or go visit all the tutoring centers near your house and ask about the rates for in person 1 on 1 or 1 on 2 tutoring. When you find one or two that seem good, pick one and ask to pay for just a class or two. Don't prepay or commit to 20 or more hours when you don't know if your kid is even going to like the tutor.

The big thing is your kid(s) should have a reasonable experience with the tutor. It's normal for kids to have a meltdown or a bad day, however the majority of days should be a positive or constructive experience (some kids would rather play computer games all day if that's an option). You want to keep it reasonably fun if possible. If your kids go to tutors for a while they will tell you if a new tutor is awful or they feel like they aren't learning anything.

You've got to tell the tutors and possibly the tutoring center coordinator that you want your kid to move at the pace they can handle the material (or as fast as they can handle the material). Many tutoring centers by default will just go lock step with the grade your kid is in (default question: what are you learning at school), which defeats much of the benefit of private tutors, especially if your kid is ahead of the material they have to do at school. Of course if your kid is struggling with the current material in school starting there is great.

Every kid is different and the tutors you get at these places are random. If you get a good or great result, fantastic.

The tutors that work at these places are often college students or other relatively employable people, so who is tutoring at a particular place tends to change as they get jobs. Tutoring tends to be less than full time.

BTW, if your kid absolutely hates studying by themselves (and just doesn't do it), using an in person tutor can be a way a way to work around that. I'm not saying that's a perfect solution, however consider it like using a JATO on a large plane.

Oh, nearly forgot, if you are going out of the way to pay for a tutor, you should see if you can get your kid to work through all of Khan Academy math exercises.

If your kid can handle all of Khan Academy math, then they may be ready for https://artofproblemsolving.com/alcumus which is an adaptive system using a database of competition problems. Warning, it tries to put problem solvers at the edge of what they know (it has a full range of problems, all the way from very easy basic math up to advanced number theory and combinatorics). Expect to need to Google math related words and terms used in problems as you encounter them.

This question is an awesome rorschach blot for the answerers ethics and morality.

I've worked with people that had answers regarding this all over the place.

My answer would be that it depends on context.

You could qualify "doesn't work" with all kinds of qualifiers, that they might or might not do, such as take credit for your your work, take credit for others work, interfere, steal, harass, block, distract, etc.

You could also specify a counter party for each of those: coworkers, management, the company, vendors, customers, or the public.

For example, do they steal money, property, or time from the company, coworkers, or customers?

In my experience the people you work with will have all kinds of different answers, that are sometimes surprising.

Some people never say anything to management or their coworkers, even if the culprit was stealing property from customers or the company, and only draw the line if it was them personally.

As a meta answer, we could try to construct levels of morality necessary for different levels of cooperation and trust to be achieved.

Anyway, if your coworker doesn't take credit for your work, steal, interfere, harass, or otherwise block anything, then you are more in a case of thinking about the relative fairness of the situation. Recognize that and put it aside. It's not useful to you.

If you end up in a situation where it's impacting your ability to get a significant objective done, then it's material and you should focus on practical ways to work around them, for example by working with other people or making it so they aren't in the decision path.