volkhavaar

When I taught a class where I assigned essays I confirmed my own suspicions from when I was assigned essays: the majority of the sentences committed to paper are awful drudgery. I then flipped the requirements on their head and removed minimum page requirements and instead had extremely strict maximum page requirements (with of course the objective material requirements of the essay itself). So much improvement for everyone involved. I had to read through so much less pointless material and the students were forced to focus their ideas in a succinct way to be able to get to all of the objectives of the essay in the limited space. Everyone saved time and did better.

A tale as old as time itself. I feel like this sort of headline might garner actual shock maybe ten years ago. It's funny how nowadays my reaction is more akin to a car alarm going off down the street.

Yes. They retrieve your location regardless of whether you have Google maps open when using an Android phone with Google play services enabled.

There's quite a bit of confusion in this thread regarding "chronic homelessness" vs "temporary/short-term homelessness". The solution for short-term homelessness is generally the use of "emergency shelters", of which San Francisco has many. However, emergency shelters do little to nothing to address chronic homelessness, which requires long-term supportive housing, something San Francisco has very little of.

This difference, which gets lost in discussions such as the one here, leads to bad-faith statements by politicians and others regarding the true amount of housing available for homeless people. For example, the number of "available beds" touted by Newsom and others are almost entirely within short-term emergency shelters, which do not address the real problem (chronic homelessness) much at all. Instead, this "number-of-beds" statistic is used to gloss over the fact that a real solution has not been found, and then justify (probably illegal) police action against homeless people. The true intent of such actions is probably to cause regular disruption in the lives of homeless people to increase the difficulty of simply being homeless in San Francisco. Whether or not you agree with such police action is up to you, but it's important to acknowledge that the argument that "there is available housing" is a bad faith argument, and that this argument is simply used to redirect attention from both police action against homeless people as well as the fact that a real solution has not been found.

Here's a citation that describes the differences between short term emergency housing and long term housing, which illuminates why the current approach being taken by San Francisco is not genuine as well as approaches that might actually work:

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). Permanent supportive housing: Evaluating the evidence for improving health outcomes among people experiencing chronic homelessness.

This is an incredibly informative and useful post. Thank you.

Thank you for your informative and critical feedback - skepticism is at the heart of science! Very true, the system could potentially be used to promote a specific agenda. However, we very much want to avoid a system that allows something such as this as much as possible. Ideally through implementing open-source / 3rd party / community-input based protocols. If you have suggestions in this regard we'd love to hear them!

And yes, we plan on including food at a later date!