The problem is that in your original comment, you are presenting a false trichotomy: people need to pay rent, or own a house, or be homeless. There is indeed a fourth option of providing social housing, free at the point of use.

Not many people are calling for the end of homeownership.

It depends on what precisely is meant by “ownership”, but maybe I am.

Personally I’m in favor of some modified version of the chinese system where almost everyone “owns” a home, but their children can’t inherit it. I think technically the state owns all the housing, and provides people with a cheap/free lifetime lease of some kind. There should also be a limit on how many properties a single person can own, and renting those places out should be banned.

And then as a compliment there should also be some excess state-owned social housing. There are edge-cases where for one reason or another you can’t/don’t want to own.

So yeah in general I think we need to abolish the concept of homeownership as it exists in the west.

Even if you misinterpret the argument that way, social housing could be provided for free at the point of use, with no rent to be paid. The main distinction is whether the housing is owned and controlled by private or public entities; the former will necessarily demand a profit to be made, the latter can operate at net zero spending or even “at a loss” by spending taxpayer funds as a social service.

Generally yes, because you are also building up equity that way. Renting is just money wasted down the drain.

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TBH like a half of those questions is something I could ask when I was younger, and the other half might have been asked by my friends when they were high. I hope I didn’t upset the retail workers too much…

I’m not advocating for “rounding up” of anyone, even though that’s happening in the comments here too.

What I am primarily advocating for is:

free & non-judgemental mental health support (incl. medication), free addiction recovery programs

I’ve spent some (short) time volunteering for homeless people, and from my limited interactions it seemed to me that at least some of them would be open to some kind of mental health/addiction support, but it was either humiliating or impossible for them to get it. And because of that, there were some people who “chose” to be on the streets in the same way as someone “chooses” to be depressed - there’s no choice involved, it’s a situation the society forces the individual in by not providing the required support.

My time volunteering was in a second-world country which didn’t have any government-supported free mental health services. Like, at all. If you wanted mental health support, you had to pay for it, or get really lucky (there was one NGO offering a “lottery”-type support system, and even that was just for a couple therapy sessions) - the former is impossible for a homeless person even if they had a place to sleep, the latter is really humiliating and sketchy.

Back in russia there were in theory free mental health services, but it had a terrible catch-22: in order to enroll, you needed a permanent residence, and none of the homeless shelters provide that. And then if by some miracle you managed to get on, you’d have to pay for any medications that were required, which is pretty much a non-starter.

And even in countries which do provide mental health services for the homeless, there is often stigma and judgement associated with it. The medical professionals themselves might be kind and understanding (and even then not always so), but the bureaucratic procedures required to get there can be humiliating as hell.

All this means that if you’re coming from a position of homelessness, which makes it really difficult to do anything already, getting to the help can be an insurmountable challenge, either physically or mentally.

Also, after you get help and a warm place to sleep, it can feel disorienting in many ways after the street. There needs to be a robust network for helping people get up their feet (with basic supplies like food and meds provided for free at least for some time), getting people back into their local communities, and helping them find a job. It doesn’t have to be a 6-figure white collar one, but even entry-level jobs can be difficult to get for an ex-homeless person for many reasons (stigma around homelessness, lack of a resume, degradation of social skills, or some really basic shit like lack of appropriate clothing) - there needs to be help associated with that, like agreements with local workplaces and support during interviews/trial periods.

Just providing housing is a good first step but it’s definitely not enough. Combining it with other help multiplies the effectiveness.

Housing is a good & necessary first step, but housing alone won’t alleviate the issue entirely. I’m not sure that there’s any disagreement between us.

I agree fully here.

I can: the solution to homelessness is a combination of mental health ed in schools, free & non-judgemental mental health support (incl. medication), free addiction recovery programs, free food, job & community support, and free housing.

If you just provide free housing, there will be a significant proportion of people who would not be able to fully benefit from it due to mental health issues, addictions, and lack of purpose in life.

Nah, honestly, I think stuffing an entire computer inside a monitor and relying on it to generate/show content is a bad idea no matter what software it runs. A dumb TV + a small computing dongle requires only a tiny fraction more labor to produce than a smart TV, but it’s so much easier to upgrade in the future if you decide you need faster boot times or wanna game on the TV, etc. And if the TV breaks before the dongle does, you can also buy a new TV and keep all your settings/media without transferring anything.

Neoliberal western democracy is not the only style of democracy possible

I think “eat the rich” implies also a significant change in the economic system towards something actually democratic and scientific.

Honestly it’s not the worst idea, the french have tried something like that during one of their revolutions.

Semi-relatedly, I’m salty they didn’t push for duodecimal numbers and base metric on that, it would incorporate the only good part of imperial system & 12-based time system, not only into measurements but also all other aspects of life.

Then they could make time more consistent too, maybe have like 10000 (20736 in decimal) “metric seconds” in a day (which would mean 1 “metric second” ≈ 4 “normal” seconds) and derive stuff from there (e.g. 100 “metric seconds” in a “metric minute”, 10 “metric minutes” in a “metric hour”, 10 “metric hours” in a “metric day”). Would be really quite neat.

Of the two, Celsius is less arbitrary because it is based on actual measurable reproducible things and not “we threw in some salts in water, and guesstimated a human body temperature”. It also makes a lot of sense in our post-industrial society because we do/don’t want to freeze/boil water almost every day for a variety of uses. Water is both an extremely important substance for humans and its freezing/boiling points occur in everyday life (unlike air or metals).

To be fair, it’s the other way around. Kelvin scale is Celsius scale shifted by -273 ℃.

Yes, the reasoning behind this is sad, but the outcome is very positive.

These particular news are based and a long-term good for the humanity. Moving from spying corpo slop to an open-source solution is a win-win for the french people. Sad that it is only happening now, this should have been done decades ago, the US empire and its corporations have always been evil. Now they are just showing their true face to europe and the US population.

Haven’t read the book so can’t comment on it specifically. That said, some economic parts of socialist theories have been used to some extent by nazis (hence “National Socialists”), so it’s not unthinkable. This doesn’t diminish the merits of Marxism, especially because Marx’s more political writings were expressly antifascist if analyzed from a more modern lens; besides, we had a lot of scientific development in understanding nationalism, colonialism and imperialism since then (see: Lenin, Fanon).

Obviously it took a lot of effort to get the salt to the place where it would be swapped for gold.

Yes, that is the point. Value is not “bunk”, it is a very real social relationship primarily determined by the amount of labor expanded on producing a commodity and marketing it (in the sense of “bringing to market”). There is also a degree of speculation embedded in the actual price of any commodity, which is problematic, but it doesn’t make the concept of value itself bunk.

Per Marx, value is a social construct, but it’s not “bunk” because it is directly tied to the labor necessary to produce something.

To be fair, it’s the nazis who were acting like americans…