*quality respect

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by PlayhousePals.

Thanks PP

edit - oops wrong place

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 3:34am PDT - promote requested by lurgee.

*talks

Adding video to channels (Talks) - requested by ant.

Bad town to be homeless in-Homelessness for me would find me at the first week without a roof in a city with a relatively mild, year-round climate with a resident population more amenable to the cause. San Francisco comes to mind immediately. Plenty of loopy, sympathetic-to-the-cause people with your choice of rooftops and squats to sleep in. Oh, and free gourmet coffee and restaurant food, and plenty of drugs

Been homeless....it ain't fun but it doesn't have to be miserable either. Get the hell outta Chicago, Ron.

If you were homeless before, how were you able to stop being homeless? According to Ron, he is unable to get a job because he is unable to look presentable as well as unable to have a phone number to be called at. I had generally assumed that the majority of homeless people were in their position because they are people who are unable to manage themselves (due to mental disability or whatever else). In my position with the information that I have, if I were homeless right now, I would attempt to gather enough money to buy a prepaid phone from the gas station as well as some decent clothes from goodwill. The combination of these things would make me much more eligible to obtain a minimum wage job.

Would you predict that Ron will pull himself out of the gutter someday?

@draak13 A person can become homeless for a number of reasons, not all of which include "being unable to manage themselves". You may fall ill/have an accident that costs you your job (or ruins you with healthcare bills *hint hint US*), and if you are living on the ropes (or in debt) you can easily end up on the street. A spouse who was depending on the revenue of hir partner may be suddenly thrown out, perhaps with the added bonus of infant mouths to feed. A bunch of greedy assholes may rig a complex banking/housing system in such a way that when it crashes, they got shitloads of cash while you and hundreds of others get kicked out of your homes. The list goes on.

I'm not advocating Egyptian style slavery and I don't bring this up because he's black (you spiteful ignorant fuck -- yes YOU), but don't we have awesome shit to build? Awesome shit that ANY man or woman can contribute to in order to live in decency?!?!

People = biological machines
People working = human productivity
People not working = lack of human productivity

Think about the ACTUAL, very simple to behold, long term number game the next time you justify your worship of an economic system that leaves this potential human machine purposeless.

PURPOSELESS.

I'm not a bleeding heart, just a fanatic of the causation of the universe. From a strategic perspective of human progression, leaving free units to roam around your base of operations without a task is dumb, and any justification you have for the system in place is invalidated by this inherent flaw. Poor people do not necessarily equate to lazy people. And laziness is a reversible symptom, if approached properly. So you're dumb to say work ethic makes you succeed and that those without work ethic inevitably fail, but that's alright because that's how it works. DUMB. You are literally dumb for thinking that. Dumb being the inability to speak, you thusly cannot speak of that logic and only parrot the natural (oft unreasonable) logic of your mind's cognitive basis. If you think you aren't dumb for thinking this, tell me the positive long term plan for this demographic.

People who are smart and have high work ethic succeed. Those who succeed make money. Those who make money make law. Those who make law judge by their view of law. (Gets a little messy here.) Their view of law judges those who do not see their perspective, and yet many of those being judged remain moral beings in a rotating system of judgement based in appropriating offender's money. Their constant state of low income makes them less likely to expend the energy (based in scientifically proven limited willpower) to meet the challenges presented by law makers. A challenge which becomes impossible if you have no job and no home. Insert the problem of mental illness that modern man has yet to conquer and you realize how ignorant we really are as a species. How advanced and yet how wasteful.

WASTEFUL. Purposeless and wasteful. PURPOSE IS MAKE MONEY LIVE COMFORT. FUCK YOU DUDE.

Sure, you can say things like "So-and-so was at rock bottom and he formed a tale of fighting all odds, etc. etc." Good for him. That's a statistical probability. VERY SMALL percentages of people will succeed despite all odds, but it still remains statistically improbable that any "market value" can be generated from this demographic.

Kardeshev Level -1,000,000
GAME OVER

What @poolcleaner said. Here here!

problem is, some people are so bent on labeling people. Oh that guy is a bum. There is a certain aspect of society that DOES NOT WANT YOU TO IMPROVE. if you're a bum, they want you to be a bum for life. It's not a conscious thing. There isn't "the man" deliberately trying to "keep you down" but there is a tangible force out there that won't lift a finger to help out and even if you try to help yourself, they just won't make it any easier for you to pull yourself out of it.

it's that same force that will not give an ex-con a job even if he/she has paid their debt to society. Doesn't matter how long ago it was, doesn't matter how much you've reformed. It's like a scarlet letter, you're branded for life. And we wonder why people have a hard time pulling themselves up and often fall back down. We, as a society do not give very many people second chances

I have no experience with extended homelessness.
My sense though is that the longer you are homeless the more likely it is you will stay homeless. You quickly go through your social and financial support systems. Mentally and physically, you start to slide into an abyss that will become increasingly hard to escape.

It's kinda like triage -- the faster you move to get out of the situation, the better you will be for it. And like triage, not everyone will make it.

The rep is there because most moderately, poor mentally disabled folk cannot hold onto a roof over their heads. And if they don't have family to support them, then yes they become homeless.

The bigger part, however, is that those who fall on hard times usually do so temporarily (Despite what conservatives say about the poor, they do work back up or try to. Most are successful.) The mentally ill, however, are perpetually down if they fall, for the most.

It is shameful that we allow this to happen. And it's even more senseless given the increasing number of studies that show that housing the homeless is less expensive for cities than allowing them to stay on the streets. If we can save people from living in degrading conditions, and save money at the same time, why the hell don't we?


http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-25-homeless_N.htm

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/housing-homeless-cheaper-more-effective-than-status-quo-study/article4563718/

http://laist.com/2009/10/13/cheaper_to_house_homeless_than_leav.php

There's an interesting doc on Showtime - or was on Showtime years back - called Reversal of Fortune. Link here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_of_Fortune_(2005_film)

Basically, they gave a homeless man 100 grand and a financial advisor, and the guy blew it all and ended up back on the streets. Sad. Poor guy had no desire to help himself.

Most homeless people are either mentally ill or uneducated and irresponsible. Everybody falls on hard times. The people who plan ahead ultimately prevail. Don't buy stuff you can't afford, make safe investments, don't build debt, don't start a family when you can barely even support yourself... seemingly simple rules yet so many fail to follow them. Society may have laws but it is still very much a jungle where only the fit survive.

Second chances are nice in concept but generally wasted in practice. Most criminals are repeat offenders. Most homeless people would waste any money you give them and inevitably end up back on the streets.

@Jerykk said "gross generalisations based on no evidence and a complete lack of understanding of how society currently works (or, in this case, does not work)."

The mentally ill: I live in Switzerland and, while our politics are far from perfect, you will not see mentally ill homeless people because they are cared for and given work by social institutions. If the mentally ill are homeless, it is society's fault.

The uneducated: almost unequivocally poor as well; it is the responsibility of any self-respecting, "civilised" society to make sure their entire population gets proper education. This doesn't mean everyone should have a PhD; learning a trade is also an education (& no useful job a human can do should be denigrated).
The way you say it, it's as if you're blaming uneducatedness on the uneducated, but would you know anything about how our societies work, you'd know that is completely illogical.

The irresponsible: considering what you follow up with, you basically mean here "the poor/uneducated", and you regurgitate the Fox News cliché of the dumb and reckless poor person wasting money and making all the wrong decisions. Yes, people with limited-to-no education (see above) will be easier to dupe into debt, bad credit/mortgages, etc, and they will also be less likely to know of (or accept the use of, you asshole Christianity) contraceptives, nor be able to afford abortions should they need one.

Second chances and recidivism: there's an interesting quote from an article on recidivism (taken from the Wiki): "Former criminals rose to become some of America's greatest leaders in law, industry, and politics. This possibility seems to be narrowing as criminal records become electronically stored and accessible."
The fact that, the more you treat a person who has committed a crime as a criminal, during and after hir internment, the more that person will have hir choices narrowed to exactly that. Especially when, on leaving detention during which nothing was learned (countries with the lowest recidivism have their inmates work and learn trades), society still brands them as criminal and refuses to let them survive in a legal fashion. Not to mention the ridiculously out-of-proportion rates of incarceration in the US, and for a number of non-crimes as well; what a great way to harden and anti-socialise your youths.

Are there lazy moochers and irreconcilable criminals out there? Definitely, but they are not the norm.

We all are a few paychecks from becoming homeless. It can happen to anybody.

The story did not say but Ron could have bee a victim of this current economic downturn who lost his job and house and money.


Don't judge but give.

Short answer: made similar moves you imagined you would make-Slept in vehicle, $70-a-month health club membership for shower, etc., saved up for a pad.

It also helped my cause to have been employed, Caucasian, articulate, well-groomed and personable.

Three months and domicile procured, in no time I was back the mumbling, unshorn, asshole from better days

@hpqp I completely agree with what you were saying but I know that I have seen a documentary recently about the problems of homelessness in Switzerland. IIRC it is not driven by mental illness but rather the attitudes of the government and the society towards immigrants both legal and legal from southern Europe and northern Africa. You fully acknowledged that Swiss society was not perfect, but i thought it interesting to raise a counterpoint to how empathetic the Swiss are towards some sectors of their society while turning a blind eye to others.

I really wish I could upvote this twice. Touching to say the least.

Good point, and I love your freudian typo, "legal and legal immigrants" (if you have a link to the doc...). The problem of homeless immigrants here is a complicated one: there are shelters for asylum-seekers but they a) are not numerous enough to keep up with the growing influx, b) try to prioritize women/children, c) have trouble with interethnic squabbles (which can grow to full-fledged knife-fights, thank FSM we don't have guns in easy circulation), d) have to deal with the profiteers/criminals giving them a bad rep.
In addition to this, those who have been denied permission to stay are less likely to show up at state-run shelters where they are liable to be found out and escorted out (of the country). Finally, criminal tourism* in Europe (especially the richer countries, like CH) is a real problem, one the US does not experience.

*a huge topic of its own, but some examples in CH are French car-thieves, Romanian mafia-organised begging/breaking-and-entering (often using children so as not to get penalised), North African drug-dealing (the hard stuff), etc. None of these make it easier for the population to be more accepting of the vast majority of non-criminal foreigners from these parts, because it is as usual the criminals who are the most visible.