It's pretty clear that hydrogen-powered automobiles are not going to be a thing -- electric batteries work very well for that use case. There are some cases where I think hydrogen might still work better than the alternatives.
The most obvious one is aviation. There are a few battery-electric aircraft flying today but they have very short range. I don't think there's any conceivable battery chemistry that will allow anywhere near the range of hydrocarbon-powered aircraft.
However, liquid hydrogen has much greater energy density than hydrocarbon fuels. It's also quite difficult to work with. But when you're talking about a vehicle the size of a 737 (much less an A-380), the economics might ultimately be favorable.
It would probably require aircraft models specifically designed for liquid hydrogen -- the tanks are so large that the aircraft will have to be designed around them. That's probably a major impediment to adoption. It's possible that biofuels or synthetic fuels made from CO2 will instead replace fossil fuels in aviation, instead.
The additional costs related to cryonics, aerodynamic drag, safety issues, and material embrittlement mean that liquid hydrogen will never be a viable commercial aviation fuel. It seems attractive in theory but ends up being totally impractical when you get into real world details.
The way forward is absolutely going to be battery power for short flights and synthetic liquid hydrocarbons for longer distances.
Totally agree. Airliners have a fuel fraction (fuel wt / total wt at takeoff) around 50%. Half the gross weight of the entire system is fuel. And that's with liquid, room-temp, atmospheric pressure fuel that's easy to transfer and can fit into every liquid-tight nook and cranny. Furthermore, you can pump it around for weight trim.
I don't see hydrogen in any form, including hydrides, meeting these criteria. Not to mention, the entire distribution infrastructure is tooled out for liquid hydrocarbons.
Synfuel is expensive compared to fossil fuel, but not dramatically so.
You're currently looking at ~$0.64/L for FF jet fuel, ~$0.95/L for biodiesels, and $1.15/L for fully synthetic fuels eg Fischer-Tropsch.
> Half the gross weight of the entire system is fuel.
That's true for jet propellant, but it's not true for hydrogen. A hydrogen powered airplane would have to have a much greater volume than an equivalent airplane fueled with regular jet fuel, but it would have substantially less weight. I'm not sure how this would work out for overall performance, though -- you'd have substantially more direct drag to overcome, but on the other hand you'd have a lot less lift-related drag simply because you'd need a lot less lift.
As a thought-experiment, you could imagine an aircraft roughly the size and shape of a 757 but with the weight and payload capacity of a 737. This might be an acceptable design for a cargo carrying aircraft, but realistically, a passenger-carrying aircraft would need large cylindrical tanks on the wings for safety reasons, but also with increased drag.
> Not to mention, the entire distribution infrastructure is tooled out for liquid hydrocarbons.
In the specific case of hydrogen-powered commercial aviation, this doesn't matter at all, because there would not be a distribution infrastructure, at least as we generally think of it. Instead, we'd need to distribute water and electricity to airports, and the hydrogen would be produced and stored on-site. The equipment to make and store liquid hydrogen wouldn't necessarily be cheap, but over any significant period of time it would likely be dominated by the cost of electricity necessary to produce the hydrogen through electrolysis.
The economics of synthetic fuels for aviation are probably still better, but I think that it might be a lot closer than people imagine. If you could cheaply retro-fit existing airframes for hydrogen they'd be a lot closer still, but I don't think that's likely. It's an interesting possibility to think about though.
> realistically, a passenger-carrying aircraft would need large cylindrical tanks on the wings for safety reasons, but also with increased drag.
Precisely. Any weight savings of energy density per wt of hydrogen are offset by the poor energy/volume, plus the need for cylindrical tanks for stress reasons. Wing fuel tanks are roughly wing-shaped, meaning no increase to cross section. Hydrogen would require sets of cylinders, which add walls which add weight yet don't directly aid the engineering constraints, or exist outside the current flight envelope, adding drag.
Maybe some big advancement in construction methods could allow synergy of hydrogen tanks walls with aircraft structure, but you are still stuck with 1/3rd volumetric density of energy, meaning larger cross section, more drag, and more fuel usage.
If your software development organization can't ship software without an agile process, then it's unlikely that it can ship software with an agile process either.
I'm not saying that agile processes are inferior or even no better than other software development processes. I'm just saying that there is some level of fundamental capability that a software organization must have before the process is even going to matter.
> One theory was that Canadians were perpetually avenging the “Crucified Canadian,” a battlefield rumour of a captured Canadian officer that Germans had supposedly crucified to a barn door near Ypres. The crucifixion was almost certainly fabricated.
The proposal for saving Antarctic ice in the submitted article may be just too big for humans to do. Sulfur dioxide injection, however, is dirt cheap, and we could definitely do that. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but we can do it.
It's so cheap that a nation threatened by climate change likely will do it "rogue", without international consensus. It's less a matter of "if" but "when."
> Analysis of our results and comparison to the results of Kuylenstierna et al.[2001] and Skeffington[2006] lead to the conclusion that the additional sulfate deposition that would result from geoengineering will not be sufficient to negatively impact most ecosystems, even under the assumption that all deposited sulfate will be in the form of sulfuric acid. However, although these model results are feasible, should geoengineering with sulfate aerosols actually be conducted, local results due to weather variability may differ from the results presented here. With the exception of terrestrial waterways, every region has a critical loading value a full order of magnitude above the largest potential total amount of acid deposition that would occur under the geoengineering scenarios presented in this paper. Furthermore, our results show that additional sulfate deposition tends to preferentially occur over oceans, meaning the chance of such a sensitive ecosystem receiving enough additional sulfate deposition to suffer negative consequences is very small.
Also note that I did not say that sulfur dioxide injection was a good idea, only that we could afford to do it.
Some of these interfaces might be really fun to implement, but there are very few of them that I think I'd want to use.
For me, writing code is about the easiest thing I do. Other than identifier completion, I don't need much beyond a basic text editor.
On the other hand, understanding code -- not just exploring it, but understanding it -- is the the hardest thing I have to do, and that's where a good UI could be helpful. I only made a superficial scan, but it didn't really seem like any of these UIs were designed to do that.
I don't really need a map to a code base so much as I need a tool for making my own maps (not just one!) into the codebase as I try to understand it. Or understand at least enough of it to do my current task.
A lot of Go programmers didn't like this proposal at all. I'd like to think this is just because they didn't think it was good enough. However, it seems that many, many Go programmers didn't like it because they think Go error handling is just fine the way it is.
I am one of the Go programmers who didn’t like this proposal.
I also spent a significant amount of time discussing with many people, including the Go team, and I am glad the proposal was declined, not because I like “if err != nil {…}” but because the proposal to add “try()” was not solving a good problem. Many, and I would say, every Go programmer wants better error handling, but “try()” was not it.
I hope the Go team keeps exploring other ideas to hopefully one day have a better error handler.
Usually to support this the language needs Enum support and a proper type system neither of which golang has. So I'm ok with the developers just baking in syntax for an error monad with specific sugar for extracting the value or handling an error.
Why is a monad the “best” solution? Best according to what criteria?
Special purpose syntax can buy you a lot more. For example Swift’s try makes it obvious which statements contain error handling without burdening each expression.
First: The monad allows for composition of functions. Returning two values does not. It breaks the flow of a function pipeline and forces you to handle every error in the same way.
Second: Extracting the value via pattern matching guarantees that the error will either be handled or used correctly. This is a way to 100% guarantee that there are No runtime errors. That's right. Using the error monad with pattern matching makes it so that there is zero room for runtime errors.
Why create a language that has runtime errors? Create a language that forces you to handle all possible runtime errors before it even compiles.
According the criteria of safety, zero runtime errors, and expressivity via composition the monad is the Best solution. There is literally no other way of error handling that I know of that can catch runtime errors at compile time.
I know you tried to flip my statement on it's head by using the term "criteria" as if there are many many different criteria for "best." And you are right, programming is an opinionated thing. However, ZERO runtime errors is a too powerful of a feature to assign to a specific criteria. Such a feature is so powerful, it should be part of EVERY criteria.
If you don't understand completely what I mean by "composition" or how pattern matching and a maybe monad can guarantee a runtime error will NEVER occur, ask me to elucidate, I'm happy to clarify.
There is a way of which (to my knowledge) is not implemented in any technology.
Presuming you know how the maybe monad (or similar named monads) handles errors. A MaybeOutOfMemoryError works in a similar way in the sense that any attempt to use the value meaningfully will force you to handle the error.
data MaybeOutOfMemoryError a = OutOfMemoryError | Some a
ioFunction :: MaybeOutOfMemoryError a -> IO
ioFunction OutOfMemoryError = println "ERROR"
ioFunction Some _ = println "No ERROR"
exhaustive pattern matching with the error flag enabled makes it so that if you forget the OutOfMemoryError case an error will occur during compile time.
Any function that can potentially trigger a memory error should be forced to be typed like this. However in programming, ALL functions can potentially do this, and side effects outside of the scope of the function (total memory available) will trigger it meaning that the only way to do this effectively is to make ALL functions typed this way. Which is inconvenient to say the least.
That being said you can just type the main function as something that can only accept this monadic value forcing users to wrap this handling in a top level function:
myWrittenProgram :: MaybeOutOfMemoryError a
-- not defined in this example
-- main is forced to be typed this way just like how in haskell it is forced to be typed IO ()
main :: MaybeOutOfMemoryError a -> IO ()
main Some a = printLn a
main OutOfMemoryError = printLn "Error out of memory"
Obviously the above has some issues with the rest of haskell syntax and the way things are done, but I'm just showing you a way where it is possible to make sure that a memory runtime error does not happen (that is an unhandled runtime error).
That being said unless you know haskell or know what a maybe monad is, you wouldn't be able to fully comprehend what I said. Exception monads exist in haskell, but nothing is forcing the main function to be typed this way.
Go error handing _is_ fundamentally fine the way it is.
That is, the verbosity would certainly benefit from some sugar, but the semantics -- errors managed by separate expressions/blocks immediately adjacent to the error-generating code -- is fundamental to the language, and one of its great strengths.
I repeatedly tell people that Go takes twice as long to write and half as long to debug. Unless you write perfect code on the first try, the trade off is probably worth it.
I often get the feeling that Go users are implicitly comparing it to languages like Python or JavaScript.
I've watched a client try to debug a Go codebase they had. It was sad. Their web server just returned 500 Internal Error and they tried to track down why from logs, but by the time the error had made it back up to the serving loop most information about where it came from had been lost. I suggested they attach a debugger to a server to see what's happening, they said debuggers don't work that great in Go and so people don't use them much.
If they'd been using exceptions they'd have a stack trace and could have pinpointed the source of the fault in seconds.
Today I spent two hours tracking down why a nil pointer was occurring in my code. Turns out I forgot to pass it along to the struct initializer through one of the damn factory functions I need to create so I can hide internal fields properly... this was nested code in a framework.
Tell me again how easy it is to debug Go. In other languages the compiler can just tell me in _seconds_ that I done fucked up.
If you response includes "You're doing it wrong if you have deeply nested framework code" then you can rightly fuck right off too.
Why are you using factory functions? Why are you trying to hide internal fields? The description of what you have to do is setting off some warning bells. It's certainly possible to write difficult-to-maintain code in any language.
> If you response includes "You're doing it wrong if you have deeply nested framework code" then you can rightly fuck right off too.
I mean, can you point me to an example? Absent more context, I'm pretty confident that you're indeed doing at least something wrong...
Because we don't want to export internal fields of structures in our API or we need to perform initialization logic before considering the structure ready for use?
That's a pretty common use case but ignore that for a moment and just distill the problem down to it is possible to have null pointer issues in Go code.
Another example eith sufficient use of goroutines and channels it gets really tricky to debug something when a receiving channel blocks because something isn't sending.
There's plenty more. I don't find Go any simpler to debug than Java, Kotlin, Rust, or Python and in many cases it is significantly more difficult because you're constantly fighting the type system or working through huge amounts of boilerplate.
That surprises me. I have to manipulate slices all the time! Popping an item from a slice, reversing one, or clearing one without allocation in a hotspot is super common for me.
I've used Go professionally for 6 years and love it, so the patterns are ingrained in my head and don't bother me. But it seems pretty clear that it's much more arcane than alternatives.
Slice operations are deliberately verbose in this way so as not to hide the cost of allocation that goes along with them. They are not common in code, but they do make good strawmen when you want to counter general points with specific ones.
I don't think myself or any other Go devs I have worked with have once thought about allocation cost when using slice operations. This may be something super common for C/C++ devs but the big adopters of Go are Python and Java converts where we just don't pay attention to this stuff and after a decade or more of writing this kind of code were not going to suddenly start thinking in terms of memory allocation cost.
I think this is one of those mistakes in the language that exist because early-on Go could have been a true systems language but it's been adopted by a large number of devs more as an infra and high-level automation language where correctness is more important than performance.
Slice operations are verbose because abstracting over them requires generics. Generic operations which don't allocate, like pop, are just as verbose as generic operations which do, while operations on slices of a specific type can be made non-verbose because it is possible to abstract over those. There is no principle of "deliberate verbosity so as not to hide the cost of allocation".
While not objectively a bad thing, that's at the crux of the problem many have with Go: it sets the bar very, very low for getting in your way instead of trusting you to be even slightly competent. Knowing basic data structures is engineering 101,and any engineer who'd (eg) blindly use std::find on a vector or "in" on a list in performance-critical code without understanding it isn't someone who should be committing code without review in any case. Inefficient data structure operations are also precisely the kind of thing that's easy to catch in code review.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a general-purpose argument and I'm not one of those people who thinks that the language should completely get out of your way: eg I'm not a Rust user but its unergonomic handling of memory safety seems far preferable to the ease with which you can shoot yourself in the foot with C++. I definitely see the appeal of Go's handholding in a directional sense. But the degree to which it takes it makes it feel like an unserious or educational language, unnecessarily difficult to get actual work done in, like Javascript but for the exact opposite reasons (and to be clear, Javascript is INFINITELY worse).
This makes it sound like Im more negative on Go than I am, but I think it's the first time I've been able to articulate what deflated my initial interest in it and kept me away from it. Perhaps if feel differently if I had still been a student and new to programming when Golang was released.
> While not objectively a bad thing, that's at the crux of the problem many have with Go: it sets the bar very, very low for getting in your way instead of trusting you to be even slightly competent.
And there's nothing wrong with that, that's exactly Go's target audience.
I spent years as a consultant reading codebases in different languages. I can tell you that Golang win hands down for clarity of code and structure of projects (and perhaps second after Rust in terms of security. If only it had options<>...)
So yeah, it's actually quite fast to dig in a Golang codebase. You notice that as a normal user when you find it faster to read the standard library vs reading the doc, or when you read an implementation instead of reading a spec/algorithm to learn about it.
My guess is that gofmt is a huge factor in this, but also the fact that there's not a huge amount of built ins, anf that the standard library is pretty complete.
Go is the only language where I look at the standard library source instead of google whenever I run into an ambiguity in the docs. I think there are three reasons for this.
First, the docs link to the actual line in source, so it’s just a click away and available in the exact context I need it.
Second, I know I’ll be able to understand it: there are usually very few dependencies, so I can usually get all the context I need from a single file; the source formatting is familiar; code style, like variable names, are familiar because of the cultural influence of the Tour of Go; and there is usually no magic anywhere—I know that things are exactly what they appear to be, like when I see a variable declaration, it is not secretly calling a complex function (this is vital to human knowledge and is aligned with Objectivist epistemology’s “law if identity”).
Third, every time I look at the standard library source, I become a better programmer. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve thought to myself “oh, that’s a clean way to organize this kind of code!” I often end up immediately using what I learn from the stand library source.
I agree, and if others disagree they should comment and explain why instead of downvoting you.
One of Go's major selling points (for me anyway) was a solid standard library written mostly in conventional Go style. It's a great example of how Go code should be written, and a wonderful learning tool for the language.
It also makes participating in the community easier because that's one less thing you have to learn in order to contribute.
It really is. My code looks like your code and the next person's code. Go is opinionated and strict and that makes reading other people's code so much easier
Experts' code should be clearer and more concise than novices' code. If that's not true, there's no payoff for getting more proficient with the language, and it's not doing enough to help you.
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." – Rob Pike
This is about readability. There are many other attributes of code (idiomatic? design? efficiency?) that differentiate. But I should be able to grok anyone's code within reason.
If a tool is going to enforce line length limits, I'd rather have it spit a warning/error than silently try to guess a good place to break the line automatically. Otherwise, an editor tool that soft-wraps long lines at the (often poorly) guessed location without touching the code would be better.
But that’s the thing about prettier - it wraps exceptionally well because it actually parses the AST. I never think about how I space my JavaScript anymore because it always does it correctly.. it’s one less thing to get in my way when I code
The number of options that prettier exposes (despite boasting about being "opinionated", i.e. disregarding the user's opinions) suggests that there are people with different aesthetics or accessibility needs who would not consider one style to be always correct.
IMHO we're about 10 years overdue for committing a canonical representation of that AST to version control instead of treating a particular serialized visualization of it as the single source of truth (and spending countless hours debating which format is "good enough" for everyone in every situation).
This. It was really hard to enforce supplementary style across my team to match common conservatism in popular codebases (e.g. only return a single value or a value and bool/error. Don’t expose channels in APIs) when K8s so blatantly fails them.
Have you seen the internals of the rand library? HTTP uses interfaces cleverly to detect optional interfaces. Today I found out that rand.Rand does a type check on every core method to see if it’s source is the hidden type for global methods.
I don't really care about try/catch, I'd just rather they come up with a standard for wrapping errors so there is more visibility as they get bubbled up. Currently you can write code to do this but most packages will not be doing the same. There also will always be some member of your team fighting you about "simplicity" when you talk about wanting to have more info than a string to log.
The go 1.13 version of errors will have the `Is`, `As`, and `Unwrap` which make this almost a standard in go. They expect you to be able to unwrap but have not created a normal way to wrap. https://tip.golang.org/pkg/errors
> Now, there’s no question that a few specific cities have seen big rises. The Bay Area is obviously one, Denver is one, and Seattle is another—though the market has responded recently in Seattle and housing development is now increasing. But if you look at big cities more broadly, there’s not even a generalized urban rent crisis.
The author's contention isn't simply that there's no housing crisis in places like Eastern Oregon, but rather that there's no housing crisis anywhere outside of a few major cities. He's also got a bunch of numbers to back up the assertion.
Now I'm inclined to think Drum's staked out a position that is too extreme in one direction (I live in one of those major cities!) but I feel like your position is too far in the other direction. I think we want to accurately characterize the problems we're trying to solve. Here in Seattle, housing supply is a big issue. But back in my hometown of Tulsa, I suspect housing is pretty cheap, and the problem is more likely a lack of good jobs.
What the article largely says is that there isn't really a housing crisis if people make more money and pay more rent. Is it realistic to pay hundreds of dollars per month in rent when Microsoft pays hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in Seattle? Not from a market perspective. People paying what they can afford isn't really a housing crisis. That is essentially the market working, pricing valuable things highly. It might certainly be some other crisis however, like society favouring property over work.
I think this is the first article I've read to use the term "visible homelessness". For many people who live in Seattle, the world "homeless" really means visibly homeless, but for many political activists, the word includes people in shelters or living in the cars or otherwise keeping a low profile while not having a permanent address. I'm no expert but I strongly suspect that the best ways to help the visibly homeless and the not-visibly-homeless are pretty different. But activists are more than willing to conflate the two cases. This particularly arises in the case of affordable housing. Housing may indeed be the primary problem for the not-visibly-homeless. It seems pretty likely though (just based on observation) that the biggest problems for the visibly homeless are mental illness and substance abuse.
I think we'd be better served by not talking past each other and instead make it clear which kind of homeless problem we're talking about at any particular time.
The evidence shows that housing-first policies applied to the worst cases (chronically homeless single people with addiction) is effective and lowers costs, in fact more so than for easier clients (families who have become homeless more recently). However popular outrage culture insists on targeting folks who have addiction with sweeps and incarceration instead, even though the law-and-order response is more expensive and less humane. It seems our urge to punish defeats our willingness to tolerate less retributive evidence-based approaches. Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/17/724462179/episode-913-countin...
It isn’t housing first, I’ve never agreed with that name for their approach, it is disingenuous at best. The policies, as described in any “housing first” policies I’ve encountered, are more reasonably described as “supportive housing first”.
If you place a chronically homeless, bi-polar, heroin addict into an apartment they will not get better, they will continue their previous life until they’ve broken their lease and are evicted; none of the “housing first” programs aimed at the “visibly homeless” we’re talking about do this, they provide housing along with a robust support system to get these people medical and mental healthcare as well as addiction recovery. It is a good model but I’ve too frequently seen them mischaracterized as just providing free rent, that isn’t what they do and that would fail. They are essentially just a reimagined mental health institute with far more freedom for the patients.
A lot of those people who are the worst offenders, routinely bouncing from the hospital, to the jail, to the streets, have problems that aren't solved by a house. They need a group-home that isn't jail but is capable of saying, "no, you aren't fit to go into public yet until you can meet these criteria." A lot of these people need others to make decisions for them, when to take medications, when to bathe, how to navigate the bureaucracy, etc. God knows it would save a lot of money and keep them off the streets. I feel like for a lot of people they'd find community and purpose in life, eventually solving the problem that created their circumstances to begin with. Jail doesn't work, the streets doesn't work, leniency doesn't work, just handing someone a house isn't realistic. We have to try something else.
You are describing institutionalization. Mandatory institutionalization is ripe for abuse, and voluntary institutionalization doesn't work when it's intended use is to serve people whose defining characteristics is inability to mak good choices consistently.
I am for the "housing first" approach, but there is a clear moral hazard when you provide free housing to the lowest rung, and then say that the minimum cost of housing for the next group is like 1.5k/bedroom/month.
It's important to note that "moral hazard", while not quite a term of art, has a specific meaning in economics that isn't associated with ethics or morality.
The quick google definitions: "a lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences"
He's using it correctly here though: the risk is that if you provide housing to the lowest rung while making the next group down pay $1.5K/bedroom/month, some of the next group down will decide that they would rather become part of the "lowest rung" group rather than pay the money. It's like the phenomena of people committing petty crimes so that they can get a warm bed and food in jail.
Your example illustrates to me why moral hazard isn't the best title for this. We should provide free housing to people in need so they don't do things like commit a crime to go to jail.
The moral hazard is for those renting: the free housing is equivalent to an insurance payout.
A renter can do risky things (like lose their job) because they are protected from the consequences of not being able to pay the rent. They get housed anyway.
This is what’s keeping me living at home with my parents. I tried to move out a few years ago, found an apartment that was $1,100 a month and plenty of parking.
6 months after moving in, after having multiple bad experiences with tenants, I realized I moved in to a “subsidized housing” apartment. There was lots of parking available because 90% of the tenants weren’t allowed to drive.
It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.
If I wanted to live in a condo, which doesn’t have subsidized housing, I’d have to pay rents upwards of $2,200. So I moved back in with my folks until I can buy something.
>>It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.
I know people who work back breaking low-income jobs and get very angry seeing people on government assistance sitting around all day getting high with their friends.
I think the position of the homeless activists: of giving people with no life skills and no discipline, and who habitually abuse drugs, no-strings-attached taxpayer aid, is totally immoral and irresponsible. It's the worse example of short-sighted unthinking compassion and/or virtue-signalling.
At the very least, drug addicts who've lost the ability to support themselves should be committed to a drug rehab center. In the past the lost souls were also enrolled in work houses. Those on public aid doing some work should be another minimum requirement for any welfare system. The nature of the work can be targeted to their intellectual and physical capabilities, but they should be required to do some kind of work if they're going to receive public support.
Anyway, demanding accountability from welfare recipients is not going to win you any elections - people would rather elect someone with compassion and a terrible plan for governance than elect someone with a logically coherent governance plan who might not have compassion - so the problem will just get worse.
The desire to quit can be shaped by the incentives society creates. If using drugs and partying with fellow drug-using friends means continually being committed to three month stints in rehab, it might encourage that party to get out of that lifestyle.
Also, some people may decide to quit once they've been forced to stop doing drugs for a few months, because it results in lessened chemical dependency, and some time for the parts of their brain damaged from the drug-use to recover, which helps increase self-control.
We forcibly prevent children from engaging in self-destructive behaviour, because sometimes they need someone who knows better to control them, until they mature and do know better. Just because someone turns 18, doesn't always mean this stops applying. In the case of someone habitually using hard drugs, I think a strong argument can be made that it still applies because they lack the maturity and self-control to make these decisions for themselves.
> It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride.
I hear this all the time - yet I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out, and getting onto the free ride bus.
One of the problems with that free ride bus is that it doesn't go to great places. It didn't sound like you were looking forward to the prospect of living in subsidized housing for the rest of your life very much.
> yet I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out
Just open your eyes. Look around Seattle, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or San Diego or any other city with mild weather, lenient law enforcement, and generous welfare benefits. The number of homeless and housed "drop outs" is astonishing.
If you think 'dropping out' and living a homeless life is in any way preferable to the alternatives, I'd recommend spending a few days panhandling, and a few nights in a homeless shelter.
I have a feeling that you'll change your tune pretty quick after that. You'll quickly realize how dehumanizing it is to be in that position.
Disregarding the factual issues there, what about the moral hazard of not doing so and turning people into Safe Seattle members who literally advocate shooting them or driving them into the forest and leaving them there?
Honestly the housing first is a bad idea for the visibly homeless. Might work Ok for the invisible homelessness but the property damage costs can easily be factors lager than even the rent cost.
I think you should seriously reconsider your position.
There is a chronic inebriate apartment building downtown Seattle that makes no moral judgements about "stopping drinking" etc that LOWERS COSTS (with studies to back it up) for the community.
People with problems get a permanent address. Ambulance and police calls drop as they aren't chasing these guys all over town.
Think again.
MAYBE your position is more about being judgemental about their moral state then actually whats good for them and the rest of us.
EDIT -
Just to be clear. If someone is too far gone (and many of these guys are) then we need to start funding involutanry commitment beds.
Might be marginally effective but at what cost. If it costs more a year to house one of the chronically homeless than incarcerate then then I’d go with the cheaper option. The money is better used to help the invisible homeless after that point
In Rhode Island they actually prosecute addicts and mentally ill who commit crimes, and offer them the alternative of drug and rehab courts that entail mandatory internment in decent facilities and rehabilitation. They emerge with no record, and no debt to be paid. Many going through the process say it saved their life.
The same drug courts and facilities exist on the west coast, but they are underutilized because there is no incentive. No criminal or civil justice funnel. People are just set loose.
Intervention helps those who are beyond helping themselves. A free place with no strings attached does not do nearly as much to help those who truly need help.
Frontline did a piece on that approach and it was a retrospective on how it had gone wrong in notable cases. Not stating an opinion here, but highlighting that even sympathetic coverage thinks the approach is a mixed bag in practice.
> was a retrospective on how it had gone wrong in notable cases.
> highlighting that even sympathetic coverage thinks the approach is a mixed bag in practice.
You mean "how a statistically non-significant number of cases lead to the usual results in our modern outrage culture"?
You will always have cases where it doesn't work. That's why statistics are important. But statistics don't sell, what sells is "SEE, WE GAVE THIS GUY FREE HOUSING AND HE DID THIS HORRIBLE THING"
I believe the homeless (and everyone else), should be prosecuted in full for crimes they commit.
I think there are two types of homeless - those who are sane and normal but down on their luck - once they get a job and support they can be contributing members of society. These individuals need all the support we can give them.
The second type of homeless, sometimes referred to as homeless by choice, those individuals who are drug addicted or mentally unstable to the point they can't even keep it together to get a government check need to be handled differently. I think we should have some form of long term holds for these people until they truly show they can survive and flourish without it.
Cities are becoming overrun with the second type of homeless. These people are generally filthy, spread disease, commit various crimes of opportunity even including assault and murder and rape, and abuse drugs and alcohol until they die.
I suggest we categorize the second type of homeless by issue involved and severity and have mandatory facilities to either help them recover or simply hold them long term. Categories could include various levels of drug addiction rehab, mental health, etc.
The evidence shows that housing-first policies applied to the worst cases (chronically homeless single people with addiction) is effective and lowers costs
I would like to dispute that. This WaPo [1] article paints a far less rosy picture.
Addiction is a symptom of mental illness (and in all likelihood may be genetic). Look at the rates of smoking among people with schizophrenia [2], they're much higher than the general population, and the usual purported causes fall flat.
> A dose-dependent relationship was found between smoking and protection from schizophrenia. This is really interesting.
The study found smoking protects against schizophrenia. The blog author skewers later science for completely misrepresenting this study in their review.
Nicotine is sort of similar to niacin/niacinamide (vitamin b3), which is probably why it protects against schizophrenia. I recommended niacinamide to a young woman who’d just quit smoking, “again”. She says the vitamin is great, is still taking it 1.5 years later and recommends it to all her coworkers who want to quit smoking.
Addressing the causes of that being a high-cost housing market, or even just walking through the though exercise of why it is that and what might change the situation, is recommended.
Sure, but the structural issues that Seattle (and many other municipalities) have with ensuring conditions to allow sufficient construction to meet housing demand don't have much to do with visible homelessness stemming from mental health issues.
City centres are where service provisioning tends to be most efficient. Providing services there does seem to make sense. And if the homeless / housing-insecure population is so large as to skew overall real estate markets ... maybe you have a bigger problem?
I have lived in Seattle since 1995. It is now a shi-shi techtropolis fully of 300k+ tech bros, of which I am an aged version. There is zero reason for tech (and god I hate hate this term) should be clustered in a locale. It is absurd, my locality has never played into anything I have done. It isn't like someone opened the yellow pages and looked for a data gravity consultant.
How about for one year, we all put our incomes into a pot and split it 1/population of america. Just for funsies.
There is zero reason tech should be clustered in a locale
Presumably because the end-product (and some intermediates) are ephemeral and can be transmitted losslessly long distances in little time at low cost?
Perversely: that's just what leads to greater rather than less concentration in industries. Especially where there's a great deal ofhumam interaction and collaboration required.
Since the end-products are ephemeral, they can be distributed to any point on Earth. But clustering of creation activities, returns to scale, even a small component of ancillary support services and infrastructure, and even small gains to round-trip interaction rates, reliability, or flexibility, favour concentration over decentralisation and mean that any one locale which gains an edge over others sees path-dependencies and positive feedback encouraging yet higher growth. Only when frictions develop (say: high costs of housing), or regional differentiators (language, cultural, regulatory regimes, say), do you see a formation of alternate hubs.
Zipf's law / power functions still strongly favour the formation of small numbers of such hubs.
Film, banking, and publishing have very similar tendencies.
It makes zero sense to set dollars on fire by housing people in one of the highest cost of living markets in the world.
I'm not a strong proponent of the Housing First model, but the reality is that it's generally cheaper to house people than to pick up the tab for medical care et al for homeless individuals. Medical bills for the homeless population tend to cost far more than just covering their rent.
What rubs me wrong about your argument is the capitalist nature of it. Access to resources and infrastructure shouldn't be limited to the extremely wealthy. A city should offer housing to everyone at every rung of the ladder because it takes a team to make it work.
This approach, known as Communism, has been tried many times. Turns out that although 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' sounds nice, wealth actually doesn't come from a fixed pie we get to cut up via politics. We actually need to let people keep what they create, or they won't bother creating and everyone starves.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All these battles have been fought a million times on the internet and nothing new ever comes of such discussions.
How you got from "offer public housing" to "abolish private property" is a mental path I'd like to explore. I really mean it. Because it seems that a lot of people seem to mix up welfare state with communism and I'm trying to understand why.
Many people seem to have setup a false choice between the two. Some people, especially politicians, benefit from the false dichotomy.
I would hope that intellectually honest people can see there is large design space for the role of government. Choosing from these options — what is better and worse — depends on individual values and collective responsibilities.
There's a disconnect here. Individuals experiencing homelessness have already chosen to do so somewhere expensive. Generally they have reasons for this that they find compelling. How would you propose to convince them to relocate to this hypothetical cheap homelessness-warehousing center elsewhere?
I have compelling reasons to choose to live in a penthouse suite in Manhattan. It has a beautiful view. Gorgeous amenities. Private parking. Really, it's the best. However, I can't afford to, so the way society persuades me not to live there is that they kick me out, since I didn't pay for the place and don't have any claim to it. This does not seem entirely unreasonable to me.
I get your point: it seems like a moral good in America for people to have some inalienable (i.e. "not required to pay for") right to have some control over where they live. But it makes zero sense to have a black and white rule that everyone has a right to live anywhere they want. Do I have a right to take up residence inside your living room? Your home? Your porch? A public school's playground? The middle of an interstate? A public park? I think the reasonable answers to all of those are "no".
The US is geographically sorting itself by wealth. You used to have pricy neighborhoods but any given city generally had some amount of property available across a range of income levels. With the transition to a service economy, this is less true over time. Now entire cities are becoming uniformly expensive.
The reality is that I no longer think it's tenable to say that someone has a right to live in Manhattan regardless of their income level. The way things are going, it's probably going to be the case that the entire city limits of SF, Seattle, and NYC will go that way.
Does it suck? Yes. Can it be solved at the city level? I don't think so.
There may well be a limited supply of penthouse apartments in specific neighbourhoods.
But the general housing crisis reflects a reality in which basic housing needs for a large portion of the population are either entirely unmet, or are intrinsically perilous, with risk of housing loss at any time high.
Your colourful hypo entirely fails to address that point.
I recommend again On the Media's excellent series on housing, "Scarlet E":
It's acknowledged that there's a housing crisis. There's also an opioid crisis, and a crisis in care for the mentally ill.
I don't think OP would challenge any of that, but he's addressing a much more specific point: if we're to provide housing to people who cannot house themselves, and in particular, the growing number of people with apparent mental or addiction issues living on the streets of downtown city centers, is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?
> is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?
Obligation? No. A good idea? Yes. Support services are in cities, especially centers. Half of this comment page is full with "housing alone doesn't help, we need support structures for the people" - doesn't mix well with the "hey, let's just put all the undesirables on a bus and give them housing in the middle of nowhere".
Why do support services need to be located in a city? What support services cannot be offered outside of a city?
The reality is that many of the visible homeless living in the city center are addicts, and they congregate in city centers, in part, because of cheap and easy access to drugs and like-minded people. In places like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, open drug use is everywhere you look now, and the city turns a blind eye to it.
Claiming that people need to remain in this environment to recover is extremely misguided.
Lower cost? That doesn't seem likely in a city like San Francisco, where the cost of real-estate, construction, labor is sky high and the housing supply is extremely limited.
Helping more people? In that sense, efficiency is meaningless if it's not efficacious. And all evidence suggests that social services in places like San Francisco and Seattle are not working well, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spend each year.
As we've also seen, housing addicts in neighborhoods where open drug use and drug dealing is tolerated is not efficient. Yet that's exactly what happens in the Tenderloin today.
Indeed. If our goal us to help these folks become productive members of society (and then start paying taxes, etc.), then alienating them and housing them possibly too far away from their families, their children's schools, and suitable job opportunities seems like a bad way to achieve that.
I certainly understand where you're going with this. It would seem to be most cost effective to put the housing somewhere where land and buildings are less expensive.
I think this can be problematic for several reasons:
It feels like just pushing the problem to other places/other people. If there's the right commitments and programs in place, maybe it can work. But where in the bay area is going to be happy to host a SF sponsored housing for homeless facility? And will it be less expensive enough to justify?
If people have some connections to service providers or family or social connections, moving them far enough away to save costs is going to make it really hard to keep those up.
I don't think any convincing would be necessary if the help were simply cut off in high cost of living areas and only available in lower cost areas.
This will probably not happen any time soon because it's politically incorrect to effectively admit homeless people don't deserve to live in high cost of living areas, but it would certainly be more effective in helping people materially. Not to mention, people in lower cost, yet populated, areas probably don't want them there either and will fight to prevent this from happening (NIMBY).
Only about 15% of homeless in Seattle are "visible". Roughly 50% are sheltered, and of the unsheltered many live in vehicle [0] (though the numbers in this article don't quite add up).
I fully agree with you though, a lot of people's frustration with the homeless comes from a vocal minority of problematic unsheltered people with serious mental health issues and/or addiction problems. If these people were committed to mental health facilities I think everybody would be better off.
More to the point, a criminal minority. It's mostly lawbreaking that makes this minority visible: assault, robbery, theft, dumping waste, etc.
> If these people were committed to mental health facilities I think everybody would be better off.
I agree and in particular, even the invisible majority. Talk to anyone who knows anything about the homeless problem and they'll tell you that homeless people are very frequently victims of crimes themselves. They don't have the shelter or resources to protect themselves, so they are easy picking for criminals.
So getting this small number of actively harmful homeless people off the street — remediating them or not — will help improve the quality of life and safety of an even larger number of other homeless people.
This has been done before and has a very dark history. Deeming someone criminal and in need of remediation has been an integral part of some very grim historical events.
I’m pretty sure I know what you’re arguing for, but how does one avoid it becoming a system whereby undesirables are vanished? Is there somewhere that has a humane and fair system?
It's not a "grim historical event" to observe when people commit crimes and then throw them in prison for the specific crimes they have committed after a fair trial. That's approximately what would happen if you or I went around brazenly violating the law.
I think one aspect of this that is worthy of concern is institutionalization. A lot of our problems these days are a consequence of deinstitutionalization, but prior to deinstitutionalization there were a lot of hidden abusive practices in the institutions themselves. I'm not sure where exactly the pendulum should come to rest on that issue.
There's also the consequences of putting violent or unstable homeless people in with the general prison population. Which is what pushed them into mental facilities in the first place, who had people better trained to deal with mental illness.
Both of those solutions have downsides and as the NPR story mentioned a lot of those mental health institutions were shut down in the 1980s.
Having beat cops and other locals or street people deal with the problem is also non ideal.
So its going to be lessers of evils and attempting to minimize the evil as much as possible.
What kind of crime though? I think that's a part of it as well. Possession of a little bit of heroin? Camping somewhere not allowed to do so? Trespassing?
I feel like the alternate proposal just says, don't put them in jail for small amounts of time after every small crime, instead preemptively give them a permanent home to stay out of trouble from. In a way, it's a kind of jail, but one where you hope they stay in forever, and go to even before any crime is committed. Would the cost of that be any more then the cost that is currently going to the jail system?
Keep in mind I think the assumption here is that when it comes to mental illness or drug addiction, jail does not work as a deterrent, because the illness or addiction will cause repeat offense no matter the consequence to them. It assumes they can't help themselves but eventually commit a crime again. That's part of the challenge.
it's a 'grim historical event' because America's history of law enforcement has been very much in favor of detaining and criminalizing minorities. One needs to only look at Marijuana statistics to see why.
The problem Seattle is running up against is that they're trying to solve what is effectively a national problem at a local level and failing. The way to solve the issues with the homeless and mentally ill is by having stronger safety nets and healthcare, but that's a longer term solution when people really just want them out of sight, which means tossing them in jail.
Where they come out on the streets and keep doing the exact same thing they were locked up for. Because our criminal justice system doesn't do anything for reform or reducing recidivism.
It’s a national problem that becomes a local problem to the localities that are the most accommodating. At the moment that includes Seattle. People show up here because they get repeatedly arrested in other places, where their solution to the problem is giving away bus tickets to places like Seattle.
> how does one avoid it becoming a system whereby undesirables are vanished?
I think the simple answer is to limit to people who have actually demonstrably committed crimes, which is exactly what this article is about.
I'm not suggesting that someone talking themselves on a street corner should be locked up forever. I'm saying that if you've got someone who already has a record assaulting people, you put that person in jail. Even if it's not to their benefit, it is a benefit to their would-be future victims.
Of course, ideally, we'll remediate them too using the mental health facilities (which need more funding and better laws). I'm not saying I prefer using prison. But it's better than letting known violent people hurt others people.
A wild tiger is not an evil animal that deserves to be locked up. It's done nothing wrong and as an animal is not legally considered responsibile for its actions. But that doesn't mean you'd just let one roam the streets even after it's mauled a couple of people.
Which obviously would never veer into "there was some crime .. it probably was this guy over there" "We have no real proof" "Yeah, but who needs that? Let's spin a few tales for the jury/judge, his look does the rest of the job." .. never happened before, won't happen this time.
If your policy is prone to abuse you better have a few ideas how to make sure this abuse won't happen. People don't want homeless people in their vicinity, so the abuse of any such system without extreme high safeguards is more or less guaranteed. And if you install safeguards you are back at square one: Someone will slip through, bad things happens, articles get written, people cry that safeguards should be lowered .. and so on, and so on. It's not an easy problem. Even if you agree that the basic idea is good.
I think I see your point but the slippery slope goes both ways.
Right now a certain class of criminals operate with impunity in Seattle. Our laws are not perfect and I even acknowledge the bias in drug prosecution but the solution to those problems is changing the laws, not ignoring them.
Contrary to popular belief we do in fact have a functional judiciary and legislature in this country.
> But activists are more than willing to conflate the two cases.
I work in philanthropy and this is absolutely the case.
To most donors and laypeople, a person is homeless if they sleep outdoors, in a car, or in a shelter.
But to people who work in this space, a person staying with friends or extended family members can also be considered homeless. This greatly increases the amount of people considered homeless in their reporting.
That is definitely the case in my community. We are not a big city, and we have essentially zero visible homelessness. But the stats for my kids' elementary school says we actually have a fair number of homeless kids. Turns out that's because they are living somewhere that does not qualify as their own home. They still have a place to eat & sleep.
It sounds like the reason here is that unlike your home staying somewhere else has a pretty high chance of not being permanent. It's probably a good idea to not state "we have zero homelessness" and a month later people run around "How can there be all these people on the streets?! You said we have no homelessness!"
> But to people who work in this space, a person staying with friends or extended family members can also be considered homeless. This greatly increases the amount of people considered homeless in their reporting.
Well of course, they've made their career in this. If people are no longer homeless under the common definition of the term, these people would be without a job, so they have to do marketing work to change the goal posts to justify their existence.
> that the biggest problems for the visibly homeless are mental illness and substance abuse.
I think there's some reasonable evidence that housing first approaches are extremely helpful in addressing both mental illness and substance abuse.
Housing creates an opportunity for both stability and routine, which are incredibly important for getting help and treatment for mental illness and substance abuse.
I don't think the evidence is 100% conclusive yet, but I don't think a housing first approach can absolutely be helpful for both populations (but for different reasons!).
I do think it makes sense to think about both of these populations, because they definitely don't have the all of the same needs. Pretty much everyone needs shelter and at least a small place to safety store items.
In San Francisco some groups use the term visible homeless as well. I think it is a good start in categorization because there is so much cognitive dissonance between seeing a thing, not understanding what is already being done about a thing, and conflating a dozen other issues as one thing.
This is very important! A few years ago I was reading about UC Berkeley grad students who were homeless. They slept in their office on campus. When people talk about homelessness, usually their talking about being visibly homeless without knowing it.
That's not homelessness; that's simple, rational economic behavior. I would have done that in college, too, had that option been available to me, and I would hardly call myself "homeless".
Is a student living in a dorm "homeless", now, too?
What I'd like to know is what has caused (what feels like) the massive increase in our cities of the "visible homeless"? Has there been a policy change, or some other nationwide change that has caused more people to become homeless? What is really going on?
I mean, there's always been both visible and "hidden" homeless people in cities - but over about the past 5 years (and it honestly feels like it increased dramatically after Trump became POTUS - but that has to be my imagination) it has gotten to the point where there are mass groups of such people, living in camps, roaming the streets, and some of them have committed crimes - either to pay for more drugs, food, maybe shelter, or just (maybe) in the hopes of being arrested and given a roof over their head.
Prior to that, I recall there being a few homeless here and there around my neighborhood and city (Phoenix, in my case), but like I said, this has seemed to change drastically.
I have heard rumors (and that's all I know them to be at best) of certain communities in California (typical culprits to the rumors seem to be wealthier areas of the State) paying for buses to transport their homeless to other cities outside California. It seems outlandish, and just another "blame California" excuse the conservatives here would use - but I honestly don't know what the truth is. It might be outlandish, but completely implausible?
One reason some homeless people seem to be more brazen is that they are not being policed as heavily, since people have realized how much of a waste of money it is to throw homeless people in jail for minor crimes. So the people who would be bouncing around in/out of jail are spending more time on the streets. And the same nonenforcement policies also enable homeless people to live in encampments that are not immediately shut down
Note, I don't think the solution is necessarily to reverse these policies. But this is one explanation for why homelessness seems much more visible now than it used to be.
There are other factors increasing homelessness in general, namely substance abuse and increasing housing costs. If you have a poor support network and are living paycheck to paycheck (like most Americans actually do), you are one incident at work + eviction away from homelessness. Substance abuse and untreated mental illness make these worse.
Also there are some pernicious cycles that are hard to avoid with homelessness. Namely that homeless people, as you mention, tend to congregate in large wealthy cities that have lots of services for the homeless. These cities tend to have very high rents so it makes getting out of homelessness more difficult as long as they stay in the city.
> I have heard rumors (and that's all I know them to be at best) of certain communities in California (typical culprits to the rumors seem to be wealthier areas of the State) paying for buses to transport their homeless to other cities outside California. It seems outlandish, and just another "blame California" excuse the conservatives here would use - but I honestly don't know what the truth is. It might be outlandish, but completely implausible?
In California, you will hear people complaining about every community in the South-West paying for buses to transport their homeless into California.
This has occasionally happened, but in a very sporadic way.
So, I think that, for the most part, both the Californians, and the non-Californians who believe this are wrong.
One part of the puzzle: anti-camping laws have been found unconstitutional when the homeless cannot find shelter [1]. Therefore, police are sometimes powerless against tent cities.
The most obvious one is aviation. There are a few battery-electric aircraft flying today but they have very short range. I don't think there's any conceivable battery chemistry that will allow anywhere near the range of hydrocarbon-powered aircraft.
However, liquid hydrogen has much greater energy density than hydrocarbon fuels. It's also quite difficult to work with. But when you're talking about a vehicle the size of a 737 (much less an A-380), the economics might ultimately be favorable.
It would probably require aircraft models specifically designed for liquid hydrogen -- the tanks are so large that the aircraft will have to be designed around them. That's probably a major impediment to adoption. It's possible that biofuels or synthetic fuels made from CO2 will instead replace fossil fuels in aviation, instead.