That’s not a contradiction. Your, my, and everyone’s bed is for sleeping in. The beds in that store are for accumulation of wealth. This displays the harsh efficiencies of capitalism, because the people in the most need for a bed cannot afford to have one.
Right but equally it’s not the mattress company’s job to accommodate the homeless person. It’s not like they didn’t have to pay an inflated price from the manufacturer so if they sold it for the price of the materials they’d probably make a loss.
100%. I have yet to see somewhere that sells display furniture/appliances at full price, usually they knock some off due to shop guests messing around with it, wear and tear
I mean I don’t even wanna know how often the average person changes their sheets, let alone their mattress. My parents have mattresses in spare bedrooms older than me.
Honestly though, display beds aren’t as scary to me as hotel beds
SPARE BEDROOMS?!! By this you mean they have beds to spare and yet are not allowing unhoused individuals to sleep in them?? How very dare they. Guest rooms should be illegal. Everyone with a bedroom to spare gets a mini homeless shelter in their house.
Especially because unless you’ve solved the limited resources problem, then even in a utopia you’re still going to have to have something like money, and therefore you will still have things that some people have that other people don’t have.
Define ‘limited.’ Because limits include trained manpower, right? There’s only a certain amount of that. Our ability to provide certain drugs for everyone who might need them are limited by the number of people trained to make them. This is true of virtually any industry. It is as limited as the number of people who can make it usable. And that is usually not an ‘anyone can do this’ issue.
Labor of any stripe is abundant. In an economy that doesn’t prioritize profit, people would be able to pursue specialized jobs that they want to contribute towards. For example, after the modernization of the USSR, they had the most doctors of any country in the world and healthcare was made accessible for millions of people. Our growth as a society is limited by the amount of cooperative labor we have available, but it’s not a limited resource.
In contrast, capitalism is reliant on a reserve pool of labor to keep wages down. If someone remains in the reserves for too long, they become homeless because every aspect of life has been commodified.
I’m not talking about labor, I’m talking about specialized labor. Which is limited not just to numbers but to numbers willing to be trained in that field.
Which things? Because all historical sources show that the bottom 10% had all the bare necessities for life. They didn’t have luxury apartments, but they had a roof. They weren’t eating steak every night, but they had more caloric input and healthier diets than US citizens.
I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, so I’ll edit this comment if I find more relevant information, but so far I’ve only found one paragraph related to food inequality, and it seems to disagree with you:
the figures shown represent average nutrient levels on a per capita per day basis for the USSR as a whole. They do not indicate the differences that exist in the diets of different population groups, which preliminary research indicates are substantial.
The problem isn’t lack of shelter. There’s enough shelter available for the homeless. They just choose not to use it because it comes with rules like no drugs and (often) no pets.
Best method we have found so far. If you want cookie cutter efficient ass state made beds you can move off to the… Well, every state who has tried has collapsed so you’re shit out of luck.
Who are the people in most need for a bed? Isn’t that need relatively equal? I mean, I guess when I was younger I didn’t really need one, but now I’m a wreck without one. I know some guys with copd that only sleep in chairs, so maybe their need is on low end.
I do understand the sentiment but the thing is a lot of homelessness isn’t because people don’t have money not exactly. They may have support systems that they can make use of but if they have other problems they may not be inclined to use those support systems.
You can’t just blame capitalism for homelessness, not exclusively.
You kinda can. Capitalism provides no incentive to help this man (actually, it provides a disincentive because the time and/or money needed to help this man could be spent on more profitable endeavors). The support structures that may exist are not capitalistic, are disincentived, and obviously not adequate.
Infantilize me all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that I’m college educated and in my late 20s. Explain to me why we can’t distribute beds to people based on need. If we can, then please explain why we have to have homeless people.
Those rules tend to kind of suck, to be fair. Certainly, if I was homeless, and had a dog, I wouldn’t really want to stay in any homeless shelter that banned me from keeping pets, if I didn’t absolutely have to. It’s really funny to me that people try to defend policies against drug use, or against holding drugs on the basis of addiction or something. I dunno, I thought it was a pretty common opinion to just want drugs to be legal since we all drink coffee and monster energy and IPAs anyways, and at this point I’d rather have heroin, or cocaine sprinkled honey buns, if for nothing else than to spice things up a little. Withdrawal symptoms are a sometimes lethal bitch, and that’s gonna be much harder to surmount outside of a shelter, than inside one, though, would be the main point of contention. IME homeless shelters tend to be populated on the usefulness of their service relative to putting up with “actual” homelessness. If your shelter is less useful than being homeless for most people, then most people will choose being homeless over your shelter.
And that’s not even really getting into the nonprofit shelters that basically require religious indoctrination on the half of the homeless, which is super scummy, or how lots of homeless shelters are super “out of the way”, and eliminate the homeless’s ability to be self-sufficient, or to seek help from whatever meager support network they tend to have. Or how homeless shelters are full of homeless people, and thus, suck to live in for everyone involved, relative to owning your own tent, where you can just move all your shit somewhere else in the event that you don’t like someone. Or how means-tested support programs tend to usually waste a ton of their budget testing the means of their applicants.
Overall I think even probably if you lived in like a communist utopian whatever whatever society with 0.1% homelessness and 99% employment or whatever, you’d probably still have, at the very least, a warehouse where you kept some excess beds, or where people could see which bed they wanted, that sort of thing, so it’s not like this picture is really illustrative of that much beyond just the plain visual irony of it, sort of in a similar genre to other pictures of, say, homeless people camping out underneath a huge trump billboard saying he’s building a new hotel or high rise or something. I dunno, this is the sort of shit you see on tiktok side by side with memes saying that jimmy fallon looks like the pink bug from backyardigans.
Fine to blame me for just being honest, as I honestly don’t care what these kids think of me- but I only hope that when they grow up- they’ll come to understand that their ideology has been incredibly flawed and that life exists within the gray area between what they only see as black and white.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a great mentality to have, you’ve simultaneously made yourself a victim, and you’ve also initialized your opposition where you presume yourself to only know the nuance therein. that’s kind of not a great position to generally regard these issues from. It’s preventing you from steel-manning your opposition.
The rules aren’t there to be agreed with. It’s how it is. If you’re homeless with a pet- that’s not anyone’s problem but yours. No one is obligated to take care of your responsibilities for you.
I’m all for anyone getting help, but not at the expense of people having to bow down and coddle to people who can’t see that they are- wether they are intentionally or not, a burden. And if you’re a burden- you don’t get to pick what rules you’ll follow.
Generally the MO of this ideology you oppose, is that all of this talk of the expense, or people being burdens, is kind of like. Not relevant. It sees homeless relief as purely being for charity, as solely being for the sake of those who give, to probably just make them feel better, out of the goodness of their heart, when that’s not necessarily the case. Both, because these services are intentionally gimped, or, are just used for optics, imo, but also because there is a form of self-interest in these services which can lead to mutual benefit. The general idea being that, if you leave people to be homeless, don’t help them through, they will accelerate out of that homelessness less efficiently than had you helped them, and this will strain the economy more than had you simply pooled money and got them a house, or a crack pipe and a manual labor job, or what have you. There are also arguments in favor of homelessness, as the homeless are both an easy pool of desperate labor, willing to be underpaid, and an effective threat against existing low-level labor, because they can be replaced at any time. You will get more amazon workers and walmart employees if you do not have a safety net for the homeless. Or, rather, you will get workers willing to tolerate worse positions, if there is no safety net. Needless to say, I’m not really in favor of homelessness, I tend to think that threats and work under duress don’t provide the best outcomes, which is important when I get pissed off that my burger has been put together wrong, and when my astrophysicist’s calculations are totally wrong and my rocket falls into a black hole because I keep telling him that it will either be done by next week or he’s on the street. That’s a really stupid set of example but you kind of get the point I expect.
But then, more to the point of these rules. You will end up spending some money enforcing any rule. If it is a broad discriminatory rule, say, curfew, no pets, no drugs (generally in that order), you end up spending in the enforcement of those rules, and that money could’ve just been spent on more direct outreach, more bang-for-your-buck. There’s not really a guarantee the people you have discriminated in favor of will be any better off “making it in society” than the people who are still on the street. And it still doesn’t really solve the broad problems of homelessness, you’re still gonna get people complaining at the city council meeting, especially as, if you were right, you’ve only helped out the least destructive of society, and pushed off the most destructive to, at worst, be handled by the police, which rockets up your expenses, because that’s not what they’re really for, and then the prison system isn’t going to end up paying off any better societally for pretty obvious reasons, if the police so choose to just push them into prisons.
If you end up implementing a niche discriminatory rule, like, say, you only will help out the most desperate, people who have been homeless for an extended period of time, those who have drug problems, mental health problems, or, on the flipside, if you just want to provide some sort of stop-gap for people who have just been laid off, you end up, again, spending a lot more, a substantial amount more, in these cases, than had you just spent it on outreach. It is usually a metric fuck ton that is spent on these forms of means-testing, this is usually why federal programs suck. You also get, not logarithmic benefits, from economies of scale, but you do end up spending less to cover everyone, especially in the long term.
So, those are kind of easy reasons as to why if you were to deal with the problems of homelessness really in any form, you would want to do so with a broad-scale housing first kind of policy, because the alternatives all suck ass tend to be pretty bad.
I think also, the idea of, you know, the rules just get to be arbitrary, the rules get to be whatever they are, because that’s the rule-maker’s choice, as though it’s some sort of like, purely ethical right, that doesn’t pass the smell test to me. Freedom for the sake of it, as the driving force behind an ethical ideology, or a political ideology, is sort of like solely having power for the sake of it: it still doesn’t tell you what freedoms, freedoms to do what, freedoms over what, or what powers, powers to do what, powers over what. That’s where the nuance comes in, and then that’s where you actually have to do the work of forming a coherent worldview based on the realities of the situation, that’s where you pull on the thread.
If any of this is interesting to you at all, shoot me (please I’m begging you please god) and I might try to dig up some sources for all of the claims I’ve made, probably by way of reference to some huge compilation document I’ll have to sort out, and then you can probably (and probably rightly) disparage them on the basis of us not living in a society where everything is totally recorded in a perfect case study with control groups and alternatives, except for when it is, in order to serve us ads. What fun, the internet!
That’s not a contradiction. Your, my, and everyone’s bed is for sleeping in. The beds in that store are for accumulation of wealth. This displays the harsh efficiencies of capitalism, because the people in the most need for a bed cannot afford to have one.
I belive the beds in a store that sells beds are either to be sold or to help you choose a bed. They are not “fuck you, see how many beds i have” beds
It’ll probably be sold at a discount too since it was for display
For probably still more money than street sleeping homeless guy can afford of we are being honest.
Right but equally it’s not the mattress company’s job to accommodate the homeless person. It’s not like they didn’t have to pay an inflated price from the manufacturer so if they sold it for the price of the materials they’d probably make a loss.
No of course not. I’m not saying that the homeless guy should be in the store, I’m saying it’s out of his reach even for the floor model.
100%. I have yet to see somewhere that sells display furniture/appliances at full price, usually they knock some off due to shop guests messing around with it, wear and tear
Ew, they would sell you a display bed? Seems, unhygienic.
I mean I don’t even wanna know how often the average person changes their sheets, let alone their mattress. My parents have mattresses in spare bedrooms older than me.
Honestly though, display beds aren’t as scary to me as hotel beds
SPARE BEDROOMS?!! By this you mean they have beds to spare and yet are not allowing unhoused individuals to sleep in them?? How very dare they. Guest rooms should be illegal. Everyone with a bedroom to spare gets a mini homeless shelter in their house.
I mean… that is what early Christians would do. They were radically giving and selfless. They would unironically feed and shelter the homeless.
It was as shocking then as it is now.
How would you ironically feed and shelter the homeless?
Gen Z volunteering.
Never been on tiktok, huh?
The Romans never crucified anyone for saying “screw the poor.”
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how capitalism works. It very much is a “fuck you look at our expensive shit” society.
To that homeless person, yes that’s exactly what a mattress store is.
That’s what everything everywhere is. Many folks in communist countries lack things others have too.
Only in a hypothetical utopia could all persons have all things equally.
Especially because unless you’ve solved the limited resources problem, then even in a utopia you’re still going to have to have something like money, and therefore you will still have things that some people have that other people don’t have.
What essential resources are so limited that we can’t provide them to everyone based on need?
Define ‘limited.’ Because limits include trained manpower, right? There’s only a certain amount of that. Our ability to provide certain drugs for everyone who might need them are limited by the number of people trained to make them. This is true of virtually any industry. It is as limited as the number of people who can make it usable. And that is usually not an ‘anyone can do this’ issue.
Labor of any stripe is abundant. In an economy that doesn’t prioritize profit, people would be able to pursue specialized jobs that they want to contribute towards. For example, after the modernization of the USSR, they had the most doctors of any country in the world and healthcare was made accessible for millions of people. Our growth as a society is limited by the amount of cooperative labor we have available, but it’s not a limited resource.
In contrast, capitalism is reliant on a reserve pool of labor to keep wages down. If someone remains in the reserves for too long, they become homeless because every aspect of life has been commodified.
I’m not talking about labor, I’m talking about specialized labor. Which is limited not just to numbers but to numbers willing to be trained in that field.
Which things? Because all historical sources show that the bottom 10% had all the bare necessities for life. They didn’t have luxury apartments, but they had a roof. They weren’t eating steak every night, but they had more caloric input and healthier diets than US citizens.
Hit me
How do you feel about a CIA report on behalf of the department of agriculture? https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000498133.pdf
I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, so I’ll edit this comment if I find more relevant information, but so far I’ve only found one paragraph related to food inequality, and it seems to disagree with you:
The problem isn’t lack of shelter. There’s enough shelter available for the homeless. They just choose not to use it because it comes with rules like no drugs and (often) no pets.
No there’s not enough shelter available for the homeless. Shelters have occupancy limits and especially in the US most states do not have enough space. Some states have less than half the beds needed to shelter their states homeless population. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/#homeless-assistance-in-america
…selling people beds so they have beds to sleep in. Beds that aren’t riddled with bugs thanks to the store not being a homeless shelter.
You’re assuming selling beds is the only method to distribute them. That’s simply untrue.
Best method we have found so far. If you want cookie cutter efficient ass state made beds you can move off to the… Well, every state who has tried has collapsed so you’re shit out of luck.
You mean like the still-existing and highly complex gift economies of natives all across the globe that have no homelessness?
Move there then.
You acted like they still existed. In that case my original point still applies.
Those gift economies don’t work at scale and you would probably have a significantly worse quality of life if you were born to one.
There are still indigenous economies in the world. The ones that I identify with were destroyed by the British though.
You mean people who sleep on mats on a dirt floor? Sure. Some of us want to lessen our back pain. You do you.
and most children in most places
Come on now, indigenous people exist in the 21st century and have modern amenities. They just also keep their indigenous economies.
And they get those modern amenities how?
How does that matter in the context of fairly distributing goods in a modernized indigenous economy?
So beds in the store are for accumulation of wealth but then when someone buys them they’re for sleeping in? Deep
Who are the people in most need for a bed? Isn’t that need relatively equal? I mean, I guess when I was younger I didn’t really need one, but now I’m a wreck without one. I know some guys with copd that only sleep in chairs, so maybe their need is on low end.
The people without beds, followed by the people that need to replace their beds, followed by people that want to receive a bed for any other reason.
Just because I have a bed doesn’t mean I don’t need one. If I didn’t need it I wouldn’t keep it
I’m not wanting for beds. But am in need.
Ok, how would this prioritization of resource distribution prevent you from getting the bed you need?
I do understand the sentiment but the thing is a lot of homelessness isn’t because people don’t have money not exactly. They may have support systems that they can make use of but if they have other problems they may not be inclined to use those support systems.
You can’t just blame capitalism for homelessness, not exclusively.
Which systems do you have in mind? Because homeless shelters are not a solution to homelessness.
But mattress stores are?
Where did you extrapolate that from?
You kinda can. Capitalism provides no incentive to help this man (actually, it provides a disincentive because the time and/or money needed to help this man could be spent on more profitable endeavors). The support structures that may exist are not capitalistic, are disincentived, and obviously not adequate.
Personally I blame it for the bulk of it in my country. We have a massive housing crisis caused by housing unafordability.
The middle class here mainly invest in rentals (not stockmarket) and then use them as AirBnBs that sit empty half the time.
Meanwhile whole families are living in garages or worse, cars. People who are sane and ordinary and work are living in substandard shitholes.
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agreed, it’s pretty funny that someone thought that was a contradictory statement
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Infantilize me all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that I’m college educated and in my late 20s. Explain to me why we can’t distribute beds to people based on need. If we can, then please explain why we have to have homeless people.
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Those rules tend to kind of suck, to be fair. Certainly, if I was homeless, and had a dog, I wouldn’t really want to stay in any homeless shelter that banned me from keeping pets, if I didn’t absolutely have to. It’s really funny to me that people try to defend policies against drug use, or against holding drugs on the basis of addiction or something. I dunno, I thought it was a pretty common opinion to just want drugs to be legal since we all drink coffee and monster energy and IPAs anyways, and at this point I’d rather have heroin, or cocaine sprinkled honey buns, if for nothing else than to spice things up a little. Withdrawal symptoms are a sometimes lethal bitch, and that’s gonna be much harder to surmount outside of a shelter, than inside one, though, would be the main point of contention. IME homeless shelters tend to be populated on the usefulness of their service relative to putting up with “actual” homelessness. If your shelter is less useful than being homeless for most people, then most people will choose being homeless over your shelter.
And that’s not even really getting into the nonprofit shelters that basically require religious indoctrination on the half of the homeless, which is super scummy, or how lots of homeless shelters are super “out of the way”, and eliminate the homeless’s ability to be self-sufficient, or to seek help from whatever meager support network they tend to have. Or how homeless shelters are full of homeless people, and thus, suck to live in for everyone involved, relative to owning your own tent, where you can just move all your shit somewhere else in the event that you don’t like someone. Or how means-tested support programs tend to usually waste a ton of their budget testing the means of their applicants.
Overall I think even probably if you lived in like a communist utopian whatever whatever society with 0.1% homelessness and 99% employment or whatever, you’d probably still have, at the very least, a warehouse where you kept some excess beds, or where people could see which bed they wanted, that sort of thing, so it’s not like this picture is really illustrative of that much beyond just the plain visual irony of it, sort of in a similar genre to other pictures of, say, homeless people camping out underneath a huge trump billboard saying he’s building a new hotel or high rise or something. I dunno, this is the sort of shit you see on tiktok side by side with memes saying that jimmy fallon looks like the pink bug from backyardigans.
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I don’t think that’s necessarily a great mentality to have, you’ve simultaneously made yourself a victim, and you’ve also initialized your opposition where you presume yourself to only know the nuance therein. that’s kind of not a great position to generally regard these issues from. It’s preventing you from steel-manning your opposition.
Generally the MO of this ideology you oppose, is that all of this talk of the expense, or people being burdens, is kind of like. Not relevant. It sees homeless relief as purely being for charity, as solely being for the sake of those who give, to probably just make them feel better, out of the goodness of their heart, when that’s not necessarily the case. Both, because these services are intentionally gimped, or, are just used for optics, imo, but also because there is a form of self-interest in these services which can lead to mutual benefit. The general idea being that, if you leave people to be homeless, don’t help them through, they will accelerate out of that homelessness less efficiently than had you helped them, and this will strain the economy more than had you simply pooled money and got them a house, or a crack pipe and a manual labor job, or what have you. There are also arguments in favor of homelessness, as the homeless are both an easy pool of desperate labor, willing to be underpaid, and an effective threat against existing low-level labor, because they can be replaced at any time. You will get more amazon workers and walmart employees if you do not have a safety net for the homeless. Or, rather, you will get workers willing to tolerate worse positions, if there is no safety net. Needless to say, I’m not really in favor of homelessness, I tend to think that threats and work under duress don’t provide the best outcomes, which is important when I get pissed off that my burger has been put together wrong, and when my astrophysicist’s calculations are totally wrong and my rocket falls into a black hole because I keep telling him that it will either be done by next week or he’s on the street. That’s a really stupid set of example but you kind of get the point I expect.
But then, more to the point of these rules. You will end up spending some money enforcing any rule. If it is a broad discriminatory rule, say, curfew, no pets, no drugs (generally in that order), you end up spending in the enforcement of those rules, and that money could’ve just been spent on more direct outreach, more bang-for-your-buck. There’s not really a guarantee the people you have discriminated in favor of will be any better off “making it in society” than the people who are still on the street. And it still doesn’t really solve the broad problems of homelessness, you’re still gonna get people complaining at the city council meeting, especially as, if you were right, you’ve only helped out the least destructive of society, and pushed off the most destructive to, at worst, be handled by the police, which rockets up your expenses, because that’s not what they’re really for, and then the prison system isn’t going to end up paying off any better societally for pretty obvious reasons, if the police so choose to just push them into prisons.
If you end up implementing a niche discriminatory rule, like, say, you only will help out the most desperate, people who have been homeless for an extended period of time, those who have drug problems, mental health problems, or, on the flipside, if you just want to provide some sort of stop-gap for people who have just been laid off, you end up, again, spending a lot more, a substantial amount more, in these cases, than had you just spent it on outreach. It is usually a metric fuck ton that is spent on these forms of means-testing, this is usually why federal programs suck. You also get, not logarithmic benefits, from economies of scale, but you do end up spending less to cover everyone, especially in the long term.
So, those are kind of easy reasons as to why if you were to deal with the problems of homelessness really in any form, you would want to do so with a broad-scale housing first kind of policy, because the alternatives all suck ass tend to be pretty bad.
I think also, the idea of, you know, the rules just get to be arbitrary, the rules get to be whatever they are, because that’s the rule-maker’s choice, as though it’s some sort of like, purely ethical right, that doesn’t pass the smell test to me. Freedom for the sake of it, as the driving force behind an ethical ideology, or a political ideology, is sort of like solely having power for the sake of it: it still doesn’t tell you what freedoms, freedoms to do what, freedoms over what, or what powers, powers to do what, powers over what. That’s where the nuance comes in, and then that’s where you actually have to do the work of forming a coherent worldview based on the realities of the situation, that’s where you pull on the thread.
If any of this is interesting to you at all, shoot me (please I’m begging you please god) and I might try to dig up some sources for all of the claims I’ve made, probably by way of reference to some huge compilation document I’ll have to sort out, and then you can probably (and probably rightly) disparage them on the basis of us not living in a society where everything is totally recorded in a perfect case study with control groups and alternatives, except for when it is, in order to serve us ads. What fun, the internet!
Tell me you don’t know anything about the homeless situation with telling me. Homeless shelters are not a solution to homelessness.
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I mean you did ask 🤷♂️
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No, they do not all have beds available, the space is extremely limited. In the US some places have less then half the beds needed for their states homeless population. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/#homeless-assistance-in-america
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K.
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If anything this guy is a lot less in need of a bed than someone who hasn’t trained themselves to be able to sleep in a doorway (to wit, me.)