Crazy idea : let’s use churches to accommodate homeless people since you can find them fucking everywhere, surely they’re not used after 8pm, and that’s basically the point of them in the first place, no?
Then they should provide access to toilets. Where are they going when they want to take a piss? Also isn’t helping the poor in anyway they can a charitable act revered by their religion?
Every major religion reveres helping the needy, for example in Islam, zakat, giving money for charity (if you have enough wealth to afford it) is a requirement.
I get the idea and I think it’s wonderful but have you ever been to a homeless shelter? They need staff to break up fights, protect women, clean up the mess made by drug users and alcoholics, and all sorts of other difficult things your average old lady pew duster isn’t capable of dealing with.
Most churches can’t keep the lights on. For every LDS or RCC there are a thousand places on the verge of bankruptcy. Every atheist I know makes a big deal about the big players but not one has shown me the raw the numbers that proves that if they paid corporate tax rates it would be mean more than a few more cruise missiles used to blow up weddings in Pakistan.
Government can’t do that job either. We already have homeless shelters. I don’t know why people talk like this is a new idea. We have homeless shelters in our society. They’re government funded in some cases, or church-funded in other cases.
We still have homeless people. We do provide free shelter and food to people. And we still have people sleeping on the street.
we need places to accommodate them. like how restaurants used to have smoking sections. there should also be access to drug abuse healthcare with no mandate and allow long term residency in shelters, including the ability to receive mail and use it as a legal address for ID documents and employment. if we did all that we could see a fraction of them, perhaps even a large fraction, eventually getting back on their feet and out of the system.
We’ve been doing extended openings 0700-2200 for several years in Oslo. As do libraries all over Norway. You need to use your library-card or app to open the door, so there’s some control (data lives for 7 days). We have very little problems - maybe there’s some homeless there but they are as welcome as anyone else. We do have security guard, or one that strays between branches. And yes we do have homeless people in Oslo.
Go Norway! I whish we had a library law here in Germany like you do - our places are underfunded and understaffed… a lot of my colleagues are very passionate about their jobs, we could do so much more with our local libraries.
A lot of Norwegian libraries are underfunded as well.
In Oslo public library (Deichman) we’ve been given more money the last 10 years than previously. And we have shown what that money can do.
During Covid shutdown the Library was what kept open except for two weeks - that really showed what kind of back-bone we were for Oslo.
It was very tough on our frontline workers as we were swamped with students ignoring any precautions. Working in libraries are still low paying compared to the education
we know the solution. it's building a shit ton of cheap housing and handing it out to people and charging them 30% of the income, not counting the first $20k. it's just rich psychopaths who run the country would rather profit off of prison and let them die instead.
Same. The homeless population has unfortunately made libraries where I live pretty dangerous places and I can only imagine how much worse that would be if they were open all night. My city doesn’t seem to care at all about people shooting up and ruining public spaces.
We should absolutely have safe housing for homeless people with UBI and transitional programs. We should also offer mental health and substance abuse treatment – and in extreme cases humane involuntary treatment for people that are a danger to themselves and others.
And none of this should take place in shared, public spaces for the safety and dignity of everyone involved. This is a failure of society and needs to be treated as such. Placing the burden on individuals isn’t the solution. Expecting public spaces designed for other uses to pick the slack of a broken societal safety net is insane.
You can’t have humane involuntary treatment. In cases where somebody is threatening someone else, I would say involuntary treatment is called for. But we shouldn’t decide when its okay to imprison people for exercising their bodily autonomy.
Yeah, nothing against that idea in theory, but in practice, places like that end up full of urine-soaked drug addicts that are high on meth, making it an extremely unattractive place to hang out and socialize.
Denver’s Union station downtown is a perfect example. It’s a “public private” space that tries to stay open late on weekends to cater to the crowd but ends up being a hellhole.
places like that end up full of urine-soaked drug addicts that are high on meth,
You’re putting all homeless into a box. Not all are homeless because they are addicts. Some are legitimately forgotten by the system and for different reasons lost job/domestic abuse/no fam/disability/health issue/financial issues. And even at that : addiction is also a symptom of a shit society. Not the same issue as what causes other homeless people but there can be more than one problem in a poorly designed system that comes up with the same result of being homeless.
Society built on capitalistic ideals for more than just survival as a goal has an extremely narrow scope for who it is interested in serving.
also more homeless drug addicts started after they became homeless, not before. being on the street like that deteriorates your mental health. the longer we let this go unaddressed the worse it gets.
You’re putting all homeless into a box. Not all are homeless because they are addicts.
Are we not allowed to make generalizations at all? I promise you if you open a homeless center in any major city you will find out very quick that psycho behavior comes with homeless people at scale. It’s a guarantee that you will have meth addicts ruin whatever infrastructure you provide them. It doesn’t matter that there are some good homeless people when you are almost guaranteed to face the bad ones.
With the exception of your first sentence (me putting homeless people in a box, which I’m not sure if you’re making a pun or not), all of other the things you said are correct and I agree with. The things you said and the things I said are not mutually exclusive.
In other words, not all homeless are the same, not all are drug addicts, and society should do better at preventing homelessness, and you might still have a late-night library filled with urine-soaked drug addicts.
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree.
Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.
The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
As someone who went to art school, a fairly common view that artists have is that they have a unique view of the world and can see it in a way others cannot. Maybe that’s true, but then the thinking goes that the way others see the world is inferior, and I think there’s nothing further from the truth than that. Everyone sees beauty in different ways.
Too many artists perceived the world in us vs them terms. Art or science. Too this I say: da Vinci. He considered himself an engineer, not an artist but married both in a fascinating way.
(Educated in fine arts myself, but damn if I don’t love science, logic and even a good snippet of code every now and then)
I’m not educated in fine arts. As a scientist, my biggest criticism of artists (particularly those with formal education) is when they insist that the art is contained within the mind of the person viewing it.
There were two sentences that completely transformed my appreciation of modern art (and I’m using that as a very general, layman’s version of the term). The first was “liberating paint from representationalism.” The idea that you could explore visual dimensions in color, shading, geometry, texture and so on without having to make it look like people at a picnic was really interesting to me. That there was a very deliberative and exploratory side to applying paint to canvas for some reason never really occurred to me, even though I studied literature in addition to science and had been developing a sense of the craft of prose and poetry.
The second was a statement from Jackson Pollock on his transformation from realism to abstract art. During the Depression (I know you know this, but I’m clarifying my experience of understanding), Pollock painted in a style I believe is called social realism. A lot of the art done via WPA (the depression-era government work program) showed average people living their lives and doing their jobs. Without getting too deeply into it, that was the aesthetic. After WWII, Pollock said something along the lines of representationalism having no place in a world with nuclear weapons. It was a horror beyond the ability of an artist to depict. He moved into non-representational works as a result. As someone who (at the time) was working in the defense industry with strategic weapons systems and plans, that also really resonated with me.
My point is that without those and other, later insights from people educated in art and art history, I’d have no framework for appreciation. It’s like reading Shakespeare with no knowledge of literature. At best, you can get a surface level of appreciation based on what you’ve seen in movies or read in modern novels, but there’s a vast dimensionality that you’re simply not equipped to notice.
When we see a flower or the exotic plumage of a bird, we can only see what evolution has equipped us to see. Other than the cases where we as humans have taken over the role of natural selection and started breeding for our own aesthetic purposes, we don’t generally realize that those beautiful things have evolved for reasons completely apart from what we see, and that they might look completely different to the species they evolved for.
I actually like it when someone with an arts background can take a painting I like and tell me why it’s a cringe-filled collection of tropes. I might even continue to like it, but I do want to know I’m looking at Goosebumps and not War and Peace.
Thank you and everyone else that contributed to such a lovely comment chain. I had a great time and learned new things but I also really appreciated your respectful and different perspectives. Art really does bring us together doesn’t it?
It only subtracts for those with less knowledge, to many of those people are content with being ignorant. And for the ignorant, there’s nothing they enjoy more than overcompensating and trying to drag others down to their level.
I recently watched a YouTube about the nature of reality and how bees, for example, see flowers’ colors invisible to us (not that color actually exists, but that’s an adjacent topic), and the video colorized a white flower to show what might see; absolutely stunning.
Don't forget about Meta somehow committing mass copyright infringement of books but playing the 'information should be free but only for this specific instance of rocketing our AI training' bullshit.
Men, proudly drag that battered and cracked android phone out on the first date, it’s a litmus test for shallow people, apparently.
I went on a first date with a girl I met from work. She farted loud enough to be heard over drunken yelling and music in the steakhouse we were in, immediately after saying “I don’t get embarassed”.
In a couple of weeks, we will have been together for 16 years. We’ve been married for 14 years. We cook together every evening, we hold each other whenever we are in the same room for more than five minutes, and on the rare nights where we aren’t taking each other’s clothes off, we fall asleep wrapped around each other. I would have missed out on a perfect relationship if I had judged her for a phone.
I take it with a grain of salt because he’s a humorist, but in Dave Barry Does Japan, his wife tells him at one point, “I heard three farts today. It’s okay here.” I haven’t read that book in decades and I still remember that line because I thought, how nice to live in a place where people don’t hide basic bodily functions.
It would be kinda cool if there was a rule where you have to at least try to post a link to the original post. Especially when it’s so easy to determine where it is by the picture.
If it was original art or something, I would agree. But this is just microblogging for the amusement of others. It’s not a work that takes real creative energy.
The image conveys everything I need, I don’t have any reason to load my browser up and visit a whole other website I don’t even use, when I’ve already gotten everything I could possibly need from the quote already.
To credit the creator and give people the opportunity to interact/follow them or the conversation on that platform.
The creator is fully credited in the screenshot and it tells you exactly where to find them on Mastodon if you choose to do so. I have no obligation to cater to your laziness.
Interesting accusations given you were too lazy to just copy and paste the URL you were already on, two keystrokes, and calling others lazy for not wanting to type it by hand.
I mean, the most manly and masculine thing you can do is exclusively have sex with big, masculine, manly men, right? Having sex with a woman is so emasculating, because you’re enjoying someone’s femininity, and that’s the worst possible thing for a man, so I’ve been told. Therefore, it’s super gay to have sex with women. Be a real man and exclusively have sex with your manly bros.
I am born and raised in metro Detroit and the only place I think I’ve seen this “sauce on cheese” you speak of is just now, in the ultra staged photos that came up when I searched “detroit-style pizza” to figure out what you meant
You’re right, this is blasphemy. Let the record show that this is not at all authentic to Detroit what makes it a Detroit-style pizza
I don’t believe you. I’m also born and raised in Detroit and you’re only faking being a Detroiter if you haven’t had Jet’s Pizza, Buddy’s Pizza, or Nikki’s Pizza in Greektown. All 3 places are well-known in the metro area for their pizza and all 3 of them serve it sauce on cheese. That’s what makes a Detroit Pizza a Detroit Pizza. There’s also Shield’s Pizza which is also sauce on cheese but they weren’t in “Detroit” proper for years until 2019 (even though they originally opened in Detroit).
Did you grow up in the suburbs or something?
Edit: Shield’s and Buddy’s are the original Detroit pizzas. Anyone who tells you they know anything about Detroit pizza that hasn’t tried them is lying to you.
I mean just look up jets deep dish and not a single image that comes up has any sauce over the cheese. That’s how my deep dishes have always come from there or anywhere else. Haven’t eaten at Buddy’s and haven’t heard of Nikki’s or Shield’s. I said metro Detroit so yeah I grew up in the suburbs around Pontiac but I didn’t realize that invalidated my opinion and made me a “fake detroiter” lol
Edit: also what makes it Detroit pizza is that it’s cooked in a deep square dish with little to no bare bread on the outside edges, not the toppings or sauce arrangement. You can take that or leave it and it’s still detroit-style.
I mean… Pontiac is not Detroit so yeah. If you haven’t even heard of the original Detroit Pizza, Shield’s, then you’re not a born and raised Detroiter. You’re a born and raised “Pontiacan”.
And no, what makes it a Detroit-style pizza isn’t just that it’s cooked in the square dish (which was originally an oil or drip pan). A classic Detroit-style pizza is cooked in the square, deep dish with the sauce under and on top of the cheese. It’s called a red top and the sauce is added in strips. I don’t need to take or leave anything. I’m not taking lessons on Detroit pizza from someone who wasn’t even born and raised in Detroit.
lol sorry I didn’t realize you were the official gatekeeper of who/what is or isn’t Detroit. I guess I’ll just ignore all of the local news networks that refer to my area as metro Detroit and the rest of the world that will say I’m from Detroit and talk to me about Detroit when I point my city out on a map. I’ll just take your word for it that I don’t belong here since I didn’t come from your specific neighborhood.
Not to mention all of the pizza I’ve had, literally from the first place you personally named as having Detroit-style pizza…
YOU don’t have to take or leave or believe anything. Really not sure why you’re centering yourself in this conversation like that. Neither the world nor the detroit area revolves around you personally and I’m not about to take food lessons either from someone with their head so comfortably shoved up their own ass…
Why would anyone take you seriously when you can’t even understand that Pontiac and Detroit are two different cities?
Just because people don’t know where Pontiac is doesn’t mean it’s suddenly the same thing as Detroit, especially when we’re discussing food from that specific city.
The only person with their head shoved somewhere is you, buddy. Don’t be clowning about our culture when you have no idea what it even is.
Detroit pizza is so fucking good. New York pizza is a greasy flap of falling toppings and Chicagoans will be the first to tell you chicago deep dish is an overrated cheese pool in a piecrust
Pretty similar, yeah.
Big difference would be that the Detroit pizza is a fair bit greasier, and the cheese goes to the edge so there’s no visible crust.
It basically makes it so that the dough is fried rather than baked.
We call this style of pizza ‘deep dish’ here in Detroit which, I suppose, is just another name for the baking tray its cooked in. Though as the other commenter said, the deep dish allows you to cover it with cheese right up to the edge, which usually ends up dark and crunchy where it touches the pan.
I’ve known people to fight over the corner pieces and I think it was Jet’s that has a whole thing with an “8-corner pizza” (as in, two smaller pizzas in a box-shaped trenchcoat, cut into quarters so that every piece is a corner piece)
Like Trump supporters. I’m done with people rationalizing and making excuses for them. They’re just shitty and I don’t care why any more. When people show you who they are, pay attention…
I still have a copy of Nero Express on a DVD in my bookcase.
Not that I use it very much - if I ever need to burn an iso Ill use xfburn or brasero or something like that, as I run Linux now. It’s more if I need to burn data onto disk’s to get it off an older PC.
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