All these Universal Basic * programs seem to work, and the only things holding them back are rich people not wanting to be taxed, and the people they have brainwashed into supporting them.
Depends on what you want. Handgun: reliable semiauto Glocks/SIGs/etc. can be had new around $500. Cheaper revolvers and semis can be had for around $200-250, but you can also go nuts and spend thousands on rarer or more pointless compensatory things like a Desert Eagle or a Smith and Wesson 500.
Shotguns: entry-level single shot break action at Walmart for around $125; the classic Remington 870 pump has Express models as low as $350 and Wingmaster models $900; popular Mossberg 500 is around $400-$500. For Benelli or something else fancy you can expect to pay much more.
Rifles: basic .22-cal Ruger with cheap scope for $125; decent .270-.308 bolt-action hunting rifles start around $300-600 with cheap scopes; entry-level AR-15 /AR-10 are in that same range with just iron sights; higher quality or more exotic round sizes start around $600 and quickly jump into the thousands. For good rifle scopes you can often expect to pay more than the rifle itself.
I think you have to have an FFL (dealer) license or pay some hefty additional fees if you want to own a fully-automatic gun. Having shot many of them, it seems like a lot more hassle and cost than they’re worth. The first couple times you shoot one are really fun, but the initial excitement quickly wears off and they just become something overly heavy you don’t want to have to carry or clean/maintain.
Used doesn’t necessarily mean less expensive, as the first thing a lot of people do is add fancypants aftermarket stuff. Models that are no longer manufactured demand a premium, as do models that are seen as historically reliable.
My numbers may be off, as I havent hunted for years and haven’t really looked at prices for 5-10 years. Truth be told, ammunition is where the real money sink lies.
A 9mm handgun can be as cheap as $100, however that is for a quite poor quality gun (hipoint). For something that is more standard, higher quality handgun like the Glock 19 is around $500.
There are some additional fees, if you buy online you have to have it shipped to an FFA which may charge you, in my state, you either need a conceal carry permit, or a ‘pistol purchase permit’ the conceal carry is like a lifetime pass to buy guns, with the idea being you proved you can be safe by doing the CCW courses and exams. The pistol purchase permit is like $15 and involves a background check.
Private sales require no ancillary permits or anything, so a used hi point 9mm could probably realistically be as low as $50-$75 if it were quite beat up.
A box of ammo for a 9mm may cost around $20 for 20 bullets depending on where you live and such.
That seems cheap and it is. But for regular use at a shooting range for example, a single box would only last a couple a minutes. If you wanted to go for an ‘all day’ thing at the range, it would cost $100-$200 (about 200 rounds) plus the fees for the range, $20 - $100 depending on the place, unless you have safe private property. Though with a hi point, it will probably fall apart before you get 200 rounds through it 😅.
Things do get real expensive though for people like shooting as a hobby, as more exotic ammo can get very expensive ($10-$15 a bullet or even higher)
Note that the “homeless” people in Finland are mainly people who refuse to accept support from the social welfare, this is because they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent. The social welfare eventually suggests a different system for such people: pay the rent for them and give a special card that can be used for anything except alcohol and cigarette. If the people keep refusing that other option, then they went homeless on their own accord and keep spending the welfare on alcohol and living on the streets. Such people are very rare in Finland in reality however, but they do exist.
Who am I going to throw quarters at? Who’s going to help me find drugs? Who am I going to blame all my problems on!!! These are the tough questions you need to start asking before you start your homelessness genocide folks…
You mean “cost” as in the cost of the collective people. Such is not given a fuck about by anyone with enough to not be a communist. That and such wealth would give zero fucks if it weren’t for the fact that this level of wealth can, instead of forcing people, simply buy anything to be done that is delirious, disgusting and more that even I don’t want to talk about here.
At the end of the day it become the choice of every individual who doesn’t want to die to sell their kid to Bill Gates who will do you know what.
I just meant that in terms of tax payer money offering homeless people cheap free housing is not more expensive than not doing that and having all these other costs go up to combat the symptoms nothing more.
When Milwaukee implemented a housing-first homeless policy, they actually saved money.
Turns out that, by almost completely eliminating homelessness, you can save a lot of money on the legal system, policing, healthcare, and other costs associated with homelessness.
Housing-first homeless policy is the obvious solution: it’s humane, it’s effective, and it saves us money.
Isn’t that what Los Angeles is currently doing? Anyway solving problem of homeless that just got unlucky and ended up on the street is the easy part. You provide support which they will use it to get back on their feet.
The hard part is that they are not the only people that are homeless. The more difficult ones are addicts, who first need to be cleaned and not all of them wants to. And the most difficult ones are mentally ill. Those should be committed to a mental institution, unfortunately during Reagan they must agree for this to happen and they obviously won’t.
While I agree that the mental health is vital, I disagree that it’s of equal importance. Housing first has a winning track record, and bundling services can deter people from using either.
Someone might be just one restful night’s sleep away from deciding that counseling isn’t a trap.
It’s worth noting that this is true for the vast majority of homeless, but the most visible contingent of homeless have severe mental issues that preclude a “housing first” approach.
Yeah, also when you throw in drug addiction. Housing-first really runs into issues with people who have destructive tendencies due to addiction or illness.
The track record of Housing First already includes people with drug addictions - it’s been tested in real-world conditions versus existing strategies. This might sound counterintuitive, but “strings attached” only makes it worse.
Having no housing precludes keeping a proper medication schedule, record keeping, and a whole list of other things.
There’s very little about mental illness that permanently frustrates sleeping indoors. Transitional housing, housing with shared bathing and kitchen facilities already exist.
That’s not how the world works. Something needs to come first. You can’t push medical treatment on people, the uptake is much worse than making available free housing.
Both are needed to be available, true. Work needs to be done so they don’t depend on each other.
It’s the only way to keep these people off the street, I dunno what else you want me to say. If you give them housing but no supportive services, they’ll just trash it and then leave back to the streets. You can say that’s not how the world works, but we’ll need it to work that way for this small subsection of homeless people.
I think the issue is the term “mental treatment”. Do you want social workers to come by once in a while? Of course: Have a talk, ask whether everything about the apartment is in order – not an inspection, more the “if the drain doesn’t work and you don’t know what to do call us” kind of thing. But that’s not therapy, it’s at most psycho-sociological counselling. Therapy in most cases won’t even work because there’s the bulk of people’s core issues is shitty life syndrome and there’s no pill against capitalism.
Psychotic schizos (acutely or otherwise) should already be in an institution and on haloperidol and for the rest of us (yes you’ve stumbled across one on the spectrum) the same applies as for normies. There’s no pills against the spectrum, either and yes we’re kinda prone to shitty life syndrome on account of shitty society seeping through our barely existent self boundaries. Housing provides space and calm to work through the shit and please make doubly sure that social worker isn’t conducting an inspection.
You can’t push medical treatment on people, the uptake is much worse than making available free housing.
And that’s IMO part of the problem, combined with some pretty bad history regarding domestic use of asylums etc.
You can’t give somebody who’s had a mental break a house/apartment/etc in the general population no-syringes-attached and maybe a once-a-week drop-in and expect things to go ok. That just results in places getting attacked with drug-fueled parties etc, and it’s not particularly great for the neighbors.
There is group housing, but again if you stick an unrepentant addict who has mental issues in with people who are trying hard to recover, that’ll negatively influence their living situation and mental health situation of those around them.
So… first-start housing needs to be in a controlled or semi-controlled environment that can allow people to recover when they’re not in a good enough mental state to make sound health/life choices. You can’t be no-strings-attached without it impacting those around them and their own ability to recover, and you just end up with a shit hole (literally in many cases) full of junkies, dealers, and people screaming at walls.
As those who are willing to improve things do so, and gain the faculties to make that decision, the housing situation and independence can change as well, but the care, housing, and healing need to go hand-in-hand with some basic ground rules for the good of all.
Why end the homelessness crisis when you can criminalize homelessness and have an endless supply of slaves to produce “proudly made in america” things for 15cts an hour ? If you think the bourgeoisie isn’t that cynical, I have a bridge to sell you. It’s the people who caused the fentanyl epidemic by getting regular folks hooked on opioids for profits we’re talking about. Who do you think’s causing the homelessness crisis in the first place ?
Why end homelessness when we can hire our political friends high salaries to hold meetings and surveys to try to think of a possible solution? In America, it is an industry in itself.
Why end the homelessness crisis when you can criminalize homelessness and have an endless supply of slaves to produce “proudly made in america” things for 15cts an hour ?
Because slave labor is notoriously inefficient relative to precarious industrial labor (particularly as your prison population ages), the cost of incarceration eclipses the savings (especially as housing/energy costs climb), and the cruelty inflicted on the populous undermines the health and well-being of the overall population in a way that stunts technological and cultural development.
States like Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma are case studies in economic mismanagement through mass incarceration. Four of the highest incarceration rates in the country and some of the worst economic growth in the nation.
Trying to treat homelessness through incarceration is a bit like trying to treat malnutrition through cannibalism. The policy is inherently wasteful and destructive, sacrificing far more than one might hope to create.
If you think the bourgeoisie isn’t that cynical, I have a bridge to sell you.
The real value of mass incarceration is not in the people you incarcerate but in the submissive atmosphere you cultivate outside the incarcerated group. Mass arrests create a functional economic blacklist of racial cohorts and social dissidents. Associating with these people can be as poisonous for your welfare as being one of them. And “high crime” neighborhoods can be targeted for “economic redevelopment” which often means mass displacement of residents through state seizure of property and other “slum clearance” measures.
I don’t doubt there’s cynicism in the modern incarceration system. But it goes a lot deeper than just “arrest a guy and press gang them”. An enormous component of the War on Crime was busting up minority social welfare groups (The Black Panthers, most famously, but ACORN and BLM in more recent iterations) and scattering their non-incarcerated members.
We’re seeing the same thing play out on college campuses. Organizers and leaders are targeted for arrest and expulsion in order to break up cliches of students focused on that individual leadership.
Even in the short-term, mass incarceration is - at best - a loss leader. And if you look at what’s happening in the UK right now, even their police and prisons are getting cannibalized by a government intent on gutting every conceivable public service.
They’re farther along the death spiral than we are, but we’re all headed in the same direction.
The major “desired” impact, I suspect, is not in direct profits from the slave labor but in the wage suppression that it causes outside of the prison population.
You’re missing a critical point. The cost of housing the inmates is borne by the taxpayers. The profit from the labor is reaped by the corporations. It doesn’t matter how inefficient it is, all the costs are borne by taxpayers, so it’s perfect for businesses.
The cost of housing the inmates is borne by the taxpayers.
The cost of housing prisoners is far higher than the cost of housing the homeless. And it isn’t as though incarcerated people weren’t employed prior to arrest.
Moving a farm worker or a retail clerk to a chain gang isn’t economically efficient even discounting the moral atrocity.
It doesn’t matter how inefficient it is.
It matters immensely. And you can see it in the sector growth of states with high incarceration rates.
The motivations behind this policy aren’t purely economic. A lot of it just boils down to fascist bigotry.
The cruelty isn’t a means to an end. It is the end itself.
The cost of housing the inmates is borne by the taxpayers. The profit from the labor is reaped by the corporations.
From a company’s perspective, you have rock bottom labor costs but you can sell your product at whatever price the market will bear.
You’re considering “the economy” as a single unit but it’s not. The public and private spheres have very different interests, and the private sphere is generally much more powerful.
Outside jobs can be coveted because they typically pay more and some states deposit a small percentage earned into a savings account for prisoners’ eventual release.
Who takes the rest? The prison.
Look up what these jobs produce and how they are remunerated.
Don’t know how Finland does it exactly. But here in Germany the rent would be paid directly by the city to the landlord. The addict would not have any real way to get to the money, because he is not involved in this process. But there aren’t enough appartments, so despite that we also have homlesness here (not at a USA level though).
Hardworking people got more shitty neigbours… Thats not a solution, its just moving the problem inside.
We have this shit in sweden and I have observed it up close. Fucker didn’t want to work nor get clean. He was comfortable with his daycare for adults… They have this thing called work training - building products that no one buys to practice working…
Had a contact that could get him a job, he just said thats for idiots and I’m not and an idiot. Rather do his work training than get a real job and a real salary…
He’s dead now, killed him self with an overdoze from the anxiety medicine they prescribed to him.
So these things looks good on paper, but in real life not so much. Hope he’s and exception and not the rule.
I personally dont believe in it, I was on the same path once. Some hard truths got me on the right path again, worked hard, took alot of shit and today cant recognize my old self.
i’m genuinely happy you were able to get yourself together.
just know that there are any number of reasons someone else might not have your strength or capacity for change, or might not yet have reached a readiness for change like you did.
They solved his immediate problem of being homeless. I’d rather have a few shitty neighbors than to have people living and dying because they lack shelter.
I wouldn’t take this comment as anything but an anecdote. This is how some homeless people can be, so the take away is that the homelessness problem cannot be completely solved with housing. Some people are just cripplingly dysfunctional. They need more than housing, they need care takers. Just handing out keys to an apartment next to families to a dysfunctional drug addict who will smoke, vandalize and play loud music at night is not fair to the neighbors. These are normal middle-class people complaining, not some billionaire who can’t stand the sight of a peasant lol.
Because it sounds like your argument is that you live in a shithole both inside and outside and it will be less of a shithole if there are a bunch of homeless people around.
So am I understanding you correctly, that you say homeless are homeless because they shat not in bathroom? Shitting in outhouse is not a preferable living condition, but it cannot be reason why they are homeless.
And his life would have been even worse if he was on the street. I honestly don’t see the problem in this story. Someone with mental health issues had a place to live? Ended up dying to suicide? It’s a sad story but also the housing doesn’t seem at fault at all?
ideally like everyone has access to housing so there’s no “taking up space”?
how do you know it was a waste of time? maybe he has loved ones who he supported and brightened the loved ones, maybe if his mental health were better supported he would have thrived? not everything is about working. his life was not a waste of time, and even if he died, I’m sure it was better to die having housing than to die on the street, forgotten and discarded.
Dont agree, in a big city with demand bigger than the supply. So many people had to stand aside for people like him to not pay rent on time, get evicted for drinking. Its not fair.
We all tried our best, but he was just selfish and didnt want to change nor be a grownup. His daughter just wasted 10 years waiting for the call or the ring on the door until it came.
If there’s a program that is supposed to provide housing for everyone, and there aren’t enough houses … it’s the government’s fault for the wait list, not the individual.
If everyone voted for a wealth tax we could have small apartments and counseling for the homeless. No more homeless in our streets. :) the surplus of cash could also improve our infrastructure. More public transportation and bullet trains 😉
I cannot upvote this enough. It also mirrors how Portugal is approaching illegal drug use - with dedicated teams of professionals providing free, compassionate care. “The commission assesses whether the individual is addicted and suggests treatment as needed. ‘Non-addicted’ individuals may receive a warning or a fine, but the commission can decide to suspend enforcement of these penalties for six months if the individual agrees to get help — an information session, motivational interview or brief intervention — targeted to their pattern of drug use. If the individual completes the program and doesn’t appear before the commission again for six months, their case is closed.”
It’s not perfect, but it is getting results: “According to a New York Times analysis, the number of heroin users in Portugal has dropped from 100,000 to just 25,000 today. The number of HIV diagnoses caused by injection drug use has plummeted by more than 90 per cent. Over the last 20 years, levels of drug use in Portugal are consistently under the European average, particularly with young people between the ages of 15-34.”
Turns out when you treat people as valuable and give them real alternatives they’ll more often than not start cooperating in improving their lives. Not all of them - the model isn’t perfect and neither are all people - but it seems to work way better than a “war on drugs/drug users” approach.
In Oregon, we attempted to model Portugal’s drug policy. The roll out was a mess and treatment centers weren’t funded for several years. Additionally, following the advice of people in the field, the measure didn’t include the mandatory meeting with the inter-disciplinary local commission like in Portugal. Instead, there was a hotline set up and possession became a citation. Unfortunately, the citation didn’t have the number to the hotline. In places like Portland, the cops at least gave out a business card with hotline number on it in addition to the citation.
Several years later, we have a roll back of the citations to making drug use illegal again. It’s not as bad as 2019, but it isn’t Portugal either. The biggest strike against it was the public use of drugs in downtown areas and in small encampments. Sadly, this was happening nation wide, but Measure 510 was blamed. And this roll back seems to have taken drug decriminalization off the table in other states altogether. I hope someone braves these waters again, but the advocates who helped design the program have seemingly shuttered their legislative pushes elsewhere.
I wonder if things would have been slightly different if we hewed closer to the Portugal model. Sad that the worst off of us will suffer.
There are definitely a lot of moving parts, and it’s hard to know which are essential until their absence causes failures. Learning how to deal with addiction is not an undertaking the world is anywhere near finishing. It hurts to hear about Oregon’s failure because a) suffering sucks and b) it may impede future efforts by way of being a bad example.
I’m not sure if this is going to work with our current system because 1) I don’t see enough punishment for their moral failures, 2) not enough profit/investment opportunities to capitalize on their vulnerable position and lastly 3) half of our two ruling parties fundamentally disagrees with the concept of a better future.
It’s a good start, but I think if you underline how we can make big money while maintaining the status quo, then we could arrive at something doable.
But if you treat drug users as human beings, where will the police get their justification for fuckmassive budgets to buy surplus military equipment painted scawwy black (because blue is SO civil servant, and olive drab just isn’t COOL enough) and pay grifters to tell them how hard their pp will get when they kill another human being???
Channel 5 has been making great documentaries on YouTube about this. No preconditions isn’t true. No drugs, need Id. Housing programs exist aswell as shelters (no Id required) but you can’t be on drugs. They exist in canada heavily. It’s not the full solution.
Vancouver, and I imagine most of Canada’s major cities are experiencing a massive homelessness crisis, I dont know of these housing programs you speak of. There certainly isnt enough provided housing to go around
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