Tag: not just there

berniesrevolution:

BLOOMBERG

It was just after 10 p.m. on an overcast September night in Los Angeles, and L. was tired from a long day of class prep, teaching, and grading papers. So the 57-year-old anthropology professor fed her Chihuahua-dachshund mix a freeze-dried chicken strip, swapped her cigarette trousers for stretchy black yoga pants, and began to unfold a set of white sheets and a beige cotton blanket to make up her bed.

But first she had to recline the passenger seat of her 2015 Nissan Leaf as far as it would go—that being her bed in the parking lot she’d called home for almost three months. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was playing on her iPad as she drifted off for another night. “Like sleeping on an airplane—but not in first class,” she said. That was in part by design. “I don’t want to get more comfortable. I want to get out of here.”

L., who asked to go by her middle initial for fear of losing her job, couldn’t afford her apartment earlier this year after failing to cobble together enough teaching assignments at two community colleges. By July she’d exhausted her savings and turned to a local nonprofit called Safe Parking L.A., which outfits a handful of lots around the city with security guards, port-a-potties, Wi-Fi, and solar-powered electrical chargers. Sleeping in her car would allow her to save for a deposit on an apartment. On that night in late September, under basketball hoops owned by an Episcopal church in Koreatown, she was one of 16 people in 12 vehicles. Ten of them were female, two were children, and half were employed.

The headline of the press release announcing the results of the county’s latest homeless census strikes a note of progress: “2018 Homeless Count Shows First Decrease in Four Years.” In some ways that’s true. The figure for people experiencing homelessness dropped 4 percent, a record number got placed in housing, and chronic and veteran homelessness fell by double digits. But troubling figures lurk. The homeless population is still high, at 52,765—up 47 percent from 2012. Those who’d become homeless for the first time jumped 16 percent from last year, to 9,322 people, and the county provided shelter for roughly 5,000 fewer people than in 2011.

All this in a year when the economy in L.A., as in the rest of California and the U.S., is booming. That’s part of the problem. Federal statistics show homelessness overall has been trending down over the past decade as the U.S. climbed back from the Great Recession, the stock market reached all-time highs, and unemployment sank to a generational low. Yet in many cities, homelessness has spiked.

It’s most stark and visible out West, where shortages of shelter beds force people to sleep in their vehicles or on the street. In Seattle, the number of “unsheltered” homeless counted on a single night in January jumped 15 percent this year from 2017—a period when the value of Amazon.com Inc., one of the city’s dominant employers, rose 68 percent, to $675 billion. In California, home to Apple, Facebook, and Google, some 134,000 people were homeless during the annual census for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in January last year, a 14 percent jump from 2016. About two-thirds of them were unsheltered, the highest rate in the nation.

At least 10 cities on the West Coast have declared states of emergency in recent years. San Diego and Tacoma, Wash., recently responded by erecting tents fit for disaster relief areas to provide shelter for their homeless. Seattle and Sacramento may be next.

“No one is in charge”

The reason the situation has gotten worse is simple enough to understand, even if it defies easy solution: A toxic combo of slow wage growth and skyrocketing rents has put housing out of reach for a greater number of people. According to Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing giant, the portion of rental units affordable to low earners plummeted 62 percentfrom 2010 to 2016.

Rising housing costs don’t predestine people to homelessness. But without the right interventions, the connection can become malignant. Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percentcorrelated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”

(Continue Reading)

ralfmaximus:

jakovu:

saywhat-politics:

When you vote a straight democrat party it changes Beto to Cruz on some machines. If you’re in Texas and voting please RECHECK your answers. If your machine does this, notify someone working at the polling site.

The issue is with specific machines that let you push one button to vote straight-ticket, which is a “feature” that is configured by the people running the machines. 

Essentially they build a small script that tells the machine which checkboxes to check when somebody selects “straight ticket”. When used correctly it’s a nice time-saving feature.

However.

An unethical person might “incorrectly” program the feature to select whomever they want, thus hijacking votes. Of course, when caught, it’s just “a programming error” and nobody goes to jail for tampering.

The workaround is NEVER use the “straight ticket” feature if offered.

Instead, hand-select each vote then verify the results before you submit. It’s seriously not very tedious and has a much higher chance of not being messed with.

lines-and-edges:

venomanti:

venomanti:

weird how I became a much more compassionate and accepting person when I realised that drug addiction is the symptom of a problem and not the problem in itself

you also start to realise just how much the War On Drugs was actually a war against the poor, against survivors, against trans people, against sex workers, against the mentally ill and the disabled, against PoC, against queers, against the homeless. how much of it was a government manufactured ploy to sell violence against the marginalized as violence against addiction, as if addiction was not a symptom of systemic abuse.

It’s true and you should say it.

midclown120boos:

plum-soup:

Re: the new Kavanaugh accuser who said that him and his other high school (or was it college) friends would get girls drunk and run a train on them (like literal gang r*pe lets be clear about that) 

At this point I’m beginning to wonder if the people hired to investigate Kavanaugh actually knew about all of this stuff and just passed it over because they didn’t think it was important. Like I’m 100% sure they spoke to people that told them he regularly attending these kinda parties were people got drunk and vague Bad Things sometimes happened (nearly always involving boys forcing themselves on inebriated girls) but they just didn’t even see it as important because that kinda shit is more than likely extremely common in the background of Federal Judges and other Influential People. The fact is that even today, people who came up in that highly insular east coast WASP prep school bougie  society still view experiences like the one i described as “normal” and “part of growing up” for both the girls and the guys. and more than often, if the girl does speak up, she is ostracized by her former friends and schoolmates. This has happened more than once. 

The same fraternities that gang rape drunk women are the ones that produce your judges, CEOs, congressmen, etc. Remember that.

I don’t even doubt that even in full light of all these accusations, with the accusers literally begging for an FBI investigation, the rest of the GOP genuinely still thinks Kavanaugh is a great normal dude cause they are all exactly like him.

klinopinions:

It’s pretty damn worrying how much from the 20s and 30s “conservatives” are bringing back; the human rights abuses and related xenophobia, the unregulated and increasingly monopolistic ‘capitalism’, the flagrant corruption and outright disdain for the rule of law, absolutely no regard for the environment leading to widespread exploitation……the list goes on.

All of those are horrible enough on their own, but there was also a certain little economic hiccup you may have heard of that happened around that time period, with the aforementioned policies playing a huge part. 

Source: fromacomrade

naamahdarling:

kropotkhristian:

Leftists: Conservatives literally hate poor people.

Coservatives: Wow what a smear campaign. We dont hate poor people, we just want them to take responsibility for themselves!

Also Conservatives:

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/oklahoma-gop-candidate-proposes-euthanasia-disabled-poor-avoid-food-stamps/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

“Sorry but euthanasia is cheaper and doesn’t make everyone a slave to the Government [sic].”

“The ones who are disabled and can’t work…why are we required to keep them?” the Chrisforgov account responded. “Sorry but euthanasia is cheaper and doesn’t make everyone a slave to the Government [sic].”

Defending his now-deleted comments, the account admin mused as to why American taxpayers should “have to keep up people who cannot contribute to society any longer?”

“Obviously, I’m not saying the Government [sic] should put these people down,” the Chrisforgov account wrote, contradicting its earlier statement. “I’m just saying that we shouldn’t keep them up.”

Even if you do not believe the Facebook comments came from him, his own campaign website is bad enough.  Given what I read there (I won’t link to it) I’d say it’s plausible he made those posts himself.

This is what a significant percentage of conservatives (and yes, even some “liberals”) believe: that people like me are worthless and should be put down for our own good.

Better dead than a slave to the government, right?

bittersnurr:

karalora:

pervocracy:

pervocracy:

Proposal for a new law: you get a maximum of ten million dollars.

Yep, no one living or doing business in the US is allowed to own more than $10 million in personal assets.  Investments, savings, real estate, cars, gold, everything; you hit that cap, and anything over is seized and redistributed as no-strings cash payments to everyone else.  You get caught sneakily using a shell corporation or offshore accounts or anything else clever to subvert that limit, it’s a criminal penalty.  Greed in the First Degree.

I’ll be merciful here; that’s ten million per individual so your spouse and children can each have their own ten million, it’ll go up with inflation, and I won’t even include your house.  (Maximum one house per adult, and only if you actually live in it, so don’t get creative.  Farms/ranches can be counted as homes, but only if you live full-time and personally work on them.)

Yeah, this means that certain people would lose literally billions of dollars.  But they’d still have ten million!  How bad can you feel for them?  That’s still enough money that you can live comfortably without putting in another day of work in your life.  It’s very hard to make a case that anyone needs more than that.

I haven’t worked out exactly what the redistribution payments would be, but my extremely-poorly-sketched guess is at least $50K per non-ten-millionaire person when the law first goes into effect.  Not enough to be set for life, but it would be a hell of a lifeline for a lot of families.  More importantly, there would be a continuing benefit from companies being unable to divert all their profits to upper management and wealthy investors.  They’d have nothing to do with that money except reinvest it in workers and facilities.

And I wouldn’t worry about demotivating workers.  If an ordinary person is debating whether it’s worth their time to go back to school or apply for a management position or open their own shop, they’re not going to be thinking “Why even bother? All I stand to earn is ten million dollars.”  Not if they have any sense of perspective.

Oh, but high achievers will stop working or leave the country once they get their ten million.  Good!  That’s the point!  They’ve earned all the money they need, so they should let someone else have a chance!  If they love their job and don’t want to quit, they can still do it for a minimal salary and distribute the rest among their employees.  Or they can quit, and we can learn that this whole “only ultra-rare magically gifted people can be successful CEOs, so they deserve to be treated like princes” thing was a wealth-worshipping myth anyway.

We’re in an economic emergency situation right now.  20% of households with children don’t have enough to eat.  500,000 people are homeless.  More than a quarter of people struggle to pay their medical bills.  Sorry, but it’s a sad fact: Ultra-rich people are a useless luxury that we can’t afford.

I haven’t thought through all the details or economic impacts or long-term consequences of this, but I think by now it’s clear that the people who make the real laws don’t either.

To all the people replying “but rich people will just leave”:

– Well I certainly hope the door doesn’t hit their asses on the way out.  They have no irreplaceable talents or knowledge.

– There will be measures in place to prevent them from taking more than $10m with them when they move out.

– The US is a huge market and has a tremendously valuable workforce.  My plan might not work for starting a new country on an empty island, but we’ve got shit worth sticking around for.  Even if McDonald’s moves out, it will still be worthwhile to sell hamburgers to Americans.  Even if Microsoft moves out, America will still have lots of talented software engineers.  I don’t think we need billionaires to organize all our bountiful supply and demand into a functional economy.

– Foreign companies won’t be allowed to do any business here if any of their employees/partners/investors has over $10m.  This will cut us off from a lot of business, but again, because we are the US and have so much to offer, it will be worthwhile for smaller foreign businesses to trade with us, or possibly even for large ones to retire all the rich guys to come into compliance.

– I’m not entirely serious about this and I’m no economist.  I just wanted to entertain the notion of radically interrupting America’s slide into oligarchy, of taking action based on the premise that vast inequality is wrong rather than merely unfortunate.  We have to do something about this situation, so fuck it, here’s something.

I like this idea.

It reminds me of an idea I’ve entertained with a similar level of semi-seriousness: requiring all holders of federal-level public office to donate their personal assets (money and real estate) to the government as a condition of taking office. For the duration of their government service, they live in assigned middle-class housing and receive a salary equal to the median income across the entire country. Whatever said income is at the time they leave office, that becomes their pension. They are barred from receiving income from any other source, for life.

It’s tyrannical and wildly impractical, but the benefits speak for themselves. The 1% would be discouraged from holding public office (since they would forfeit their wealth), and lawmakers would have every incentive to set policies that raise the median, instead of funneling everything to the top.

Also like.

Currently people on ssi have an asset limit of 2000$. No I did not miss a 0 or anything. For perspective a wheelchair usually costs at least that by itself and this applies to a bunch of stuff, you literally are banned from saving for emergencies.

So what do you do? You go over the limit and you have to spend it. This would not have any effect on EARNED MONEY, as long as you spend it immediately upon making it. It doesn’t prevent making money, just hoarding it.

So basically this would be encoragement to say, pay your fucking employees instead of sitting on your riches like a fucking dragon as the economy tanks

zoe-of-the-veil:

gingerweed-man:

tilthat:

TIL a man once sued McDonalds for $1.5 million because of “emotional distress” he suffered after receiving just 1 napkin with his meal.

via reddit.com

Except no that’s not what happened, that’s not why he sued, he sued because when he went to ask for more napkins, the staff started racially harassing him, all over fucking napkins. As for the amount, ut was probably exaggerated by the lawyer so when the court shrinks it, McDonalds would still have to pay at least something.

There are no such things as frivolous lawsuits made by individual people.

McDonald’s (and most businesses) have insanely good pr departments. The woman who sued McDonald’s for being burned by their coffee was turned into the face of “people will sue over anything” because suing over coffee being hot sounds ridiculous, right? Except for she was literally burned to the bone. The pictures are nauseating. What she went through was horrifying.

If you ever find yourself ridiculing an individual on a company’s behalf you’re probably just repeating pr propaganda