Yeah, I’m addicted.
Addicted to the good old outdoors.
“Worth” = “cash”
So I’ll bite …let’s say he’s right and they’re “not” homeless they’re suffering from mental illness, drug addiction or a combination of both WHILE being homess.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to actually fucking help those in need especially now we know they’re struggling with homeless AND other incapacitating issues.
Society should be judged on how they treat the weak, struggling members of society. They are not a burden but real people hurting, and we are all closer to homeless than we think.
There is also a cynical neoliberal argument that one could make. By helping those homeless people, they are reintroduced to the economy. They will produce value, consume products, and not dedicate on the sidewalk. In other words it’s a good investment.
So if I’m being honest, after reading Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, I see absolutely no need to ever embrace anything from the Chicago School of Economics or any bullshit Neoliberal ideology, it only serves to transfer wealth to private hands.
Even when my objective and a Neoliberal objective inadvertently line up, they are not the good guys.
I agree with you all the way. However, this is a very good talking point if you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t care about human decency or empathy
Then that person shouldn’t be allowed to make any decisions regarding other people
I hate that I’d even have to entertain that as a reason, or spew it at those who just won’t care about any other argument.
When it comes to the homeless, some are forced into that situation (see: tent cities coming up around metros during COVID, 2020-2023 ish, some are ongoing), while others, mostly long term homeless, are either there because of mental illness or drugs, or stay there because of mental issues/drugs.
It can be both cause and effect.
Dehumanizing the homeless as all drug addicts and mentally ill people is unnecessarily cruel. A lot of them simply need help and support, whether that support is stable and affordable (cheap/free) housing, and food banks, or more broad social services like drug rehab, and mental health assistance.
Some mental health conditions are difficult to treat, like those with paranoid schizophrenia, who are constantly fighting with voices telling them that any medication to alleviate the symptoms is poison or something like that. This is just one example of many; but the majority of mental health conditions are very easily treatable.
However, with the US healthcare system in such a wretched condition as it is, though it has improved somewhat, it is not built for the people who need the most help, or need help more significantly or urgently, such as those who are homeless.
IMO, the watermark of how “good” a society is, in no small part, is demonstrated by how we regard and “deal with” homelessness. Needless to say, America ranks pretty low on that list.
Compared to something like the National defense budget, making even the smallest move towards helping the homeless would be a massive help, for a relatively small cost. In no small part because everyone would ask where the money is coming from.
Where does any money come from? When a society issues bonds for more currency from the “global banks”, and gets, say $100M to spend, then in a year, they owe $103M on that debt, but only have $100M in total currency, what then? This “debt” will never be paid. Also, for an international superpower, who do they owe this money to? Who are you in debt to?
The Fiat money system is a sham and the currency has no value at all. It’s simply the worthless material we use as a middle man for the barter system. I trade my effort/labor for this worthless paper, and this worthless paper grants me the ability to feed and house myself. Rather than my labor being paid for in… I dunno, coal? Wheat? Coffee beans? Then me having to trade that for something the grocer wants, and something my landlord wants. It’s stupid.
Musk is a moron, but if you think $20 billion could end homelessness, so are you
He isn’t a moron, he’s just a narcissistic sociopath. Musk is no different than you at the yolk of a WWII bomber. He has no idea what he’s doing.
But in his element, he’s dangerous and does very well know what he’s doing.
Musk doesn’t care about the homeless. He cares about their labor and how much he and his buddies can get it for free. If being homeless and sleeping in your car is suddenly illegal nationwide, then many of us will be forced into rents we don’t want to pay or end up in Musk’s labor camp with the rest of their undesirables.
It was never about helping anyone.
You’re a moron if you don’t think $20,000,000,000.00 wouldn’t raise millions of people out of homelessness and poverty.
Sure it would help significantly. It would most likely be the most successful initiative in human history. But it won’t “end homelessness”.
How would you know ?
My wife is a tenured professor of macro social work for a major university, specializing in underserved populations. She studies these things.
You don’t think ~$31,000 spent productively per every single homeless person in the US could effectively reset the homeless crisis?
Sure it would help significantly. It would most likely be the most successful initiative in human history. But it won’t “end homelessness”.
I feel like that’s pedantry on whether the definition of “end homelessness” means, 0 homeless forever vs, homelessness is a small, manageable problem again.
And if say, half of that 20 billion were put in a perpetual trust it could give a perpetual budget of 100s of millions of dollars to fund maintenance and social work staff to continue to better manage the problem.
Possibly, but the text already specifically says “in America”. I feel like if you add qualifiers like that, you have already partitioned the problem as far down as you intended.
I guess but then you have to stop expanding what they mean by the solution. You’re not partitioning the statement of the problem any further but you’re seemingly appending “forever” to the end of the solution as well as other problems that go along with homelessness. $30,000 each is enough to get every currently homeless person in the US some form of legal shelter, by definition ending homelessness in the US, however briefly.
Funny. So less public health would do what exactly to benefit the homeless/insane?
So-called genius can’t fathom that in many cases the mental illness and drug addiction came from the homelessness.
I have anxiety and likely some deep seated depression that would rise up with a vengeance if I didn’t have a warm home and access to food. I also love drinking wine, and while I do have access to said home and fridge, this wine hobby is cute and socially acceptable.
Make me homeless and I’d very much represent a mentally ill substance abusing human like Elmo is describing there. They’re not ‘them’; they’re just us in a different reality.
If Elon suddenly became “homeless” he would have a sign begging for ketamine & screaming “put I never went to therapy on my tombstone”.
They are drug addicts and mentally ill because usa has no safety nets for such people
We were supposed to take care of these people after de-institutionalization. We didn’t.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/special/excerpt.html
We broke the promise and now it is their fault. What a bizarre world we live in.
Republican playbook. Cheat, be an asshole and don’t ever care for anyone else than yourself. Classy and on Brand
Zero is the amount of drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers that Elon has built. Zero is the amount of mental health facilities.
Zero is also the amount of mental health therapy Musk probably had, unfortunately.
Is this older or does his wealth just fluctuate ±100 billion as stocks fluctuate? Recently read he was at 450 billion. What’s crazy it losing or gaining 100 billion really doesn’t change much with his wealth.
In short, yes.
See this graph: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-stock-spacex-valuation-xai-neuralink-trump-charts-2024-12
There’s full time employees that are homeless. Go out to a bridge, find a homeless person, ask how many homeless people they know that are working 40hrs a week. An alarming number. Looking forward to the violent end to elon musk. His violent games, have very violent ends.
The guy who is so addicted with twitter engagement boostingbhis ego he bought it for himself just to go full fascist. Is calling homeless people addicts lol.
pretty sure you can’t end homelessness with $20b unless we’re talking about absolute homelessness or something…
pretty sure you can’t end homelessness with $20b
The math is straightforward: Cost of a housing unit * number of unhoused people. Even assuming the extraordinarily inflated market rate for housing in 2024, $20B is more than enough to house 650k people.
Now, will the institutional actors that produced homelessness stop existing? Will we see an end to predatory lenders, robo-signed foreclosures, police harassment and civil asset forfeiture of the working poor, and unregulated real estate scammers targeting our most vulnerable neighbors? Probably not.
But we wouldn’t have so many billionaires running about squandering our national wealth on vanity projects like Twitter without billions to be fleeced from the public to begin with.
$20B is more than enough to house 650k people
I got curious, so I whipped out my phone’s calculator. $20B/650k = $30,800, give or take. I truly don’t know if that’s enough to break the cycle of homelessness, but if it is that seems like a pretty low number. We spend 40x that number on the defense budget, which is totally a jobs program but it seems like fighting homelessness would also ultimately be a jobs program.
That could be the cost to house people who are otherwise unhoused, aka “homeless”
The word “homeless” (without a home) literally as descriptive and neutral as possible. Elon Musk: Propaganda
