How live "homeless people" in your country ? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Miyuki
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 08:14:31 pm
content: This might be little controversial.As I had to use public transport last few days I saw something I want to talk about.When I go to work at morning (like 9 - 9:30 am) they are sleeping around train train station, in park at benches or just in grass.When I go home about 5 pm they sitting everywhere drinking beer, cheap wime and spirits, smoking cigerets and laughting. They have party every day a year.How live this kind of people in your country, around the world ?

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 08:37:55 pm
content: Quote from: Miyuki on August 28, 2017, 08:14:31 pmThat's very common unfortunately and I think many are on hard drugs, not just the legal ones. Here in the UK spice (synthetic cannabis) is a big problem. It's much worse than the real thing and only exists because real cannabis is illegal.By the way, this sort of controversial topic is normally not allowed here.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 08:42:31 pm
content: In my city they normally keep to themselves. They are often just poor and unable to get work no matter what they do (who wants to hire a bum off the street sorta deal). I do give some of the nicer ones money on occasion when I can.

author: daqq
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 08:44:26 pm
content: It's hard to say something universal here.Yes, you have people, who pretty much drink, drug and smoke away all of the meager earnings, involved in all kinds of dubious behavior but these are the most visible kind - as such they may give a distorted impression about a massive group of people, most of whom you do not get to see and distort your observation.There are those that make an actual effort, taking miscellany jobs, staying at shelter houses, selling Nota Benne (or similar projects) and pretty much trying to get back into life, or if not that then at least get of the bottom.I do not know the statistics for Slovakia. As I've said - I've seen those you speak of and I've seen those I've speak of, and there's a whole spectrum in between.As to the drugs: Alcohol is bad enough to do lots of damage when the person using it is an idiot. It's really scary how easily people can get so deep into shit they can't get their selves out.

author: abraxa
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 09:13:09 pm
content: QuoteYeah, like the ones who dig through thrash cans in hopes to find some food. They're too proud to beg and will be extremely happy if someone appreciates that and gives them something for free. I always wonder why these people can't get back on their feet. Germany offers such people a lot of help if they're willing to accept it.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 09:32:57 pm
content: Recently I've lived in Wellington, New Zealand and Moscow, Russia. Both have very few homeless people.In Wellington, the social welfare people get to people on the street pretty quickly. There was one guy who was so determined to refuse help and simply wanted to live that way that he's famous enough to have a wikipedia page:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_HanaIn Moscow ... it's -20 to -25 for a week or so, once or twice per winter. And below -15 for several months. Not easy to live on the street. Well-used street underpasses and metro station entrances get their share of buskers and beggars. The beggars are almost completely in three groups: 1) elderly women, 2) pregnant teenagers, 3) youngish men with missing limbs (usually both legs) and wearing military uniform. Unlike many other places, the beggars are sitting or standing quietly, head bowed, holding out their hand with hat or bowl or whatever.I've seen no evidence of people sleeping in the underpasses and metro stations. If there are people roughing it in other places, they are unobtrusive.

author: IanMacdonald
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 09:50:39 pm
content: Well, I've always thought it a bit of a paradox that single people who can't afford a roof over their head have to make do with a cardboard box, yet married couples, neither of whom have a job and are spending all their time boozing and popping-off children, get the Ritz treatment at public expense.Round here we have quite a few homeless, and they're mostly quite inoffensive people who've just fallen on hard times. Some have more qualifications than I have.At the same time, we have feral gangs of youths going round spraying graffiti, yelling obscenities and destroying property. Absolutely disgusting individuals. These are the unwanted children of the unemployed, who were only spawned for the sake of the handouts that having children provides.A rethink on these policies is needed.

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 10:04:39 pm
content: QuoteQuoteI wish I had a job like that.

author: b_force
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 10:37:45 pm
content: It depends a little where you go.Unfortunately, most of them just want money for (hard) drugs or booze and don't seem to be very friendly where I am from.If you offer to buy some food (which I sometimes do), they even refuse it.After a while you kind of know who they are.We seem to have a new kid around, which I feel really really sorry for, he is maybe in his 20s at most.He doesn't annoy or bother people and seems very respectful.I seriously have been thinking about how to get these kind of people back on track again.To start some kind of community organization or something.The government doesn't seem to do a whole lot to fix it.

author: ez24
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 10:57:17 pm
content: Quote from: b_force on August 28, 2017, 10:37:45 pmWhere I live there is an organization that helps. I recently had a heart attack and now I want to down size so I have started giving most of my stuff to this organization (Father Joe's). I have not started on my electronic stuff yet.It is painful putting the stuff in boxes and painful seeing it go into their truck, but after a couple of weeks I feel good about it.I bet there is a community organization that helps them near you.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 11:15:31 pm
content: A very great many people in the US are homeless, unfortunately. More all the time. Its particularly tragic how a growing number of children are homeless. Nowadays, statistics are telling us that one in seven children in New York City public schools is homeless, for at least some of the school year.In my opinion, what's happening is basically a sea change, a transition in the nature of much work. We're devoting a lot of energy into saving labor and its succeeding. Experts in computer science estimate that around 40% of our jobs, globally, are likely to vanish due to automation within the next few years. Then an additional 40% of today's jobs in developed countries (mostly office jobs) may shift to lower cost countries and be done over the Internet as a "bridge to automation". This is claimed "will make business much more profitable" because of reduced costs. However those making these rosy estimates in Washington, Brussels and Geneva fail to take into account the global loss of customers due to wide scale unemployment. Also, I think they are overestimating economic growth in developing countries. (They are making the assumption that wealth there will be shared, leading to increases in consumption of Western-originated products. I think this assumption is faulty, I don't think that wealth gained there will be shared, so I don't think its worth trading away precious, vanishing high skill service jobs for market access to those countries.)We should treat homeless people based on the way the person acts, and not assume homelessness is the result of personal failings or vices. (Maybe homelessness in Europe is less common than it is here in the US because of the EU's much more generous social programs, which make it so most of those who lose jobs can remain housed for some time. Here, many less skilled and/or less educated, especially single families with young children and older people with health problems, as the US is the worst country in the world to be chronically ill in, are struggling. )Its unlikely to get any better without a realization that we're all in the same boat when it comes to our future planet. Studies have shown that the "American exceptionalism" of bygone days has largely shifted to Europe (except for immigrants, who do better han native born Americans)Unfortunately, what that means is that the biggest predictor of social class in the US today is the economic status of one's parents. (the US is now even more socially stratified than the situation in Western Europe used to be.)Meanwhile, in the EU, the prioritizing of education over the last few decades has led to real gains in social mobility. Many countries, like Germany, pay for their citizens to go to college, and most of Europe has for decades, (since before the creation of the WTO, which cut off the ability of countries to implement it) had public healthcare systems which prioritize high quality health care over profits. (although this may change due to the Services Directive that emerged from the Lisbon Treaty, which creates a plethora of new rights for corporations.)Globally, it seems the wealthy are putting their wagons in a circle, as it were. Perhaps they see themselves as entitled to lower wages by supply and demand and indeed that is what is predicted by standard economic models. A race to the bottom on wages for the remaining jobs.However, that's a mistake, because unless we radically change our priorities to fund substantial increases in public education, its quite likely that within many of our lifetimes, eventually we will live in a world where jobs are rare and unemployment is the norm rather than the exception. That will lead to a huge increase in the cost of living as many of the things we take for granted are based on trust which we will lose. That will help nobodyAutomation's rise shouldn't lead to elimination of public education as some are suggesting. Instead it should lead to a different approach to both work and learning.Looking into the future, its clear to me that nobody is likely to get good enough at what they do to have a "guaranteed job" in the work environment of the future, unless they really love it enough to devote a substantially larger amount of effort to it than most people do today.Additionally, very high levels of stress basically cause so much illness they have the potential to render large portions of the population unfit to work. Because stress hormones are neurotoxic.Now, imagine if only the people who really wanted to work needed to. This would be good for students because they could move forward far faster.I think its inevitable that we will live in a welfare state of some kind in the future. What we need to do is create a society that does not exclude most people on the basis of money - when nobody needs to work. That's a recipe for disaster.The sooner we come to terms with that fact the sooner we can start figuring out how to make that a world we all enjoy living in, one where the future of humanity is bright, instead of a nightmare.We are going to have to grow up, stop posturing, and start behaving like the citizens of an increasingly linked global community that we are.Rather than trying to take advantage of one another we need to start figuring out how to deal with these changes positively as they are pretty much unavoidable.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2017, 11:16:58 pm
content: Here in the US it is probably not very different from much of the world. The answer is complex.Some are insane. This is one area which may be different than the rest of the world. A few decades ago some crusaders campaigned against the unfairness of incarcerating people diagnosed with mental disorders. This campaign coincided with a political need to reduce spending so the institutions were closed and a great many of those people ended up homeless as they are literally unable to function in society, both because of their problems and because of lack of training.Some have come across hard times. A devastating illness, or fire or flood or whatever. These people are sometimes only temporarily homeless and eventually make it back into the normal world, but others find the climb back too hard. Before they were homeless they were frequently hanging on by the fingertips to the bottom economic rung.And finally there are the lazy, often drunkards or druggies.All of these people live on some combination of begging, charitable handouts, dumpster diving and government support programs. I don't know the percentages of the three categories, or if there are more categories, but do know that there are at least some of each of those three types. You generally can't tell them apart by looking, but it takes only a few minutes of conversation to get a lot of insight.If anyone in the world has a real answer (humane) to this problem it sure hasn't turned up in the US.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2017, 12:01:10 am
content: I wonder how much of the mental illness we see is PTSD caused at least in part by being homeless?Also, the difficulty of getting one's first decent job today is quite substantially higher than it was back in the last century when I was growing up.Employers that used to hire young people and teach them the ropes now have access to a vast pool of would be "interns" who will work for free.That makes the better jobs much more difficult to get for young people without those family resources.And it gets much worse as they get older if they never get their foot in the door.Quote from: CatalinaWOW onTodayat 17:16:58

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2017, 12:14:08 am
content: I am sure that some of the mental illness is PTSD. But we did empty our mental institutions, and have not re-opened them. Unless the incidence of serious mental illness has gone down since then the problem still exists. People with these severe problems have only their families to turn to now. These people can be very hard to live with, and often don't make decisions in their own best interests and so even those who have families potentially able to support them are either turned out or decide to leave.

author: retrolefty
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2017, 01:20:55 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on August 29, 2017, 12:14:08 amI feel that mental illness among the homeless is complex and hard to solve. It's not just funding matters but legal as many judicial rulings have prevented the ability to have someone committed against their will. Personal freedom rights are very big here.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2017, 04:12:40 am
content: I am sure they are thinking they can convince the country of their lack of malice by pretending to be so dumb that they think by treat sick (or unemployed) people badly enough, they all will just snap out of it and get better, or get jobs that don't exist, or go elsewhere, or die..

author: BradC
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2017, 08:21:50 am
content: Quote from: retrolefty on August 29, 2017, 01:20:55 amExcuse my alteration but (at least in Australia) it's a much bigger problem than just the homeless. I don't know about your health system, but while we pride ourselves on a universal healthcare system, that only applies to physical things you can fix. If you don't have the personal means to finance professional help for mental illness, our system is not equipped to assist you in more than a token manner. It makes no difference if you are homeless or work a 12 hour shift just to pay the rent.

author: Miyuki
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2017, 08:40:05 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on August 28, 2017, 11:16:58 pmI think here is big difference between US and EUHere in EU we have big welfare system, it is not perfect, but cover almost everyone who want it, from homeless shelters with food and clean clothes, to stable social housingAnd mostly free healthcare and open mental institutions

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 29, 2017, 08:44:40 am
content: Sorry but this is not appropriately on-topic for this forum.