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A perfect visualisation of a wasteful system
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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What the fuck is with this thread being overrun with dickheads? Is this the breaking point, has Lemmy reached critical mass?
The image represents how capitalism uses the myth of scarcity. There's a bed there, and there's a human being sleeping on the ground. The lie is that there isn’t enough to go around; that somebody has to go without.
That's bullshit. We have everything.
The message is that you deserve nothing and must earn everything, not that there isn't enough to go around.
Well you dont deserve anything that someone else has made...
Then go live in the fucking wood like your caveman ancestors so you can truly live of everything you made yourself.
Society is built on the shoulders of those before them, that they themselves built on the shoulders of those before them.
Stop being a dick and go help someone in your community, you will probably learn a thing or two.
If someone creates something to trade it for goods and services, thats fine, even if that means its free at the point of consumption.
If someone creates something for their own reasons, you have no entitlement to it. Please try to be less emotional with your responses, this is a discussion platform meme page after all.
Your initial point is that no one deserves what someone else did. My counter point is that since the dawn of humanity, every human has used someone's else idea or tool to make their life better.
So yeah, you owe it to everyone around you for the lifestyle you have right now.
I think you two might be working with different definitions of deserve
You're on Lemmy.
That's not the message either. There are homeless shelters, mental and health services, and affordable housing being priotized all over.
Necessities are in large free to those who need them. Nice to haves and luxury beds are not.
The annoying thing is that there will very likely be a homeless shelter in this city that he's not allowed to sleep in because they have a zero tolerance drug policy.
Your precious taxes are still going to get spent on cleaning up their mess, regardless of you wanting them to be helped or not.
That guy would walk down to the prison and give them his pay check volenteerily.
It's annoying because people who do drugs still need homes. Also not every drug user is aggressive or disruptive or whatever other reason the shelter would have for not allowing drug users.
That's just unfaithful interpretation of the argument, and you know it. US on average has 27 empty houses per a homeless person.
That's technically true, but really not important. Houses are defined as vacant if they're unoccupied on the day of a census. There's many reasons a house might be technically vacant, but not currently be able to house a homeless person.
Was the house just sold, and is it unoccupied for a week or a month between owners? It's vacant. Did the owner just move into hospice or a memory care unit and their children haven't yet sold the house because they need to arrange an estate sale? It's vacant. Is the house under construction but is mostly built? It's vacant. Is it not safe to live in, but not officially condemned? It's vacant.
Want to move to a city? Either you have to find the apartment of someone moving out, or you have to move into a vacant unit.
Having a good number of vacant homes is a good thing, actually; having low numbers of vacancies in an area leads to housing becoming more expensive because you can't move into a unit that isn't vacant. Increasing housing supply relative to population leads to higher vacancy rates, but decreases housing costs.
Housing-first approaches to homelessness seem to be good in practice. But those are typically done by either government-built housing or government- subsidized housing; it's mostly orthogonal to vacancy rates.
Are those houses like habitable right now? I agree that there is a mismatch but 1:27 ratio seems high to me.
You might be confused because typically that figure refers to 'homes', not 'houses'. Apartments and other multi-family housing types are included in that figure.
Alright but still. There must be at least a million homeless Americans if not more. That would mean 27 million housing units sitting on the market now ready to go and not be sold or rented out? That dwarfs almost any city in the US, I can't even picture it. My building has three units for rent all occupied so you would have my building in a line of 9 million other ones I guess it takes about 1 seconds to walk across the front of my building, a line of 9 million would take 2,500 hours just to walk past, or a bit under a third of a year if you walked non-stop 24/7.
This is very very large number.
Vacant homes are any home that's not someone's primary residence when they calculate vacancies.
That includes vacation homes, temporary housing for traveling workers or college students, houses that are sold or rented but haven't been moved into yet, housing held up in divorce or estate proceedings, etc.
According to the census, last year there were 15 million vacant homes. Yes, that's a lot, and yes, many can't reasonably have a homeless person live there.
It is absolutely a large number.
Might also help to know that this number likely also includes AirBNB's and timeshare rentals. 27 million, spread over 3 million square miles (size of the US) and often in high-density buildings, including units that may appear to be occupied but are transiently used for only a third of the year.
Bed stores are a problem. They sit there taking up space for what? To look pretty for people to try out different brands of bed because we like to not figure out a universal solution to the problem of making a comfortable healthy platform of material that we can lay upon for long term rest. On top of that, instead of supplying our nation with affordable housing and furniture, it is laughably ignored.
All these empty locations for these corporations to advertise products and "experiences"
We'll do that as soon as we invent the universal spine.
yes health of your posture and spine is very important too
I think his point is that any universal bed will be comfortable for some people and uncomfortable for others because people are different.
I said solution, not one bed to rule them all lol
We need something that can scientifically determine a way to get people an affordable and comfortable bed that is not just go into a giant waste of space filled with random mattresses in hopes you find the right one and will likely just pick one that is "just good enough" after a minute or two from laying on it, When its use case is meant for laying on it for about 8 hours
IKEA and Costco both sell relatively affordable bedding and furniture solutions.
Also, there are some delivery only bed companies. Ie Purple Mattress.
Some people insist on actually trying out the mattress first and spending $4,000+ on a bed.
Obviously not. The existence of homelessness isn't due to scarcity at all, it's to do with a system that tolerates (even necessitates) homelessness. The image could have just as easily been someone sleeping outside an apartment with a sign advertising available units; they sleep, freeze, and starve, because our economic model rejects their basic needs in favor of commodifying them.
It's not that hard a concept to grasp, it just seems like people have ingrained the logic of the market in their brains and can't conceptualize the issue of poverty beyond 'stuff costs money'.
Has been for a while. During the big exodus from reddit we brought with us lots of typical redditors that think being a contrarian dickhead makes them cool.
As well as lots of the usually sad little losers from across the internet that see people enjoying themselves and get the irresistible urge to make things worse.
"irresistible urge", sure, but I wouldn't give them credit for making things worse. Sure, they snicker at sticking their old gum under the desk, but it's a whole set of other issues that're burning down the building in the meantime.
We have more empty homes than homeless people.
I have. Also sheltered illegals before. Which at one point involved me having to stare down and bluff a process server. Not a moment I would like to revisit but proud of myself for doing.
👑
I had a friend who did that too, once.
Her roommates did not approve. She became homeless too at the end of the month.
Fixed.
You'll shit your pants when you will learn that liberal is center right on anywhere else but the US.
There is no such thing as "center-right" - the only differentiator between one right-winger and the next is how comfortable they happen to be with the violence that maintains their precious status quo.
Liberals are just right-wingers that prefer the violence happening somewhere where they don't have to witness it.
I still think that center is useful in that context because it tells you where their policies actually lands usually. But otherwise, I agree with you.
Fair enough.
There's a ghastly number of people who are aggressively ignorant assholes.
The point is that we don't have people sleeping on the street for a lack of... anything, really. Including beds. The point is that, when nearly everything is run for-profit, and it's even slightly more profitable to let people suffer and even die, then people will suffer and die. We do a better job selling beds than we do making sure everyone has a bed to sleep in. We could make sure everyone has access to a warm bed, shelter, food, medicine, etc., but we don't, and it's less and less acceptable to just accept the status quo just because it's the status quo. If someone thinks the status quo is defensible, it's on them to defend it.
That doesn't mean the mattress seller is evil, or (and I can't understand the logic in one of the other comments) that wanting people to be housed makes you a hypocrite if you have your own housing. And the absolutely shameless comments that openly admit they won't (really can't) explain their position, but are going to condescend anyway.
I think people's issue with it is it's just not very well thought out.
The bed store would never under any circumstance provide the bed for homeless people to access what world would that ever happen in? The problem is the homeless person doesn't have access to shelter but that's not the fault of the bed store that's the fault of the state.
The image seems to suggest that the bed store are holding all the beds for some kind of weird show of economic supremacy rather than you know the fact that it's a display room. No one's buying those beds they're display models.
No one is arguing that homeless people shouldn't be held but that particular image isn't really anything.
You've understood about 90% of the argument. That 10% is capitalism is the link between the bed store and the homeless person.
BTW, let's all go hold a homeless person. Unintentional wholesomeness.
But there being a salespoint for bed does not take home from the homeless. The issue is them being without shelter.
This is Symbolik, but not the issue at hand. Also turning commercial buildings into flats does not seem like a good/efficient solution to a complex issue like homelessness. (Disregarding living out of a car homelessness)
The other guy said it perfectly:
It really isn't more complicated than that. Any explaination why this person is not allowed to sleep in this bed or why this person should not be able to sleep in this bed is absolute bullshit.