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> You say you have been homeless. I'd like to ask you what you think of my idea: instead of giving the homeless shelter in the city, and having them drain resou

• planfaster 11y ago
  > I have been homeless, it's not something I just say. I can't verify it, so I can't say "you have been homeless" or I'd be lying about having evidence of something I don't. So I used the reported speech version, "you say you have been homeless". It was not meant as an attack, nor to be ironic, nor anything like that. > I disagree with your entire post. It's based on this false assumption, "the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment". Wrong. You could have argued that you disagree with my being against helping the poor and homeless stay in the city, as that was the only part of the post predicated on the premise that cities are wealth-creation centers. Which they de facto have been historically (regardless of intent or word definitions). In other words, all wealth produced has mostly come from cities as opposed to farms. Therefore, cities are wealth-creation centers, de facto. > Definition of a city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City Definition of "de facto" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto "in fact, in reality, in actual existence, force, or possession, as a matter of fact" > Nothing in there mentioned wealth, or welfare. Remove that personal bias/motive from your proposal and your proposal very quickly falls apart. And yet all the wealth in the world came overwhelmingly from cities, which makes them de facto wealth-creation centers. And it's a premise, not a "proposal". And the premise is correct, and your definitional refutation is a non-sequitur to it. I am arguing about what cities end up effecting in reality, and you're showing me something someone wrote on a website. If you're not going to address my arguments, you shouldn't reply to me, you should post under your own thread branch. > That is before one would progress to the more offensive part of your argument: That those with money and wealth have more right to live in a city than those without. That those who work in lower paid industries have less of a right than those in higher paid industries. Offense is in the eye of the beholder, it is not inherent to topics or arguments. If you hadn't brought your ego to this conversation, you would not have been offended. I haven't, and I'm not. I also never mentioned rights, and I have no idea what you mean by it, since you seem to be using that word in a gradual sense ("more right"... "less of a right") when to me it is a binary thing (you either have a right or you don't). But if you want me to rephrase what I said to use the word "rights", I can do it: everyone has the right to live in a city, but no one has the right to demand that others pay for them to do so. So if you have the skills it takes to live in a city (a place where you can't grow your own food and have to rely on money to use services to provide you with what would otherwise be free in your plot of farmland) and you want to, you can, because you have that right. But if you want to, and you can't afford to because you don't have the skills to substitute for manual labor, then you still have the right to live in the city, but at the moment you are unable to because you can't support yourself, and you don't have the right to demand others to pay for your expenses. Is this clear enough now? > It seems horribly convenient as a concept, that you could put the poor and homeless on buses and drive them out of your sight. The point is not to drive them out of my sight. It seems you are mischaracterizing what I am saying to make me look bad. Don't do that, it's not an argument. Even if the farm is next to my house, the point is to give the poor a way to be independent so they don't have to rely on other people's money to survive. The point is not to "drive them out of my sight", it is to teach them to fish, to be self-sufficient, and not to be dependent on others giving them fish.
• DickingAround 11y ago
  I would like to see the idea of a city as 'wealth creating' proven. It does seem much more complex an establishment. That said, if people don't own land in the city and can't afford to rent some then they should not have a 'right' to use other's land there. Land ownership is a pretty basic part of society and I'd be hesitant to give everyone 'rights' to land in a city. Those are the easy arguments to make. Let me also make a hard and unpopular one: Spreading our resources to people who won't provide ROI is a waste. In defending this, let me first claim broad experience here; I've let homeless people I barely know stay in my house and given them my keys for weeks. I have given out loans without paperwork. I've hung out with a lot of segments of society from prison inmates to college students from small towns. Just anecdotally, I think the ones who can provide real value are already finding their way through the system. For example, owning a computer and occasionally an internet connection is pretty much the only capital investment for getting a median-income job programming. I've lost count of how many poor people won't even try. Is that their fault? The fault of their upbringing? The fault of their genetics? It doesn't matter. If we throw our value away on them no one will get anywhere. Even putting aside questions of morality and property rights, if this was a communist dictatorship, the optimal choice is to play favorites with those that produce good value. And naturally we do invest in the ones that can generate value. One day that might not be true, but it still is today. Just last week I read about Ortega using Zara to turn himself from rags to richest person in the world. That's incredible upward mobility. There is more opportunity today than ever before. We just have to accept that opportunity != reality for everyone, ourselves included. I have limits. I know I won't reach the that level because I'm not good enough. But I'm good enough to admit I don't want to bring down those that can.