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I think your "Just for context" provided no context at all to the statistic provided or anything to do with my observation that tech workers' treatment of thems

I think your "Just for context" provided no context at all to the statistic provided or anything to do with my observation that tech workers' treatment of themselves is different than that they advocate for the homeless. You brought the character of the person making a claim about a statistic into a tangent that had nothing to do with my comment. That's an ad hominem. With respect to the $100K a homeless person, I quite frankly find that absurd. If it was a spending problem, you could pay them the money directly and they'd be richer than most Americans.

akiselev 8y ago
Have you really thought about that $100k number? I live in Seattle and I can tell you from a close friend's experience that an uninsured ambulance ride and emergency visit for a serious condition is ridiculously expensive, even after negotiating the cost down with the healthcare providers. We're talking tens of thousands for a concussion and I don't even want to know what the costs are for drug over doses, psychiatric holds, and the multitude of medical problems that result from roughing it in Washington winters. Throw in the cost of police responding to reports of vagrants, social workers, and all the other infrastructure and 100k a year seems very reasonable. We're talking about less than 1% of the population in the most extreme living circumstance that usually find themselves in that spot because all other systems have failed. Of course it's going to be crazy expensive helping that last (quite literally) marginalized group. Thats why Utah just started paying for housing. They figured out that the follow on costs to homelessness were huge and for many subgroups of the homeless population it's much cheaper to just pay for their shelter than to pay for all the other things that are certain to go wrong that will require state intervention anyway.

akiselev 8y ago

Have you really thought about that $100k number? I live in Seattle and I can tell you from a close friend's experience that an uninsured ambulance ride and emergency visit for a serious condition is ridiculously expensive, even after negotiating the cost down with the healthcare providers. We're talking tens of thousands for a concussion and I don't even want to know what the costs are for drug over doses, psychiatric holds, and the multitude of medical problems that result from roughing it in Washington winters. Throw in the cost of police responding to reports of vagrants, social workers, and all the other infrastructure and 100k a year seems very reasonable. We're talking about less than 1% of the population in the most extreme living circumstance that usually find themselves in that spot because all other systems have failed. Of course it's going to be crazy expensive helping that last (quite literally) marginalized group. Thats why Utah just started paying for housing. They figured out that the follow on costs to homelessness were huge and for many subgroups of the homeless population it's much cheaper to just pay for their shelter than to pay for all the other things that are certain to go wrong that will require state intervention anyway.