14 ms·

This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course we'd be more emotionally involved if it was someone we knew, that's not hypocritical. Most people aren't aga

• ranger_danger 4y ago
  • tut-urut-utut 4y ago
    > You do realize that KaiOS is Chinese, right? What's the point of this comment? Google is American, so what? And people all over the world still use it regardless.
    • yardstick 4y ago
      And Linus is Finnish!
    • j_k_eter 4y ago
      [flagged]
  • Bakary 4y ago
    Is that really your only takeaway here? Feels like a parody of HN comments. It could be any other equivalent, I don't know. Even if it's KaiOS the homeless probably have other things on their mind than the CCP or whatever.
• reaperducer 4y ago
  homelessness is definitely something that affects a ton of people so it definitely is our problem as long as we are city dwellers. We have to break out of the stereotype that homelessness is a city problem. It isn't. Far from it. Homelessness is more obvious in cities because there are fewer places for homeless people to be. But there are plenty of homeless people camped out in rural and suburban towns, if you know what to look for. I recently lived in a snooty city suburb where most of the homes cost from $600,000 to $10 million, and guess what — the drainage tunnels beneath the Home Depot, the maintenance underpasses in the parks, the undeveloped wooded lots were all full of homeless people. Promulgating the notion that homelessness is a city problem is what allows suburban and rural politicians to cut funding for homeless services because "it doesn't affect my constituents."
  • throwawaysleep 4y ago
    If you can't notice it is what makes it not a problem for most people.
    • reaperducer 4y ago
      It's absolutely noticeable, even obvious, but people choose to not see it.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    What I mean is that it's almost impossible not to be affected if you are a city-dweller, it's a lot harder to ignore. Most will ignore it, but still acknowledge it as a problem for them. Even in a cynical and dehumanizing way.
• upsidesinclude 4y ago
  I would argue yours is a poor point of comparison and you have missed the forest. google isn't requiring specific 2FA data, like address, because they are stalwart guardians of data. They are harvesting data because that is their business. The homeless don't have enough data to be of value to an entity like goolge
  • blfr 4y ago
    Google demands 2FA because popped accounts are used to abuse their services. Homeless people don't have enough of anything to be an attractive target for advertisers.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    If Google were to shrivel up and dissolve, I would not mind at all. But what's currently happening is that a metric ton of people are using their free email service and won't stop doing so any time soon, and so they had an incentive to hand-hold and force along 2FA that coincides with some form of public utility: fewer security breaks and financial ruin for massive globs of vulnerable, tech-illiterate people.
• peatmoss 4y ago
  > Actually giving homes to the homeless would probably be cheaper than whatever we are doing now, even taking into account the mental illness and drug-abuse problems that factor into this. This point is worth reiterating. Homelessness can be solved by providing housing. Yes, homelessness is a complex multi-faceted problem, but the first order solution to the problem is to provide housing. Homelessness is a problem with huge externalities to society. Put another way, homelessness is an enormously expensive solution to the problem of providing space for humans to live.
  • warent 4y ago
    Unfortunately it's more complicated than this. There have been nonprofit organizations and government initiatives to give homeless people space in unoccupied hotels for example. What ends up happening is they generally just destroy the living space in a variety of ways. It's because the majority of homelessness is an issue of mental health. In the USA, there are pretty much zero mental health resources for people in poverty.
    • jakelazaroff 4y ago
      The problem is multifaceted. And homeless people are not a monolith. There are large cohorts for whom simply receiving a home would make life significantly easier.
      • newaccount2021 4y ago
    • acdha 4y ago
      What sometimes ends up happening. It’s true that we have huge gaps for mental health and substance abuse but there are examples (famously, Salt Lake City) of such programs working. The mixed history says we need to take the problem seriously, not give up.
    • faitswulff 4y ago
      There's a positive feedback loop between mental health and housing, so it takes more than tilting either end of the equation to fix it.
• jakelazaroff 4y ago
  I like your comment because it gradually stumbles upon the actual solution. We aren't being ambitious enough, but developing a device designed to be harder to steal or lose is timidly incremental. By the last paragraph, we're talking about ending homelessness entirely. That is an ambitious — but achievable! — goal, and one that actually addresses the root of the problem.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    If you mean a stumble in the sense that I'm not truly aware of the implications of what I'm proposing, that's not really the case. I personally believe we could be yet more ambitious than what I am describing here, but I realize that most people aren't going to be on board. So the next best thing is to propose a different framework of looking at the problem and a different methodology for looking for solutions. A dedicated device would be incremental, yes, but what matters is that if we unlock the capacity to think towards this sort of innovation the big changes will follow naturally.
    • jakelazaroff 4y ago
      Just to clarify, I meant “stumble” as in it seemed to be somewhat stream of consciousness; just happening to end up at “give everyone a home” rather than planning a route there from the opening sentence.
• highwaylights 4y ago
  To be fair, some of us have been calling attention to this problem for a long ass time, and nothing is being done about it. E-mail needs to be a regulated utility, given that getting locked out of one’s email happens all the time with catastrophic consequences.
  • pas 4y ago
    Don't single out email. The problem is much larger than that. Any big megacorp nowadays figured out that the best way to do whatever they are doing is to provide the service to the median consumer, and just cut the rest out as perfectly as they can. It started with the idiotic get a number to wait in line at the branch offices, IVR audio labyrinths on the phone, completely useless self-service portals, and now there are no branch offices anymore, and in many cases the "helpdesk" is just a dumb caricature of a robot in a fucking submenu of a tragedy of a hacked together mobile app. Sure, it's great that gmail is cheap, after all "it's free". But Google (and MSFT, fuck outlook.com in particular for their completely anti-competitive spam "protection" that only accepts email from other big providers) cross-finances gmail from their ad business, completely distorting every kind of service and product markets. --- For email in particular what's needed is a LetsEncrypt-like community-driven solution for reputation management and acceptance of emails from reputable sources by the big inbox providers.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    Why does email need to be a regulaty utility when there are other methods of communication?
    • highwaylights 4y ago
      Great question! The long version (if it’s patronising please skim forward, I’m writing as an explainer for anyone else that comes along): E-mail was originally a means to communicate informally between two participants over the Internet. In this early version of the system the message would leave your machine, go to your Mail server, then the recipients mail server, then their inbox. This would complete the transmission and a copy would exist at both ends. Companies providing ostensibly free online e-mail inboxes have slick sign-up funnels that on the surface seem to be offering a very similar system as the one above, with very little in the way of regulation around either the sign-up funnel or the mailbox (and which do not explain the catastrophic life consequences that can occur as a result of losing access to your mailbox). These new mailboxes work differently from those of the early Internet, though: 1) Your mail is sent to your mail server. A copy may or may not be retained locally. 2) Your mail server transmits the message to the recipients mail server as before. 3) The recipient receives a notification of the e-mail and may or may not retain a copy locally. This infrastructure is ubiquitous and now not quite 30 years after the early Internet we have an issue where you’ll be required to have an e-mail address for almost all public services and common accounts that have little to no online component. Your entire life, more or less, may pass through that inbox. If one day you lose access to the account (in that you insert your password and the provider says no), you will lose access to your entire e-mail history. You may attempt to reset some passwords for essential services, but you can’t, because they’re sending e-mails to verify your identity - which you’ll never be able to receive. You move on, create a new account, and attempt to start over. However, e-mails - potentially important e-mails containing personal information - continue to be delivered to a mailbox that you can’t access ever again. Maybe you miss some important alerts. Perhaps it was a gmail account that had your entire photo and video history in google photos. That’s now gone too. With your passwords, if you’re using chrome passwords. You rebuild, and a couple of years pass, and perhaps someone else gets access to your account (either through a hack, or a rogue employee with access rights, or someone who guessed a badly thought out password). You never find out that the account was accessed, so have no-one to complain to, and maybe you end up with savings or 401K/pensions getting emptied. Which in a lot of cases wouldn’t be discovered until they’re due to be collected. Some of the above might sound far-fetched, but you’d be surprised how much having access to an email inbox is accepted proof-of-identity in 2022. Hence the need for regulation.
• bArray 4y ago
  > Having Google change their 2FA system for this group would be one such decision. It could be opt-out. > It's similar to the 'think of the kids + terrorism' attacks on encryption. No, it's not. Nobody choosing whether _they_ enable 2FA affects your decision to use it or not. It's more like forcing drugs down somebody's throat because you believe it benefits them and everybody else is doing it anyway. > Why is it such a hassle to keep the same number after a theft? We could investigate there too. Sim-jacking. Somebody could claim to have lost it and just take your number. This has happened before. The problem of authentication is fundamental in security and Google are just passing the buck onto phone service providers. > Heck, if we want to focus on Gmail, why not focus on why it's the default choice for the homeless to begin with, as opposed to removing features. Because it's free and the emails don't bounce. Most big tech has 2FA now.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  > The problem here is that misapplied empathy can lead to terrible decisions. That's not the problem, that's a vague wave at a generic class of innuendo that could be used just as easily to rationalize not allowing your child to eat ice cream or Japanese internment. You have to make the case why Google changing their 2FA system is so much more important than the homeless having phone service, you can't just say "sometimes, empathy can be bad." I'm not getting that from the rest of the comment, which seems like a gish gallop around a bunch of other things that we're also not going to do for the homeless, and about which you or somebody else can say "it's only human to be worried about other people going through these issues, but empathy can be bad. The answer isn't that HUD should change the second line of the third section of Form B, it's that we should fix the homeless problem completely." edit: We can't use as an excuse for not making small changes that we should be making larger changes. The excuses that one makes to avoid making small changes will apply more so to larger changes.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    I can make a very specific case for it. Out of 1.5+ billion users, millions of which are barely tech-literate and vulnerable, with gmail a constant target for malicious entities. That means intuitively at least hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people getting cleaned out of their life savings. Changing things for billions in exchange for a marginal benefit to thousands is bizarre. It's not a 'gish gallop' but a framework for looking at the issue. I'm not saying that empathy is sometimes bad, I'm saying that it can't be the starting point for our reasoning. It can be the impetus that makes us act, but the actual solution should come first. Sure, maybe none of the things I'm proposing will be implemented. Maybe they're all godawful ideas, but I can't fix the problem in the five minutes it took to write the post or even five decades of intense research on my own. But it's clear that keeping to that pseudo-empathy performative martyrdom mindset is an active roadblock against the more ambitious solutions. And it leads to truly awful ideas such as getting rid of encryption, rights, and so on.
    • rini17 4y ago
      So you don't want Google to do anything or what is the purpose of all this verbiage? Which moreover, unjustly dismisses whole issue as "marginal benefit to thousands". Being able to keep/recover email address is so much more than a marginal benefit, and there are many more than thousands of homeless in the US alone.
• tbagman 4y ago
  Homelessness in the US is a complex problem. I found the Soft White Underbelly interview series by Mark Laita insightful when learning more about it: https://www.softwhiteunderbelly.com https://www.softwhiteunderbelly.com Mark spent considerable time earning the trust of LA's skid row population – a large roadside tent community – and has a series of 1:1 interviews with a slice of the population, exploring their histories, challenges, preferences, and culture. Mark doesn't believe that many (most?) of the skid row population would benefit from being provided with housing, and that issues of trauma, mental health, and childhood family environment are what he believes would have the highest leverage on the problem. This is of course just one perspective on the problem, but Mark's perspective taught me quite a bit.
  • tayo42 4y ago
    I have a feeling that the issue isn't homelessness really, but the kinds of people that end up homeless cause problems anyway. Someone won't stop being violent or committing crime because they got moved from a tent to a studio. I don't think the temporally homeless, like someone down on their luck. makes up the issues people have with homeless. You see some crazy person, then you see that person is homeless, your answer to that is "oh give them a studio apartment!" and not lets help them with their issue. Police should be policing violent people, for some reason instead of that we want to build homes in the middle of nowhere and drop them off their. They're still going to cause issues.
    • MichaelCollins 4y ago
      I think people would be a lot more compassionate towards homeless people generally if the violent and destructive subset of homeless people were put in prison where they belong. With the awful ones out of the way, the peaceful sympathetic homeless people would become the public face of homelessness and the general public would be much more willing to to address their problems constructively (e.g. provide housing to them.) But instead the justice system is set up to give effective impunity to the worst sort of homeless people; they're back on the street days after being arrested (if they are even arrested in the first place.) They cause incredible damage and commotion, so they hog all the public attention and give all homeless people a very bad name through association.
• Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Look, I'd love to fix homelessness in America! Really, I would! But Google's policies are causing people to get locked out of their accounts now, today. Google could put a toggle in Google Account settings titled something like "Allow anyone who knows my password to log in to my Google account (less secure)." It could sit above a description of the risks involved. It would need to be disabled by default, and it wouldn't help users who don't know about it. It certainly would not fix homelessness in society. But it would do a lot of good for a lot of people! Would this option lead to some increased number of hacked accounts? Probably, but these would be accounts that explicitly opted in to that risk! I think it's excessively paternalistic to not provide the option. Every life situation is unique, and people know their own lives better than Google does.
  • tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    That wouldn't help at all unless it was the default.
    • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      Why? The homeless aren't stupid, and we have libraries and other institutions that can provide education.
  • everforward 4y ago
    The problems are downstream of that. Not having 2FA is going to allow some portion of users to get hacked. When those users do get hacked they will need a way to regain control of the account. Methods of regaining access to an account are notorious for bad actors social engineering their way to gaining control of accounts. 2FA relieves some of that, because even if you do get hacked you can provide a token from the authenticator that was attached to the account, proving that you do in fact own that account. > I think it's excessively paternalistic to not provide that option. I don't find it paternalistic. The goal is to cut down on support costs by reducing the number of users who get hacked and need assistance regaining access to their accounts, and to force users to have a method of demonstrating they own the account even if they can't log in. That it confers some additional security to users is nice, but not really the end goal.
• spinlock 4y ago
  Yup. Why break 2FA when we could have the Obamaphone program work with the case workers so that they don’t loose track of people in the first place? Also, homelessness isn’t the problem we think it is. It’s millions of problems. Any solution will never help more than a subset of the homeless population. We need to iterate on small solutions to make progress.
  • tdehnel 4y ago
    Utter nonsense. Mandated treatment for drug addiction and severe mental illness would tackle half the problem. Then provide contingent housing based on staying sober, sticking to your treatment plan, and getting a job. You can graduate when you’re able to pay your own way. For non-addict/mentally ill homeless, it’s housing contingent on employment, graduate when you can pay your own way. This would solve 90% of the problem.
• scythe 4y ago
  >In this case, we actually aren't being ambitious enough. Why are we having a system where we give out phones every 12 weeks to each homeless person? We'd probably save money for the program by developing some sort of dedicated device designed to be harder to steal or lose. Maybe a high-autonomy low-powered KaiOS smartphone that can be attached as a strap? It's not like the current devices are working. You're putting the cart before the horse. The far simpler solution is for the government to provide the homeless with email. Now the auth can work however you want.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    I agree that it would be a good start. What I'm saying is that the system of having to replace phones every 12 weeks is dysfunctional on its own and probably should be looked at.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• xg15 4y ago
  > Maybe a high-autonomy low-powered KaiOS smartphone that can be attached as a strap? May I introduce you to the concept of scissors?