QuoteThere's still problems.  People who do their community service job might be slackers.  They show up for work and pick up the broom, but they don't get much sweeping done.  They work slow and take long smoking breaks.

The supervisor will write in his/her report that the individual is not be invited back next week.  The individuals card balance falls to the cheese sandwich level.  Bouncing around from job to job would identify someone who needs training.

No different than now, except that someone with a problem gets help.

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2024, 09:21 PMIn a world where we have eliminated homelessness and hunger not everyone gets a tenth floor penthouse and prime rib for dinner.  A restaurant may have a free menu like a kids menu.  You can have a cheese sandwich and an apple any time you want.  Ordering something else would require a plastic credit card with a job or retirement so the card has a positive credit balance.  All of which the state can provide.  But everyone still has to work.  Not paying bills would have consequences.  Theft is still theft.
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With expectations more clearly defined, most people would be able to live a more successful life.  Define success as you wish, but a cheese sandwich and an apple does not work for me.

This returns to my original proposal.  NOT showing up for work does have consequences.  The consequence is that ALL you get is the bare bones box to live in and mac & cheese you eat.  If you are an ascetic who is happy with just this, you can live this way.  But if you want anything MORE than this, you need to work.

You start with the Mandatory 10 hr/wk Community Service job that everybody must do. These are all the unskilled jobs from street sweeper to janitor etc that would pay min wage.  They would be assigned weekly at the community employment office.  Once completed, if you have another skill like Dentist, you can drill teeth and make more for those work hours.

There's still problems.  People who do their community service job might be slackers.  They show up for work and pick up the broom, but they don't get much sweeping done.  They work slow and take long smoking breaks.

Then for the people with skills, if they are in short supply you might need say electricians to work lots of hours to get everybody's electricity going after an outage.  So they don't show up for their community service job.  If it's just once in a while, OK, but what about systemic shortages?  Not enough Nurses, are you going to make a nurse work 10 hours pushing a broom?

RE

Quote from: RE on Jul 19, 2024, 01:09 PMI agree that everybody who is able bodied physically and mentally should have to work at something and that everybody regardless of education or how brilliant they are should have to do some time each week working the shit jobs nobody wants but some people have to do all the time because they aren't qualified for anything else.

However, what do you do with the person who is just plain lazy and doesn't show up for work he doesn't like?  What is the punishment for Laziness if a person is guaranteed food to eat and a place to sleep, shit and shower?  Do you imprison them?  Force them to listen to Rap Music?

RE

I had to go to work so I could not answer the question right away.

It would take more than one incident to label a hard case, but while at work an interesting thing happened.  Before closing a couple came in to do some shoplifting.  They each left with a full shopping cart, their take was in the thousands.  They picked by price.  Hard cases they are.  Serious grifters.

If we confront a shoplifter, we will be fired and this causes the young men I work with to do nothing at all.  I'm part time employed on the bottom of the totem pole.  Actually not even on the totem pole.  So it was not on me to call the police.  I would have.   

This was case where the police should have been called right away.  Everybody working knew what was up, and the couple were in the store a long time to make sure that they would not be messed with on the way out our door.  The couple should be arrested and jailed but in the land of plenty we just call what they do 'shrinkage' and pass the costs along.  To this couple the huge new 'we prosecute shoplifters to the fullest extent of the law' advertised the fact that, no actually we do not.  We just like posting signs big signs that lie to you.

In a world where we have eliminated homelessness and hunger not everyone gets a tenth floor penthouse and prime rib for dinner.  A restaurant may have a free menu like a kids menu.  You can have a cheese sandwich and an apple any time you want.  Ordering something else would require a plastic credit card with a job or retirement so the card has a positive credit balance.  All of which the state can provide.  But everyone still has to work.  Not paying bills would have consequences.  Theft is still theft.

I have asked myself the question, how would your life (mine) change if your (my) socialist dream ever came true.  You (I) still have to get to work on time, or my social credit score (work history) suffers.  I have asked myself this question many times.  What would be different.  It has been a useful exercise.

Consequences we have for bad behavior now are inconsistent and as it is now, our society breeds criminal behavior.  In a more planned economy BOTH consequences for negative, and rewards or positive social conduct (showing up for work or not) become consistent.  More consistent than what we have now.  A fact which no doubt, scares the pants off some people.

A right-wing nutjob fears society would fall apart under socialism because everything is suddenly free.  They are wrong.  Prime rib still costs more.  We still have money.  Rewards for behaving in a socially positive way would mean a family is be able to buy a house unlike they are able to do now.  In a managed system rewards and punishments become consistent, more consistent than they are now. 

People go off about China having a social credit score.  I don't get their concern.  What is an American resume, a credit score, and a clean criminal record but the same fucking thing.  To get the good jobs I have had here required I looked good and show my papers.  As I must do in any civilized system.

With expectations more clearly defined, most people would be able to live a more successful life.  Define success as you wish, but a cheese sandwich and an apple does not work for me.

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2024, 01:16 PMThere can be no solution then.  Not short of a revolution. 

Sadly, this is the case.  Because the Property Ownership system is so deeply embedded into our culture, all property of any type will either belong to an individual or belong to the state.  So to make Free Housing possible, all housing has to belong to the state.  It doesn't all have to be equal, if you make more money by working harder or have a higher paying job it can be priced higher, but the availability of free housing at the bottom level undermines how much can be charged for more luxurious digs.

While the dream of free housing isn't achievable this way, AFFORDABLE housing probably is.  If these container size homes are offered at a cheap enough price (say $5000) and cities zoned for where to put them and built the Frameworks they go into, charging say $500/mo rent and to hook up to the water, sewage and electric, this would put housing within reach of most people with min wage jobs.

Meanwhile, until then I still advocate for the Stealth Van & Trailer combo as the closest approximation you can have as an insurance policy against falling straight down to the street level sleeping rough level.





RE

QuoteAs soon as you start offering these FREE Universal Basic Shelter containers, everybody who is in one of the many tiny cramped NY studio or 1 bedroom apts that are no bigger than this (and sometimes smaller) but is paying rent of $3000/month will want one.  So it's not just the currently homeless who need shelter that you have to provide for, it's everyone with a low income who wants to start saving money and will take what amounts to a very small drop in standard of living to move into a free container home.

There can be no solution then.  Not short of a revolution.  In Japan the 'market' was able to provide a half-assed solution.  But America can't have anything like this.   

Markets can't respond to crisis, but Japan has unique circumstances.  A capitalist solution was already in place providing a digital office in a country where privacy is limited.  That solution somewhat adapted to provide 'housing' to people who can behave themselves better than most Americans can.


Internet Cafe Refugee - Homeless in Japan

And in this one we find what living the good life in a Internet cafe is like.

Watching the RE market crumble is like watching grass grow but less exciting. lol.  The payoff though when the worm finally turns is marvelous, so it's worth keeping track of what is going on.  This is the first article I've seen which gives insight into the depth of the problem in the banking and insurance industries.  This won't stay confined to regional banks holding thee mortgages,  insurers, reinsurers and TBTF banks underwriting CMBS securities are going to get hit as well.  2026 looks like the worst, except the probability of recession could accelerate the decline and force liquidation of properties before they need to refi.

Anyhow, unlike 2008 where the banking crisis arrived during a period of economic growth, this one is going to arrive when the economy is already shrinking.  Bailouts are going to be uch harder to manage with currencies that are already questionably backed with irredeemable dent.  Firinig up the Helicopter and loading the Bazooka with Funny Money will not be so EZ.

https://investorplace.com/2024/07/the-commercial-real-estate-meltdown-is-spreading/

RE

Noise pollution amid CO2 burning vehicle at ground level and above, hope you can hear my thoughts on the purported Assissination attempt on El Trumpo and the likely resignation from the election by the POTUS Dementus Uncle Joe.


RE

The mega security firm Crowdstrike which offers protection to a huge number of big users of Microsoft computers made a bad BooBoo yesterday and crashed banks, airlines, hospitals as well as my Gulag here for several hours.  We are back up and running, but appparrently at least some of the networks require the techs actually be able to physically access the hardware, which isn't always too easy to do.  They do most of this shit remotely.

The whole security thing has got totally out of hand.  Social Security just added a new layer Login.gov which requires a 12 character password as well as phone authentication and 2 keys for password recovery.  The shit is becoming so cumbersome and complex it's becoming impossible to use.

Imagine what will happen with an outage like this when there are tons of self-driving cars on the road?  Can you imagine the mess if it happens at rush hour?

Obviously also, if/when somebody wants to purposely crash the networks, if they succeed it makes it way more difficult to fix.  The best hack would be to scramble the security software itself.  You probably could render the whole system unfixable.  No way to get back in to make any changes.

Every day that goes by I become more nostalgic for the good old days.  Of course I realize with financial information you need security, and yea online shopping is great but we did get along OK back when you called an 800 number and gave your CC# over the phone to pay.

Computers probably will die from security before they die from lack of juice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et

Global IT chaos persists as Crowdstrike boss admits outage could take time to fix

RE

Now that I have explained the common sense solution, here's why the RE bizness will never allow it to even start.

As soon as you start offering these FREE Universal Basic Shelter containers, everybody who is in one of the many tiny cramped NY studio or 1 bedroom apts that are no bigger than this (and sometimes smaller) but is paying rent of $3000/month will want one.  So it's not just the currently homeless who need shelter that you have to provide for, it's everyone with a low income who wants to start saving money and will take what amounts to a very small drop in standard of living to move into a free container home.

No kid just graduating HS is gonna want to stay at home and live with Mom & Dad when they can have their own little box to play video games and vape.  They don't have sex anymore, but in the old days having your own pad was how you finally graduated from 3rd base in the back seat of your car and got laid.

Free shelter, even very basic like this totally undermines the current RE market.  All the housing currently used for low income people becomes worthless.  I wouldn't move out of my container size free dwelling until I was making big money.  It's not worth it if it takes up 1/3rd or more of your monthly income.

The solution to this might be to have a 25% Housing Tax on all incomes.  So once you start making $10K/mo, it might be worth it to leave the system, although you still have to pay the tax in addition to your for pay home costs.

Besides this, as soon as you start offering this, the demand would be so great they never could supply the containers and places to drop them fast enough.  How do you you decide who gets them first?  A lottery?

Anyhow, it's not gonna happen.  Free Basic Shelter is pretty much an impossible dream to get rolling, except perhaps after collapse and a significant die off.  Then there sshould be plenty of excess housing around.

RE

I agree that everybody who is able bodied physically and mentally should have to work at something and that everybody regardless of education or how brilliant they are should have to do some time each week working the shit jobs nobody wants but some people have to do all the time because they aren't qualified for anything else.

However, what do you do with the person who is just plain lazy and doesn't show up for work he doesn't like?  What is the punishment for Laziness if a person is guaranteed food to eat and a place to sleep, shit and shower?  Do you imprison them?  Force them to listen to Rap Music?

RE