Quote from: RE on Jan 04, 2025, 05:31 PMhttps://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/the-new-report-on-homelessness-shows-a-catastrophe-for-wa/
The new report on homelessness shows a catastrophe for WA
RE

Catastrophe indeed. I say K-Dog gets the ACP to come in there, sell their plan, and get all of those homeless 7 figure homes and luxury cars for them and their spouses by just making them good Communists! It would cure the homeless problem, the ACP can take the credit, throw in some MAGA politics to run off the "undesireables" (dark skinned, South/Central American origins, or slanty eyes of any type or maybe even suspicious Canadians?), and presto! New America! Still lousy weather, but the homeless problem solved, and those who already own 7 figure hovels and luxury cars will need to find other mechanisms to display their social status. Maybe special gold medallions or secret hand shakes or something? 

One thing is 4 sure, the ACP couldn't do worse than the current goobermint in dealing with the problem.

Far as what the ACP has as a plan to address homelessness, I doubt it involves 7 figure homes.  Probably they would have HUD build 1 bedroom apts on a standard plan for singles and townhouses or condos for couples and young families at a subsidized cost, off a waiting list until enough units were built to get everyone housed.   That's the most straightforward plan anyhow.  A better plan would be to use this as an opportunity to completely redesign our paradigm and get away from the urban/suburban/rural models of housing and begin demolishing the current suburban individually owned McMansions in favor of more flexible modularized mobile housing.  Both of these methods could be employed depending on the situation in the current community.

RE

Not doing much better in Chi-Town than Seattle with making progress on their homeless population either.  They're slightly above the national 18% increase, at 300% in 2024.     Don't worry though, they have BIG PLANS in the works!

There are also plans to explore a $2 million rental assistance program for Chicagoans.

Let's see, if you divide up that $2M by the roughly 20K people who experienced homelessness last year for rental assistance, you can slip each of them a cool C-note one month this year to help with the rent.  Forget the rent, maybe that's enough to keep the lights on for a month.  Are we just a little bit underfunded here?

Also highly encouraging is bringing the Chicago Public Schools and the Teacher's Union into a room together to work out how they can help with the homeless problem.      This makes sense since they do such a great job with running the school system.  Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the teachers are homeless.

Really this political farce which makes homelessness appear "insoluble" is ridiculous when it's a simple problem with an obvious solution.  BUILD AFFORDABLE HOUSING UNITS!  Don't issue any Building Permits for luxury housing until you have a surplus of apartments that rent for $1000/mo, or around 30% of the monthly income for a min wage worker.  Problem solved.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/real-estate/2025/01/04/homelessness-rate-chicago-migrants-affordable-housing

RE

Quote from: RE on Jan 04, 2025, 11:40 PMOne thing is 4 sure, the ACP couldn't do worse than the current goobermint in dealing with the problem.

Far as what the ACP has as a plan to address homelessness, I doubt it involves 7 figure homes.

Well, the ACP hasn't accomplished anything to date, so sure, it could possibly do better. Could certainly be worse. We know the results of communism and warehousing people, we've got plenty of USSR/Chinese and central/south American folks as examples.

Their 10 step plan seems completely reasonable for anyone, and it obviously works for dopers and drunks..not all of them of course...but some. Is "some" solution enough to be better at scale...or worse?

Quote from: REProbably they would have HUD build 1 bedroom apts on a standard plan for singles and townhouses or condos for couples and young families at a subsidized cost, off a waiting list until enough units were built to get everyone housed.  That's the most straightforward plan anyhow.

Sure. USSR style communism. Personally, I think K-Dogs ACP version is much better. Teach people to be better, and then the results will follow from sticking to the self improvement principles. BOOM....7 figure homes and cars for all ACP members. We promise!

Quote from: REA better plan would be to use this as an opportunity to completely redesign our paradigm and get away from the urban/suburban/rural models of housing and begin demolishing the current suburban individually owned McMansions in favor of more flexible modularized mobile housing.  Both of these methods could be employed depending on the situation in the current community.

RE

Hopes and Dreams abound. Outcomes however...well...I think K-Dog has it right. Get yours first..and THEN proclaim your support of ....whatever...and the ACP salesmen can use those ACP members as examples of what being a good ACP member can get you.

Changing paradigms is hard. Americans aren't the hard workers they once were, fast, loose, and easy rule the day now. Get on the internet, become an influencer, collect your cut of the ad sales, everyone can do it (or they want others to believe that) and presto! Call the system whatever you want, as long as those pitching it got theirs first. You need them to bring in the suckers.

Quote from: TDoS on Jan 05, 2025, 08:37 AMSure. USSR style communism.

The Soviets weren't perfect, but homelessness was not a problem.  Everybody got an apartment.  If you were a successful gymnastics coach, you got a really nice apartment too! 

Far as more recent examples of goobermints that have a successful Affordable Housing system, the Austrian socialists did a pretty good job over the last 20 years or so. Vienna's Unique Social Housing Program is known as an effective and innovative model for providing superior, affordable housing to the city's residents.

Of course, given all the problems the central European countries have right now with energy due to the Ukie war and the general piss poor state of the Euro economy there's no guarantee this will last, but our economy isn't yet in such a dogshit state so we could apply that model fairly easily, if the political will was there to stand up to the bankers, hedge fund mgr and RE brokers, which there is not.

RE

Quote from: RE on Jan 05, 2025, 11:08 AM

Quote from: TDoS on Jan 05, 2025, 08:37 AMSure. USSR style communism.

The Soviets weren't perfect, but homelessness was not a problem.  Everybody got an apartment.  If you were a successful gymnastics coach, you got a really nice apartment too! 

Sure. Special folks did well. Others not so much. So the obvious answer is make two distributions, with the same minima and maxima, except one is skewed heavily towards the American living standards and the other towards the USSR back in that time.

Guess where you, me and ACP member K-Dog choose to live? Along with hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens. CFS

QuoteOthers not so much.

bullshit

QuoteIn 1983, American sociologist Albert Szymanski reviewed a variety of Western studies of Soviet income distribution and living standards. He found that the highest paid people in the Soviet Union were prominent artists, writers, professors, administrators, and scientists, who earned as high as 1,200 to 1,500 rubles a month. Leading government officials earned about 600 rubles a month; enterprise directors from 190 to  400 rubles a month; and workers about 150 rubles a month.  Consequently, the highest incomes amounted to only 10 times the average worker's wages, while in the United States the
highest paid corporate heads made 115 times the wages of workers.

And now asshole, the ratio here is 500 to one.

QuoteThe Soviet Union not only eliminated the exploiting classes of the old order, but also ended inflation, unemployment, racial and national discrimination, grinding poverty, and glaring inequalities of wealth, income, education, and opportunity. In fifty years, the country went from an industrial production that was only 12 percent of that in the United States to industrial production that was 80 percent and an agricultural output 85 percent of the U.S. Though Soviet per
capita consumption remained lower than in the U.S., no society had ever increased living standards and consumption so rapidly 2in such a short period of time for all its people. Employment was guaranteed. Free education was available for all, from kindergarten through secondary schools (general, technical and vocational), universities, and after-work schools. Besides free tuition, post-secondary students received living stipends. Free health care existed for all, with about twice as many doctors per person as in the United States. Workers who were injured or ill had job guarantees and sick pay. In the mid-1970s, workers
averaged 21.2 working days of vacation (a month's vacation), and sanitariums, resorts, and children's camps were either free or subsidized. Trade unions had the power to veto firings and recall managers. The state regulated all prices and subsidized the cost of basic food and housing. Rents constituted only 2-3 percent of the family budget; water and utilities only 4-5 percent. No segregated housing by income existed. Though some neighborhoods were reserved for high officials, elsewhere plant managers, nurses, professors and janitors lived side by side.

Quote from: RE on Jan 04, 2025, 05:31 PM

Looks like Seattle is the odds-on favorite to win the "Worst City in the FSoA to be Homeless" Award.  Despite the fact it's far smaller than NYC, it far exceeds the Big Apple in terms of the number of people sleeping rough and is doing the worst job at addressing the problem possible.

The term "stark outlier" is used for Seattle four times in that study

As in it's so far off the curve it sticks out like Shaquille at a party for Kentucky Derby jockeys.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/the-new-report-on-homelessness-shows-a-catastrophe-for-wa/

The new report on homelessness shows a catastrophe for WA

RE

The political group I am involved with has made connection with a group of Seattle people that are dedicated to 'Stop the Sweeps'.  This group shows up to help move homeless people and their shit to a new location before police start hauling away their shit.  They also do small protests when there are relevant city meetings.

My skills moving heavy boxes may come in handy.

Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 05, 2025, 09:19 PM

QuoteThe Soviet Union not only eliminated the exploiting classes of the old order, but also ended inflation, unemployment, racial and national discrimination, grinding poverty, and glaring inequalities of wealth, income, education, and opportunity. In fifty years, the country went from an industrial production that was only 12 percent of that in the United States to industrial production that was 80 percent and an agricultural output 85 percent of the U.S. Though Soviet per
capita consumption remained lower than in the U.S., no society had ever increased living standards and consumption so rapidly 2in such a short period of time for all its people. Employment was guaranteed. Free education was available for all, from kindergarten through secondary schools (general, technical and vocational), universities, and after-work schools. Besides free tuition, post-secondary students received living stipends. Free health care existed for all, with about twice as many doctors per person as in the United States. Workers who were injured or ill had job guarantees and sick pay. In the mid-1970s, workers
averaged 21.2 working days of vacation (a month's vacation), and sanitariums, resorts, and children's camps were either free or subsidized. Trade unions had the power to veto firings and recall managers. The state regulated all prices and subsidized the cost of basic food and housing. Rents constituted only 2-3 percent of the family budget; water and utilities only 4-5 percent. No segregated housing by income existed. Though some neighborhoods were reserved for high officials, elsewhere plant managers, nurses, professors and janitors lived side by side.

When the Bolsheviks filled the Romanoffs full of lead in a Ruskie basement in 1917, Mother Russia was an agrarian society that had been ruled by a brutal monarchy going all the way back to the Rus, descendants of the Vikings.  The Romanoff dynastye went all the way back to Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century.  Peasants had nothing, they were serfs bound as slaves to the land from birth and owned by the aristocracy.  Pogroms in the 1800s were undertaken to exterminate Jews and drive them out of the country, a century before Hitler.

By the  time WWII rolled around not even a quarter century later, the USSR was an industrial economy producing Kaalishnikov assault rifles superior to the arms made by Remington, Winchester and Smith & Wesson, who had been manufacturing small arms for a century.  By the 1960s together with the German scientists they inherited from the Nazis they built the most powerful nuke weapon ever created and tested, the Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton thermonuclear device.  They beat our German scientists putting Sputnik into orbit and put Yuri Gagarin into space while we were still sending up chimpanzees.  By the 1980s ,  their education system was producing STEM Ph.D.s while our education system was failing to teach basic math.

Eventually, they were outmaneuvered economically by the Rothschild & Rockefeller controlled banking system , the IMF hitmen, the CIA destabilizing goobermints and using the Israelis to destabilize and control MENA with a perpetual war.  They've certainly had their own problems with corruption, but to this day they don't have the kind of slums we have in cities like NY, Chicago Los Angeles and Philadelphia.  They don't have near the epidemic of gang violence and drug either, although there certainly is plenty of organized crime there too.

Anyhow, you can make all sorts of comparisons, but in the area of housing for their population, they dida better job for a laerger percentage of their population.

RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 05, 2025, 09:19 PMAnd now asshole, the ratio here is 500 to one.

I was specific about the method used to calculate how the choice was made K-Dog.

It was not related to the wages of workers. I said "living standards".  Feel free to attack someone else's metric, but you didn't attack mine. Feel free to get faux offended at your strawman.

While your claims of how great the USSR was are nice...there was a reason why defections tended to be a one way street.  Someone let me know how many US hospitals lack hot water...and we can factor that in to the care one might receive in a Soviet style system versus the admitting expensive, and top notch, US one.

QuoteDespite a doubling in the number of hospital beds and doctors per capita between 1950 and 1980, the lack of money that had been going into health was patently obvious. Some of the smaller hospitals had no radiology services, and a few had inadequate heating or water. A 1989 survey found that 20% of Russian hospitals did not have piped hot water and 3% did not even have piped cold water. 7% did not have a telephone. 17% lacked adequate sanitation facilities. Every seventh hospital and polyclinic needed basic reconstruction.

As a quick aside, I've noted the dichotomy between American good communists like you and the personal wealth you bring to the table obtained in a capitalist system, but unwavering support for a system that most certainly wouldn't even have provided you with the KITCHEN in your current abode seems a bit...incongruous.

Are these just straight up personal biases coming out vis-a-vis political leanings, that are so powerful as to cause you to lean into the "good old days" of hospitals without running water and lousy kitchens?  But at least the homeless weren't sleeping in the streets...them and the undesirables probably really enjoyed feather filled mattresses and 3 hots a day in the gulags. The Soviet solution to the American homeless situation might not have the appeal you think it does to those homeless and undesireables.

Quote from: RE on Jan 06, 2025, 12:20 AMEventually, they were outmaneuvered economically.....

RE

Sounds like a good synopsis without all the need for some interesting extrapolations on how capitalism certainly cleaned their clocks.

Why can't we just agree on American Exceptionalism and leave it at that?
I just love this propaganda piece myself, but it does capture the feel good exceptionalism part. Both good and bad.

Quote from: RE on Jan 06, 2025, 12:20 AMEventually, they were outmaneuvered economically...

RE

Not exactly.

Quoteit was triggered by the specific reform policies of Gorbachev and his allies. In 1987 Gorbachev turned his back on the reform course initiated by Yuri Andropov,the path Gorbachev himself had followed for two years. He took up new policies that replicated in an extreme way the Khrushchev policies of 1953-64 and even further back, the ideas espoused by Bukharin in the 1920s. Gorbachev's about-face was made possible by the growth of the second economy that provided a social basis for anti-socialist consciousness.

Gorbachev's revisionism routed its opponents and went on to discard essential tenets of Marxism-Leninism: class struggle, the leading role of the Party, international solidarity, and the primacy of collective ownership and planning. Soviet foreign policy retreats and the evisceration of the CPSU soon resulted.  The latter process occurred with the Party's surrender of the mass media, the unraveling of central planning mechanisms and resulting economic decline, and the end of the Party's role in harmonizing the constituent nations of the USSR. Mass discontent enabled the Yeltsin anti-Communist "democrats" to capture control of the giant Russian Republic, and to begin to impose capitalism there. Separatists won out in the non-Russian republics. The USSR fell apart.

Quote from: TDoS on Jan 06, 2025, 06:40 AMcapitalism certainly cleaned their clocks.

Capitalism "cleaned their clocks" only in the sense that capitalism was a highly organized criminal cartel that had been in operation since the founding of the British  &  Dutch East India Companies and the Bank of England in 1692.  By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, through the colonial period from 1700 through 1900 the Rothschild bankers had 2 centuries developing a lock on international trade enforced first by the British Navy until WWII and then by the Amerikan MIC in the post-War era.



The Nazis didn't lose the War, they simply moved their operation from politics to economics and their base of operations to Switzerland and Brussels and consolidated their economic hold on the global trade and banking system with the Bretton Woods agreement at the end of the war.  By controlling the global money supply and international trade, they were able to shut out both the Ruskies and the Chinese and wth the creation of the Petro Dollar control the Oil prices to bankrupt the Soviets in the 80s.  The BRICS have been trying to break this monopoly over the last 20 years, but came into the game  so late most of the good shit has already been used up.



This maxim is even more true when applied to the global money supply than to an individual nation.  The Rothschild lock on this has been unbreakable for over 300 years, and any nation that doesn't play ball is destabilized and puppet goobermints installed to maintain this hold.  As a criminal racket, capitalism was quite a successful operation.

RE

Quote from: RE on Jan 06, 2025, 11:23 AM

Quote from: TDoS on Jan 06, 2025, 06:40 AMcapitalism certainly cleaned their clocks.

Capitalism "cleaned their clocks" only in the sense that capitalism was a highly organized criminal cartel that had been in operation since the founding of the British  &  Dutch East India Companies and the Bank of England in 1692. 
RE

While the history of Western European colonialism has been written, the interpretation of it certainly appears to be a popular hobby for some folks.

Without those random acts of history, there is as much chance of NON American exceptionalism as ACTUAL American exceptionalism. Certainly the Bank of England, bankers through 1940 or money supply through that period of time encouraged the Japanese to pull the pin on the dumbest military adventure of the 20th century, thereby activating something that wasn't much related to all those pesky bankers and events prior.

Transition events can really bollocks up a cool macro story.

And then capitalism in America post WWII is what did in those fine Commie gentleman. Oh sure, we had some red scares along the way and more run of the mill capitalism, No Dutch Indies around much anymore. And in the world of those fine Soviet Commies, with third world kitchens and if memory serves, NOBODY driving those fine German luxury autos available to American communists, turns out that system failed pretty specularly. China is still an ongoing concern, so maybe we should all cheer on a better society as replicas of the ChiComs?

Everyone here would LOVE the minders living with us to make sure we treat our children right? Brainwash them correctly? Don't the Chinese have some wonderful row housing sort of like the Soviets did?



I wonder what it takes for a ChiCom to be given a million dollar home and luxury cars for family members? Political influence probably?

Why is it when the wonders of Communism are espoused, we don't talk about the ChiComs as our model of how well Communism works? Or...not...?

Trump flips on immigration and our troll's ancap filth pollutes our forum.






And the earth still goes around the sun.