This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."
When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else was closer to $1.5k.
I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25% of the people were "problematic" but that was more than enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3 AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.
Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.
There are two kinds of 'low income.' There is a working-class neighborhood where people are not rich; life is hard, and stuff is a bit run down, but people are normal. Employed-ish, don't start fights and are respectful. The sense of community and friendliness might even be better than a 'normal' place because you need community to survive. Living in these places is fine. Then there is the kind of 'low income' you describe, which is a very different kind of place and people.
When people talk about this topic, people get into big debates about it because they are thinking of 2 very different kinds of low-income places.
The comment you replied to said "income-restricted", so they probably mean a building covered by government programs that give preferential tax, planning, or other treatment to developers who commit to below-market rent, with tenancy restricted to households meeting income limits.
These are common in large American cities. The problem tenants are a minority, but the landlord lacks the usual incentive to address them since the building will always be full, since it's below-market. The landlord may also be a social benefit organization that's politically disinclined to evict.
Non-market housing tends to go badly in the USA, including programs closely resembling those that have succeeded in other countries. The reasons for that are complex, though I strongly suspect that the weak mental health system (many of the worst problem tenants would be institutionalized elsewhere) contributes.
My understanding is that countries who have "solved" homelessness either -
• Societally and culturally produce so few individuals who would behave the way America's most problematic homeless do that direct 1on1 intervention is feasible. There are school districts in the US where the truancy rate exceeds 70%. There are other countries where this is not the case. Switzerland and Norway come to mind.
• Involuntarily commit or arrest individuals who are mentally unfit to function in normal society. Institutionalization, basically. China and Russia come to mind.
If there was a silver bullet which was politically acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure you, folks in California would have tried it.
1. Yes, it's cultural and we keep encouraging people to be selfish. Our influencers, the media, this push of "make it in your own" despite no one in history truly being self made. And if we're being frank, prejudice is still alive and well which underfunded certain kinds of areas. We don't want to help those people. And we have 50 mini countries to balance this between.
2. Almost. They don't use for profit prisons who are incentivized to punish. Other countries actually focus on minimizing recidivism. But America keeps falling for "Hard on Crime". Again, that selfishness: "I would never do that, that person deserves to suffer".
>If there was a silver bullet which was politically acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure you, folks in California would have tried it.
I agree. But politically people treat reformation as "free handouts". With that attitude nothing will change.
>But America keeps falling for "Hard on Crime". Again, that selfishness: "I would never do that, that person deserves to suffer".
We really need to repeal the 93 crime bill. We have the most incarcerated population in the world by both ratio and total numbers. Way too many offenses are felonies and once people get marked by the system, they will most likely never excel in society, much less get by.
And what happens if they don’t find a job? Do they become homeless? I know a few Americans who moved to Finland. They accepted lower wages for a better quality of life.
At a certain point after decades of low wages, the “quality of life” you speak of has been eroded severely. But hey, at least there aren’t any rich people around.
California, like most of the USA, contains a very broad spectrum of political opinion. There are plenty of conservative right wing folk there, it just so happens that the current state of things there leads to them not holding huge amounts of power at the level of the state legislature or governor's office.
This is marked contrast to, for example, most European countries (particularly the two you've mentioned) where the number of people who simply do not see a role for non-carceral government action (i.e. the first solution you've described) is quite small.
Combine that with a referendum process, and you've got a situation in which there are lots of things that could theoretically be tried but will not be, even in California.
The problem isn't "solved." The problem is you have to deal with it in a way that most/everyone would be OK with and vote for. I don't think we can do that in the US.
We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes. In fact, IIRC Singapore is one of the safest places on earth. I'm sure SF (and California, and the country at large) would probably take issue with a sudden step up in policing.
Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.
If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
Do the math on the execution rate. You do _not_ want to be a criminal in Singapore. You especially do not want to be a criminal involved with drugs (which is the highest % offense of prisoners in the US).
> Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.
How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place like that if there weren't criminals running around.
The problem I was referencing was the problem of trying to get the general populace to live with antisocial types. I don't think that can be "solved" in the US anytime soon.
> If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for it.
You basically have to bring drugs into the country to be executed. So as long as you don’t do that, this statistic doesn’t affect you at all.
> How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place like that if there weren't criminals running around.
Three quarters of Singaporeans live in these places, and there is no significant police presence. There doesn’t have to be because the crime rate is so low. Criminals aren’t running around.
> Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for it.
I think you read “public housing” and interpreted it as something like you have in America, with high crime and poverty. That’s a misinterpretation. This is the type of place most people live in Singapore. They are nice places to live, they are just massively subsidised by the government.
Your (likely rhetorical) question presumes that a nation which is devoted to free markets would require housing to be distributed via free markets, but that's not necessarily true. In fact I'd say there's a lot of evidence built up now that the free market is in fact, not actually that great at distributing property, because necessarily to engage with a market, one must have money, and everyone needs a home, but not everyone has money.
Personally in my ideal world, we would distribute life's essentials in such a way as to be free at point of use, and then leave markets to handle things they're actually good at, like televisions and such.
You're assuming that US federal/states do not also subsidize housing.
They are a "a paragon of free markets" because their social safeties actually work. Housing probably isn't a stock to hoard like in the US, nor owned by private equity to treat as a business. so you can focus on more than just staying alive and do actual work/passions.
The "housing crisis" all over the world is not really a housing crisis per se. The problem is not with the cost of building more shelter. It's a crisis of land values (they aren't making any more of it, so the free market cannot "provide" it in any real sense) and misguided government regulation, viz. zoning (that has nothing to do with the free market). If you want to improve free market dynamics in the housing sector, get rid of Prop 13 and put a higher property tax on urban land values (that are seeing most of the actual "crisis") while untaxing the built structures. Then local governments will be incented to provide the best living arrangements, since these will directly translate into higher tax revenues.
It’s a “housing crisis” in the very straightforward sense that a lot of people need a house and don’t have one. Your comment is like saying “this ‘famine’ is not really a famine per se, as the problem is not with the cost of growing more food, …”
Not at all. I'm curious about those who seek to import Singapore's authoritarian climate while praising its free market and rebuking social welfare policies at home
As pointed out above, we in the US incarcerate way more people as a percentage of the population than Singapore. Singapore's Police don't have qualified immunity making them above the law. Not sure what qualifies more as 'authoritarian' but I'd go with the country that imprisons more people and whose Police are immune from consequences.
You don't have to compare Singapore or other places. Just comparing the USA to other English countries shows stark differences. The UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and NZ have way less of the bad kind of "low income", better incarceration rates, homeless and more than the USA. And in many ways, people are poorer in those countries than the USA too. It's not money, it's political will and organization.
You are mentally on a wrong track there. If imprisonment solved your problem, it would already be solved. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...). Fifth place versus Singapore on 105th. The US incarcerates 3.5 times more of it's population than Singapore.
If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg: Nobody plans to break a leg, so jailing people who do won't reduce the number of people who do. The only thing criminalization of such involuntary traits achieves is to reduce visibility and pushing people to hide it.
There is a _huge_ difference between how crime is handled in the US and how it is handled in Singapore.
> If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
I'm not talking about the homeless. The people I lived next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0 repercussions for it. I knew of someone in the building that was on their 5th DUI somehow. They were still driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
In 2024 Singapore executed 9 people, that is a rate of 0.149 per 100k of their population.
The rate of people shot by police in the US is 0.34 per 100k of its population. Who needs capital punishment when you shoot people your police doesn't like even before they have been found guilty?
And your anecdotal evidence is not really valuable in the discussion at hand. Somebody else can say the opposite, I for example live in a country where crime is treated differently and we have less violent crime. You can leave your doors unlocked in a major city, despite living in a red light district with its own share of homeless, drug addicts and mentally ill.
Singapore might execute more people, but now go and compare how many people get killed by the state. I always think its hilarious how people argue about execution when the police kills astronomically more people to the point where actual executions are a statistically insignificant.
> They were still driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
That's what you get when you build a car dependent society. You can't actually prevent people from driving because people can't practically live without driving.
540 ish executions in 35 years. 50 executions last decade. I don't think these are the statistics that make me thing Singapore is a kill happy country.
>m not talking about the homeless. The people I lived next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0
Anecdotes are just that. I've been in a nice neighborhood. I don't think people are naturally evil.
——
If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg:
—-
Forgive me if i misinterpret you.
But i think theirs three relevant perspectives here whereof two and a half disagree with your points that americans dont punish people down on their luck.
first perspective is the common american sympathetic or not to homeless and their perspective on penal code. then 2nd, theres reactive use and enforcement of code, which is the main punishment for homelessness. and third is the figurative cognitive behavior modifiers but instead of being therapists they are american rulers who want subjects to behave in a certain manner ( more on that at the end).
first perspective is divided into two camps i think. empathetic yes lets not punish homelessness, lets help them out. they seem to have more influence in liberal states. then theres the “lazy bum” castigators, like trump said or would say. no sympathy, get a job types.
2nd perspective matters more because homelessness in-effect criminalized if police enforce laws and the laws are sufficient to cause more than a minor inconvenience to the homeless. Most states technically have all types of laws to put homeless people in jail, but in certain states and certain contexts do homelessness get more aggressively targeted and thus punished. its in the form of no body wants to deal with homeless people where they hang out at (nimbyism) so they have police remove them however the police are instructed and allowed to do, which might be making and enforcing laws incidentally target behavior homeless are more likely to do but everyone does like loitering.
3rd perspective is more conjecture but is based on academic documented equivalent cases in french and british colonies (found in david graebers writings) and extrapolated to say that people who make the laws in america must think like cognitive behaviorists specifically to wielding the threat of homelessness as a tool to modify the populations behavior to their agendas. this is conjecture but not unreasonable, and its substantiated.
But places in America do penalize homelessness if not intentionally implicitly. examples include hostile archtecture, no sitting rules in transportation hubs, sleep police in new york, and consequences for being, acting, or appearing homeless in various municipalities which sometimes results in jail.
People get jailed/locked up when they are a physical danger to those around them. The reason jails are the way they are is not so much to punish the inmates but far more relevantly, to protect them from one another. As it turns out, unfortunately, much of the supposed problem with the really long term homeless is that, rightly or wrongly, they are perceived as a physical threat to others. So, even assuming the best possible intentions on your part, whatever place you put the homeless is going to look a lot like jail.
This was a valid perspective in the 1960s - jobs grew on trees, most people who didn't have a job just didn't want a job. Some people built that perspective in the 1960s, and then never updated it despite jobs no longer growing on trees.
> But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
I advocate a Singapore-style justice system then thanks to atoav's revelation that they do much better on crime than we do with punishments like caning and execution for most hard drug offenses.
> We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes.
This clearly isn’t true, as the US has a per capita prison population four to five times that of China & Singapore! We jail far, far more people than they do.
You're right, but progressives treat crime statistics as dog whistles for racism, which to be fair isn't uncommon. However, you can make a very similar "woke" argument. Much of crime is caused by centuries of systemic racism that Singapore and China never experienced, so you can't do an apple to apple comparison between incarcerations per capita.
Overall, Singapore and China are significantly more willing to sacrifice freedom in exchange for security. There is more surveillance and no trial by jury, for example.
US Police have qualified immunity, protecting them from their actions against the people, Singapore's Police don't. Who's sacrificing their morals in exchange for security?
What gives you the idea that police in Singapore don't have qualified immunity? It sounds like you're treating it as a buzzword. The police anywhere are not liable for the actions they take as part of their job.
It could simply be that more people in China and Singapore are afraid to commit crimes. Their prison sentences and punishments are much worse. In 2022, they executed 11 people, the US executed 18. The US has a ~50x larger population.
I'm not even saying the solution is more/harsher policing. I'm saying it is a solution that seemingly works.
It could also be that they didn't governmental distribute drugs to their population with the purpose of mass arresting for petty crimes. So half their criminal population aren't just in for smoking pit.
If the bottom line were actually king, we'd have a VAT, LVT, functional public transit, and sensible zoning laws among other things. Hell, even a fully socialized healthcare system would be more economically efficient than the public-private Frankenstein we have today.
A common meme on both sides of the political aisle is that public spending that they don't like is motivated by someone else's profit, but that's never the why the spending happens. I'd like the government to give me a million bucks to dig a hole in my backyard, but that's not going to happen unless if the voters agree to it.
if you think prison privatization is the problem... you should see state run prisons. while studies show that private prisons are "statistically" worse (lots of problems with the statistics, e.g. commingling criminal incarceration contracts with migrant incarceration contracts), the difference is marginal, at best.
The incentive structure is the bigger issue here, not necessarily prisoner treatment (though yes, we can address that too). A state wants to minimize prisons. A profit run prison wants to keep getting prisoners.
state run prisons and prison guard unions also have this problem. and these orgs are known to have successfully put legislative pressure on laws that will increase incarceration rates
You don’t have to even go to more authoritarian places to see the “solved” phenomenon. Many conservative states have harsher sentences or are more proactive in enforcement of petty crimes to “solve” undesirable/nonconformist behavior. Also solve is a funny word to describe dealing with people who ultimately dont want to conform to arbitrary restrictions on behavior.
Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting, yet certain governing “civilizing” forces had the audacity to eliminate that as possible lifestyle, and then label people who defy that restriction on lifestyle choice as problemmatic.
yeah the pattern is indiscernible because i was talking about petty crimes and related behavior (specifically homelessness) that have a lower per capita rate. violence isnt petty and i assume many drugs offenses arent considered petty. a quick google has validating statistics, although i cant find sources better than business insider at the moment. homeless population per capita by state and homelessness criminalization by state.
> Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting
Frequently asserted, but not really well substantiated. Plenty of new (or previously) ignored archeological and anthropological evidence that humans moved back and forth fairly seamlessly between hunting, gathering and cultivating in many differents part of the world.
You sound like the kind of person who would have somehow managed to read "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber & Wengrow, but apparently either did not or for some reason disagree with one of their fundamental conclusions.
The US seems to be a text book case of treating the symptom rather than the cause (and not just in terms of homelessness either). Culturally we:
- Seem to tolerate high income inequality or even see it as a good thing.
- Value "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and devalue social safety nets and other avenues of providing opportunity to the masses
- Have given up on higher crime rates, lower education, poorer health care and health outcomes compared to other wealthy nations
Instead of trying to prevent homelessness in the first place, we try to tackle it once it's already there, then throw up our hands and say it's not possible to deal with.
>Seem to tolerate high income inequality or even see it as a good thing.
A free society will by definition be unequal; people have different priorities and abilities, and wealth acquisition isn't a zero sum game. If anything, instead of vilifying billionaires, take a look at the unelected but taxpayer funded and vastly bloated bureaucracies in every country around the world. The shocking revelations of USAID spending billions upon billions to interfere in other countries is example enough.
Prisons are the most equal places in the world in terms of living standards and options available to prisoners; nobody sees them as ideal.
Now lack of upward class mobility - that's a separate problem area to focus on.
It is hard to imagine a nation without this sort of thing to some degree without a total police state. These are issues with poor living in apartments in Europe too you know; a tragedy of the commons situation as the community shoulders the burden of those of it that have vice or mental illness that the government authority doesn’t effectively treat because this class is invisible in local mass media.
yeah, ive heard not having a home was illegal of sorts in the Soviet Union, meaning eviction was illegal or something equivolent.
I know what you mean by police state, but i wonder why america doesn’t consider themselves a police state, with such a large prison population and all the innocuous behaviors that can land you in legal trouble. i guess americans get indoctrinated in a certain way of thinking, where their subset of freedoms which they can mostly practice, makes them think they are free but ignore all the numerous other penalized behaviors. for example: i cant possess cocaine regardless if it wont be consumed as a drug, cant drink in public, cant lay down in public, cant sleep in public(ny), etc etc. a lot of intermediary stuff gets penalized because its the only way to control some tangentially related detrimental behavior, or its penalized for making people feel odd (nudity).
but more on point: america polices property taxes. Any property owned gets taxed automatically. this creates a forced work state to accumulate money to pay Uncle Sam. Failure to comply with this system and you get policed or pushed around as a homeless. David Graeber talks about Madagascar colonies set up with a similar system (underline) intentionally(/u) to produce a productive populace. similarly he mentions ways monarchies created rules and systems to force markets and force productivity elsewhere. I think homelessness circumstances is by design, and this free nonpolice state we call america is actually an artificial created police state. we can choose different governing setups that have different features emergent and by design. Its what Mao attempted to do, its what the French and British monarch did. But i see the coercive force in all the government setups even the ones that claim to be free.
America is a Police state. Qualifiers:
1. Surveillance state. The amount of surveillance information our police now purchase from private companies would make the old Soviets drule.
2. Separate rules for the Police with qualified immunity protections. Singapore doesn't give it's Police qualified immunity protections unless serving warrants. There are two different rules of law in the US, those that apply to the normies, and those that apply to law enforcement.
3. Mass incarceration.
4. Making so much illegal that 'selective enforcement' can be used as a tool of coercion. Just coming up on the Police radar (even if you are someone that reported something) leads to a significantly higher chance of incarceration in the US.
During the late 19th to early 20th century, asylums were launched all over the US. They were commonly public-private partnerships but tended to be spearheaded by altruistic individuals. They were genuinely positive places and were constantly lauded by the public/press/pols.
The focus on humane care was universal. The methods sometimes suffered from incomplete understanding but that improved over time.
From 1930s to 1960s, the responsible individuals died off and no one replaced them. The p/p/p quit caring. Locations transitioned to gov-only. The public/press weren't interested so neither were pols. The quality of care steeply fell off as budgets (read 'efficiency') were prioritized over everything.
By the 1970s, asylums were associated with hellholes for mostly good reasons. By the 1980s most were shuttered. The public justification was the inhumane conditions (typically true). The motivating reason was to recapture the remaining funds that were spent on them. There was little/no interest in funding replacements.
FF to today. Florida has 5 state criminal mental health institutions. Their long history is that patients and staff die there with some regularity. After that came out in a news series, reporters lost access and that's where that's at.
source: 10y genealogy research & 25y caring for mi spouse.
Also: 10y supporting developmentally disabled care facilities (public/private) that are still spearheaded by caring, invested individuals. They are models of what is possible.
>This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."
It certainly can be solved. The real think is people in power don't want to solve it, and the voters don't want to invest in solving it. Admitting your own folly and vainness is much more difficult than dismissing it as an "impossible problem".
>Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.
And those people do not get the help they need. Again, and investment no one cares to put in. Better to sweep it under the rug and try to rely on the security of higher income areas to deal with it than taking preventative measures.
Just throwing my vote in for Stanford. Tbh, on the basis of nothing but what I hear about the two schools. Ultimately you should choose whichever you feel is best. Gathering feedback is a good idea but everyone will have their opinion/bias.
So far (thankfully) I've noticed this stuff get voted down on social media but it is blowing my mind people think pasting in a ChatGPT response is productive.
I've seen people on reddit say stuff like "I don't know but here's what ChatGPT said." Or worse, presenting ChatGPT copy-paste as their own. Its funny because you can tell, the text reads like an HR person wrote it.
I've noticed the opposite actually, clearly ChatGPT written posts on Reddit that get a ton of upvotes. I'm especially noticing it on niche subreddits.
The ones that make me furious are on some of the mental health subreddits. People are asking for genuine support from other people, but are getting AI slop instead. If someone needs support from an AI (which I've found can actually help), they can go use it themselves.
You should have a lot less confidence in your ability to discern what's AI generated content, honestly. Especially in such contexts where the humans will likely be writing very non-offensive in order to not-trigger the OP.
I think some of that is the gamification of social media. "I have 1200 posts and you only have 500" kind of stuff. It's much easier to win the volume game when you aren't actually writing them. This is just a more advanced version of people who just post "I agree" or "I don't know anything about this, but...[post something just to post something]".
It's particularly funny/annoying when they're convinced that the fact they got it from the "AI" makes it more likely to be correct than other commenters who actually know what the heck they're talking about.
It makes me wonder how shallow a person's knowledge of all areas must be that they could use an LLM for more than a little while without encountering something where it is flagrantly wrong yet continued with its same tone of absolute confidence and authority. ... but it's mostly just a particularly aggressive form of Gell-Mann amnesia.
I don't really subscribe to any conspiracy theories about the assassination _but_ it always seemed odd that the assassin was assassinated. I think there's more to the story... nothing mythical or extraordinary though.
Maybe because they have a high volume of users or something but it virtually doesn't exist. I would pay $$$ to get any sort of support but that isn't an option either.
To suggest there hasn't been a cultural shift is insane, imo.
I wouldn't argue that both sides have gotten more extreme, rather the political spectrum curve has flattened. There is much less rational discourse in general.
Reddit is a great example. Even 10 years ago you could have mostly rational discussions. Now its no better than Facebook. I saw a post today about people being upset the government is giving OpenAI half a trillion dollars. They didn't even realize it wasn't government money. They didn't want to be corrected.
the internet has a lot more people on it, it is much less self-selecting than in the past. even this website is a lot less self-selecting than in the past
The straight up "shout out" in the pop-up, I almost couldn't believe my eyes.
I don't think I've seen anything like it in a long time. I also don't think an American company would ever do that as it seems "unprofessional." Ironically, it probably got them huge bonus points so they know what they're doing.
Damn, this is the simplest, most accurate breakdown on what’s actually happening that I’ve come across. The incoming administration is pretty transparent in the bend toward corruption, and these folks know exactly how to manage that as a business challenge.
Why don't you detail why you believe only the Chinese government operates that way. It's MY government, the US government, not the Chinese government that is the subject of these bribes and flattery. It's a human trait not a trait of the nation of China.
> I don't think I've seen anything like it in a long time. I also don't think an American company would ever do that as it seems "unprofessional."
Have you been paying attention the last few weeks?
NVIDIA: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-policy/ "As the first Trump Administration demonstrated, America wins through innovation, competition and by sharing our technologies with the world — not by retreating behind a wall of government overreach."
Companies aren't stupid. They know that in order to be successful in today's world, you have to personally fellate Trump. Thanks to the American voters for bringing us this reality.
"Sucking up" implies there’s a meaningful choice—that firms or individuals can realistically be expected to show courage now. But voters chose this, knowingly. Blaming firms for bowing to public will misdiagnoses the issue and wastes emotional energy fighting a false battle.
Whats the realistic alternative? Standing up to Trump? The president who has explicitly said he will retaliate against firms and individuals who oppose him.
The same president who was re-elected even though everyone knew this was coming?
If this bothers you, and you want to address it, focus on identifying the real root cause and work toward changing that.
And if you genuinely believe firms would act differently, make the case. But let’s be honest—how many rational people would stand up to someone who:
- Faces no accountability,
- Has the Supreme Court and legislature backing him,
- Is in power for a second term,
- Commands an incredibly effective political machine (Fox-GOP),
- has die-hard voters behind him?
> after the democratic party decided that their winning strategy would be to villainize tech and emerging west coast values.
Trump proposed the TikTok ban and even tried to enforce it via executive action during his first term. He also said he would put Zuckerberg in prison and attacked big tech companies for almost a decade at this point. The reason Silicon Valley is aligning themselves with Trump’s administration is for strategic reasons. If there are any ideological reasons I doubt these would stand the test of pendulum shifts.
Republican speaker Johnson also still wants to enforce the ban and only considers Trump’s interference as a delay to have TikTok sold to a US entity (which the bill explicitly allows as an alternative): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-johnson-2-...
yes, the Trump faction also flirted with anti-tech politics in the 2016-2020 cycle - but there have been shifts since then. i don't disagree with you that a significant part of this alignment is due to strategic reasons - but it doesn't fully explain outsized donations to Trump prior to his election and shifts in donation patterns by regular tech workers. I do think that there has been a real political shift rightwards in SF/SV, especially among the tech elites but percolating downwards.
This line in particular sums up the cynical stance of these billionaires:
> We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.
They simply don't care about society as a whole, they want their businesses to thrive, no matter what.
There has definitely been a rightward shift in SV management and ownership. Maybe a lesser shift in individual workers, but it's really hard to tell. And frankly, that hardly merits a footnote when compared to the sums that the wealthiest can spend on elections now.
With other words, while Silicon Valley founders said and pushed that they actually have ethics, morality and "good for the world" ideas, it wasn't actually true and money+extreme capitalism won in the end.
Democrats decided they did not like the results of the “anyone can talk to anyone” social media revolution.
I think they should have tried to adapt, they decided to focus their efforts on putting the genie back in the bottle.
Technological progress has made us more affluent and better off. My father grew up in Europe and his family couldn’t even afford shoes for him or education past the third grade. I am wholly uninterested in anti-tech politics or a politics of stagnancy as seems popular in Europe. Democrats need to stop looking to Europe for inspiration and become the party of abundance, redistribution, and human capital investment. How can we make everyone better off, rather than focusing our energies on finding the next bogeyman to blame.
So then by convincing ByteDance to reinstate TikTok, did Trump just spell the end of his popularity, is Trump behaving erratically to reinstate TikTok, or are you projecting because you helped author and canvas for the bill? Moreover if the bill had so much bipartisan support, why did it need to be combined in a foreign aid package to Ukraine rather than stand on its own?
(P.S. Given your deep involvement in the bill and the sheer amount of comments you make on this site trying to convince readers that it's both popular and necessary, I think you should absolutely disclose your position on the bill. I'm a transit and modeshare advocate and I do not discuss specific bills I have helped author and sponsor online without disclaimers.)
> Moreover if the bill had so much bipartisan support, why did it need to be combined in a foreign aid package to Ukraine rather than stand on its own?
You've got things reversed. The ban is what the Republicans wanted and the Ukraine support was bundled in to take advantage of that. They wanted the Tiktok ban so much they allowed the Ukraine funding (as part of the larger funding bill).
Trump is doing what the law permits, granting a 1-time extension of not more than 90 days. In the meantime, he’ll find a way to remove the national security threat.
> why did it need to be combined in a foreign aid package to Ukraine rather than stand on its own?
This is how all bills are passed. I also advocated for the Ukraine bill; that was the weaker (and far more partisan, though not entirely so) of the two.
> I do not discuss specific bills I have helped author and sponsor online without disclaimers
Cool. I do not. (I’ll disclose my involvement if I need to add gravitas or if there’s a conflict. But it’s not a conflict to be arguing for a thing I advocated for, or vice versa. I’m not professionally in politics, after all.)
> the only time there's something bipartisan is when it's to do Israel's bidding
The gay marriage bill was at Israel’s bidding?
I worked on the TikTok bill. I really don’t care about Israel. While it’s tempting to see everything through the lens of your pet issue, it’s myopic to believe everything is motivated by a single cause, particularly a foreign-policy line.
Since you worked on the bill, can you clarify if the driving force behind it was national security concerns which have not been revealed to the public?
Right, but what's the actual demonstration of this? I keep hearing "TikTok can do bad thing" but it's not shown to actually happen and we don't seem interested in making them not do that.
> We all know you don't care about Palestine, you care about Israel
Not sure who "we" are, but they're wrong.
It's not a war I have strong views nor knowledge about. I've never visited either place and while I respect people who have strong views on both sides of the debate, my pet war over the last few years has been Ukraine. (Though even there I'm aware enough not to paint everything through the lens of Russian meddling.)
Nope, just worked on it as a private citizen. (Don't have an account with any Meta service.)
In an ideal world, we'd regulate social media. I've tried and failed advocating for privacy legislation--the people who are passionate about privacy in America, unofortunately, also tend towards political nihilism, which makes the cause a political nonstarter. I'm also concerned about Chinese influence over American society, and care about Taiwan's security, so TikTok sort of aligned between my views on privacy, teen mental health and national security.
> Democrats decided they did not like the results of the “anyone can talk to anyone” social media revolution.
Wasn't it Republicans that initiated what would eventually lead to the ban of TikTok? Maybe I remember incorrectly.
> How can we make everyone better off
Wasn't it a really long time ago that was the goal in the US? It seems capitalism leads to a very different goal than "redistribute so everyone is better off"
Democrats? The government as a whole has been incompetent with regards to tech for years now. That said, there are huge issues with the “anyone can talk to anyone” revolution, namely that some people are a bit easier to talk to and some issues are a bit easier to talk about, and that these are selected on the basis of increasing engagement and use time for advertising. This causes the benefits of said revolution to be buried under a mountain of cynicism and slop.
The key question is whether you think Nazis have the right to express their views freely. It used to be that everyone agreed this to be the case, but we are in the process of learning a very hard lesson that allowing Nazis the right to express their views freely only gives them power to restrict our speech later on.
On the contrary. I'm not afraid of Nazis, I'm afraid of those who would restrict speech for Nazis. Because once you break the seal, it's simply a matter of time until it's another unpopular thing which gets silenced... and another, and another, until we don't have freedom of speech any more. The road to hell is very much paved with good intentions.
Me personally? I am pretty afraid of nazis, that's their whole deal, violence on people, that was kind of the whole big problem with them initially and what led to a world war and genocide. A nazi isn't just someone with different viewpoints from my own, it's people who based their whole ideology on violence, against me, my wife, my children, my friends, my coworkers.
How much time? Because the way free speech absolutists talk about these ideas always seem to imply that we are mere moments from a country like Germany collapsing into authoritarianism. What evidence do we have that the US's level of free speech is truly better than a country like Germany which does specifically restrict the speech of Nazis?
Can you point to a single time that banning the speech of Nazis has led down a vast slippery slope of further speech bans, particularly in a vaguely democratic country?
Russia is allegedly attacking Ukraine due to Nazis there. The issue with these things is that you can easily motivate horrible things with the "but we are attacking nazis!" argument, that is why people hate it when you say that.
I used to believe this vehemently. It has become clear that that’s a notion from a bygone age.
The internet has created a global town square where the loudest voices are the ones that catch people’s attention, regardless of the veracity of their claims. There is no truth any more, only the cult of personality.
Tomorrow the US installs a racist, rapist, treasonous kleptocrat as president because the majority of people are unable to think objectively and swallow his promises at face value, despite every indication that life will be immeasurably worse if you’re not a billionaire oligarch.
i do not agree that this is the key question nor do i find Nazis so compelling that i have to avert my eyes from their speech for risk of becoming convinced myself
You’re speaking for yourself now. Millions of [mostly russian but not only] people today are convinced that the extermination of millions of Ukrainians is the morally righteous course of action.
Populations being persuaded into harbouring extremely bad ideas is a thing.
The problem isn't that they're scary or compelling but that they bring discourse down to its basest level once they comprise a certain proportion of the environment. Imagine if 90% of HN threads were mostly just discussion about if the author of a submission or comment is Jewish, what their ulterior Jewish motives are, and what repercussions they should face in an ideal world. Many clusters of Twitter are now that.*
A lot of people see the culture shift and start posting less or leave, and then the ratio gets worse and worse. Freedom from government restriction of speech is a good thing, but I disagree that this new era calls for throwing out norms of discussion platforms curating their communities' cultures.
I fully acknowledge there are valid, interesting philosophical reasons to host a site like Twitter or 8chan where "if it's legal it's allowed", but on net I think the benefits do not outweigh the costs.
*(Even many 4chan boards are less obnoxious. In part due to its linear format.)
It’s amazing, really. No matter what, the Dems are always wrong.
Trump is a criminal? The Dems are wrong.
Trump brings up trans issues during elections? The Dems are wrong.
Trump lies constantly? Somehow, the Dems are still wrong.
Let’s be fair: we can only blame the Dems. Because how do you blame a force of nature like Trump? Bring up any substantiative discussion, and you get identity politics and gotchas.
Facts don't matter, because "everyone has their own facts.", even when they dont.
People arent really discussing reality. They're fighting for their teams. But the least thing we can agree, is that the Dems had to have made some mistakes, since they didnt stop it. They didn't win. So the Dems are wrong.
The reality distortion field that the world builds around Trump and against democrats is literally insane. I unironically believe the source is an IRL SCP object (they have to exist otherwise no explanation for no cornucopia on the fruit of the loom logo) - and trump lucked out into being in possession of one or being that object!
Biden said it best: The USA has gone through the greatest economic recovery story NEVER TOLD. Democrats do great policy work and NEVER get credit for it.
Obama was a great president, Biden was a great president, Carter was among our very best of presidents, and NONE of them get the damn respect they deserve.
Trump, yet again, on day 1 gets an insanely good economy, an insanely good geopolitical situation, etc. Why? Because of those no good horrible marxist dummicrats!
Trump voters tomorrow will magically gain 100,000$ in their bank account, an extra house, 1$ gas, eggs, and groceries, and 500 more guns. And the day trump walks out in 2028 (if that happens) and a democrat comes in, they will instantiate become papurs again.
Ah, the propaganda GUI element. I distinctly remember covering it in my HCI class. Right between 'How to Design Intuitive Interfaces' and 'How to Influence Favorability Ratings with Popups.'
> I have no issue with American companies trying to change American policies.
For me that's a naive stance that ignores the problem of corporate influence on politics.
Apart from that, how is US corporate influence necessarily better than foreign corporate influence? Neither care about the US general public. Some US companies knowingly harm their own citizens (Philip Morris, Exxon, Purdue, etc.)
One can argue the problem with TikTook is that it's controlled by the government of an adversary nation (from the viewpoint of the US), but it's not just the fact that the company resides in a foreign country.
Corporations and their wealthy owners have an outsized influence on policies to the near total exclusion of everyday people. Not sure what future you're envisioning here but you might want to consider where you fall in the pecking order before bending the knee to blatant oligarchy.
I agree they know what they are doing by manipulating or perhaps secretly enriching Trump. He posted on Truth social that he is seeking 50% US ownership. That’s very odd. Why not 51% so that there is US based voting control? Or full divesture from China as the law requires?
And then there’s the fact that the conditions for an extension aren’t met as written in the law. There’s no way he can certify to Congress that the conditions are met, which is why he’s trying to use an executive order. But that’s illegal.
The Biden administration signed the thing into law. Of course they need to comply. And people are acting as if somehow TikTok decided to self-ban and have now un-banned. No, it's only those with the app already installed that are able to continue to use it. It's still blocked on the app stores, and will presumably stay that way until tomorrow.
> We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.
Additionally, an extract from TikTok's later statement [1]:
> In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.
What the fuck? That's some incredible bootlicking by TikTok. They've done a great job making Biden seem like the bad guy for banning TikTok, while Trump saves the day by rescuing them. This is especially ironic considering Trump was the one who wanted to introduce the ban in the first place until he gained 15M followers on the platform.
How? The law as written only gives the president the authority to give one 90-day extension, only if certain conditions have been met. And those conditions have not been met.
Please don't put words in my mouth, I did not comment on who bears the most responsibility for the ban. It is undeniable that Trump laid the groundwork for it though:
I mean, the promise to boosting Trump in the popup is probably literally what got them the promise of an executive order, possibly with the suggestion that if they wanted to stay on Trump's good side they'd best ensure their algorithm was Trump-friendly in future.
Of course, everything he does is quid pro quo. Now he has a sword of damocles he can hang over their head to ensure he can get anything he wants in the future.
How remarkable that our major geopolitical enemies (with the exception of Iran) support our incoming president. He must truly be a great uniter that will usher in a new age of global peace.
Ah ok, enlightened one. I’m sure the trough you feed from is propaganda-free. Care to explain why they are not actually our enemies? Please try to stick to facts and evidence.
> The problem is most readers still think theres a discernable difference between the parties.
No, the problem is people like you who try to convince others that Democrats and Republicans are the same, when some child-level reasoning is all that's necessary to disprove this tired bit of rhetoric.
Are you familiar with Malcolm X's speech about the fox and the wolf?
Given the past four years have seen things like shutting down labor strikes, support foreign wars, expanding arctic drilling at record pace, increased police budgets, erosion of women's rights, erosion of lgbtq rights, and a steady increase in corporate power... I think the difference we'll see is in degree, not in direction.
A party that wants to kill my and a party that wants to kill me politely are the same. Yeah, sure, I can discern one is smiling, but practically the "choice" I have is die or die (politely), which really isn't a choice at all.
Numerous pieces of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation have passed at a state level under the Biden presidency. You might argue that that's outside of the purview of the federal government, but that certainly wasn't the case in the 50s and 60s where federal military force was used to enforce civil rights legislation. The federal government failing to use its sovereign power is 100% erosion of rights.
I don't think those situations are comparable. There is precious little LGBTQ-rights legislation at the federal level, so there's nothing for the federal government to enforce when a shitty state-level government chooses to discriminate against LGBTQ folks. And it's not like Republicans in the federal government will let LGBTQ-rights legislation to pass.
LGBTQ rights are popular. Appropriate legislation could be drawn up and enforced. It would be an authoritarian move, certainly, but authoritarianism just won the election.
You're arguing Biden should have used the military, and because he didn't do that he's clearly sympathetic to anti-LGBTQ sentiment and that makes it the Dems fault? Well, that's certainly a take. It feels like it ignores the current government dynamics.
That seems an unreasonable expectation as to what the Dems can do. It's sets them up to fail, and make it's easy to say they are the same, when you set up an unreasonable scale where one is trying to remove the rights and the other isn't fighting hard enough become the same.
The Dems are writing and sponsoring anti lgbtq laws nationwide. Biden removed anti lgbtq discrimination rules, permitting local municipalities to discriminate against trans kids. The Dems aren't just side liners here, they are active participants in the erosion of lgbtq rights.
Read up on 1557 changes and title ix changes, which include language that specifically permits institutions to say, "we do not discriminate based on criteria X, y, z" when they discriminate against trans people.
It also affirmed that they felt they could supersede state law to protect caregivers (doctors, etc) who provide care against the law in their state (gender affirming care). They declined to exercise that authority and explicitly said they would not.
They also said they would consider provider discrimination only on a case by case basis (which they are not funded to do, and leaves poorer people more likely to suffer discrimination).
They added language stating "nothing in this rule imposes a requirement that covered entities provide gender affirming care".
They specifically struck the following language: "a providers belief that gender transition or other gender affirming care can never be beneficial for such individuals is not sufficient basis for a judgement that a health service is not clinically appropriate." Basically giving doctors the explicit right to say "I don't believe in gender affirming care and will not provide it".
I'm not the one setting liberalism up to fail, it seems to implode catastrophically every few decades. Last time was during the interwar period. The failure of liberal governments to exercise their sovereign powers in the face of social and economic crises is exactly what handed electoral victories to fascists in the decades after WWI. Their failure was baked in and you were duped from the start for thinking that liberal democracy could be a sound basis for human emancipation.
It's worse than this, actually. Biden administration removed anti discrimination statutes that both Obama and Trump had in place around discrimination in healthcare care and education. Biden changed the rules to permit discriminatory behavior by states as long as it was not "systematic". So, of course, states and municipalities will discriminate against trans folks and then claim they were all unique cases.
Yes, you are right Biden did nothing to protect LGBTQ folks, but he did also take action to harm them.
Most of that legislation is to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls, or to safeguard children from medical harm. When you examine the details it's not really going against anyone's civil rights.
Ah, the great American rhetorical tradition of masking discrimination in the language of civility. Just like pre-Jacksonian restrictions on voting protected the rights of the propertied from the depredations of the masses. Or how Jim Crow protected the rights of white southerners from those uneducated undesirables threatening orderly society. Or how restricting gay marriage protected the rights of Christians...
You should elaborate on why you believe these are comparable.
For example, consider a male convict who desires to be incarcerated in the female prison estate. Is it really civil rights discrimination to deny him this? If so, how?
Most importantly, what about the civil rights of the female prisoners he would be incarcerated with, if this were permitted?
American prisons violate any notion of humaneness and rights from the outset. The abject subjects who are condemned to dwell in them cannot be used to illustrate anything about civil rights, other than the fact that the state regularly uses its sovereign power to violate them.
If I was under constant threat of rape or murder, I would do anything to get to a situation that I thought might be less dangerous.
When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else was closer to $1.5k.
I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25% of the people were "problematic" but that was more than enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3 AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.
Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.