I’d answer this with ‘we rebase the dollar when a coin can’t buy a thing.’ It should have happened decades ago. Here’s my worked example.

A penny used to be a lot of money. You could buy actual things with a penny. I’m sure our oldest contributors can point to the day that a penny would get you a piece of candy. In my earliest days, I could get that same piece of candy with a nickel, but by my teens, that piece of candy would be a dime or even quarter. I remember when a bag of M&Ms cost $0.50, That became $1.00 around the 2000s, and is now $2.00.

A penny sitting on the ground was ‘good luck’ back in the day. I think that’s because you could bend down, pick up that penny, head to the store, and plink that penny down and get something in exchange for it. Today, you can’t plink down a single penny for anything. You can’t even plink down 10 of these pennies or a dime and expect to get something today, with the cheapest things requiring 25 of these coins (or a single quarter). Not much luck if you need 25 of them to get a burst of sweetness.

If we did away with the penny, would anyone lose anything? That’s 5 seconds at Federal Minimum Wage, and about 2 seconds at my city’s minimum wage. It takes more time to reach down and pick up the penny than you’d earn working a minimum wage job, so arguments about ‘Oh, prices will go higher if we eliminate the penny’ ring hollow to me. There is functionally no difference between $7.99 and $8.00 pricewise. Even a hike of a $7.9 priced item to $8 isn’t a bunch of money. We’re almost to the point where you can’t buy something with a single dollar bill. The time for the hundredth of that dollar bill passed a LONG time ago.

Kooky answer to a real question.

It’s much the same problem you guys had in the 1920s. Hate is easy. Cruelty is the norm. Humanity, like the chimpanzee we’re closest related to, is a very ‘in-group/out-group’ species. You’re either one of us, or you’re a threat to be beaten down and killed. Hate is easy to stoke, especially when things are tough. And don’t forget – Hitler studied hate-filled regimes world-wide before he put together his authoritarian empire, and one he studied hard was the US Southeast. Abuse of ‘inferior’ people was a way of life for them!

Standing up could get you killed in these not-so-United States, so a lot of us try to keep our heads down and be ‘Good Americans’…

I suspect reactionality would prefer that servers be paid like they’re paid in Europe and New Zealand and other places – a living wage without having to rely on the generosity of the customer. And that pay, of course, will be taxed, because taxes are the payment for your government services, and Europeans in particular tend to prefer to have good government services, unlike Americans.

…showing your prejudice…

Yeah. You got me. I’m prejudiced against the idea that people can do what they want, without consequence. How heartless of me, eh? Make it difficult for me to remain civil to you, why don’t you?

Here’s the difference between you, AnalogNotDigital, and me: You both have staked out opposite but equally extremist ends. Let me reduce your position to its core principles.

People should be allowed to do what they want, when they want, without any consequence for their actions.

No. No, a thousand times no. I am not going to sit by and let people walk over me, because I’ve already dealt enough with people walking over me. I have to get up and do my 9 to 5 every weekday, and moderate my drug and alcohol use to a level that I can function in my job, to keep a roof over my head and food on the table. In no world will “in my opinion we should do literally nothing about them being there” be a valid option to tent cities with rampant drug and alcohol use.

To make this more stark, you engage in the same duplicitous and dishonest debate tactics the Right uses. Because of course if I want accountability for people, I must want homeless people starving in the streets. Let me make this clear for you. I want housing to be available to everyone. Said so multiple times, in fact, in this thread alone. But that housing needs to be contingent on people getting clean and becoming productive members of society to the extent their clean selves can be. I do not support any demand that unhoused people be swept in order to partake of Proposition 1 funding. That’s what I expressed in my second paragraph. I guess you skipped that in your rush to attack me for my first paragraph.

News flash, pal. I stand by what I said in that first paragraph. You do not have a right to society subsidising your drug and alcohol habit. You DO have a right to housing, but that right has a responsibility of putting your labour in for society. Your access to transitional housing should be contingent on you getting clean if you have a drug or alcohol problem. It should be clear that the alternative you are proposing, living a drugged, drunk life in a vermin-filled tent on public space, is not an option. If you put the effort in, we give you the carrot of subsidised housing to allow you to get back on your feet and make your way into the workforce. If you decide that’s too much effort, then the stick comes out until you rethink your bad decision and go after the carrot. That’s been my position all along, and I don’t appreciate you putting words in my mouth and bald-faced lying (no homelessness in the 19th century?! History lessons for you). No solution is complete without both the carrot and the stick, because people are jerks and will take advantage of you the first chance they get. There are jerks who are looking to take advantage of homeless people with the Stick Only approach. Then there are gullible fools who will be taken advantage of by some homeless people because they want the Carrot Only approach. I’m advocating for both because I want to minimise being taken advantage here, and you’re accusing me of being … prejudiced and making bald-faced lies that only need a tiny bit of research.

So, in the spirit of launching personal attacks, I see your prejudiced accusation and call you both naive and an asshole. Good day, sir.

There will be people who will, despite having the option to be moved into housing, refuse to move there because they prefer the freedom of panhandling for money, getting drunk and stoned, and being nuisances to people around them. If you think they should not be dealt with, then yes, we don’t agree, and you’re just as bad as the people that say no help for the homeless and just want them swept away. There is a reasonable position, and it’s not either your position or Newsom’s position.

Except that’s not what WoodScientist said. He didn’t say that wanting to end dangerous homeless encampments is fascist. He said that doing something just for the sake of doing something without careful thought is a key aspect of fascist thinking. “Act first and fuck the thinking” is how Fascists work, attacking rationality and denying thought in order to suppress their followers ability to see through the lies Fascism clinks to. Fascist thinking doesn’t mean you’re a fascist, though. It just means that you’re prone to accept Fascism if you continue to think like a fascist, and at a minimum, you’re going to make a bad decision.

Again. I don’t disagree with the notion of “no, we’re not going to let you live on the streets and harass your neighbours.” I do think that it should be paired with things like expanding housing in all forms and making it easier for people to get on their feet, however. And I don’t think a strong-arm tactic of denying the funding for those positive things to compel communities to adopt your hard ball tactics is something I want to see somebody on my side doing. Those are Trump tactics. Leave them to Trump.

I definitely get what you’re saying here, but I think you’ve overblown what you see as the issue.

Housing is DEFINITELY the issue itself. Many homeless people get started on the path to mental and drug abuse issues when that paycheque doesn’t go far enough to pay the bills. Student Loans. Car Notes. Rent. Food. All get more and more expensive, making it harder to be a productive member of society, and meanwhile, pay stays criminally low. Until you watch as your landlord kicks you out, with a few dollars to your name and hundreds or even thousands of dollars of bills screaming for those few bills, and watch as everything you ever owned gets thrown out on the lawn and then stolen because you can’t protect any of it, and then some shadowy figure offers you a hit of the good stuff to make you just forget the fact that society considers you a failure, you can’t know how hard it is to deal with this situation unless you have a tiny bit of empathy.

I’m not saying we should tolerate this. I’m saying that we need to address the real root causes: costs are so high while pay is so low, and get people into housing again, with the understanding that drugging up and being a ‘free spirit’ on the back of somebody else’s labour isn’t an option. But saying housing isn’t an issue shows you don’t actually understand the problem. Please rethink that.

I agree with you. That’s why I pointed out that the only mandate was enforcement, aka, the stick, and no incentives, aka carrots, were required. If Newsom was serious about tackling this, the enforcement would be paired with incentives, and the cities would be getting help to set up alternatives to camping in public places, such as the supervised camping we use here in my neck of the woods.

But let’s be clear. You still need the stick. It’s perfectly OK to say “We’ll do everything we can to get you off the streets, but you need to put in the effort yourself, and no, trashing public spaces is not an option.”

Yeah. I’m torn.

On one hand, I’ve seen what happens when homeless people, especially the worst of them, take over a public space without supervision. It is not hyperbole to say they destroy the area. The massive homeless camps in downtown Denver featured needles, excrement, unwashed clothing, and, in two instances I personally witnessed, a fire that tore through the area, destroying the homeless camp and risking damage to everything around. I get that we need to do better on housing all around and support the various proposals (such as homeless communities, repurposing abandoned buildings, etc), but there has to be an element of enforcement, including disallowing camping in areas not specifically purposed for camping, ensuring that people move on, and forced relocations, if for no other purpose than to address buildups of trash and vermin (to be clear: rats, not the people, I’m not calling homeless vermin 🙄 ). And IMO, a key component of this is funding a public healthcare program that addresses mental illness, such as Proposition 1 in California. This is good because addressing mental illness can lead to reduced drug abuse, which is a major cause of homelessness.

But on the other, what Newsom is doing is using tricks right out of the Trump playbook by demanding that cities and counties adopt policies they do not wish to implement to share in the funding that would make homelessness go down. I also notice that there are no requirements for carrots, only sticks. I.E. no demand that supervised camping sites be set up, or empty buildings bought up and repurposed as housing. Just the requirement that you’re unwelcome in public places if you’re unhoused, and that the law will be brought against you if you dare persist in the same place for 4 days in a row, no matter how much you take care of that space. Seems like he’s working to appeal to the Right? “See, I can be as heartless and cruel as any Republican!” Makes me less inclined to vote for him.

I think we found the downvoter. 🤣

That said, nah, I upvoted the comment. And it’s now 195 to 1. I’d say that downvoter should really think they’re stupid, but then I remember how confidently stupid Trumpers act, and how smart they say they are. :)

I just want to know what’s going through the head of the lonely single downvoter you have at the time of this post. What sort of horrific mindset would prompt them to vote your comment down. Does this shithead think that this ISN’T a case of a baby being gestated in the body of his/her dead mother? Or does this shithead think that gestating babies in the corpses of dead mothers kept alive by technology at great expense is a good thing?

What an awful person, this downvoter.

Don’t forget conservatives started the Civil War to protect their access to unpaid labour in the form of people treated no better than animals. They may have swapped political parties between 1865 and 2025, but they REALLY want that free labour again!

I see these plans, and I see disturbing parallels to the fictional setting of Night City in Cyberpunk. For those not aware:

Night City was founded as an attempt to bypass the inefficiencies its founder perceived in centralised government in the United States of the Cyberpunk world. Free of governance by the central US authority, and indeed independent of the two Californias it sat on the borders of, it was a hellscape of corporate governance with rampant homelessness, a ruthless economy, brutal crime, a police force that unapologetically serves the rich and powerful, and corporate armies that regularly shake down subjects of this so-called ‘free city’.

Considering Grimes’ particularly important role in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, and of course Musk’s appreciation for nerdy fiction, I think there’s a 0% chance that Musk is unaware of Night City. Thus, the similarities to his idea of a free city to the fictional Night City can’t possibly be coincidental – he WANTS to make a world where he can sit at the top of his ivory tower while his goons rough up people like you and me in the dirty streets below. I don’t want to live in that city, though.

I’m going to guess the single downvote took you at face value, but that’s what happens when you live in a world like this one, where the Poe Principle applies and we sure can’t tell you from a real MAGAt.

full brunt of their (in)decisionstupidity.

Fixed it. :3

…twice!

I mean, when you give Nazi salutes, and advocate for treating people like shit and removing the supports that keep them alive, and specifically target ‘undesirables’, I mean, that earns you the “Nazi” achievement, bro. You do understand that, right? 🤣

Response for the two options this may be.

Poe Principle: Don’t do this. Don’t give them ideas, because they’ll take your idea and run with it. The shitheads on the other side don’t just believe in this crap, but they WANT to believe in this crap, because they are shitheads.

True Believer: Your god is a hateful god and not the God of Christianity. Buzz off now.

I see your whataboutism and respond with what your mother should have told you: Two wrongs don’t make a right. Does anything you said have anything to do with promising us the sun, moon, and stars and delivering more cashola for the moneyed class?

I prefer Dems to Reps, but man, you got your head so far up the Democratic Party’s ass with this bullshit you’re spewing here that you can taste what they had for lunch!