They want you to despair and die. They want you to kill yourself because then they can pretend they aren’t the cause. It’s critical that you understand this: Despite any pain we endure in the near future, it’s nowhere near over and we will fucking survive.
I am not making an optimistic assertion when I say this cannot stand. Fascism always destroys itself. We may end up living under a fascist dictator, but the world has survived powerful fascists before, and it will again.
This is a Learning in Progress post. Contents are brief and accuracy is not guaranteed.
Observing propaganda is useful to see how it is constructed. I just got through watching a video that claimed California is being taken over by “the drug-addled violent homeless”1 due to decriminalization of felonies and stringent building codes. In case you need the reminder: Homeless people are victims of landlords, a lack of rent control2, and a lack of social services. And the felonies in question? Minor crimes like drug possession and petty theft, the kinds of crime done by the desperate or disadvantaged. In other wods, crimes that never should have been a felony in the first place.
(They also claim that providing medical services to drug users increases harm. I remind you that the purpose of medicine is to reduce harm.)
California’s population peaked in 2020 at 39.5 million people3. At the time, there were approximately 151,000 homeless people living there4, and 711,679 housing units were unoccupied5 – enough for every homeless person to have 4 homes! (This mirrors a larger trend in the USA, where there were 16,883,357 vacant housing units in 20196, and 1.5 million homeless people7.) By 2022, California’s population had dropped by 0.5 million and there were 2.4 million more housing units (from 12.2 million5 to 14.6 million)8, which is plenty more space, despite the increase in homeless population to ~181,000 people9.
A preliminary estimate shows the homeless population in California has grown by 2% since that figure, which still doesn’t strain the available housing units10. However, the source of that claim is one of the least reliable sources available, so the real difference may be higher.
Underreporting & Accuracy
The USA has always had very reliable census data. The numbers regarding housing units all come from census data, and are accurate. The information on homeless populations that I found broadly comes from 3 categories of sources, with varrying levels of accuracy.
“Continuum of Care” sources (commonly abbreviated CoC) seem to be the least reliable, first because they count homeless people at a single point of time (which ignores the magnitude of homelessness by omitting people who are frequently homeless for brief periods of time repeatedly), and second because they only count homeless people participating in a homelessness preventation program (which are often highly exclusionary, tunring away most homeless people). For example, the HUD’s CoC sources claim that in 2019 there were only 279,327 homeless people11in the entire country instead of the 1.5 million7 I stated above.
The Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) seems to still fall into the trap of only counting people at a single point in time, but as far as I can tell actually does try to come up with an accurate count at that moment in time. The 9th and 11th items in my footnotes/sources are these reports, whose numbers are close to the PIT estimate in the 7th item (so I consider them related / roughly equivalent in accuracy).
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) only counts homelessness based on children during a school year. Despite this, it captures a much more realistic estimate of the magnitude of homelessness by accounting for families over a significant period of time.
It would be fair to take these sources as a lower bound, average estimate, and upper bound. Operating from that assumption, I note that the difference between the lowest estimates and the highest is about 5x, while the difference between the average and upper is 3x. I think it important to consider this when looking at the numbers presented earlier, specifically the comparison between California and the whole USA.
There Were Always Enough Homes
When I want to make a point clear, I take the estimates most against my position, and use those to prove my perspective valid even under a worst-case.
California has 1/3rd the homeless population of the entire country. The estimates I found for California match the average estimates for the USA. If we assume that the average estimate is wrong, and the upper bound is correct, there are 3x more homeless people in California than I said above.
In 2019, the highest count I found was 181,000. If we presume that there are actually 543,000 homeless people, that the 2.4 million new housing units don’t actually exist, and that 500,000 people didn’t actually leave California… there are still 711,679 housing units available for them. There have always been enough homes for everyone.
Footnotes & Sources
(Note: All resources are archived using the services linked to on Archives & Sources.)
An important signifier in any conversion about disadvantaged people is how they are spoken about. A specific flag to look for is the usage of terms like “the homeless” vs terms like “homeless people”. The first is dehumanizing, the focus is on a group of “disliked things” whereas the second acknowledges these are people of a categorization. While this language usage does not necessarily coincide with how a presenter values the people being discussed, it is a hint at how they perceive of a topic.
This is just to vent frustration at a thoroughly stupid experience I had recently. A portion of that stupidity is me failing to read something correctly, but I’m just really stuck on the stupidity of the response to me asking for help:
My reaction clearly indicates that I am not undrstanding something, and I even tried to give context to where I’m coming from so that it would be easier to spot what I misunderstood, but instead I was told to go ask a bot.
And then they blocked anyone from ever asking for help again.
What’s most frustrating to me about this is that it coincides perfectly with another issue I ran into today where I couldn’t add an important detail to an old issue. Past conversations are useful to people looking for assistance, especially when one solves their problem and explains it. When I am blocked from replying to something with a solution, anyone in the future experiencing the same issue is likewise blocked from finding the answer.
I now know what I messed up, but I’m not allowed to pass that knowledge to the future, because I was confused and made a mistake in how I asked for help.
There’s another layer to this that is often ignored: When this is the response the average newbie gets when they first try to contribute, they are encouraged to never ask again, or in the case of submitting pull requests, encouraged to never try to help again.
When open source maintainers discourage newbies, they cannibalize the future of their software.
Okay, that’s my entire point, but I also encounted some funny things as part of this.
What is a contribution? GitHub doesn’t know!
I think it’s interesting that GitHub says the repo limited opening issues / commenting on issues to past contributers, but I am a past contributer. GitHub clearly considers issues to be contributions, as every profile has a graph showing issues as part of their contributions:
AI tools can be very powerful, but they can also be very stupid
Earlier today, I tested Perplexity AI’s capability to answer a few basic questions easily answered through traditional search engines, such as which insect has the largest brain and which country is the current leader in development of thorium-based reactors. The results? It doesn’t know ants are insects, thinks fruit flies have large brains just because they have been the subject of a large number of studies, and ignores India in favor of China because western media reports on China a lot more.
But you know what, I wanted to test this asshole’s suggestion to ask ChatGPT about my problem, and surprisingly, it gave a very clear and accurate response!
Note (2024-10-02): Open AI has since removed the ability to access web sites from ChatGPT, and dumbed it down significantly. It is no longer a viable tool for most use cases.
When you offer binaries for a project, they have to actually exist..
To be fair, this is a fairly recent change to the ReadMe, but maybe you should publish binaries before advertising that you publish binaries?
Installation and usage aren’t the same thing
It’s understandable to be confused about whether someone has correctly installed something, but after confirming that installation has worked, ignoring the question asked is unhelpful to say the least.
This is a Learning in Progress post. Contents are brief thoughts based on few sources, and have not been checked for accuracy or usefulness.
These notes are based on a section of Equality by Darrin M. McMahon. I haven’t finished reading it, and a bug deleted most of my notes from the first ~200 pages, so it is even less complete than it might otherwise be.
People are different, and this makes them inherently unequal. This has been used to justify bigotry on arbitrary differences throughout history, but declaring equality of all doesn’t make people equal either. Everyone has needs and capabilities, and the only path to equality is to have all people use their capabilities collectively to fulfill their collective needs.
Stalinism took “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” and replaced the word “need” with “work”. By including this seed of meritocracy, anyone injured, disabled, or elderly is excluded from equality. (I think every person has a phase where they see meritocracy as ideal. Fortunately, most people grow out of this phase.)
Nazis promoted equality of a few at the expense of everyone else. (How equality has been used throughout history changes. It is important to recognize that it means different things to different people.) Fascism creates a meritocracy exclusive to one class, relying on the existence of outsiders (who must be murdered1). In this way, fascism must shrink the accepted class to have more outsiders, and eats itself.
We claim all nations are equal, while propping up some, sabotaging others, and we can all see that nations are not equal. WWII’s devastation increased equality (see “four horseman of leveling” in Quotes). Post-WWII, economists claimed that industrialization forms a natural progression of brief extreme inequality that quickly brings in equality. (This is an obvious lie.) At the same time, economists claimed that it was better to make a nation wealthy than to fix its inequality, and that commerce is a leveling force. “When a rich man sells to the poor, they become equal.” cannot be true, and yet it was the predominant claim.
Quotes
“self-love is the great barrier to full human equality” I see in many people, especially myself, a critical lack of self-love, so this stood out to me as worth investigating further. It may not be true, or it may be more true than I am capable of recognizing right now.
“Christianity is Communism” If you research when and where Christianity was formed, the people were living under a form of communism.2 The ideals of Christianity are communist ideals, but have been changed and replaced by centuries of adaptation and interpretation.
“iron law of oligarchy” In every government, an elite few control all. There are many systems to stop this, but they have all failed so far.
“four horseman of leveling” – war, revolution, state failure, disease. These are all common things that have caused increases in equality by hurting everyone.
Questions
Does communism only work at small scales? It is implied to have only worked when implemented by communities instead of countries.
Does Marxism rely on individualism? The more I learn, the more I see that individualism is the biggest threat to progress. (Ever heard “divide and conquer”? Individualism IS self-division – a destruction of community. It makes us weak.)
What makes immigration “good”?3 From my education, I “know” that immigration has always had benefits, but what are those benefits? Why do we call them beneficial? As far as I know, the benefit has always been cheap labor (exploitation of immigrants). I want to challenge my education, and learn more about the complexities of immigration. (There is never a valid reason to stop immigration.)
Should we not want greatness? What IS greatness? Nietzsche argued for a constant personal struggle to achieve greatness, and against many institutions that improve equality. If seeking greatness requires sacrificing others, should we ever want it?
What was good/bad about the “New Deals”? They compensated for a destroyed economy, and produced infrastructure still used today, but what were the exact short-term and long-term effects?
Further Reading
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx
Footnotes
Fascism relies on exploitation of the unaccepted classes, which often literally involves mass murder, but also makes the unaccepted people leave. This is why fascists inevitably shrink their accepted class.
Romans were the capitalists of their day, exploiting the people that became the first Christians. Communism is a broad and complex subject. In this context, communism is being used unrelated to the way it is used as a classification for modern countries.
A partner reminds me that diversity is an inherent good, and that immigration increases diversity. (At minimum, diversity brings new ideas and perspectives into focus, and increases resiliency.)
(It’s kind of difficult to keep motivation when hard work is unceremoniously destroyed by a glitch..)
I have a very rare piece of music. It doesn’t exist in any form you can access online. It’s a mixtape of Hip Hop beats spanning from 1975 to 2011. I found it shortly after it was published on SoundCloud. It’s always been special to me, but I never thought about the possibility of it disappearing. I only downloaded the audio because I enjoyed it and wanted to have it in my music collection.
In a way, I’m happy because I still have this relic. In another way, I’m really sad. There was a long and detailed description of what each piece of music in this track is from, and what it represents about the history of Hip Hop. It’s lost forever. Prozak Morris still has a SoundCloud, a Bandcamp, a YouTube.. or at least there are still publicly facing pages there.. but this one track and its associated detail is gone.
Normally, when I run into something like this, I am able to quickly find what I was missing on the Internet Archive. I did find when it was originally published, including access to comments people made on the track shortly after it was released.. but the page where it was posted (and that lengthy description was written) was never archived.
I was.. a bit desperate to find if it still exists, so I looked for other archives. To be fair, I didn’t check under every stone, but I really don’t think it does exist anymore. And I stumbled across another level of pain in the search: Google killed its archives. Used to be, you could browse archived versions or cached versions of websites that Google had indexed, and at one point in time, this page was definitely there.. but it has either long since been deleted.. or was deleted NINE DAYS AGO.
It’s possible this wouldn’t have been lost forever if I searched for it NINE DAYS AGO. Because I absolutely save everything I care about now. And when I remember something I knew about, I go looking for it.
Anything not saved will be lost.
Nintendo Wii Remote Settings “Quit Game” Message
I was going to stop typing there, with a reference to Nintendo which is always more appropriate than one might expect.. but I remembered the phrase wrong, as “Everything that is not saved will be lost.” Apparently, the entire internet remembers the phrase wrong too, as it is quoted everywhere as “Everything not saved will be lost.”
It is also referenced as an in-game quit message when it was part of the Wii Remote Settings. Additionally, a band released an album with a similar name, so now search results for the phrase only refer to that band and album. (Fortunately search suggestions still reference that it has something to do with Nintendo.. or I’d still be a bit lost on its origin.)
Kind of ironic that the origin of such a well-known phrase is almost lost itself.
And.. I only found a single image of the original message. Everything else is incorrect references.
