Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@SuperSpaceFan

It's just targeting people who are struggling to take care of themselves.

And this hasn't totally ended.

I don't often encounter people in my life who are as openly hostile to homeless people as Republicans can be. However, I do encounter a kind of... sorting.

The Deserving vs. The Undeserving
The Injured vs. The Addict
The Families vs. The Lazy Ones

Different people have these different categories or little stories they tell themselves about people they don't know that they'll use to dismiss them.

Or they'll just say "but something has to be done"

Many ordinances, laws, "initiatives" or um "military occupations" since we have those too in the mix that target "homeless people" in big cities are, just by the nature of who is homeless, targeting disabled people.

And this whole "right to not see" undercurrent is just people missing these laws. Or finding the way to do the same thing as these laws without having to spell out what it is as they once did.

Why is it so uncomfortable to read about "ugly laws"?

From 1867 to 1974, various cities of the United States had unsightly beggar ordinances, retroactively named "ugly laws." These laws targeted poor people and disabled people.

(From the Wikipedia)

I didn't know about these laws, but, with all of the crying and moaning about "homelessness" it seems like a good time to sit down and remember that this happened.

And still happens, if not as explicitly codified.

@argonaut

From what I know there isn't any chance of running out of coal and it would be hard for it to be any cheaper than it already is. It's not hard to find.

@rose_amd64

Yikes!

@Wyatt_H_Knott

I'm interested in WHY people are so receptive to "crime is out of control" political messaging.

The causes of the crime itself isn't a matter for polling and also is very interesting.

@semitones @AnnyJoe @bmoe

A good faith operation wouldn't need to do that. "call your parents they need to come pick you up" is enough of a punishment. (and pay for the item)

But this is very boring and difficult work that requires police who work in the same neighborhood for years (their "visibility" statistical system means I never recognize any of the officers since they are sent all around the city by the computer)

It's a whole different way of looking at the role of police.

@violetmadder

The kind of polling work I see tells me they aren't really interested in finding out what people really think or what people REALLY care about.

There are topics they don't even ask about that are massive. The questions are leading and full of assumptions.

@violetmadder

In my experience polling firms skimp on leg work. They hate paying people to go and find and interview their sample because it's expensive.

There are a lot of data out there, but it's very biased in unpredictable ways.

Pulling text from facebook twitter or X has nothing on doing interviews on a sample you have randomized well.

And it's critical to try to find the entire sample to the best of your ability.

@violetmadder

I'm not convinced that LLMs are a reliable statistical tool.

For example. If I did my fantasy intensive polling and interviewing project and had little text paragraphs from thousands of carefully sampled people would an LLM be a good way to summarize all of those responses?

How would it compare to human sorting and reading and statistics about word frequency?

I want to see some side by side comparisons.

@paulc

"The best explanation seems to be unleaded gas and removal of lead from the environment, especially peoples’ homes."

I don't know if this is the "best explication" At least where I live I think it has more to do with increased population density and our neighborhood having a substantial number of poor but stable families so the social fabric is functional again.

In the 80s there were a lot of abandoned buildings and lots and just fewer people around who would respond ... normally.

@AnnyJoe @bmoe

I think the beauty shop owner would be happy if he had some help tracking down the parents of the the teens who keep stealing bleach to do bathroom sink highlight jobs. And in nearly every case this would be sufficient to solve the problem.

@AnnyJoe @bmoe

To be fair they seem to have only two modes:

1. Do nothing
2. Beast mode

Even the beauty shop owner I've been talking about, who is very annoying and conservative lamented that he hates the thought of calling cops on local teens because the police over-react. But, he's also getting fed up, and plenty of people seem strangely excited to see a child beaten into the ground for horsing around on a bicycle, for example:

Sauropods.win

(sauropods.win)

Consider the alternate history where fungi never evolved the ability to digest lignin, the tough woody material found in many plants.

The period of time where plants could produce lignin, but fungi couldn't break it down resulted in the massive coal deposits found in the earth.

Some bacteria can break down lignin, but they require wet conditions to do this. This is what happens in the gut of termites.

So, of course, we can imagine an alternate history where termites rule the earth.

@wakame

There are SO MANY cops and most of them are doing nothing.

But to the beauty shop owner and everyone he complains to (I asked him how much total was stolen and it's about $300 over the past few years) crimes are happening all the time and the police are swamped with "more serious" crimes and no one else is helping him.

It's kind of easy to be annoyed at the guy but at the same time I get why he's exasperated.

@wakame

"broken windows"

Is a broken name for this kind of policing because they never really looked into how the windows were getting broken. The only reason why broken windows aren't a problem in the Bronx now is because there are almost no abandoned buildings anywhere and it was nearly always abandoned buildings being vandalized in that way.

This whole approach to crime prevention came out of a time of under-staffing which also isn't a problem now.

I can parse out what's happening in my own neighborhood. But I have no idea what's going on across the country.

"What have you seen or experienced that has lead you to think crime is rising?"

Media play a huge role in driving these ideas. But it can't all be media.

What are the little wrinkles in day to day experience that shape this worldview.

What is really going on? My guess is it's summer and teens are stealing $8 hair bleach because dying your friends hair is something to do. These are small items and the stores are very large with only one person on staff.

In my ideal world someone would show the video to their parents. It would be a lot of work to do that but also very effective.

Instead the shopkeeper is thinking about banning teens from the store.

And there are a dozen cops in the subway.

The previously mentioned beauty supply shop owner makes a ton of calls and reports about the ongoing petty theft problem. Another beauty shop half a block away has a similar issue. Could there be 12 NYPD standing in the subway because of their calls?

I can't prove it but from what I understand that's how the system works.

It's very... depersonalized.