Posted by cainxinth 2 days ago
One of the funny things about China is that there are a lot of "experts" who insist on reading the tea leaves and assign secret, nefarious motives. The truth is that China is pretty open about what they're doing. If you take everything China says at face value you're going to be ahead of 95% of the China talking heads on TV. That's not hyperbole.
Property speculation was a common way for Chinese people to accumulate wealth. This has made property expensive in the Tier 1 cities in particular. The CCP had tried to cool this with various reforms but it turned property into a Ponzi scheme. Basically, developers would have to sell new units and then use those funds to finish a previous project. This is a big factor in the Evergrande default [2].
Xi Jinping took power in 2019 and had some policy priorities that include cracking down on corruption, reforming the housing market and ecological living. In 2019, he famously said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [3]. So the real estate market has been in decline for years. Some might view that as a failure but it was an intentional popping of a real estate bubble for the greater good. China makes it difficult and expensive to own more than one home. Likewise, foreign capital can't be parked in real estate like it can in the West.
One of the good things about the Internet is that people can see for themselves how modern, clean and people-centric Chinese cities are, particularly Tier 1/2 cities.
Instead of investing in society, we militarize and overfund the police, start pointless wars, create homeless people through unaffordability and build our cities around various profit opportunities for mega-corporations (even having to have a card is to the benefit of corporations). And of course we can't forget what role racism played in how our cities evolved and were planned.
[1]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/default-delisting-evergr...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
All land in China is state-owned. You own the building. You don't own the land the building is on. In this way, it's really no different to leasehold in the UK or land-lease in NYC. Do we say that all these UK leaseholders don't really "own" a house? Is there the same fearmongering?
And in the UK, it's often the Royal Family or some aristocratic landholder who owns the land (eg the Duke of Westminster owns an awful lot of London land) whereas in China, the lease renewal is essentially automatic and there's no property tax or land lease that gets paid.
It's also worth adding you never really truly own property anywhere. The government is free to change their mind at any time. And they do. All the time eg eminent domain.
Seriously though, you have an unsupported belief and you're looking to cherry-pick ways to support it. It's not rational.
How do you prove that housing supply linked to homelessness is NOT just a correlation?
This is intensified in spaces administrated by government due to the incentives of government and the type of people who are best retained and fill out the org chart of such organizations and it is obvious because these spaces are most public but it's a thing everywhere, for example your hospital has security that could kick out "bad people" (whatever that means) but it still has a crappy waiting area not because they don't want to make it inviting for people who care about you to stick around lest they be there to raise a stink in the event you are mistreated.
There are comparable examples of this sort of "make things worse for people who are doing fine things" in all sorts of public and private contexts beyond just seating. I wish it was just the benches.
Here's one of them, can't remember where the other is (in the same park): https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSFyikeerp7i77oZ8
Traditionally, programming has had a high barrier to entry, but it has also been a profession where compensation has remained relatively strong. As societies become harsher under pressure from high housing costs and economic displacement, they tend to become more aggressive and violent. But many people do not sympathize with this issue because they are not personally in that situation. They mostly experience the visible disorder: aesthetic damage, drug use, and the social harms produced by deeper structural failures.
But if we compare this to HN debates about LLMs, an irony appears. In labor-market terms, LLMs are similar to hostile design.
LLMs are not installing benches for programmers. They are closer to removing the benches.
In the past, there were lower-level tasks where junior developers, non-traditional developers, non-native English speakers, and small open-source contributors could remain inside the profession. CRUD work, documentation fixes, test writing, small bug fixes, simple UI, repetitive glue code — these were not glamorous tasks, and they were often inefficient. But they functioned like public benches inside the profession. They gave people a place to sit long enough to learn.
LLMs attack exactly that layer.
From a company’s point of view, this is rational. Code that might take a junior developer several days can now be drafted by a model in minutes. Documentation, tests, boilerplate, simple screens, and repetitive API wiring no longer seem worth preserving as training grounds for humans.
As a result, the market may look more efficient. But that efficiency resembles the history of removing benches. It is not only the “problematic” people who disappear. Elderly people, children, travelers, disabled people, and ordinary people who simply needed a place to sit are pushed out as well.
Software has a similar problem. If we remove low-level work, low-quality work may appear to decrease. But at the same time, we also remove the space where beginners can fail, receive correction, observe others, and slowly acquire the instincts of the profession.
So LLMs are not merely productivity tools. They can also function as a force that removes public seating inside the software profession.
That is why I find it difficult to reconcile the logic of people who argue that public benches should be removed, while also arguing that LLMs should not be accepted.
They are already sitting inside the profession. They already have experience, English, networks, code review experience, and existing project history. For them, LLMs look like a faster tool. But for people trying to enter from the edge of the profession, LLMs are not just a tool. They are a change in the structure of entry itself.
The lower seats where people could once sit and learn are disappearing. Newcomers are expected to start from a higher level of abstraction and with stronger verification skills from the beginning.
In cities, the logic for removing benches is usually expressed in the language of order, safety, aesthetics, and maintenance cost. In software, the logic for adopting LLMs is expressed in the language of productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, and quality control.
But behind that language, what disappears is the buffer zone through which a community receives people.
A city without benches may look cleaner, but it does not become more public. Likewise, a software market without entry-level work may look more productive, but it is hard to say that it has become a healthier ecosystem.
When I read HN, I often see this kind of irony. And perhaps we all live inside such ironies. That may also be part of what makes communities interesting.
People do not seem to have a consistent attitude toward publicness itself.
Instead, they show completely different moral intuitions depending on where they are positioned within that public space.
I always find that interesting to watch.
This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained.
We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to many folks satisfaction is shameful. Still when public services are make less functional this can interfere with the literal viability of expensive transportation systems. They can rapidly become insolvent if transit consumers prefer alternatives due to the misuse of spaces.
The idea that need trumps all other factors leads us to inefficiency public services that collapse.
If we live in a would where we accept that we allow some folks to disrupt complicated social programs, then those aspects of the social programs will disappear or the programs themselves will disappear.
This is exactly what the essay describes as happening. When someone on a bench disrupts the service and we will not remove the person creating the disruption, then we will end up removing the bench.
We can clutch our pearls all we like here, but people will stop using a social service they are uncomfortable using. And when they don't want to use it, they will stop funding it. As long as we live in a democracy, this will be in issue.
The Earth has lots of resources that are privately owned. The process by which these resources become privately owned has no satisfactory libertarian justification ("land and oil become yours when you mix them with your labor", really?) If the profit from these resources was divided equally, everyone would have enough for food and shelter. The people who have less than that are essentially victims of theft. Society should first pay these people the fair share that was stolen from them, and only then start telling them about their duties to society.
There is a distinction between pro- and anti-social behaviors beyond capitalist and socialist systems. You can have anti-social behavior in both systems. You can have pro-social behaviors in both systems. This should be fairly straight forward.
Not accommodating someone disrupting a service does not mean we need to be absolute pricks about it. This happens every day in public libraries, public parks, public toilets, and public transit systems. Simple because a need exists, doesn't mean the library or transit system does not also exist to meet needs.
If you think that socialism -- alone -- will end homelessness, I would ask you to check your history books. There was homelessness and vagrancy in the USSR. There are plenty of folks in San Francisco who refuse shelter when offered: https://x.com/LondonBreed/status/1734350588899717423 ... we are currently experiencing a move in large parts of the west from high-trust to low-trust societies. Much of the issues around homelessness, lack of housing, and refusal to provide adequate shelter space stem from folks engaging in low-trust behaviors, treating property as a zero-sum good, and cities as places that should exist in a type of stasis... rather than as communities that must continuously grow and change to meet needs. These low-trust issues certainly can persist in low-trust socialist societies as well.
Unclear with the language permissible whether 20th century homelessness on another continent is comparable to western homelessness in 2026.
Nobody ever does that, whatever a "categorical imperative" might be or represent. But not having benches because a victim of capitalism might, Heaven forbid, sleep on it, is the epitome of cultural and societal barbarism. Countries that do that are not part of civilized society, they might be wealthy, and many of them are (I've seen a similar philosophy in regards to benches in Switzerland), but they're not civilized.
If you do not understand the concept of a categorical imperative, I would strongly suggest studying some ethical philosophy. There are folks that have spent lifetimes trying to figure out the best ways to see human flourishing, and they have some very, very good ideas.
This one is fine. If the city doesn't like it, it should legalise sleeping on park benches.
Another one is "it costs society nothing if you occupy an empty seat on a nearly empty car". Most people don't sleep in the transit system when the transit system is busy, anyway, because why would you sleep in such a noisy place? They are there at quiet times because they don't have a better place. They don't like it any more than you do.
Another one is "everyone is equal". People here are complaining that a homeless person sleeping on park benches takes away their ability to sit on them. But why is sitting considered more valuable than sleeping? Or why should the benches be reserved for people who HN readers agree with?
On the benches specifically, I've noticed something interesting. I don't mind sitting on the ground, and when I cannot find a bench, I do exactly that. People often assume I must be homeless.
Your own policy is anti-social then.
If we universalized your suggested policy of having strict(er?) prevention and/or (probably and) enforcement against "anti-social" (whatever that dog whistle means) behavior we would have the war on drugs but for every issue and policy area. We'd be living in more of a dystopia than we already are. The government would be subjugating us (more than it already is) rather than serving us (not that it does this much already). I think any honest assessment based on any degree of standard western/liberal (small L) assumptions about society and government would consider that "non functional".
Asking someone to leave a subway platform because they are not using the public transportation system for transportation is not a war on drugs. It’s just making people exit a subway station.
Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.
Unfortunately this is pretty selective evidence, but I know for a fact they don't exclude people on the basis of having mental illness or addiction problems, I've worked with them personally.
But it still beats where they came from, and hey... it's free.
But you do help illustrate a concern: homelessness is ultimately a federal issue, as some states dump theirs on other more "accepting" states.
This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.
The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London.
The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.
The problem is also political, unfortunately. $10 billion isn't going to change zoning laws and a NIMBY attitude of freezing things in time.
If they like that point in time so much, they should build a museum, sheesh!
But that doesn't answer the question. It's "a lot" of homes, but less than a tenth of what would be needed.
And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum.
> And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum
Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.
I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc).
And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing.
There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-home...
I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals.
If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.”
Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails.
YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed.
A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail.
Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons.
Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.
A country with so expensive legal defense that most simply cant afford it. And a country that punishes even attempt to go to court to defend oneself with years and years of additional prison time if you loose.
A country where it is near impossible to convince a cop or prosecutor of wrongdoing, a country that goes really out of its way to rationalize what would be a clear murder elsewhere. A country with qualified immunity too.
Oh, and a country willing to incarcerate on any quack pseudo science.
But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.
I'm not sure how you get that from what I wrote. My solution is (like many, many places in the world): "treatment or jail, but we will not tolerate a destruction of the commons". PDX/SF could do this with the police they have, and it might even imply force reduction as getting those people off the streets would reduce A LOT of crime.
Yes, the U.S. has many significant problems. I agree. Is your suggestion that we have to address them sequentially, prioritized according to your preferences... or else do nothing?
The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.