Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of the above, it's at least part of Imperfect Produce's identity. If they are marketing to conscious consumers, this article helps those consumers consider more broadly their social impact.
For my own value judgement, I feel like I'm missing some important data: - If IP is taking waste produce from larger farms, are they actually competing with BeetBox for the supply of produce? - Downstream of above, has IP's activity actually reduced the amount of food donations being made available to food banks?
If IP is mainly competing with BeetBox for the "conscious consumers" that subsidize their charitable work, maybe BB can focus efforts to marketing their distinction from IP. Maybe this article is the first step.
Alternatively, if the BB folks are prioritizing social impact, have they tried to convince/train IP to work with the same social gaps they fill? If IP is more efficient in extracting conscious-consumer dollars, they have more surplus that could be poured back into the community.
I don't know anything about either of these groups, but the article says that this is simply the marketing of Imperfect Produce that doesn't bear out in reality. Do you have information contradicting their points that you decided not to share?
Article asserts: "That food wasn't being thrown out it was going to food banks and homeless shelters."
So while IP is almost certainly helping the farmers by paying them for produce they can't normally sell they certainly aren't reclaiming mountains of food otherwise destined for rot.
They don't. They wont. The article is nonsensical and ignores basic economics. Suffers from "we know better" attitude.
Small farmers are struggling. If the ugly produce helps them become little more profitable it is both good for them and also good for the food security of the nation. More available food would mean food will be cheaper for everyone. Will the world be better place if small farmers are out of business and a large businesses like Amazon takes up farming ?
Personally do not think there is anything ugly about ugly produce.
Note: I am not a rich techie. I earn less than $10K a year.
In all seriousness, banning plastic straws is a much lower hanging fruit than solving the homeless situation. The money to build and maintain affordable housing has to come from somewhere, probably by raising taxes. Would the SF residents, lots of whom are high income earners and who ironically are the ones feeding the crazy housing and rent prices, be willing to chip in to solve the problem or just sit on the sidelines and complain about the homeless?
They do mainly because of the promises of a high-paying job in the tech industry, not because a politician focuses his policies on plastic straws instead of taking care of people in need.
Can you name a supervisor you think is more concerned with plastic straws than homelessness?
> San Francisco reportedly is set to spend nearly $280 million in its next budget fighting homelessness – an average of $37,300 for each of the city’s estimated 7,499 homeless residents
I live in a place where I don't see homeless people even on a monthly basis. Maybe a fuew time's per year when I've ventured an hour or more from home. So I'm sure there is a lot of nuance to the problem of homelessness that I don't understand. Still, considering these facts naively, I fail to see how such a large amount of spending can fail to address the issue:
1. $30k per year is more than enough to enable a person to be not-homeless. Rent them an apartment, buy them groceries and medical care, etc.
2. If they refuse to live in that apartment because they have itchy feet, schizophrenia, or just don't like the wallpaper, then perhaps we should suppose that they don't consider their homelessness to be much of a problem.
3. If any of those folks who don't take the city up on the free apartment do something illegal, like defecating in public, they can probably be incarcerated or institutionalized for $30k per year.
4. Some of the people from #2 might not be eliminated in step #3, because they don't break any laws. Being that that's the case, even if we consider them to be a nuisance, shouldn't we just get over it and ignore them?
[1]: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/07/19/san-francisco-continues...
If the "problem" was as simple as you assume, the solution pointed out would have already worked.
It's a complex problem, which requires complex solutions. In my experience, the major element is mental health. Many people are on the streets due to mental health issues, or develop mental health issues when on the street.
One take away note: most people are only two simultaneous life disasters away from being on the streets. One disaster (health / family / relationship / job) can typically be weathered, but two or more at once is typically catastrophic. There's many a PhD / CEO / father of four on the street.
Should a non-homeless person be institutionalized or incarcerated for defecating in public?
We'd need a very very good mechanism for deciding who gets institutionalized if we're going to start suspending legal rights. Far better than we have now. A Galaxy better than "staff at general recognizing" someone.
So then what happens? The homeless die? What solution do you want?
I'm sorry, but are these even people to you any more? Most might say "homeless people" at least.
The current thought is not to identify a person based on their primary characteristic at all any more.
These are not "homeless people."
These are "people who are currently homeless."
Not to point you out specifically as others in the discussion are using word choices like yours as well.
Lets put the person first.
Worse, you went for personal attack downthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787724). We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that here.
When someone goes bankrupt most don't say "Oh this bankrupt person tried to [blah blah]."
It just seems weird to me with homeless we replace their entire personality with the trait.
The following sentences say the same thing but I feel they come across vastly different.
"The mentally handicapped person went to the store."
vs
"The person, who is mentally handicapped, went to the store."
With your examples about mental handicap, the same principle applies - it matters what's the topic of the discussion, what's the next sentence, and thus where the emphasis should be. If the fact that that person is mentally handicapped is irrelevant to the rest of the story, then "person" is the part that should be emphasised; but if the mental handicap is the key factor for what happens next, then that is the most salient information of the sentence and it should be emphasised.
Describe the man, don't define him.
First one is obvious, every person is ... a person. 2nd and 3rd are not determinable by looking.
Anyways, I can see this is pointless. I hope your day is as pleasant as you are.
Since we're firing off arbitrary primary characteristics, let's just choose "male" for me. Could be that I'm homeless. Could be I'm a billionaire. I could be a Nazi with heads in my freezer.
Dimunitive language dehumanizes. Why the effort to classify with a single word?
Reduce redundancy. Other "occupations" do this as well. You say "painter", not "people/person who paint(s)".
Two, if you really want to reduce redundancy just use "person/people." Everyone knows if you say "homeless person", that that person is, in fact, a person. Seems like an extra word there.
If you want to be precise and point out someone is homeless, use "person, who is homeless." If two words and a comma is too redundant for you, see my first point.
And at some point we have to accept imprecise language in service of useful abstraction (which is all language is).
Just that focusing on the fact these are people first, and that homeless is something they are experiencing and not something they are, is important.
Banning straws is easy. Solving homelessness is not. It's not as if the SF Supes can just have a "No more homelessness" vote.
We need to dramatically improve availability of affordable housing. That would get a lot of retirees and the like off the street.
But the ones who would, say, burn the house down while you weren't looking need a lot more than a free place to live.
If you care deeply about this issue, work on affordable housing. But please stop acting like homeless people are all puppies that need to be adopted by some well-meaning stranger. It's incredibly dehumanizing and tends to compound the problem.
* https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...
There used to be an article online called "Diseases of the mind." One thing it talked about: When antibiotics were invented, thousands of people in asylums were successfully treated for syphilis and then set free. Another point it made: Mental illness tends to occur in demographic clusters exactly like infectious disease, which implies it might actually be due to infectious disease.
Let me suggest this for a little related reading:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867
Edit: This is what I am working on:
Being homeless and helpless is crazy-making. I want to help people start making money, setting goals, etc while still homeless, like I did.
Video from The Loneliness Project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYc85A8f2CM
It's aimed at the issue if isolation in the elderly. Homeless people also suffer from social isolation.
It's late. I'm tired. I will add that not all personal problems are about being crazy. Some people have learning disabilities or other barriers to regular employment.
I feel like this answer really sucks because of the framing of the problem in this subthread. I have tried to answer your actual question, which is a legitimate question, but I think the problem is more complicated than that.
:/
It's not just about availability of work, it's also about the availability of infrastructure, opportunities to make connections, in short, ensuring a decent quality if life.
If the current trend continues, this will probably push larger parts of the population to increasingly low-quality living spaces. This isn't even a problem restricted to homelessness.
A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar; it's a luxury good that they're not going to realistically get because so many others want it as well.
If you want better availability of infrastructure, better opportunities to make connections, and a better quality of life, then the question is how to improve the quality of life at locations which currently have low cost real estate - and decoupling income from jobs is one way that can happen; for many of these places the living environment actually is quite good (mainly because you can afford much more space), but the main (only?) problem is the lack of local jobs; if the local people wouldn't be forced to move to where the jobs are, there's nothing wrong with the infrastructure.
Homeless people gravitate towards big cities because that's where the concentration of services tend to be. It is why I went to San Diego: there are enough soup kitchens there to eat every day, even if you have no money or benefits at all. I left San Diego after I got food stamps and had dealt with a few things where I felt I could cope without daily access to homeless services.
It's inhumane to suggest shipping people elsewhere and actively evicting them from a particular city because they are poor. This is a mentality similar to the one that was behind removing Native kids from their families, sending them to boarding schools, forbidding them from speaking their own language, etc.
I have a collection of websites I run. I actively encourage people to do things like develop portable income and move someplace cheaper. That is exactly how I got back into housing.
But one woman I spoke with couldn't move because she was currently a college student. She had huge student loans that would immediately come due if she dropped out of her program. She needed to complete her degree in order to have any hope of making her life work.
Other people have children and shared custody with the other parent, or they can't leave because they are on parole and are required to remain in the area or any number of other reasons.
Homeless people are still people. They still have many things going on in their lives that can give them ties to a particular place.
Homelessness arises out of complex, multifaceted problems. One-size-fits-all solutions do not work and tend to make things worse, not better.
Yes, but the scarcity of real estate hasn't changed - there haven't been any holes suddenly opening up in the ground and decreasing the amount if available space. Nevertheless, housing prices have skyrocketed (and so have the number of homeless from what I've read).
So to stay in your frame of discussion, it seems the definition of what is "non-luxury" living space has shifted considerably.
I am willing to actively encourage poor people to develop portable income and move someplace cheaper.
I am not willing to agree that we should ship people with boatloads of problems to the middle of fuck nowhere with no services, no shopping etc because burned out hell holes have nominally cheap housing.
That's potentially an even emptier life than they currently have.
It sounds like you personally are not at all involved politically, other than maybe occasionally voting and chatting on this forum where none of the stakeholders or policymakers involved are likely to see it.
The way the American system of government works (and to some extent any system of government), problems get addressed when someone cares enough about them to spend their time and attention working on them, organizing, looking for compromises with other stakeholders, etc.
There are folks out there working on increasing Bay Area’s housing supply, helping the homeless get the help they need, building public bathrooms, drug rehabilitation, lobbying the city to change police priorities, and so on. You can look them up and lend some of your time / money to projects you think are important.
City government is done by you/us, the residents of the city. It’s not some abstract force beyond human comprehension, but people just like you who are willing to put in the effort to make things work.
Though, fair warning, it seems like you are more concerned with judging/condemning the less fortunate and maybe chasing them out of your town than really fixing any of the root problems. If you go into working on government/policy problems with that attitude, be prepared for a lot of frustration. Actually, be prepared for frustration regardless; democratic government is inherently frustrating.
Yes. Like home owners and people looking for a place to live.
I've been chewing on this for a while. Who's in charge of setting up a social safety net? Whose responsibility is it to make sure people don't starve in the streets?
I thought I paid taxes to my government to socialize the issue across my representative district, but my government (in the USA) has disagreed with me - that money is to be spent on fighter jets (to quote the executive branch), while the churches are responsible for taking care of the homeless. And by the way, the homeless are responsible for policing themselves (to quote my mayor).
A couple weeks ago Domino's Pizza filled a bunch of potholes and stamped their logo on the asphalt after. I thought that would cause a national discussion. I thought at the very least, the city that it happened in would be humiliated enough to make the foolish mistake of maybe trying to slap back at Domino's for putting their logo all over the street. Nope, business as usual.
In other words, why suddenly are people starving again because imperfect produce found a capitalist way to reduce waste?