It's the job of the reporter to figure something resembling reality out from the competing sources of truth. Who is reporting what figures, and what is their background? Where do they meet? Why are they divergent in specific places-- what is their sampling methods, etc?

I've already heard 10000000 times the 1000 foot view. No one has told me the specific appointed people, the percentages of the total they've been distributed, and where those peoples' public records are for their own municipal budgeting.

The reporter did exactly what their job is and it is not to figure out reality from competing sources of truth.

Why does it matter? Whoever the appointed people are you can’t fire them. Your only lever is to fire the elected politicians that are currently manifestly doing a poor job.

You can still have reporting that digs into things, perhaps not detailed sob stories about particular homeless, but do the digging and track why they're homeless, what they have done (and what has been done to them), look at program projections and program results, and so on. Compare cities to Houston [1]. Are the homeless in CA the same as the homeless a year ago? Five years ago? Obviously, since the numbers have gone up, some aren't, but there's tons of data (and governments are probably already tracking major portions of it).

Simplistic articles that go "money in, homeless out" don't help inform, which more and more seems intentional, because everything is political.

17 billion divided by 250,000 would be 68,000 condos (rough numbers). There are obvious problems with "give every homeless person a condo" but the numbers are huge and something's not working.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

The problem is that some groups have no problem taking facts and distorting them into untruths.

We truly are living in an age of alternate facts.

I’ve read papers put out by research groups that were easy to debunk. Most people won’t go to that effort and will take the glossy material and legitimate sounding author as being truthful when in fact every conclusion made in the report is a lie.

My family and I were having a chaotic political argument about the policies of a school district 2,000 miles away when I realized we need to focus. We either need to talk about a specific event or general ideas about what should happen. It's very easy to alternate back and forth. If we're talking about specifics, let's look up and read the actual policy of the school district. If we're talking in general, then stop referring to one school district 2,000 miles away as evidence that it's a wide spread trend, and let's see if we can agree, in general, on the way things should be in the abstract.

Which brings me to my point, and my advice. Focus on feelings and abstract beliefs first. Don't talk about (e.g.) the specific spending bill, talk about whether military defense or caring for the poor is more important from a personal and moral perspective. Make it a small conversation, leave the paid-for "facts" out of it. What do you and I believe? Can we find common ground? After we find some common ground on a small scale, maybe we can talk about a larger scale. Maybe then we can look at the facts.

I think there are alternate facts. Both left and right have sources of information and narratives as to what is helping this country and what is harming it. Alternative facts are like alternative religions. Alternative orientations and life goals

They are, among other things, ideologies in the sense that they take experiences and narrativize them. It's important, and I think you get this already, is that the symptom of our time is that there's no getting outside of ideology. We can draw from Zizek for example, that the idea that we can be outside of ideology as blinding ourselves to whichever ideology we are using. That's sort of the final step and the bridge between post-modernism towards meta-modernism.

"alternate religions" implies there are real religions. How does that work?

I was at Wood St in Oakland, CA.

I was beat up by that black woman Ramona Cayce. I was washing dishes, and she stole the dish soap. What followed was a black woman hitting me, while people egged her on, and then I was blamed. She is a drug addict, as are almost all the residents, including T, the person who started ALL the fires, and P, who tried to control as much as the crime as possible, and G, who stole 3 cars a night. You want facts? I was there. No one, least of all the New York Times gives a shit about the facts.

> I’ll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.

Wrong.

The $17B spent on homelessness spent over several years on the problem of homelessness was not (even in a loose sense) divided across the set of people currently homeless, or a set the same size. It was spent on the set of people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness at some point during the period of expenditures, which is a much larger number.