Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.
What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.
The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.
Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's spending all her energy attempting to help people with the least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a free hotel room as well.
Even then, the problem could be Elon buying so much steel, or it could be steel manufacturers deliberately limiting steel production and only selling it to Elon to keep prices high. The latter is what is happening with landlords and building restrictions.
(There are of course some who only got rich by transferring wealth away from others - but they're not the ones people mostly complain about wrt. 'the rich'.)
I met a nursing student in Shanghai who ended up marrying a "driver". (For reference, the way you get into nursing school in China is by flunking the college entrance exam.)
Attending Fudan University, I also met several students there and at the school across the street, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Both are highly prestigious.
Everyone's graduated by now, and the most materially successful of all the contacts I made, by far, is the nurse. She already owns a Tesla and an apartment in Shanghai. (She also has a child, which is true of only one of the university students.) What's her secret?
The couple's parents bought those things for them.
Quick question: what is the only country mentioned in my comment above?