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'.)
Well, nobody's perfect. After all, perhaps you could've been perceptive enough to understand that I meant that for a long time, and even now, Elon's cars have been premium products at the high end in their category, priced accordingly, and tend to be less affordable for working class people than the alternatives (and even out of reach for some of them), without getting wound around the axle on these "exchanges on semantics." And yet, here we are.
> Anyway, of course a cheaper product is more affordable than a more expensive one, that's a vacuous, trivially true statement that does not add anything to the discussion being made in this thread.
In my experience, it's the trivially true propositions that internet debaters most readily overlook.
I could say the same if I had no real argument to provide too. I understood perfectly fine what you are saying about Teslas being premium products, but I don't see how it is relevant to the question at hand, because the person above said "Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people," so saying that you personally don't know anyone who is middle class who could afford them is a non-sequitur; no one said anything about Teslas being affordable for middle class at all (even though they are now starting to be, whether there are more affordable options or not), as "goods and services for other people" does not specify anything about the types of people or their income levels; if he sold superyachts to only the rich, then he'd have also gotten rich himself.
If you'll then say something about how "he should make things more affordable for people," or "he shouldn't have gotten so rich selling rich things to rich people," well, I'm not sure what to tell you, that's shifting the goalposts at the very least, and it looks like you have an axe to grind against rich people in general. "[Billions of dolalrs] worth of productive capacity [are] being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people" is not how economics and value creation works, much as you believe so.