Honestly, recognizing the precariousness of your positions (and that of others), represents a high level of introspection.
Ironically I would read your families history the opposite way because I view a persons stability through change as being extremely related to their immediate usefulness to whomever happens to be in power. You’re a physics PHD and I’m a logistician. While it’s true that you can run extremely bad and end up in a gulag, that’s usually avoidable with sufficient resources… which is why the second major variable in your stability is having a sizable financial cushion that you can drop like a lizards tail in a crisis and get away to rebuild somewhere else with that extremely useful skillset.
That Russian saying is extremely Russian. Russia has always been a very volatile country lol.
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I agree most of the time. I just think there are better things to worry about wrt precariousness. For example my big risk factors are my mental and physical health, neither of which is strong enough to feel remotely safe about.
Non electric cars are definitely going to become houses as the future gives weigh.
@microbet (humbled to have you back bro) care to way in on the logistics of solar tying in to car batteries?
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Thanks.
There are people living in Priuses and Teslas of course (can provide links).
Most van and rv dwellers have solar and batteries, but that’s to run lights and small appliances. Solar cars are not impossible (I converted a car to electric that later ran entirely on a ridiculously large for a car solar array) but there’s not enough surface area for it to be practical. And that’s pretty much true theoretically and not just practically (even if solar panels captured 100% of the available energy).
But of course lots of people with electric cars charge them with energy they get from solar arrays on their houses and the grid energy can be more solar as well.
Random aside, but just this morning I learned about this old solar car thanks to the TrueAnon Tesla episode:
There are groups trying to improve solar cars but they’re not yet feasible:
Violet is the sixth vehicle designed and manufactured by Sunswift. It is the second vehicle manufactured by Sunswift that is built to compete in the Cruiser Class. Design of Violet began in 2016 and manufacture was completed in late 2017. In comparison to previous generations of Sunswift vehicles, Violet is Sunswift’s first four-seat, four-door vehicle with a 5-square-metre solar array consisting of 318 monocrystalline silicon cells with an approximate efficiency of 22%. Violet was designed with a greater focus on practicality, with the aim of resembling a more comfortable family vehicle in comparison to previous generations of Sunswift vehicles. New features have been implemented in Violet such as live monitoring and fault detection, entertainment systems, air conditioning, navigation, wifi, reverse camera, adjustable seating, parking sensors, front and back boot-space, and ergonomic dashboard. As a result of this, the vehicle competed in the 2017 World Solar Challenge and placed third in practicality. In December 2018, the team had driven from Perth to set a Guinness World Record for the lowest energy consumption while driving across Australia in an electric car. VIolet was then further tested and refined for reliability and efficiency, leading to an all-time highest Sunswift ranking of 2nd Place Overall in the 2019 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge and finishing first across the line in Adelaide.
Cars like that aren’t theoretically feasible. They weigh like 100lbs and can’t do what cars do and the most efficient solar panels now convert like 23% of the available energy. The max theoretical efficiency for silicon cells I think is 35%, but even at 100% you’re looking at about 1 horsepower per square meter of available power when in full sun. You can save up the energy in a battery and if you charge enough and drive little enough it works, but for anything like a real car you’re looking at 10 miles a day or something like that. Something like that could work in very limited circumstances, but put the solar panels on a roof and it’s already practical in many cases.
But yeah…I followed the solar cars back in 1987.
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And looking at how efficient those kinds of cars can be, this car:
is gas powered and gets over 10000 miles per gallon.
Wasn’t sure where to post this, but a former private-prison executive earning $1M a year running homelessness non-profits sounds just about right for the end times of a society that’s gone completely out of whack.
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This article is a pretty good encapsulation of my feeling of hopelessness with regard to addressing the homeless issue in Los Angeles.
Maybe paywalled? If so here are some chunks:
For the last year, Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de León has focused much of his energy on reducing the number of encampments in his Eastside district, working with city agencies to move people off the streets and into temporary housing or other forms of shelter.
Last spring, he said, his office succeeded in moving 74 homeless people off a median strip in El Sereno and into two converted motels. Six months later, dozens more were relocated from a two-block section of Main Street in downtown. And since Thanksgiving, his team — working alongside outreach workers — moved about 90 people out of encampments that have long surrounded El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument and into temporary housing.
Those efforts have put De León, a veteran politician known for his left-of-center challenge to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2018, in direct conflict with some of the city’s most outspoken homeless advocates, who say he is pursuing a policy of “banishment” for L.A.'s unhoused.
“What’s happening is that Kevin De León staffers … are coercing people against their will into temporary shelters that are not always a good fit for them,” said Camnitzer, a writer who lives downtown. “We’re out there reminding people that unhoused people deserve self-determination over their own lives and should be able to choose what’s best for them.”
De León began the work at El Pueblo in October, unveiling a plan to establish no-encampment zones in the area that prohibit people from sleeping, lying or storing property on local sidewalks. Street Watch fought those efforts, saying they would push people into an overcrowded shelter system that “further perpetuates cycles of homelessness and poverty.”
The no-encampment zones were approved in November, and within weeks, staffers from De León’s office and several other public agencies were going from tent to tent, offering rooms at L.A. Grand and other facilities.
By early January, outreach workers had succeeded in moving 93 people into temporary housing or other locations, according to figures provided by De León’s office. Of that total, 57 went into L.A. Grand, one of the city’s Project Roomkey sites.
At that location, the city is spending an estimated $6,651 a month per room to provide housing and services, City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo said. The facility offers 483 rooms for homeless residents.
Camnitzer, the Street Watch organizer, described L.A. Grand as a “quasi-prison,” pointing out that residents have a nighttime curfew, are barred from having guests and regularly have their rooms searched.
De León, who joined the council in 2020, is one of several council members who have clashed with homeless advocates over the last year. In August, Buscaino abruptly ended a news conference after a scuffle broke out between one of his aides and a group of protesters.
A few months earlier, activists disrupted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a 200-bed “tiny home” facility in North Hollywood. At that event, they protested the city’s decision to clear encampments in the area where the 103-unit village was built.
Near the end of the ceremony, Councilman Paul Krekorian lashed out at critics who have panned such villages as a series of “tiny sheds.” One tiny home, Krekorian said, offered privacy and a locked door to a homeless woman who had been raped while living in her tent.
Cliffs:
- Los Angeles is currently full of large encampments of homelessness
- On one side of the issue you have the authorities, who at great expense and effort are establishing alternative places for the homeless to live, but then compelling them to get off the street and live in this alternative housing
- On the other side of the issue you have activists for the homeless who argue that forcing people to go to a certain place / live in a certain way violates their rights
I definitely see the activists’ point, but it seems to be that providing places for the homeless to live is absolutely something the government should be doing. But then what do you do when a huge portion of the homeless are like “fuck you, I’m staying here in my tent”?
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Build a shelter that is better than a tent?
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Super grinch. But this pretty much ran past my house growing up.
We would go down and watch every year. There was also a pre event that was super fun. The cars had to go round and round a race track being overtaken by 3 trailer trucks (aka road trains) to make sure they wouldn’t get flipped by the wind rush…
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According to who? The alternative housing the city is providing consists of repurposed hotel rooms, and increasingly tiny home villages.
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I’m sympathetic to the idea that rounding up the homeless and throwing them into motel rooms against their will is unethical, but no one has an unlimited right to self-determination. If the homeless advocates have a better plan to get these people off the street, I’d certainly hear it, but if the plan is to just leave them alone and that’s the end of it, then I think it’s at least a reasonable to have a conversation about where camps are allowed, putting bathroom facilities there, and keeping it in some semblance of clean.
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Yeah I’m not sure what the solution to homelessness is, but I’m very sure that it’s not a state/local problem to be solved. What’s happening is that if your locale is relatively friendly to homeless people you immediately get homeless people from all over the country arriving to live on your streets in tents.
I don’t think it’s remotely realistic to expect a handful of major metros to deal with the brunt of the consequences of our ridiculously dystopian late capitalist nation.
We need to expand job corps to provide huge amounts of mental health care, free job training, housing, and at that point I think it’s totally reasonable to criminalize the current homeless lifestyle. It’s incredibly fucked up that so many people are forced into it, but my tolerance for it would do a 180 degree turn if there was an objectively better alternative available and people were opting for street life over it. That’s the moment when you transition from victim to victimizer IMO.
Totally fine with these job corps housing/training/treatment complexes being built in major metros, in fact I think that’s a good idea. They need access to public transportation and decent jobs or the whole thing isn’t going to work.
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This is one of the real sticking points, obviously. Because who wants an encampment in their neighborhood? When you hear people in LA spouting off about this, they say stuff like “make a big camp in the desert”. But forcing (how else would you do it?) the homeless into some large remote camp out of our sight seems significantly worse than what the city is currently doing. And needless to say, the communities with the resources and will to “crack down” on camps end up without camps, while poorer areas with other big problems pick up the slack.
According to the people who prefer to live in a tent?
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Yeah the quasi-homeless who would be cool with a big camp in the desert are already living in Slab City.
Talk of “throwing” “these people” around seems less sympathetic with the homeless than with those who complain that the homeless are making a mess of their streets.
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