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Comment by vmfunction | Hacker News Reader

with $17B, we can literally 3D print a bunch of micro housing. Seems like money is still wasted in Bureaucrat, red tap and some kind financial fraud.

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You don't even need any sort of novel new technology. We could build housing out of wood just like we have for hundreds of years.

The main problem is that new housing is largely banned as established wealth that already have detached homes vote for politicians that promise to not allow any new homes near them.

Pardon my ignorance, but how do you reasonably stop fires in attached wood homes from becoming a huge problem fast?

Fire code and building code, like everywhere else in the US. It isn't like the US has nonstop city wide fires raging on for decades.

Well, the issue is also because homelessness isn't caused because people don't have a home.

People could move to the midwest and live very cheaply if that were the issue.

The true cause of homelessness is mostly mental health issues, at least in these big cities.

This is an often repeated and false claim.

Well it's not false, in that it would be extremely cheap for someone to just go live in the mid west.

Or do you think buying bus tickets for people is some sort of impossible to do thing?

I've heard it called the homelessness industrial complex, that was from some City Journal article someone posted to HN some years back that introduced me to that publication. It was a shocking thing to contemplate but yah with that sum of money what exactly do we have to show for it?

If you're being paid by the government to manage homeless people, your incentive is to keep them homeless. Else your contact would end.

yah, and I can see this being true of any effort to remove something negative from society. What do you do next when satisfactorily eliminate it and how do you test when that negative thing has not sufficiently retreated for a given effort. How do you differentiate spinning wheels when someone doesn't want to advance and is intentionally idling burning the hours and when the problem is just downright difficult.

This same nonsense logic would apply to the police, firemen and nurses too. Are the firemen out there discouraging sprinkler systems because they want to keep their jobs?

Even if we were looking at this from an utterly cynical, purely financial viewpoint, the people paid to help the homeless are effectively property managers and they benefit from housing the homeless, not letting them sleep on the street.

All those other professions have preventative value. It is wholly desirable for cities to run homeless shelters - the incentives are rightly aligned to make it temporary to keep down costs. Involving private outfits as contractors, just as with private prisons, skews the incentives terribly. (I also have nothing against private healthcare, security, or fire houses as a luxury spend for those who want it.)

This is an interesting concept I’d like to hear more of with this so called preventative value. Is this to say in their absence bigger troubles would show up so having their services prevents worse outcomes from sneaking up on us or something?

More or less. Otherwise you can get easily stuck arguing that any profession that fixes problems is untrustable for fabricating problems. E.g., doctors deliberately give us bad advice to keep us sick or overdiagnose so that they have more patients. (Okay, maybe chiropractors do this - hah!) But I think it's fairly safe to argue that employees of a system like nurses or cops - who are payed a salary regardless of how many "customers" they go through - are very different than the owners of private hospitals, prisons, or shelter operators whose profit incentives are directly aligned with funneling more people into the system, not at preventing or fixing anything.

that's an interesting point, I think for those professions theres sufficient quantity of a baseline demand that they don't need to artificially create demand. However it's not unprecedented, there was a crazy story a friend shared with me like 2 years ago I think. Something from this François Bonivard, Geneva Chronicles in the 1500s that details this doctor trying to contaminate his town to secure future plague patients. I tried to find the primary source but all I could locate was this odd website that happened to hit some of the text my friend emailed me https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=11047763. The original French text is in the archive however https://archive.org/details/leschroniquesde00bonigoog

A more modern example I recently stumbled across maybe 2 weeks ago was this crime story of this wicked nurse working in the ICU who was thrashing patients on his floor with air embolisms. The reason, the guy wanted to prolong the patients stay to ensure more overtime hours https://youtu.be/dgWcplHgAjU?t=645. Absolutely unbelievable.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it” - Upton Sinclair

With that level of money, you could hire lots of smart people to generate lots of ideas to solve the problem.

You could hire people to investigate the problem and provide data. And then you could use that money to implement small scale (locality level) experiments to see what works. And still have billions left over.

For some reason, the whole concept of "Do more of what works, and less of what doesn't" seems lost on the people involved.

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