I love love love that we're having these discussions about housing first and tiny homes, what if the homeless damage them, let's build (new) traditional custodial institutions for the violent, and so on...
...at exactly when architectural Brutalism is having a critical revival, don't tear down the Moriyama Science Centre, look at those beautiful Brutalist churches...
We scrounge ratty old buildings for inadequate, dangerous shelters, and haggle and whinge to the point of inaction about housing people in shipping containers or surplus hotels, but laud "jail cell chic".
It goes to show that "The cruelty is the point", that "We'll give you the world if only you bow down before [our economic truisms]". Some people have taken into their hearts that human suffering is a renewable resource.
UBI has already worked. We hunt and forage food and water, but air and gravity are supplied for free, the latter being inescapably mandatory (good luck ending it, rulers). They're not nothing, not "but that's different", there's wattage in all.
We talk about tax and money like they're natural theories, when we could easily pursue compatible, interoperable regimes that meet the UBI design brief. If price is value then change in price is a proxy for externalities, so tax transactions based on change in instantaneous price. The power to do so is in divide and conquer, between rentiers who value stability and those who cultivate volatility. The Not-In-My-Back-Office corporate leadership creates gigahertz iPads but never seems to buy their way out of overnight transaction clearing and filing labyrinthine returns for some reason.
I hate being livestock in the "incentive" farm. We almost all do. And while I appreciate insights about the Roman Empire as much as any white male...it's less the done thing these days. :)
Charities create community for marginalized people, through one-on-one outreach, holding community kitchens, operating thrift stores or bicycle repair shops, or operating shelters or supportive housing. We discover how people survive with creativity and difficulty when they are "alternatively economied", and we create connections between people to keep them alive and offer them hope.
We use I.T. including software much as any other paper-pushing corporate entity, except: paying for software and its care and feeding takes food out of mouths, so we don't like to do that if we don't have to, and; we don't have much use for the software intrigues that pass for productivity and wealth creation.
Software pain points are bad for everybody, but some have training junkets, and some do not. Things like: performative or intrusive licensing asks; yet another cloud account; mandatory UIs with no equivalent API/CLI; layers of awkward cruft papering over legacy functionality that should have been discontinued decades ago (a certain backup package comes to mind); gratuitous UI changes. These are nano-distractions, but they add up for orgs. and workers who don't have much in the tank to begin with.
We do have some interesting proprietary needs. For instance, street-involved people often go under several different names: your average CMS might allow that with a plugin, but it's so niche it might not induce anyone to build it (or worse, we try ineptly ourselves). Password/account recovery workflows are absolutely torturous for people who are anxious, depressed, neurodivergent. I once tried to guide a man with anger issues to fix a copy and paste mistake; he gave up and stormed off and, as a result of missing a deadline, probably wound up in prison, with a decade of knock-on effects.
We rely on Free software--we adore simple, functional, administer-able packages that don't distract or use dark patterns--so that is a way you could contribute to our industry. Another way would be advocacy: government asks us to use lots of software that marketing pushes relentlessly even as it sabotages its functionality, so drawing on your experience to make government aware they're captured would help immensely (we don't have the time or literacy, and we can't bite that hand).
Yes, and/or social media, as an evolution towards a citizen dashboard. I used to think federated media (Diaspora was my choice at the time) is a natural e-community centre: joining a local interest-based hub for day-to-day use that can nevertheless serve as a node for broader discussions. Just like voting down at the rec centre.
Government "spying" is a hard but not unsolvable problem, rooted in our own values. We're so culturally punch-drunk we've no hope on making progress right now. Maybe when the wind changes again...
I don't mind private corp. email, as long as it doesn't capture anything. Basic communication seems such a no-brainer that speculating to make it available to the market seems superfluous.
...at exactly when architectural Brutalism is having a critical revival, don't tear down the Moriyama Science Centre, look at those beautiful Brutalist churches...
We scrounge ratty old buildings for inadequate, dangerous shelters, and haggle and whinge to the point of inaction about housing people in shipping containers or surplus hotels, but laud "jail cell chic".
It goes to show that "The cruelty is the point", that "We'll give you the world if only you bow down before [our economic truisms]". Some people have taken into their hearts that human suffering is a renewable resource.