Comments on: Providing Infrastructure to Homeless

By: steve

steve — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:03:14 +0000

And here i thought it was there choice to be on the street.

By: darwin

darwin — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:50:39 +0000

Yes, I would assume that some percentage of homeless people have treatable mental illnesses, and could be productive workers with proper treatment; others we could at least get off the street.

By: steve

steve — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 04:17:12 +0000

Can you infrastructure someone out of ‘mentally handicapped’?

By: Mitch

Mitch — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 03:40:17 +0000

Based on the information in the article, this not a laudable program at all. Handing out used cell phones to the homeless just means, since they can’t afford cell service, most will just sell them to whoever they can, and the few remaining phone will be in the hands of people like Nomar.

I also feel that it’s important to point out that the homeless are a subset of “mentally handicapped”, and not a subset of “poor”, when it comes to providing assistance and charity.

By: darwin

darwin — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:18:05 +0000

Yeah, every silver cloud has a shitty lining, to clumsily misquote a phrase. I agree, but I’m not impressed- if the worst thing that came from a program which helps the homeless get jobs and reenter society is a few prank phonecalls, I’m happy with it.

Now, if you had shown that the program doesn’t actually help anyone, I’d have to agree that the program is a bad idea. But you didn’t.

By: steve

steve — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 18:48:16 +0000

Not really what I was going for but it might work.

My aim here was only to highlight how the good intentions of helping the unfortunate has unintended negative outcomes. This commonly the case when one aspires to help the poor. Particularly through governmental means.

By: darwin

darwin — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:41:25 +0000

“Listen, enforcement is a joke; if owning cell phones is a crime, then only criminals will have cell phones.”

By: darwin

darwin — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:40:15 +0000

Ironically, this perfectly mirrors an argument I could make against letting everyone have guns by finding an anecdotal account of someone injured in an accident.