This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Another round of naive techno-optimism :
I ran across this interesting tidbit from Los Angeles news : the March 2024 ballot includes a proposed Responsible Hotel Ordnance to provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room. The pro and anti reactions you'd expect are in full swing, with the unexpect-to-me wrinkle that the hotel worker's union organized the petition campaign. Bill text here, courtesy of LA city clerk. There's some historical context here in that Project Roomkey was (is?) a COVID-era initiative to rent idle rooms from hotels and motels during the pandemic downturn and use them to house homeless people, under the reasoning that this would reduce the risk of transmission among the homeless population by controlling their living conditions and reducing contact rates.
I mention this only to set context for my actual topic: for purposes of high-density commie-block-style housing of the feral, incompetent, and non-economically viable, how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant? Online discussion points out the inevitability of a lawsuit after someone trashes their residence in a fit of, uh, exuberance, and the comparisons to open-air prisons write themselves, but I'm interested in the actual engineering challenges of building an individual space so well that a tenant can't render it unfit for use, modulo bleach, power-cleaning, and replacing some Ikea furniture. I figure the key is to keep the interior of the room entirely sacrificial, and to have the room's border act as a firebreak for damages, so that even if the occupants render everything inside into unusable scrap, it doesn't propagate to your service trunks in the hallway. What's this cost? What are the regulatory hurdles? Who's solved this before, and how well?
That depends on the tenant. These are homeless people, so generally not long term planners(who can wear through anything) or possessing tool collections(they’d pawn them for drug money). But they do have small items- lighters, knives, etc.
Now Sheetrock is delicate, but you don’t need it. Bare, polished(a rough surface can itself be used to damage things) concrete with electrical/plumbing access routed through stainless steel conduit. You’re probably going to want to seal everything; liquids can do a lot of damage. Obviously, you don’t have built in furniture, or if you do it’s the same concrete and stainless. That means you need to worry about the other furniture being used to smash things up, so it’s flimsy ikea. You can’t harden windows, so they’re right out.
Also, the doors have to be decent and locking, because I’m assume you’re hosting multiple homeless people in this facility and letting them run away instead of fight is probably a necessity.
Congrats, you’ve invented the prison cell.
Bars or grates could be used over the windows; they could be made out of Lexan or something, too.
Even so, the biggest problem here seems to be good old fashioned flooding, either through malice or gross incompetence.
Pretty sure that's illegal. That's a fire safety violation. "But concrete doesn't burn." Fire code doesn't care.
Concrete may not burn, but lots of other things do. You might get away with "can only open the window a limited amount so people can't commit suicide by flinging themselves out the window" but bars/grates like that, very probably not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link