The problem is that we built a housing system increasingly organised around speculation and then act surprised when some of its casualties become impossible to ignore.
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cold comfort for change
Tag: homelessness
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Loaded Dice
The simple and uncomfortable truth of urban life is that it functions as a kind of brightly lit direct-to-consumer clearance warehouse with lifestyle amenities. Marginalisation and exclusion are not side effects; they are throughput. Value is not attached to who you are, how you feel, or what you believe except insofar as these can be […]
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POSIWID
The purpose of a system is what it does. Stafford Beer’s principle strips away the comfortable illusions of intent and moral posturing to reveal a bleak symmetry between cause and consequence. If a society continually produces homelessness, addiction, disaffection, and loneliness, then these outcomes are not malfunctions—they are the operational outputs of the system. The […]
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The Mirage of AI Wealth
Artificial intelligence is widely proclaimed as a generator of new wealth. The suggestion is that models trained on large datasets, coupled with computational scale, will deliver prosperity by sheer force of information processing. Yet this claim collapses under even modest scrutiny. Wealth cannot be summoned into being by wordplay, nor does it arise automatically from […]
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Wealth: Breaking the Future
Hyman Minsky, an economist who studied the fragility and collapse of financial systems, showed how finance is not neutral but recursive: price rises create collateral, collateral expands credit, and credit drives prices higher still. This acceleration does not move toward equilibrium but toward a critical inflection where reversal cascades through the system. Housing markets in […]
Why does homelessness occur and why is it so difficult to find and apply lasting solutions? In a nutshell: Entropy. This is not a rhetorical affectation but as an authentic explanatory and causal explanation. Many socioeconomic problems are complex but within a relatively limited problem “dimensionality” – consider crowd control or public transport. They are […]
Justice or fairness is not implicit in the world; we have to continuously define, cultivate and maintain it ourselves.
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An Ethical Vacuum
Nothing quite extinguishes any mythology of accomplishment and pride in the achievements and sophistication of human civilisation than seeing an utterly isolated homeless person sleeping on a ramshackle mattress and amid their few ignominiously-bagged worldly belongings while early morning commuters rush to work around them…
Daedelus Kite 