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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

There's plenty of reasons you might want something like this. They can play an important role in public safety

Also just general accessibility. Houseless people exist and every business is increasingly hostile towards letting them charge their phones. Most people who haven't had to experience houselessness aren't aware about this but next time you go to some bougie upscale shopping district try to acknowledge how many outdoor, easily accessible outlets there are. Now do the same thing in some inner city/poorer area or anywhere with a decent amount of houseless folks

Or they're gonna find away to put ads in the service lol

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I recently travelled internationally and was reminded how hard even simple things like changing a restaurant reservation can be when my cell phone isn't compatible with the local providers. I actually did have to rely on pay phones and was lucky to find some.

Payphones with ads seem like they could make a limited comeback in certain extremely busy locations: airports, popular venues, bars, etc. For all non-emergency services [1], play an ad at call initiation and again to both the speaker and the listener every minute or so.

I've been stuck with a dead smartphone at music concerts and festivals a few times, and it was not easy to find a charger. A payphone could have worked to phone a friend.

Nobody remembers phone numbers anymore. Add the ability to call Google Hangouts (or whatever that's called now), Facebook Messenger, or other services and it would be effectively modernized.

[1] This would need a database of callers not to interrupt - local 911, hospitals, utility companies, etc. are all important emergency services. Wouldn't want to listen to jingles while the gas line is leaking.

Why is everyone suddenly calling homeless, houseless?

It's homeless people, not houseless.

If there is some bizarre attempt to reframe things, fine, but what does owning a house have to do with anything? A condo is not a house. An apartment is not a house. So it is:

(house|apartment|townome|condo|cabin)lessness??

A home is any of the above. A house is not.

idk who "everyone" is. Maybe you came across another comment of mine where I also used the term houseless

I use it because of a conversation I had with someone who is houseless. She didn't like being called "homeless" because the city she was sleeping in WAS her "home". She grew up there. Her parents grew up there. She went to school, knew the community there, etc. Eventually due to gentrification she couldn't afford to live in a house anymore.

When the term "homeless" is used I think it often has the effect of painting those who are labelled it as not part of the community. Indeed an off-duty cop later harassed us after the talk w her and some other houseless folk and told me "we don't want them in our community". The cop had an out-of-state license plate...

Whether it's a house or an apartment, the point imo is to draw attention to how our definitions of who does and doesn't have the right to claim membership of a community has been degraded to purely material means. This person who's not even from this state gets to say he doesn't want HER in "our community"

Changing terms is meaningless, as any stigma assigned to the prior term immediately exists for the new term.

And that unfortunate woman does indeed have no home, even if she is living in her old home town.

Home has more than one meaning.

This is just virtue signaling.

I would disagree that it is meaningless, as words have meaning and make it into thoughts. But sure, just renaming something doesn't magically solve the big root issue. But it can make people aware a bit more, which is something.

"And that unfortunate woman does indeed have no home"

And home is where your heart is. Homeless people also have their spots. Their living space, their sleeping space etc. it is just all in the open.

Yes, they do have a home in the open, but they have no home.

(This is how multiple definition words work)

Changing terms appear to have enough meaning to compel you to try to stamp out others usage of language. Isn’t trying to impose your view of the necessity of the word “homeless” its own sort of virtue signaling, just of another virtue? (In this case, I’d assume the virtue you attempt to espouse is that of adherence to traditional social mores from your youth?)

It's not "imposing the necessity of the word", it's calling out the nonsensical euphemistic language that gets churned out by the most neurotic of society and then imposed upon everyone. George Carlin called this specific phenomenon out decades ago [0].

You can kvetch about using words that signal your virtue, but homelessness has a codified definition [1].

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/

Why don't you go argue about the semantics and terminology with your local "person who has no roof over their head" otherwise aren't you just kinda doing your own sort of virtue signaling by arguing about it on the Internet?

> Home has more than one meaning.

Exactly!

> And that unfortunate woman does indeed have no home, even if she is living in her old home town.

Oh. Interesting how you acknowledge the fluidity of the meaning of home but then impose your very specific formulation of it onto others

You know how college students who live in dorms tend to differentiate between "home" (as in going back to their dorm after a night of drinking) and "home home" (as in I'm going back home over the weekend). Clearly there's a lot more to the definition of "home" here than just the shape of the building you sleep in. I don't think you have to be a romantic poet to relate to the feeling of feeling "at home" in the arms of someone you love. Or to move to an apt in a new city and have it never feel like home because you struggle to recreate the feeling of belonging to a community you felt previously

Conversely, I'm sure many people relate to the feeling of it taking a while for a new "house" they moved in to really feel like "home". And there are some sleeping arrangements that might never feel like home like a college dorm or a stay at a hotel/motel

> Changing terms is meaningless, as any stigma assigned to the prior term immediately exists for the new term.

Not really what I'm trying to do. Just changing my own language to be more accurate to what I want to be talking about.

Language changes. That's kinda its thing. If you wanna spend your life fighting the very nature of language you'll probably burn yourself out

> Oh. Interesting how you acknowledge the fluidity of the meaning of home but then impose your very specific formulation of it onto others

Just as you're imposing your specific formulation?

> Language changes. That's kinda its thing. If you wanna spend your life fighting the very nature of language you'll probably burn yourself out

I would very surprised if "homeless" as a term were not used orders of magnitude more than "houseless". The standard term quite simply is "homeless". You (and your acquaintance) are the ones fighting the language. You may win and your terminology may become standard, but language has hardly evolved to the point where the people using the (supposedly) old terminology are fighting the tide.

That said I find your acquaintance's position interesting. I don't, however, think that saying "houseless" instead of "homeless" is making the "language to be more accurate". "Home" has multiple meanings. With one of them your acquaintance is unquestionably "homeless" while with the other she is not.

For what it's worth, I consider homeless people as members of the community and that the city is just as much their home as it is mine. I don't find the multiple meanings all that confusing.

Thanks, I was also wondering about the recent change of terminology and this makes a lot of sense.

Unhoused might be a better term than houseless for your purposes.

/2 cents

I use houseless because it was what she suggested

That's presumably intended as both kind and respectful of you. I certainly appreciate the comments you have made here and you are, of course, free to use whatever terminology you so choose.

FWIW: I have had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy, I spent nearly 6 years perma-camping and self-identifying as homeless and I have written about the topic on and off for years, mostly my own blogs but also sometimes paid articles on the topic.

That's really great. I think that experience is something that's very often missing in online discourse and I'm glad to hear you sometimes write about it

There's a leftwing trop that the way to get attention and bring about change is to take charge of the words in the conversation. It goes back to an influential book called Keywords for Radicals. In this specific case the argument is that '[City or town] is their home, they just don't have access to housing' - which is true enough in that people who are homeless often still have strong social and community despite finding themselves living in a vehicle or on the street.

Trying to redefine the conversation by changing the wording seems rather clumsy and inept to me, but also your objection it in overly pedantic. You can just keep using 'homeless' (as I do) and simply ignore side arguments about the semantics.

The latest effort I've come across is very much a right wing effort. Trying to rename Native Americans as First Immigrants.

I detest any renaming such as this, and this is compounded here, as most native Americans were certainly not "first".

Most archeological evidence I've read up on, shows those we call native americans, to be only one of a multitude of immigrant waves.

And yes, their arrival displaced those already here, sometimes violently.

Every beast and creature wars, and competes, for territory. Humans are no different.

"Immigrant waves" ... probably not. Reaching the Americas from Asia, Africa, Europe by sea is probably not impossible and likely happened more than we tend to imagine, but was still extremely challenging. There has probably not been a multitude of immigrant waves.

"Normal patterns of within-continent human migration" ... sure. My Hopi neighbor still (jokingly) calls the Dine (Navajo) "those Athabascans" (referring to the people of what is now British Columbia who migrated to what is now the US soutwest in the 1400s).

No only is there the sea, and the artic route, but with water level drops, immigration happened via land corridors, during the ice age.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period

This ice age lasted about 100k years, which is perhaps 1/3 of the time modern humans have ever existed.

Multiple peoples immigrated during this time.

There has probably not been a multitude of immigrant waves.

Archeological evidence says otherwise.

I do not believe there is any solid evidence of multiple waves at this point. Happy to be shown wrong on this.

It is still up in the air when the land bridge to Siberia was open, when/if it was used, how often it was used, and how far those who crossed it migrated in any given time interval. The information I am most familiar with suggests likely low-single digit migrations via this route (if indeed it happened at all).

The "arctic route" is not a suggestion I am familiar with.

To be fair, I think you need to read a bit more here. I was going to provide links, urls, but quick Google searches (for example), cite theories re: people living on the land bridge for countless generations, and why not? Why wouldn't people live there?

It was land, right on the ocean, and they've found evidence under water of people living at the end, of this being the case.

And if people are living on the bridge, why on earth would they just stay put. For 100k years of time?! Even if the land bridge was only open for 10% of that time, that's more than all recorded human history!

But beyond this, I'm baffled that you haven't heard of the artic route. How do you think the Inuit got where they are today? Artic people just lived in the artic, and didn't care if it was some future country called "Russia" or "China" or "Greenland", but just wandered where ever they wanted.

But what I find baffling is that there is the concept of "one wave". What does that even mean?

Was there a group of people in a boat, and they crashed on the shore, and the entire massive population of all of North and South America arrived from those dozen or so peoples?! Because that's "one wave".

Or was there an old civilization, 10k year ago, 100k years ago, 200k years ago, and all the people came by boat then, and then just... what... no one ever came again ever? For 100k, 200k years?!

There has never been a single wave, a single point, ever! Why do people believe this? I'm genuinely baffled here.

It being difficult, vastly underestimates our ancestors.

My only thought is that perhaps you grew up in a Mormon household, and believe that all the peoples here are of a single lost tribe of Israel? Or maybe you were taught in a more traditional public school, back when people were still hung on the idea that the Earth was 6k years old, so of course, naturally, there was only one wave of Natives!

A lot of narrative about native americans was crafted with theology in place. It's time to disown that.

A "wave" for immigration/colonization purposes typically describes a period of somewhere between a decade and a century, during which "significant" numbers of people from one place arrive and remain in a different place. The "wave" that occured post-Columbus also wasn't a single wave, but had several somewhat discrete "waves" within it: the initial Spanish settlement starting in the early 1500s and ramping up across the 16th century; then the English starting to arrive on the eastern seaboard during the 17th century. At that point, migration by sea was sufficiently easy (not easy!) that from that point forward, it is hard to separate out distinct "waves", and we simply have 200+ years of steady migration towards the Americas.

So now to go back in time: the issue with the "they were on the bridge, so obviously they moved south" model is that it is one thing to live on or near the bridge (which they clearly did), and something else to migrate thousands of miles across an essential arctic landscape with little/no access to food. This has raised some questions among paleo-archeologists about whether the people who crossed the open land bridge ever did actually migrate substantially further south or not. The consensus that I read seems to still veer towards this being "likely", but not a certainty.

The alternative (or parallel) pathway is to arrive by sea. And yes, it is absolutely possible that the "entire massive population of all of North and South America" could come from a dozen or so people. To think otherwise, as you put it, is to "vastly underestimate our ancestors" :)

Of course, that's not saying this we know this to be true, although the genetic variability of indigenous Americans, last I read about it, does seem to point to a very narrow origin. This could also be explained by many different settlings originating from the same source population, so this is also not a decided question.

The Arctic route that you still haven't really described goes from where to where? Most people would associate the land bridge with "the Artic", so the most common version of "the arctic route" would be "from Siberia to Alaska", but you seem to be referring to something different. As far as I know, it is not currently well understood when the peoples who live in the Arctic arrived there (archeology looks a little different in that sort of landscape).

What I would say to all of this, is that the length of time is key here. And also that the ice age, plus the jungles of more southern regions, would be exceptionally good at scrubbing smaller human group evidence.

People have known how to salt meats essentially before modern humans. But regardless, fish keeps easily, and dried fruits and nuts are very packable, and simple to make:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican

It is beyond simplistic to throw food stores on a two-pole travoline, and drag it behind you. Even more trivial to do so with a sleigh.

Traveling "great distances" without food, when people can stop and fish, or hunt seal, is to me strange, especially when food stores do exist for travel.

To put this another way, virtually every primitive/low tech society we have found, has shown signs of food storage.

So I don't get the "but it is hard to travel" long distances argument.

The artic route is just people wandering around the artic, over the pole. Again, stored food and summer temps.

But that all said, I go back to the timefame. Hundreds of thousands of years, for modern humans, to make it over and over again to fresh territory.

From where I sit, this timeframe alone makes a very strong argument, a third of a million years, which requires proof that it was not difficult, but literally impossible to make the trip.

I would find it beyond bizarre if there were not thouands of "waves".

> I would find it beyond bizarre if there were not thouands of "waves".

How would you account for the narrow genetic variability within indigenous American populations?

I sincerely doubt such statements, for they are often predicated by pre-derived assumptions.

Eg confirmation bias.

One example? Having a close to extinction event, doesn't invalidate that prior waves existed.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...

EG, this potentially happened with populations seen in the old world, so there is no reason to presume differently for the new.

And there is no reason to presume it only happened once, eg near extinction.

It's more than just the "leftwing" that does this sort of thing it has been going on for a long time. Keywords for Radicals appears to have first released in 2016. "first published April 12th 2016"

I'm sorry, I mixed up the title with that of a different work (though I believe inspired by the one I had in mind). The work I was referencing is called simply Keywords and dates from 1976.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keywords:_A_Vocabulary_of_Cult...

> It goes back to an influential book called Keywords for Radicals

... That book was published in 2016. Semiology has been around since at least the late 19th century (and can be traced back much further than that). Foucoult's approach to studying language and words through their genealogy and Derrida's contributions to literary studies were both big in the late 20th century. And feminist scholars from both analytical and continental traditions have been pointing out that language isn't neutral for forever. Gramsci's work on cultural hegemony was done in the early 20th century.

Any of these would serve as better starting points for when leftists started focusing on the relationship between power and language. Not sure why you found this random book to pick on but it seems like you're missing some serious context here

Fun fact! Words take on different meanings as they are used by differing groups of people!

While you are correct that an apartment is not a house, did you know that they are considered to be a type of housing? Further, the concept of “housing” in English has been acceptable for many decades! It’s neat how English works!

We live in a time when even bums are concerned with their titles and how their status is conveyed.

It is lefties to far lefties trying to reframe things to trick people into thinking if you give these people a house all their glaring other problems, like drug abuse, will magically disappear. It oversimplifies the problem, but is probably true for a very small percentage of homeless. The deceit is that that same small minority of homeless that this will actually work for would be helped far more by removing policies that are keeping housing prices artificially high, like the excessively restrictive zoning and long permitting processes and that would benefit everyone else except for the entrenched nimbys who pushed that crap in the first place to accumulate unjust gains for themselves.

Lefties may well do this, but this is kind of a nonsensical argument. The alleged oversimplification was already present with "homeless". How does "houseless" imply any simpler solution? Give 'em a home, give 'em a house. Both sound equally reductive to me.

This is the smart guy logic argument when politics is not governed by logic, it is governed by emotion and therefore marketing. Homeless does not oversimplify the problem in the same way that houseless does because homeless has all the negative connotations of people's experience with homeless associated it with it. The negative connotations of the actions of the homeless people the listener has come in contact with are brought up by that term so a listener with any experience will realize giving a homeless person a house will solve almost no problems and cost a huge amount of money.

Whereas houseless is a new term with little to no baggage so it's easier to sell people obviously stupid ideas by changing the terms whenever the new term captures all the connotations of the old term. It's the euphemism treadmill abused for marketing rather than being used to describe the process of transferring meaning to overcome this kind of thing.

Think of it as "house" as in "housing".

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