Comment by thr0way120 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thr0way120 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that has been fascinating about "The Law" as I get older: You can literally rule on most things whatever way you want, and change your mind and thats cool too. Have seen too many "set in stone" decisions change to feel otherwise.

One example is the debate over whether Trump can be prosecuted. One side argues: Well, if Biden assassinated Trump with a predator drone, wouldn't you want him to be prosecuted and not protected by executive privilege? If not, Trump should be prosecuted.

That is a standard that is completely arbitrary and you can rule either way depending on what you feel like any day of the week. The argument that executives should be protected from doing the shady stuff they usually do in office (Obama assassinating arabs with drones all day long) is a kind of coin flip, both arguments are solid.

I am truly convinced even the law is political behind the scenes, and applied at will based on which way popular opinion or political pressure / expedience is blowing at that moment.

For example: Commercial Real Estate is collapsing. Cities are finally being destroyed. Guess what happens? Suddenly all employees mandated to go to work (how convenient for commercial real estate sector that every employer is forcing employees back to work ... its almost as though a capitalist / finance conspiracy is happening behind the scenes to try to help out real estate owners).

And now another "pro commercial real estate" ruling. By the Supreme Court.

Kicking homeless people out of downtowns is great for cities. suddenly a random change of heart linked to a meltdown in the sector. That doesn't seem like a coincidence.

What on earth would make the supreme court, which has an unlimited list of things to do, decide to randomly revisit an 8 year old ruling which just so happens to benefit commercial real estate?)

I am pretty sure the courts are political and highly influenced by capital and it is done behind the scenes, and they can change their ways at will, like this. It all feels way too synchronized.

Aliens or even humans in the far future would be puzzled looking at our time and seeing overabundance of unused buildings and a lot of unhoused people at the same time and the same place.

Aliens maybe. Humans have understood, and enforced, "property rights" for quite a while now. Unused buildings are not just automatically ideal for homeless shelters, and even if it were for some reason a perfectly usable vacant apartment complex, there is still the issue of wear and tear/maintenance costs.

If it was as easy as just building some apartments and walking away from responsibility after that, this would be a much easier thing to solve.

Your explanation is natural, even obvious I'd say, for today. Imagining though how people of the future would ask "Why all those people had to suffer and die in the cold?" your explanation given as the response to that question would sound like "They didn't have a right critical for their survival" - very unconvincing to say the least.

>Humans have understood, and enforced, "property rights" for quite a while now.

May be 10-12K years. Copyright has had only 500 years and is already in turmoil. The property rights may as well be just an artifact of scarcity, similar to how copyright has been an artifact of "copy". Thus with technological progress, space exploration, etc. the property rights may get completely changed or even completely disappear, at least those property rights that we today call so. And in several thousand years the current property rights and their power over an individual well-being would be a hard to understand puzzle. Especially if the future people will get even more capable of empathy and less prone to violence, greed, etc.

>If it was as easy as just building some apartments and walking away from responsibility after that, this would be a much easier thing to solve.

Again, in future it may be even much easier than that, and the future people would be looking at it like generation Z looks at paper maps (and that is just meager 20 years of tech progress - now compound such changes 50 times over 1000 years)

Unused buildings are not just automatically ideal for homeless shelters

The perfect is once again the enemy of the good. People always invoke the building code to talk about Why We Can't Do Anything despite an abundance of empty commercial real estate, but the alternative is people trying to survive in broken down cars and tents.

It's a slow motion catastrophe on the scale of a natural disaster, but every attempt to address it in concrete form (ie by policymakers) is stymied by either self-styled moralists whining that it's stealth communism, or dissemblers hiding behind bureaucratic nostrums. At best you get half-assed pilot projects like tiny houses in parking lots under bridges, which only serve a small number of people and are themselves grossly insufficient.

I was mostly talking about building maintenance and upkeep. Somebody has to pay for that. Truly vacant buildings are often mothballed to the extent of having water shut off, hvac disabled, etc.

Filling a building with homeless adds to costs, increases wear and tear, and those costs have to be borne by someone.

It’s not about perfect being the enemy of good. It is about simple costs and overhead. The homeless people obviously can’t cover basic costs. The building owners don’t have much real incentive to donate the building for use, so in the end the vacant buildings do not equate to a solution.

Obviously, I think we should use tax money to support them because a lot of them are indigent and literally dying slowly on the street. Certainly this costs money but turning on utilities and converting the building away from its original commercial purpose seems a lot less expensive than starting from scratch or relying on some distant-future housing development policy to alleviate an urgent immediate problem.

Large empty building which have already been constructed and fitted with internal infrastructure are significantly more useful for sheltering people than policy objectives that only exist on paper. Even a building with no services enabled is significantly better at providing shelter than a car or a tent because being inside a building minimizes exposure to wind, rain, and snow.

Thus, buying or leasing the large empty buildings makes it a lot easier to start solving the problem in a practical way.

This is a really interesting point.

Problem: Too much commercial real estate empty. Too much homelessness.

Solution: Why ... not put the homeless people in the empty buildings?

Them: ZOMG NOOOOOOOOOOOO

The VCs and commercial real estate owners and government opinion shapers on here downvoting me.

These are FACTS.

>One example is the debate over whether Trump can be prosecuted. One side argues: Well, if Biden assassinated Trump with a predator drone, wouldn't you want him to be prosecuted and not protected by executive privilege? If not, Trump should be prosecuted.

We have an actual living former president (Obama) that ordered the assassination of an American citizen with a predator drone (and killed the target's 16 year old American citizen son as collateral damage) and virtually no one called for his prosecution outside of weirdos like me.

Executive privilege is an ugly back door to do whatever you want, and no amount of legal argumentation covers it up. Someone was elected to run the country, that gives them power to do things. It is assumed they are trusted to do those things. The proper mechanism to get rid of them is an impeachment. That's it.

America kills people that are anti-America. Its not going to be a pretty process. The door is left open to that, and there must be protection for presidents in this system to do those things.

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