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> Why? Why are there men who demand 50-whatever billion payouts in a country where not everyone has a place to sleep?

It is my firm belief the US is only good if you’re rich. If you aren’t rich, well, you slave away to make other people rich.

The rich however need the poor to make their food, fix their cars, serve them lattes, deliver their groceries.

The only thing that will really effect change is if the poor (in vastly greater numbers) stands up and takes the boot off their necks.

> We're not on the earth to "do great things" or "achieve progress" or any of that crap. That's for people who have some special enthusiasm which the rest of us need not share, or, as Bertrand Russell says, for the elite who want us to labor for them. If one builds one's morality or sense of virtue on doing stuff one is a self-whipping slave and probably ready to become a slave driver for other people too.

Thank goodness there are people who do build their morality on "doing stuff": surgeons, cancer researchers, etc.

Some people innovate, and some (most) maintain. A healthy society needs a spectrum of endeavour.

I think our fundamental problem is that many of us do work that does not feel meaningful, and it seems that a lot of meaningful work is not respected and compensated as it should be.

I agree strongly with the last two paragraphs. I think the surgeon/medical example is nice (though not they certainly don’t work for free), but a lot of the ambitious people I’ve known all sought middle management or higher in some big company, which hardly seems like a good application of human potential.

Ask any healthcare worker about the issues in the medical field and they will say people are overworked, hospitals are short staffed, mistakes are made and patients die as a result of burnout and lack of any time to recharge or process traumatic incidents they see.

So while yes some groups do good work under pressure, no one does their best work under pressure, the opposite in fact.

A person researching cancer doesn't need to do it because they're desperate to pay off the mortgage. They can do it because it's interesting, or a personal challenge. There are a lot of people with advanced degrees now - we don't need to put enormous pressure on a few of them.

One can argue that the California homelessness crisis is caused by a certain type of idleness. NIMBYs refuse to adapt to their changing cities and instead try to force it to remain unchanged. You also have progressives who think that they can simply throw billions of dollars in tech money at homelessness, which is another form of idleness. As a result, you get nonprofits that receive millions of dollars a year that don't accomplish anything.

> Why?

If you're actually interested in learning why the homelessness situation in a particular area is how it is, you can pore over the countless (politicized) discussions of the issue to start piecing together the concrete issues and factors that contribute to it, beyond the vague notion of "rich country has homeless". Alternatively, take a specific example of one of those "50-whatever billion payouts", and your idea for converting it into the right combination of land-near-San-Jose, housing construction, mental health care, actual improvements to mental health, caretakers, government workers, outreach, policing, jobs programs, public infrastructure, etc, etc that's supposed to solve homelessness there. The internet commentariat is bound to have people eager to impolitely point out the issues in that plan.

The USA is the richest country precisely because many people have been made poor in a zero-sum way.

Starting with the Native Americans.

The USA became the richest country despite many people having been made wealthy via corruption, and despite the establishment of a nearly all-powerful oligarchy.

Isn't it a corollary of lassez faire capitalism? - there has to be a winner and a loser. If there's no social security net, then abject poverty is the ground state.

No. Poverty is the default no matter what. From there, there are really only two methods of human interaction. The economic or the political. The economic means are voluntary and the political means are force. So far, all attempts at creating a third means either result in tyranny or in societal collapse.

The europeans seem to have succeeded in the middle state would you say? they have sacrificed some competitiveness for a more stable social framework. Not sure I agree that poverty is the default state no matter what.

The european way right now is to be a freerider. Get military coverage from US and sell assets to China/Russia/etc to get some money for now.

It will be interesting times once easy money dry up and US tells us to pay for our own defense.

Because some people want to sleep outside. Are you proposing we round them up into camps against their will? Very European of you.

I'm from Zimbabwe - so insults like "very European" aren't your get out of jail free card. The third world has an excuse for its problems - where's yours?

Well, we haven’t had an authoritarian dictator to cull the herd, so there’s that going against us.

You seem to be suggesting that homelessness is simply an expression of people's wish to sleep al fresco?