Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

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    > Barcelona, previously a jewel of Europe, now has as many homeless as LA in some areas.

Hmm, I doubt it, but let me spend 7 seconds to Google about it.

Ok, I just Googled: "Barcelona homelessness"

    > In December 2023, Fundació Arrels, an organization that helps the homeless, reported that 1,384 people were living on the streets in Barcelona, the highest number ever recorded.

Then I Googled: "los angeles homelessness"

    > The 2024 count estimated that the homeless population in Los Angeles County declined by 2.2% to 45,252.

Living on the streets is one very visible form of homelessness; your numbers are apples to oranges.

LA is also an order of magnitude bigger than Barcelona, so absolute numbers (even if carefully only tracking people sleeping rough) are a weird point of comparison.

So Barcelona homelessness is going up and Los Angeles homelessness is going down? The only reasonable conclusion must be that the homeless are relocating from Los Angeles to Barcelona. It is only a question of time then.

So you cherry pick one real-world observation, try to refute it and it makes the rest wonderland? EU is doing super great because you just scentifically proved that Barcelona can't be as bad as LA?

You probably shouldn't make claims that aren't true if you want people to not refute your claims.

I said in some areas of Barcelona which is true. Now somebody did the Simpson's paradox using the whole data set instead of conditional data, leading to a different result.

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