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Comment by WorldPeas | Hacker News Reader

I think it is a critical omission by this article of this woman's former homelessness. Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue (though some more urgency may be nice), but this woman is not some unsympathetic traitor, most of what she was doing was over her head. If you watch a few of her tiktok videos, she doesn't seem to clued into what's happening and happy to be normal. It's a shame that it came to this, but I imagine this has happened in other cases that didn't involve state-actors.

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-everyday-americ...

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> I think it is a critical omission by this article of this woman's former homelessness.

"Person with no prospects takes too-good-to-be-true job offer that turns out to be helping do crime."

The specific details (homeless vs living with parents in a trailer park vs barely affording something etc) aren't really relevant. Any of those are roughly the same: someone in a shitty situation isn't careful enough when trying to get out of that situation.

The general situation (no prospects) is aiui fairly typical. Which makes it not news[1], and therefore not much of an omission at all much less a critical one.

[1] "Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is news.

> The general situation (no prospects) is aiui fairly typical. Which makes it not news, and therefore not much of an omission at all much less a critical one.

Whether it is "news" or not affects whether you choose to report on the story. It is not relevant to the context you provide when you report on in the content of said story.

> "Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is news.

That's a headline, not the content. If a man ended up in jail because his hand was bloody, and you decide to report on it, it absolutely behooves you to mention that it was because a dog bit him, vs. letting readers wonder if he's some sort of criminal.

Really? I see the fact that she was homeless as a failure of the system that she ended up unwittingly becoming a bad actor in, perhaps due to desparation.

The system was asking for it.

Somewhat coincidentally, executive order today making homelessness a priority federal issue. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-orders-crackdown-home...

I was thinking wealth inequality, mental health, etc.

> Trump orders crackdown on homeless encampments nationwide

He went another way, it’s almost comical if it weren’t so sad.

There are some homeless people, screaming all day, addicted to drugs, defecating in their pants and in the street. These people do not deserve to live in the street. Having the “freedom” to do this where children walk on the sidewalk is actually completely insane. We live in a society. They need to be forcibly removed, put into asylums, given 24/7 care, and if they recover they can re-enter society.

Alternatively I would be amenable to putting them in, say, national parks, where they are given a tent and free food so they can scream all day there. Maybe it would be far enough away from transport that drug dealers wouldn’t bother to drive out there. But not in a major metropolis where normal people need to live and work. It’s absurd

Read the first sentence for context, they aren't just being shooed away its to help them.

> President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order urging cities and states to clear homeless encampments and move people into treatment centers

Florida built a “treatment center” in seven days!

> Read the first sentence for context, they aren't just being shooed away its to help them.

Well, no, it says it's to help them. Important difference.

Like saying you're restoring free speech but then personally calling up Rupert Murdoch to kill a news story. Or saying you're bringing in radical transparency to the HHS, but then cancelling all public notice and comment periods on new health policies. Or saying you're a fiscal hawk but consistently voting for bigger deficits. You get it.

I will assume that you are genuine in your belief that Trump or city leaders have any intention of helping people experiencing homelessness. In practice, the only thing that matters to them is to remove homeless people from public spaces by any means necessary. Any rhetoric about doing so for their benefit will not be followed through with. Most people who are homeless are either addicted to drugs which precludes them from participating in programs which require immediate abstinence, or too mentally ill to be helped with the limited funding that will be supplied for their "treatment". It is much more likely that they will be imprisoned indefinitely in a for-profit prison owned by a Trump donor than "helped" in any meaningful capacity.

By concentrating them into a camp like set up…

They have zero intention of helping them. These things are literally being built before your eyes. It was brown people last month and it’s homeless people this month… it’s not going to stop unless they are physically stopped.

Executive order criminalizing homelessness. The order comes on the day I witnessed police disappear an unhoused person

you're gonna be seeing a lot more people disappearing in the next few year, mate.

they've given ICE more money than the FBI+DEA, or more than the entire Russian military.

> this woman's former homelessness

Did she lift herself out of homelessness with this job? Or was she just homeless at one point in the past?

It was this job that did it. If you watch her tiktoks she's almost bewildered that she is employed. It was beyond her comprehension what she did.

>Christina Chapman: I'm classified as homeless in Minnesota. I live in a travel trailer. I don't have running water. I don't have a working bathroom, and now I don't have heat.

>Annie Minoff: But Chapman's situation was about to turn around. In fact, the answer to her financial troubles had arrived just a few months before she posted that video in the form of a social media message.

>Robert McMillan: The message comes via LinkedIn. And it says, we're a foreign company looking for a US representative. That's really all we know about the message.

Why is it critical? Is there a causation link between homelessness and treason?

They're saying that having large numbers of a vulnerable and often disabled population on the brink of day to day survival is a national security risk because they are easily targeted and exploitable.

You don't need to find a causal relation to treason specifically to understand. They may not even be aware of what they are involved in.

You’re making a very good point here. We’ve always known that malign forces of various varieties will exploit the vulnerable in society, and we’ve definitely experimented with trying to imprison every last one of the vulnerable sucked into criminality. The War of Drugs has pretty definitively demonstrated this strategy doesn’t work. Poverty has been a national security issue for some time.

Just wait until you realize that the reason we have “national security” is because they are protecting a system that impoverishes americans and the world. North Korea is targeted because it is a socialist counter example. That’s a crime and it must be slandered.

This is why this line of argumentation is at once true and will never be persuasive: the poverty is the point of our economic system. That’s what they’re protecting. If Americans were all relatively equal, the economic royalists would have no throne to sit on.

> North Korea is targeted because it is a socialist

You've got to be kidding me.

America has a Gini coefficient of about .42 [1]. The last time North Korea's was estimated, it was around .82. To to put that in perspective, the inequality gap between America and North Korea is well more than double that between America and the Netherlands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in... 2023

You should read up on the Korean War.

Here’s an accessible resource: https://blowback.show/

Did you really think anticommunism disappeared from American elites?

> You should read up on the Korean War

To learn that we went to war with North Korea because it's communist? No shit. We also did that with Russia, China, Vietnam and a good fraction of current NATO members, trade partners and allies.

> Did you really think anticommunism disappeared from American elites?

Elites? Most Americans have unfavourable views of communism [1].

But you didn't say communism. You said socialism. And it's a bit ridiculous to argue (a) North Korea is run as a socialist economy or (b) that we have a beef with Pyongyang, today, because of how it runs its economy.

[1] https://victimsofcommunism.org/annual-poll/2020-annual-poll/

I don't have a beef in this discussion but I just want to point out that if you want to quote a source, then quoting Victims of Communism may not be your best move. They label all WW2 Nazi casualties by the Soviets as "victims of communism" so not exactly an objective and truthful source.

> quoting Victims of Communism may not be your best move

I’m citing the YouGov poll they commissioned, but fair enough.

it is kind of befuddling that they had a working system that gave people the marginal quantity to not rebel and even that was too much for them. Even then don't carry water for NK as some sort of utopia. America is (as clickbaity as I feel saying this) more communist at its worst than NK ever was.

We are capitalist. The fact that you doubt this means you are misinformed on basic facts.

America's homeless population is because of America's land use policy, which is pretty communist. Or rather, it runs on "economic democracy" - no matter how much money you have, you can't do what you want with your land unless all your neighbors agree with it enough to change the local zoning policy. Which means you can't build low-cost multi-family housing on it.

That's democracy and not communism?

It doesn't work, so it must not be communism.

A charitable interpretation is that it is a form of democratic control of wealth (neighbours decide what you do with your land) rather than individual control of wealth (building however many stories you want on your own land), and democratic control of wealth is definitely closer to communism than individual control of wealth

Yes, I agree. extending that logic, democracy in general is closer to communism, than to oligarchy (extremes on either side, ignoring feudalism ), but its not communism. I simplify the "isms" with communism - socialism - democracy -capitalism - oligarchy , extremes at both ends generally not good to society at large.

??? What country would let rich people do whatever they want with national territory? In any case, you are complaining about other landed people. The renter class and homeless are considered non-persons.

You’re right it’s not like we have a leader that unilaterally decides what companies live or die or what mergers get approved based on who pays him off.

Or the same leader doesn’t unilaterally raise tarrffs, exempt companies that bow to him and tell other companies not to pass cost increases on to customers.

That doesn’t seem like the free market to me.

Capitalism != free market. It means private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism naturally tends towards monopoly due to competition. Companies go out of business, competitors buy up their remains, and consolidate market share.

What is happening politically is a reflection of this concentration of power that naturally accumulated due to the dynamics of capitalism (and as they rose they influence the state to enable further concentration, also part of the natural life of actually existing capitalism).

In new markets, capitalism looks pretty good and the competition drives good deals for consumers and the barriers to entry are low. This devolves over time into a highly concentrated market with high barriers to entry. We've seen this story in our industry time and time again. Unfortunately, the new market state is transient, and the concentrated part is steady state. This is why people are always looking for new market opportunities.

None of these companies that Trump is pressuring not to raise prices in response to tariffs are in any shape form or fashion monopolies, duopoly’s are any other type of “opily”. They are the car manufacturers and grocery stores and retail stores which have not been a monopoly in our lifetime.

And by “our” industry I assume you mean tech.

Which one of the tech companies is a “monopoly”?

There is nothing I can use Google for that I can’t use another company for and with Google Search, it isn’t even the best.

Amazon? I can order most things from other places or go into a physical store.

Apple? I can buy one of hundreds of different phones or computers

Microsoft? My life is completely Microsoft free.

> America is (as clickbaity as I feel saying this) more communist at its worst than NK ever was

America has its wealth more evenly divided than North Korea does. America has never been communist. (And North Korea doesn't organise its economy according to Marxist-Lenninist principles other than running a command economy.)

It's so sad that that the US is such a poor country and that its leaders refuse to learn from North Korea on how to become richer

The US has attacked North Korea constantly economically and killed 20% of its population in the 1950s. It economically supported South Korea. You are complaining about the results of this attack. In the 1970s the DPRK was economically outpacing the south and the US stepped up support to prevent capitalism from looking like shit.

The US did support SK, e.g., by giving it "most favorable nation" trading status, but NK had supporters, too, in the USSR and China.

>In the 1970s the DPRK was economically outpacing the south

-- according to statistics published by the DPRK.

The USSR no longer exists and China has only recently become strong enough to offer similar kinds of supports (which doesn't mean that it does in fact do so). China was an agrarian society until basically the past 25-35 years.

I’d rather be poor in the US, than rich in North Korea. And I wouldn’t wish “poor in the US” on my enemies.

exactly. It doesn't help that homeless individuals are usually disproportionately suffering from mental illness. In a more industrial economy they would fit the basic requirements for industrial production jobs, not saying that they are fulfilling, but now that the economy is centered around knowledge/service work, their disenfranchisement has increased greatly the bandwidth of the school to prison pipeline and schemes like this.

They have no reason to respect the American social contract because so far it's gotten them nothing, and in many cases like this, they are entirely unfamiliar with the stakes of the game as they stand now, as they are more concerned with the basic realities of their next meal and warmth. Her great move from the midwest(well I guess that used to be the west right) to the southwest indicates that not only was she likely adrift as many people are now, but open to anything that would keep her normed to the people she saw on her screens.

It's not even something that's unknown. There's a reason bad debts can get you denied a security clearance.

I thought that was more about blackmail potential.

Not in the slightest.

Its both about your decision making in getting to that point, and about what you might do to get out from under those debts.

Exactly the issue we see in this situation.

> national security risk because they are easily targeted and exploitable.

same reason FBI agents generally paid paid alright, and why federal government clearances take a strongly negative view of bankruptcy and poor financial management.

now it's writ-large across the population. yet more improvements brought to you by technology.

OP does address why it's critical:

> Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue

Without this it's easy to think that this was just a bad actor we could have caught, instead of just a symptom of a deeper issue not being addressed

I'd be more surprised if there isn't a causal link between homelessness and making bad choices - I don't think it's really disputed that there's a causal link between homelessness and crime in general.

Amusingly, a significant fraction of people will read what you wrote as a causal link in a particular direction and agree with it. And a different fraction of people will read it as the link going in the other direction and also agree.

I'd hope that it's not a significant fraction that would get it backwards haha but just to clarify - homelessness/poverty will cause people (on average) to make worse decisions and lower cognitive ability, but making bad decisions or having a lower cognitive ability is not a cause of homelessness/poverty, at least from a statistical causality perspective on a population, individual cases will of course be different

> Why is it critical?

The root cause was desperation, not greed.

Doesn't change the effects of the action. And should be more or less legally irrelevant. But it does impact, in my view, the moral judgement they deserve.

And should be more or less legally irrelevant. But it does impact, in my view, the moral judgement they deserve.

I suppose, if moral judgements and legality have no relation, sure. But what does that imply.

We try to have moral laws but it’s impossible because morality is slippery. This is why we have judges and juries. Also, laws are not moral merely because they exist. Plenty of unjust and immoral laws on the books just depends who you ask.

> if moral judgements and legality have no relation, sure. But what does that imply

Something akin to moral hazard [1].

I should also clarify that I meant legally irrelevant to conviction. It's absolutely relevant to sentencing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

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