A growing number of Americans are ending up homeless as soaring rents in recent years squeeze their budgets.
According to a Jan. 25 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, roughly 653,000 people reported experiencing homelessness in January of 2023, up roughly 12% from the same time a year prior and 48% from 2015. That marks the largest single-year increase in the country’s unhoused population on record, Harvard researchers said.
i paid rent this month the exact same as last month and they emailed me after a week saying i owed them $35 more. just out of nowhere, just because. yes it’s only 35 but also fuck off
You forgot to tip
The company sure didn’t. They didn’t even bother to lube up first from the sound of things.
Just put the whole hog in
35 now, 35 more later, 35 more next year. Then you’re eventually paying $500 more in rent and can’t afford it anymore.
My front office totally fucked up my rent. They put me on a different rate than I agreed to, and added on their own renters insurance which I opted out of by showing proof I already had renters insurance. My bill was like an extra $300 because of their fuckups.
If it’s still a fuck up if it’s intentional?
Review your contract. If you aren’t month-to-month, tell them to pound sand.
Guillotines are expensive. :(
Actually… you’d be surprised how many things can be dropped with a similar success rate!
Hah. Touché. Butt, if I use my own weight it’s nearly free! Derrièrotine?
Just a head up, youtube has been attaching tracking links when you copy their urls now. You can delete the tracker ?si= string and it’ll still work.
Yooo that’s messed up. Thanks for the heads up!
Trebuchets aren’t, and they can yeet the fattest of fatcats at least 150m which is more than far enough.
They really aren’t though. The raw materials would easily be less than the price of my rent.
But the craftsmanship.
Quite easy to build…
Buy a sheet of metal about 50x100cm, a bit thicker so it has some weight. Use an angle grinder to sharpen an edge. Buy some wood (like 2x4), build it into a rectangular frame, slightly smaller on the inside than the blade, and make a channel for the blade to slide in. Make 2 holes into the blade so you can attach some rope.
All that’s missing is the wooden thing that goes around the neck. You can make that from 2 slabs of wood, and you can cut the neck shape with a jig saw.
Edit: thinking about it, you can simplify the build by making 2 wooden frames instead of 1, and have the blade slide between them.
In term of tools, all you need is an angle grinder, some kind of saw for the wood, and a drill/screwdriver.
honestly it’s really simpler than that, like you pointed out you only need one frame to make the track, the metal you do not need to sharpen if its less than an inch thick, most modern sheet metal, cookie pans etc will do, you just need weight and you cut the blade at an angle, then you use a table and some ratchet straps to hold the subject in place, but have you seen the price of lumber?
Needs speed holes.
Also how do you make sure it doesn’t go crooked and get jammed on the way down?
Also paint it red.
Need basic skills, we’re not building an artisanal execution device or to last decades.
As the guy who made r/Artisanvideos, I disagree.
Yeah we will have to start with dull wood axes I suppose, at least till enough rich people have dropped loot so we can buy a few.
I’m seeking series one funding for my startup which will be like Uber, but for guillotines. PM for investment opportunities.
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Too complicated, just turn the lawnmower sideways.
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It’s okay, we only need one per region.
But record low unemployment numbers guys! And wages made a tiny dent in decades of inflation!
You’re right I forgot green line go up!
Don’t look down
Or zoom out
I just wish that helped more people than just the rich
Yea, I’m starting to have a hard time believing what they’re telling us.
People drop off the unemployment numbers after 6 months as they’re considered to have “given up” searching for work. They’re one of many metrics the government uses to gauge how “good” our “economy” is doing that are absolutely useless and paint a false narrative.
Same when it comes to the stock market. Apparently, if the stock market is doing well, the “economy” is doing well. Pretty sure the stock martket doesn’t help the majority of Americans in any meaningful way.
It literally destroys lives every 3 months when companies try to bury things that normally happen but don’t mean profit under the rug by laying off employees so they can keep their stock market pimp daddy happy for another quarter.
Another “wonderful” metric is “family income.”
Yes, family income has been steadily increasing since
women entered the workforcethe 60s-70s. Geez I wonder what could possibly account for that, it must be thathaving 2 incomes became mandatory to survivewe’re all just doing better!I wonder how life is like for those who don’t have a family income… Source: perpetually single, make 60k (in a VHCOL area) and have to live in a garage. (No I can’t “just move,” I am “uneducated”…)
Corporate landlords are using price-fixing software to illegally raise prices and gouge average Americans. Executives need to go to jail for robbing us all.
No war but the class war
America no longer has classes. There’s the wealthy and the non-wealthy.
The non-wealthy get divvied up into something that is closer to caste.
We are at a point now where most people will see a person on the street and instantly toss them into a specific bucket of people based upon dress, posture, cleanliness, accent/dialect, hairstyle, car, whatever.
Notice specifcally missing from this list is race. I’m not saying America isn’t racist. But as a privileged suburban cis white male, I don’t think it’s nearly as relevant as it once was. There’s centuries of institutional racism that’s still weighing down progress, try as we might to avoid it…but I think that “race” is often getting mixed up with other “otherings” related to outward appearance, and the overlap tends to not include that persons own race.
I.e, I think there are a lot of people who would feel nervous around a muscular 20-something black or Latino man in urban-style streetwear downtown, that would otherwise gladly grab a coffee with the same person dressed in a well-pressed oxford shirt and khakis at the office. Racism there isn’t the problem, it’s more of a distaste culture that had been formed by the race, and that’s distinctly separate, in my mind.
Anyways, that was a bit of a tangent. What I’m basically trying to say is that class warfare isn’t really what we’re making it out to be. The classes are literally 8 billion people on one side and 20 on the other.
“Millionaire” don’t mean shit anymore. Any boomer who bought a house anywhere but BFE on the 90s and managed to pay it off is at least halfway there just in equity. Another quarter of the way there for the median 401k balance at 65 of $235k. Thats 75% of the way to a millionaire, just in house and 401k (and $235k isn’t really enough to live off on its own over the course of retirement. Thats something like $15k withdrawal from ages 65 to 85, and hopefully you die by then).
The two classes are the workers and the propertied class. The first supports it’s by working, the second supports itself by the work or the first. Capitalism came from feudalism, with a propertied class and those that serve them.
Those who serve have always been divided internally against each other, with some form of warrior class acting as class traiters.
They should GET A JOB! And don’t you COMMIES tell me that Wages won’t cover a one room rental because that’s a LIE! I BOUGHT my house 30 years ago working as a JANITOR! Kids today are just LAZY! GIVE me my Social Security you COMMIES!
College only cost me $25 and a jug of corn liquor and when I got out, they immediately made me president of a metal fabrication company! What are these lazy millennials complaining about?
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It just seems like really sarcastic trolling to me.
I realize there’s a higher than normal level of autism on Lemmy in general but sometimes the obvious sarcasm people miss is just wild.
Ever since 2016, people’s ability to detect sarcastic comments without the “/s” tacked on has just fucking gone out the window. People are just taking comments at face value and assuming the worst in each other anymore. I kind of get it sometimes though, there does seem to be alot of stupid people online, though in some cases it’s like people are purposefully misinterpreting comments. It’s so weird.
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And…no one (people I know) believes me when I tell them who the homeless are. Every one just holds onto the concept that they are just mentally-ill people who need to be in an institution. When I explain that any person’s mental health decreases the longer they live without a home, a job, and a family for support. Homeless people end up turning to drugs because they can’t stand the fact that their ability has decreased so much that a drug-induced hallucination is better than reality.
A number of homeless are indeed are victims of our terrible socio-economic system. However I have heard many homeless outreach workers say the same thing “The ones who stay homeless are the ones who stay addicted”. Addiction is a serious issue and the challenge of beating it is nothing we should dismiss, however it is clear some people end up homeless due to drugs and stay homeless due to a refusal to get clean. When your life is centered around just getting high, you won’t care much about anything else. All the horrors of living on the street disappear once you get your fix, and some people are okay living like that.
I guess I’m writing all this to say that homelessness is a very complex and nuanced issue. They aren’t all victims, they aren’t all criminals, they aren’t all mentally ill, they aren’t all addicts, and for some its the only life they’ve ever known.
This is why the conversation around homelessness is so difficult. People just latch onto their idea of what being homeless is then build their argument from there, dismissing the remaining context of the concept.
I highly suggest doing homeless outreach to broaden your perspective on the matter (look up a local Food Not Bombs group if you live in a city!). If that isn’t something you’d like to do, there are plenty of videos on youtube that give you more insight into the homelessness experience. Obviously watch out for the videos that treat living on the streets as a spectacle or oddity, I absolutely hate these videos because they serve to shock and entertain, not educate.
A lot of people on the streets have no one left to help them for a reason. They’ve burned every bridge with loved ones. Saying this as someone who’s dealt with an addict on my wife’s family. Thankfully she’s not in the streets right now but she has been several times. We’ve helped her out in so many ways just to end up getting stolen from
So is this why people on the streets who AREN’T addicted unable to get back into housing?
Y’all let me know when we’re tired of the bullshit enough to get a “general strike” going. I’ll bake the “cookies”.
And here I am…just earning some nine hundred dollars a month u.u wish me luck!
Bro. What are you doing here? You should be out there hustling. I turned down a $10 million inheritance so I can stay hungry. Hustle is life bro
Bro, I quit my 9-5 to become homeless and hustle every waking second of my life. Hustle is life.
Can’t. Hustling is informal in my country and has no benefits :') the amount i get is like, triple the minimum wage but still feels like garbage :(
good luck
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Secure and close the borders to relieve the pressure on housing demand and limit the amount of people with no means to support themselves from entering the country. If our country and economy is failing at providing for the people we already have we shouldn’t be letting in any more.
Or… solve the wealth hoarding issue at the top, instead of blaming poor people.
No no it’s the immigrants!!! (please ignore the real estate funds buying up property and jacking up rents)
Ah. The Russian trolls/bots have discovered lemmy. It was nice while it lasted.
You’ve never seen lemmygrad or hexbear? And lemmygrads been around for years
Wtf? You’re the richest country in the world. It’s not a problem of too little money, it’s capitalism
If our country and economy is failing at providing for the people we already have we shouldn’t be letting in any more.
Wait – our country is supposed to be providing housing?
I won’t lie, I’m super into that. Normalizing rent across hundreds of millions of people would go a long way to stop bloodsucking leeches from buying property, price gouging residents to live there, and calling that a “job”
How exactly are immigrants who can’t support themselves able to pay rent and put pressure on housing demand?
By adding crime into the fray
A great point were it not quantifiably true that immigrants have lower per capita rates of criminal activity than citizens. Also, it is perfectly legal to come into the country and ask for asylum (which many are doing), it is further known that there is rampant and illegal employment for migrant workers by agricultural and hospitality industries that rarely suffer any consequences for exploiting and underpaying workers. (See: dollar menu pricing)
Ignoring the motives behind migration and even worse the lack of funding for enforcement of legislation whose reform is stuck for political reasons blames the victims for their plight.
But simple explanations are easier, no matter how wrong they may be factually.
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Yes, Mexicans are to blame. Well done.
They can’t afford the rent either.
