Some homeless people are mentally ill but this isn't a reason to not have a social safety net. There used to be a term 'noblesse oblige' where the more fortunate are duty bound to look after those less fortunate, to my mind this is where a social security net is required.
Some people will for one reason or another, whether by bad luck or plain old stupidity will end up at some point in there life out on the streets. If these people have kids then the kids end up on the streets and no longer receive an education, so they'll end up as criminals or on drugs or something like that. If this cycle is allowed to continue you end up with large areas of slums in cities. If instead when bad things happen there is a security net that allows you to wipe yourself down, get up and move on then the cycle is avoided, or at least it's depth is less. It can become a social welfare problem, but at least you don't have children dying in tents from exposure, and there's always the chance that when things pick up, they'll be able to get a job or at least the children do.
Why would it be a cage? Isn't the idea of a free society is that it is a society? A group of responsible adults could agree that events could occur which result in people having to live on the streets for no reason of their own. I agree with some forethought these events could be planned for, but this is the sense of noblesse oblige. It recognises that not all people in the community are able to plan with the same level of forethought, and that the resources they have to work with will forbid this level of planning. And so a wealthy society can afford to look after all people if they so desire. If they wish to opt of the safety net then that is fine, I don't see how it's a cage.
> I agree with some forethought these events could be planned for
Really? One of the things that Hayek is well known for, the 'socialist calculation problem', states that too much central control is bad because it's simply impossible to 'calculate' an economy - it's best left as a dynamic system with millions of independent actors. However, doesn't that also apply to individuals? You can do your best to make plans, only to run into things beyond your knowledge or control.
I agree that it's not possible to calculate an economy. I was talking on a personal level, a rational person in a situation where at any time they may lose their job and be thrown on the streets will save and put aside enough money to survive for a reasonable amount of time. However if you're already living hand to mouth, you lose your job, the bank forecloses on your house and you're out on the street, well it seems in the US it's tent city here I come. Many of the people are victims of an economic event out of everyones control. A social security safety net would prevent tent cities from happening. Which is the greatest cost to a society - having citizens living in tents without any sanitation or health care, which will increase crime and health care needs - or provide all citizens with a safety net of a subsistence wage?
I agree - which is my point, that it's more or less correct to point out that a government, with everything available to it, is unable to 'calculate' an economy, but by the same token, individuals can try their best and miss the mark too. There ought to be something there for them to help pull them up and get them going again.
You are ignoring Pat's point, which is that many of the homeless choose to be homeless. So you must answer the question: should we force homeless people into shelters?
I never said anything about forcing people into shelters. My point was by providing a basic level of social security the tent city could be avoided. In Australia there are still some homeless living under bridges and so on, this can't be prevented, but we have no tent cities (except for the occasional political protests).
There are some shelters run by charity groups for the remaining homeless, who provide food and shelter for the night if so required. Most of these people have mental disorders / drug problems / or homeless kids who've left home, and there are mechanisms that help these as best as possible, but it's not 100% successful. Most of them choose to find a shelter for the night.
This situation is different from the one that creates the tent cities. From the interviews these are people who lost their jobs because of the economic collapse. Shouldn't a 21st century society provide some sort of safety net for these people so they can maintain some diginity?
Isn't there any sort of social welfare if you're unemployed in the US? I'm in Australia, and if you're unemployed here you get an allowance from the government, it's not much but enough to keep you able to share the rent with a couple of people and so on, so no one has to live in tents or die from exposure in the year 2009.
There are a small percentage that abuse the system, but not many and most view it as an acceptable price to pay for a social security net. To receive it you have to do so many hours of community service after a number of weeks, which minimises abuse of the system. But then we also have free medical if you need it to. If you're really on the skids the government will provide housing even. I believe this is the same in the UK and some other european countries, the UK is where we got it from.
The total laissez-faire system has it's up and down sides, which really aren't necessary in the 21st Century imho.
Unemployment in the US can be tricky to get. You need to be laid off in the proper manner and then you can only collect for 9 months on average. It would definitely be enough that you don't need to live on tents. It's different in every US state.
Here is one program in social welfare program in PA: a lot of college kids working 20 hours a week in minimum wage jobs qualify even if they're aware. I know someone who did it, apparently there are multiple interviews that are annoying. http://www.dpw.state.pa.us/ServicesPrograms/FoodStamps/ I can't find the specific figures right now but regular old welfare is now called TANF. I remember seeing the numbers paid and they were laughable, not enough to pay rent.
Yes. We have welfare, food stamps and related programs, which consist of transfer payments to non workers. In most regions we have homeless shelters, which provide beds and food. Various regions have a variety of other programs.
In particular, I believe Seattle guarantees a bed in a homeless shelter. I know NY does. People live outside the shelters anyway.
"the crash of 1873, the Great Depression—have a way of upending the geopolitical order, and hastening the fall of old powers and the rise of new ones."
There has been much ado about the US failures, but the failures in the UK seem even more serious. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere as the focus seems to be on the US, as is usual, but this is the last nail in the coffin for the UK as far as I can see, after this it will be an island off Europe that spends its time talking about the old empire.
What about javascript's dynamic object model, where the objects can be changed at run time? I don't think this was possible earlier on, can't remember if this was possible in smalltalk or self?
Javascript's design owes a lot to Self. Modifying an object's slots in realtime was pretty much the whole point of Self and what lead to the concept of a prototype language. (Well, technically, I think Self was simply an implementation of the already-existent prototype language idea... but is an idea actually useful before there's an implementation of it to test theories with? Chicken-egg... :))
The DOM (as in Document Object Model defined by W3C) has nothing to do with Javascript - it's just an API originally designed for accessing the various parts of HTML. It was set up so that it could be implemented for almost any language. In fact, had it actually used some of the more advanced (Self-inspired) features of Javascript within the definition of the DOM, the DOM may not have been such a pain in the ass. :)
What Javascript did manage to do that was very important is that it ended up becoming not only the most installed programming language of all time, but unlike BASIC, it's actually a pretty damn good language under the covers. So if anything, the fundamental innovation of Javascript within every browser has basically yielded another BASIC-like inspiration to a whole new generation of programmers. Except this time, their intro language was much more abstractly powerful.
I suspect the Hindley-Milner type inference algorithm probably showed up in the early 80's, since ML had it, and I was taught Standard-ML in the 84ish timeframe.
Of course there may be pre-ML work predating even that.
Try a maths for engineers course at your local Uni. If you don't want to or can't enrol, you could probably just sneak in up the back and take notes, I've done this in the past for courses I was just curious about, lecturers usually don't mind. often they enjoy it - someone who actually wants to learn!
There may be something of interest here too, this is the link to Itunes U in ITunes,
I spent much time researching why the tables are bad camp exists, and this is the result of my research:
The beginning
Initially tables were the only way to layout a web page, and so much abuse occured - this was before CSS and the only way to make a layout was to use 'spacer' gifs. spacer gifs were one pixel gifs that you had to put in td elements so they would retain there shape. As you can imagine this was a mess.
Then came CSS and the DIV tag, many books were written about 'spacer gifs were evil' use Divs and CSS, and this was correct spacer gifs were a nightmare.
However what seems to have happened is the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Tables are the easiest way to do what's now called 'liquid layout'. You can do these using Div's but it takes a bit of fiddling, and the result can sometimes be wrong if the screen width becomes too small.
From a software development point of view I regard using div's for liquid layout as an optimisation - semantically what you want is a spaced layout that resizes dynamically. However, using tables does cause a couple of problems that div's avoid (which I mention below), div's avoid these problems but at a cost (which I also mention below).
The real crunch was early on - Netscape 4.7 (the one that was widely used) crashed with multiple nested tables (try this on browsershots if you're curious). So Div's were used and techniques for using div's in browsers became prevalent.
The combination of the Netscape problems and spacer gifs created the 'tables are bad' thing and new developers coming in were told 'tables are bad' and it continues.
So people used div's and IE6 became the dominant browser, but the engineers who built IE6 never expected anyone to use divs for layout - that's what tables were for - and so the mess occured with div's and css and IE6. This, I think, made the situation worse, as to use div's meant you could MS bash, it also required a deeper understanding of HTML and CSS and so arose the specialist web designers who used multiple incantations in DIV tags and CSS to create what any joe could do in 5 minutes using table tags. This strengthened the DIV/CSS camp until anyone who used table tags was openly scorned as a newb.
In any argument you have with the DIV people the last one they always bring up when they're on the ropes is that braille readers can't handle tables - because the ordering isn't defined. However most of these people don't actually write for disabled readers and this too seems to be without base, I have asked many times for concrete examples, and never have received any.
There are some negatives with tables:
1) The whole page needs to be loaded before it can be rendered (in some cases), as the layout can't be done until the contents of each cell are known.
2) This seems to be a big one - it's very hard to edit nested tables in notepad and figure out where you are, you need more expensive tools to navigate the document, something web developers seem to be averse to for some reason. Me, I buy whatever tools make my life easier.
The negatives with Div's as layout are there too:
1) If you have a few fixed width div's with the rightmost floating (the usual way) and make the page smaller than the width of the div's the rightmost falls below the other div's, it's not possible to stop this from happening. If you use tables a scroll bar appears.
2) You have to have a deep understanding of CSS and a lot of time to experiment on multiple browsers to see what works
Div's can start to display quicker as they have a fixed width usually and so no layout algorithm is required to be calculated. (The actual time to calculate the layout is no longer an issue, but it used to be for tables).
So that's the issues as I see them, and how we ended up with these two camps. If anyone has some more data I'd like to see it. Personally I use a couple of layers of nested tables to establish the rows and columns and fill it up with div's as necessary, and don't worry too much any more. Oh and use styles to actually describe the TABLE/TR and TD elements, which is CSS as far as I can see.
For point 1) on Div negatives: you could set a min-width on 'body' or the host container if it's flexible to ensure the width never gets small enough for the divs to clear.
By lodging a provisional and having a released product that implements the invention, I believe no one else can patent that invention, even if you don't proceed with the patent. Ask your lawyer. A patent search will reveal if someone else has patented this already and would be a bit cheaper. Also shop around and get quotes from a couple of lawyers.
Some people will for one reason or another, whether by bad luck or plain old stupidity will end up at some point in there life out on the streets. If these people have kids then the kids end up on the streets and no longer receive an education, so they'll end up as criminals or on drugs or something like that. If this cycle is allowed to continue you end up with large areas of slums in cities. If instead when bad things happen there is a security net that allows you to wipe yourself down, get up and move on then the cycle is avoided, or at least it's depth is less. It can become a social welfare problem, but at least you don't have children dying in tents from exposure, and there's always the chance that when things pick up, they'll be able to get a job or at least the children do.