I have thought about this a bit as one of the parks I walk through has a few homeless people and a lot of litter. And I don’t like litter.
Picking up litter in a park isn’t a steady job, but it’s something they can do because they’re already there, and paying them to do it seems better than handouts of equivalent value. It’s a win-win in terms of value exchange, and it doesn’t push the recipient into the mental role of panhandler or beggar or unworthy-person. They did something, they got something for it.
When I've thought through this, some of the scenarios and questions that come up are interesting and I'm not sure how things would play out. Would homeless people litter more, in order to be paid more? Would everyday people litter more because they know the homeless will get paid to pick it up? Is there any net gain for society? Would I be exposed to liability if I were the one paying these people? Should the public be the one paying?
In a way, this thought pattern is akin to finding a way to gig-economize homeless people. idk. Just things on my mind, about my community that I would like to improve.
I suspect what's happening here is that you two are conflating different groups.
If you include the invisible homeless in the group, you can probably say that the majority of the homeless don't have mental health issues. It takes functional mental skill to not be a visible homeless person.
The highly visible homeless probably have significant mental health issues. Mental health issues have a nasty way of completely destroying your social network. If someone doesn't get medical help before they hit bottom, they're in real trouble.
The biggest problem is that the "homeless" aren't a monolithic bloc. So, Amdahl's Law is at work--even if you completely eliminate one class of homelessness--you still have 80% of the problem left, it looks like you didn't do anything and everybody gets angry at the waste of money.
I like the reach for Amdahl's Law, but it's about how fast you can speed something up by doing it in parallel, isn't it? What's to say someone else can't be eliminating the other classes of homelessness in parallel, making the problem effectively embarrassingly parallelizable?
> What's to say someone else can't be eliminating the other classes of homelessness in parallel
You both can and must address everything in parallel to actually dent the "homeless problem".
That's the point.
Let's say there are 5 primary classes of homeless. Even if you take one of them and reduce it to zero (and you will never accomplish this)--you're still left with 80% of the problem.
Only now the people approving the checks are angry because the "homeless problem" doesn't really look any better.
Hmm. My takeaway from Amdahl's Law is that if one has a parallelizable problem, one can keep throwing processors at it, but eventually there is a slice of overall work that cannot be parallelized. Stepping back and refreshing myself on Amdahl's Law, I can see how this relates to Amdahl's Law. I like it.
Anyway, I agree with your general sentiment, and it tickles my mind. Thank you!
