• TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    It’s the whole West Coast. BC Canada is about to elect conservatives who are going to push through mandatory or “involuntary” treatment for addicts and people with “mental health issues” and by that they mean poor people who are visibly struggling to find housing to be weird and do drugs in. They’re not going to send their alcoholic and neurodiverdent friends and family to jail as long as they don’t suffer publicly. It’s only for the homeless and the working poor living out of vans and motorhomes and tents because they’ve been priced out of the fucking rental market by short-term rentals and tourists and small boom economies of scale.

    Who knew that making basic human needs into luxury items would displace huge swaths of society. Idk… I learned about shelter being one of the basics in grade school… But obviously it’s not profitable to make sure everyone has their needs met.

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      Ha! I remember my feelings of literal dumbfoundedness upon realizing the majority of people see housing as an investment, no different than stocks…And then those same people looking at me like I have two heads about the idea of looking for ways to lower rent, and then eventually housing costs.

      The anglosphere is so cooked.

      • TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Oh yeah it’s totally fucked. I spent a fair amount of time in South America and when locals expressed to me they wanted “what we have” (in North America) I’d go into great detail about how every dumpster behind every grocery store was locked behind razor wire with thousands of pounds of edible food and people who couldn’t afford to rent an up(per)scale place would get fucked with and arrested for trying to live off the grid on the outskirts of town. They literally couldn’t believe that a culture so wealthy would treat their people like that, but it makes sense that none of these elements of our culture made it into the Hollywood content they were consuming at the time.

        In most parts of the world if you need to build a fuckin shack to keep the rain off yourself and your family you just do it. Like our species has done for literally tens of thousands of years, naturally.

        This was pre mainstream Internet, so I think a lot of those veils have finally been lifted with all of this information sharing. Good.