Agree it’s fun to think about even if not practical. If anything reminds me of how my own memory works, where it’s more like a description of what I saw than an image.

Yeah, not sure what’s up with that. Here are the working links as best I can tell:

• “A recent HUD study found that the cost of providing emergency shelter to families is generally as much or more than the cost of placing them in transitional or permanent housing”
• “All the residents at this Housing First styled residence…”
• “A cost study of rural homelessness from Portland ME found significant cost reductions when providing permanent supportive housing as opposed to serving the people while they remain homeless”
• “A study from Los Angeles CA… found that placing four chronically homeless people into permanent supportive housing saved the city more than $80,000 per year”

Lastly this link did seem to work but I thought the statistics and the FAQ were helpful.–

Some others here have highlighted that “shelter services” is not the same thing as an actual shelter. People can’t stay as long as they want, they don’t have a secure place to store their belongings, and they can be dangerous. Here is a post with sources that outlines why permanent supportive housing is more cost effective than temporary overnight shelters

Lol are you inspired by Buckminster Fuller? Dome over Manhattan

Can you share sources about the idea that some people don’t desire shelter? My understanding is more that drugs or mental illness make it difficult to retain housing. Their behavior towards others and their inability to pay means they end up homeless, but seems like people universally want a roof over their heads. My understanding is that among professionals working in this area, the view is that having a place to live is the first step in addressing issues like drug abuse and mental health. I’m aware of one organization in Philadelphia, Project Home, that others view as a model.

I’m interested in actual approaches. Not saying I want to perpetuate capitalism, but asking how you would tackle the problem, and could be from the viewpoint of any of those entities.

What do you use for spreadsheets, libreoffice? I could see not liking a specific program but I love a spreadsheet and use them constantly. I use libre for ideological reasons but don’t find it as convenient for certain tasks as excel or google sheets.

The government wants to carry a debt, because everyone who is owed money by the government is incentivezed to support it.

I wondered about that too. Maybe it’s stuff like “driver visits this address every Friday and Saturday night” but that hardly seems like solid data. Could just always listen to the installed mic intended for hands free calling and instead analyze for moans…

I’ve got to say, having been involved in campaigns to end gerrymandering, there is a subset of people who can be bothered to learn/care about how it works, and many others who don’t. Your process sounds even more complex and time consuming, and I don’t see it being effective because the general public won’t be invested in it. Like voting for traffic court judges but even more confusing.

More importantly I also think you’re underestimating the complexity of reconciling hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods per state, each a ranked choice list of different variants. One person will pick a boundary, and then some other person will pick a boundary that conflicts with it, multiply that by a dozen million and then what, some algorithm will decide which lines are correct? And then the resulting districts still won’t have an equal number of constituents? That violates the one person one vote principle, which is part of the issue with gerrymandering and the electoral college.

Well that’s the challenge, is that in order to have a vote on what the district lines are, you’ve already chosen a group of voters eligible for the election, so you’ve drawn a district. (Unless we’re having the entire country or entire state vote on districts) I also think district boundaries are exactly the sort of thing that voters aren’t inclined to research or show up to vote for, even though it makes a huge difference in election outcomes. For that reason I like STV/proportional voting for legislative bodies.

The sustainability of a monarchy is the problem. Even if you have a great king, they’re smart, they’re competent, they care about the good of the people, what about their successor? And what’s more, every person is fallible, susceptible to blind spots or maladjusted thinking. With a monarch there’s not a true means to address that sort of problem. Democracy has all sorts of problems, it’s true. But as the quote goes, it’s the worst form of government after all other forms of government.

Other comments have mentioned ranked choice voting, proportional representation and single transferable vote - these are all voting systems which encourage having more than two parties. The reason we don’t have them in the u.s. now is because people know they’re throwing their vote away or even helping the candidate they don’t like by voting third party.

I like this concept. Do you have thoughts on how you would address gerrymandering? One reason I like proportional representation is it addresses that challenge, but wouldn’t have the same intimacy in the concept you’re describing.

I could also see challenges with too many steps meaning that officials in the upper tier of representatives don’t actually know the tier below them and so may not have that sense of interpersonal obligation.

There’s a great documentary on HBO called Telemarketers that talks about this business model and how it’s essentially a fraud. And they address how if someone ever donates they’re put on a list of chumps to call back forever