Austin’s Homeless: Laissez Faire in a Mixed Economy

Here in Austin, Texas, the reductio ad absurdum of the city government’s policies toward the homeless is that you (and all your friends) can take over any public space for your own use. The city council and mayor have declared de facto privatization. I want a school. They are not being used now and I can make good use of one. Once in, I will be hard to extricate because schools are defensible fortresses. (See, for example, The Girl Who Owned a City.) Perhaps you would like a park or a sports arena. Just find one that is not being used and make yourself a home. 

 

Menchaca and Ben White Jan 2020 and June 2020 

Austin Statesman

City Council rescinds measures that critics say criminalize homelessness

By Elizabeth Findell 

Posted Jun 21, 2019 at 3:36 AM

Updated Jun 21, 2019 at 6:14 PM

 

The Austin City Council early Friday rescinded city prohibitions on sitting or sleeping in public and panhandling — measures social advocates said wrongly criminalized homelessness — after hours of emotional testimony from passionate residents on both sides of the issue.

 

The decisions, made after 2 a.m. during a meeting that started at 10 a.m., capped a long day of intense discussion surrounding several homelessness-related votes at City Hall.

 

https://www.statesman.com/news/20190621/city-council-rescinds-measures-that-critics-say-criminalize-homelessness

 

Ben White opposite Target Then 

Summary of Changes to the Ordinances

On October 17, 2019, the City Council made several revisions to the city ordinance that prohibits camping in public areas.  Other ordinances, including those prohibiting obstruction on sidewalks in the downtown area and aggressive confrontation, remain unchanged.  The ordinance changes went into effect on October 28, 2019.

https://www.austintexas.gov/department/council-direction-and-policy

 

The Texas Tribune

Greg Abbott says TxDOT could remove homeless camps from Austin's highway underpasses

BY DAVIS RICH OCT. 18, 2019

 

The governor has vowed to use state resources to clear Austin's homeless residents from public spaces since city officials began changing local ordinances dictating where people can and can't camp.

 

Gov. Greg Abbott's office said Friday the Texas Department of Transportation could force homeless Austin residents out from under bridges and overpasses where some of them live or camp if recent changes to city ordinances don't result in less feces and fewer needles by Nov. 1.

 

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/10/18/greg-abbott-says-txdot-will-remove-austin-homeless-under-highways/

Ben White opposite Target Now 

 

KVUE-TV (ABC)

After more downtown stabbings, Abbott says Austin's 'reckless' policies on homelessness 'must end now'

Author: Drew Knight, Luis de Leon

Published: 5:16 PM CST January 24, 2020

Updated: 8:16 AM CST January 25, 2020

AUSTIN, Texas — After a series of Downtown Austin stabbings overnight left three people injured, Gov. Greg Abbott released a pointed statement for the Austin City Council on Friday.

"City of Austin leaders have allowed lawlessness throughout the capital city that is resulting in violence against Austin residents, including those who are homeless," Gov. Abbott said in a statement released to KVUE. "Last night’s tragedy, leaving three injured, is just the most recent instance of this violence. This rise in violence has corresponded with the revocation of the camping ban that the Austin City Council passed in June. Public endangerment and murder can no longer be tolerated because of the actions – and inactions – by City officials. Mayor Adler and the city council should re-instate the camping ban and restore the rule of law in Austin. The City’s gamble on these reckless policies has been a loser and must end now."

https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/gov-abbott-calls-austin-homeless-policy-reckless-after-stabbings/269-fe1bd9ab-d65b-4cff-a013-3edb295c4c1f

 

Fox-7 TV

Gov. Abbott working to override Austin homeless camping ordinance

By Steven Sarabia 

Published February 7 [2020]

Homeless Crisis FOX 7 Austin

While talking about Austin's homeless issues Wednesday, Abbott said on Twitter, "Next step should be to reinstate the ban on camping and work with non-profit organizations to assist with shelters. That's exactly what I will ask the Texas Legislature to do."

https://www.fox7austin.com/news/gov-abbott-working-to-override-austin-homeless-camping-ordinance

Wikipedia provided this definition from the Communist Party of Texas

LUMPENPROLETARIAT - German for "rag proletariat." Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. Sometimes described as the bottom layer of a capitalist society. May include criminal and mentally unstable people. Some activists consider them "most radical" because they are "most exploited," but they are un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle.  See https://www.cp-texas.org/glossary

 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

 

Workers’ Paradise Promised an End to Money 

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

Furloughs for Freedom: Downsizing Government 

Toxic Leadership 

 

Ruby Methods the Ruby Way

On Monday, October 5, 2015, Hal Edwin Fulton, author of The Ruby Way presented “Core Methods We Forgot We Have” to AustinRB at the Capital Factory. First published in 2001, and now in its third edition, Fulton’s book was the second English language guide.  It is available in Chinese, Japanese, and Polish.  My introduction to Ruby on Rails was in 2012 through a four-week class offered by CabForward. As a technical writer, my interest is in being able to work with programmers. Hal Fulton’s lecture was clear, concise, informative, and insightful. I enjoyed it so much that I stopped taking notes and just watched.

RubyRB starts at 6:30 with a sideboard. This month’s host was Netspend, who treated us to Qdoba. “Hurray! It’s not pizza,” said one of the 30 or so present.  As we ate, we introduced ourselves to the group.  Several of the attendees were enrolled at The Iron Yard, and looking forward to going to work as developers.   One of the other attendees said that his firm is hiring. That is pretty common. At the other Ruby group, Austin on Rails, employers looking for devops people sometimes out-number the unemployed.

A method in Ruby is like a function in Fortran or a procedure in Cobol: a little routine that someone created to do something useful. Some of them seem redundant: concat and append, for example. Hal Fulton explained that internally, concat builds a new array and fills it with the elements of the objects, whereas append actually does place the source object at the end of the target object, changing the target. append is computationally more efficient than concat.

 

Hal Fulton: Ruby Hacker and Author of The Ruby Way

The next day, via email, I asked Hal Fulton about this redundancy.  “… Ruby is community-driven.  So, you cannot stop people from creating new methods and publishing them, even when they do exactly the same thing as an existing method.”  He replied: “Well, anyone can write a method and use it (or even create a gem and publish it), but Matz [Yukihiro Matsumoto: the creator of Ruby] and his minions are still very picky about what actually gets into the core. My take on it -- better too much functionality than too little.”  

This book can be viewed as a sort of “inverted reference.” Rather than looking up the name of a method or a class, you will look things up by function or purpose. For example, the string class has several methods for manipulating case: capitalize, upcase, casecmp, downcase, and swapcase. In a reference work, these would quite properly be listed alphabetically, but in this book they are all listed together.

 We don’t often think of the etymology of the word "way," but there are two important senses in which it is used. On the one hand, it means a method or technique, but it can also mean a road or path. Obviously these two meanings are interrelated, and I think when I say “the Ruby Way,” I mean both of them. So what we are talking about is a thought process, but it is also a path that we follow. Even the greatest software guru cannot claim to have reached perfection but only to follow the path. And there may be more than one path, but here I can only talk about one. 

That zen understanding explains the title of the book in Japanese: “… an invitation to the road.”

In his talk to AustinRB, Hal focused on arrays.  You can do three things to an array, he said. You can initialize or transform it; access an item or iterate; and search. Beginning with delete, delete_at, delete_if, and reject, he then rapidly produced examples for almost 50 minutes non-stop, working until his Macintosh warned him of a low battery, and still continuing until finally running out of power, at 8:03 PM.

• Find Hal Fulton’s website “Rubyhacker” aka “I <heart> Ruby” here. 
• You can download the front matter and “Chapter Two: Strings” from the publisher here. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing 

John Kemeny Knew: We Shall Have Computed 

Claude M. Watson (1922-2013)

Profits and Benefits in a Foreign Language 

100,000 Page Views

This blog earned its 100,000th page view on December 10.  The Google metrics are somewhat questionable. I read through all of the numbers provided individually and found many more that were popular, but not listed.  Also, it is hard to understand why so many hits come from France, the Ukraine, Russia, China, and Malaysia.  Perhaps hackers automatically probe all blogs looking for weaknesses.

Many of my Objectivist comrades visit, as I post out-takes, or cross-link articles from here to Rebirth of Reason, Objectivist Living, and the very popular Galt's Gulch Online.  Unfortunately, from what I can tell by the metrics, they seldom have read more than the target link, even though most of the articles here close with "Also on Necessary Facts" (sometimes "Previously on Necessary Facts").  I also get some traffic from Michael "wintercow" Rizzo, professor of economics at the University of Rochester (New York), who writes the Unbroken Window blog. A few more viewers come in via Organizations & Markets.

Although "Alongside Night" jumped to first place this year, historically, the top post had been "What (if anything) did Dorothy Learn?" The conclusion to the famous 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz still leaves people around the world wanting to know.

The other subject of perhaps truly wider appeal that did not make even the top 30 this year was "Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard Serenity."  A libertarian friend recommended the series on the Objectivist Living discussion board.  I found it favorably reviewed on the Atlas Society website.  I got the disks from the library; and we both enjoyed the series. My ex enlightened me about Joss Whedon. From there, I found more works, such as his Astronishing X-Men issues; and I understood why the "Serenity" page won so many looks.  (We just watched Season One of Buffy the Vampire Slayer last month.)

I created the Score by dividing the Days into the Views. I figured that about One per Day was good.

Title	Date	Views	Days	Score
Alongside Night to Run in Austin	27-May-14	1856	195	9.52
There is no John Galt – and that’s worse	13-Sep-14	388	89	4.36
Republicans for Voldemort	20-May-14	362	202	1.79
William Sheldon: Psychologist, Numismatist, Thief	1-Sep-13	792	461	1.72
Your State Defense Force	23-Nov-14	32	19	1.68
Contradictions in the Constitution	13-Aug-13	781	479	1.63
What (if Anything) Did Dorothy Learn?	6-Jan-12	1329	1056	1.26
LASCON 2014	24-Oct-14	60	48	1.25
Megacities	19-Aug-14	122	113	1.08
Scripophily	10-Aug-13	510	482	1.06
Money as Living History	9-Jan-14	344	333	1.03
Bob Swanson and Genentech	3-Jul-13	500	519	0.96

Personally, I have my own favorites.

• Newton versus the Counterfeiter  (This version of my book review was rejected by the Ohio State University Law Journal because I missed their cut-off for timeliness. The ANA granted me a Heath Literary Award for my biography of Newton's tenure as warden and master of the British Royal Mint.  So, when Thomas Levenson's book came out, I was enthusiastic and placed several book reviews.)
• The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy   A group of academic philosophers spin essays based on popular television shows. As a fan of "Big Bang Theory" I believe that it was over their heads.
• Sergei Magnitsky  His death (murder, actually) was a brief news story and generated some bills in Congress.  It was one of many rocks in the road of Russian foreign relations.
• Laissez-faire Criminology   Asking rhetorical questions while praising sleeping policemen.
• Visualizing Complex Data and Knowledge Maps  These related essays display some of the many ways to organize information.

Over all, topics on this blog ride a wide range because it is my alternative to paid work.  As a technical writer, I enjoy delivering information about products and services to the clients and customers of those who hire me.  Here, I write for myself.  Many of the posts fall under a few rubrics.

• Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics, Informing Economics, Money as Speech and Press,… 
• Graphic design and typography: Creative Genius, Art & Copy, Start the Presses, … and others…
• Astronomy, Physics, Biotech; the History and Philosophy of Science: Seeing in the Dark, Monsters from the Id, Science in the Middle Ages, Misconduct in Research
• Criminology: The Fallacy of Fingerprinting, Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security, Security in the 21st Century, Integrating Criminologies, Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops, Junk Science in the Courtroom
• Nerd Nation: Big Bang Theory, Numb3rs and NCIS;  Educating the Gifted, Where All the Children are Above Average; Liberal Education and Sociology; the Dragon's Lair store here in Austin.
• Cities: Megacities, City Air Makes You Free, etc.
• Austin culture and foods

Some necessarily cross the demarcations. John Jay Ford and William Sheldon perpetrated their crimes within the field of numismatics. Similarly, misconduct in laboratory procedure is one of the causes of false convictions. So, I have a different site, entirely, CSI:Flint (2011) which I created for a "Super Science Friday" session for middle schoolers visiting the University of Michigan.

Austin's Chinatown

By the middle 2020s, Austin will have more Asians than African-Americans.  Austin already is a town without an ethnic majority. Moreover, the texture of the Asian groups is changing.  In the middle 1980s, most Asians here were Chinese and connected to the University of Texas.  Granted that the demographers differentiate Taiwanese (7.9%) from Chinese (12.2%), nearly a fifth (18.1%) of the Asians are Vietnamese, giving them substantial visibility. (City of Austin data PDF here.)  The city even tracks their family names, mapping the Trans, Nguyens, and Phams (PDF here).   

Fu, Lu, and Shou,
the three gods of traditional folk religion
representing Happiness, Prosperity, and Longevity
stand under the welcoming gate.

The City of Austin notes: "This highly entrepreneurial population has opened new businesses, purchased restaurants, made loans available to its network and acquired real estate." In fact, in her essays and book on "Bourgeois Virtue" Deirdre McCloskey goes into some detail on how co-ethnics within a wider culture create these community networks. They exemplify many of the fundamental virtues of commercial culture, including the importance of reputation and the willingness to trust.

Southwest National Bank. The doors are in
Chinese characters, Romanized Chinese
and Vietnamese: Ngân hàng quốc gia

Across the street from the Southwest National Bank
The first character means da "big" (a man with arms out).
The second character may be "auspicious".
The last two compounds are yin hang "bank" 
= silver (metal under mountain) 
+ capable, to do.

 "Amazingly, by the middle of the next decade, the number of Asians in Austin will more than likely exceed the number of African Americans.  While the general population of Austin doubles every 20 to 25 years, the number of Asians in Austin is doubling every ten years." (City of Austin "Top Ten Demographic Trends" report here.) 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Formulas for Success
Shooting the Roadhouse Relics Gallery
Kalliope
Jaime's Salsa of Austin

Shooting the Roadhouse Relics Gallery

Roadhouse Relics is the Austin, Texas, studio and gallery where neon artist Todd Sanders crafts his vintage-style designs using durable modern materials and specialized weathering techniques. -- http://roadhouserelics.com/

It is not surprising that people stop to photograph the mural.

What may be notable is that so many do.

I had lunch on South Congress; and then walked over

to South 1st to catch a bus. In the time I waited ... 

...  I counted eight different photographers in 35 minutes.

Previously on NecessaryFacts
Around Austin
High Brew Cold Coffee
Austin at Night
BSides Austin 2013
SXSW 2013

Around Austin

The Wheatsville Co-op recently opened a second location closer to us on the south side of Austin, but the main store is still convenient sometimes.  

While they were making the sandwiches, I met Staci, a product rep from Hops & Grain, a local brewery.  Texas has a lot of Germans. In fact, some argue for Texas German being recognized as a dialect. (See Wikipedia, here.)  You never actually hear it on the streets; but we do have towns named New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, and Weimar, and some others. So, they brew a lot of beer, or try to.  Coming from the Great Lakes, I am just not impressed.  Eliot Ness came from Cleveland and there’s a reason why the Prohibition wars were fought in Chicago, not Dallas.  Schlitz claimed to make Milwaukee, not Houston, famous.  Texas beer lacks a dimension; and I do not know what that is; but I know that it is missing. This is a southern state. Until the revolutions of the 1960s, you could not buy beer on Sunday.  Now, you can, but not before noon.  Beers could not advertise their alcohol content. Recently, that changed, but many still keep the old labels.  For all of that, Hops & Grain of Austin has some good brews.  Staci was a good marketer.  I bought a six-pack of Alt-eration. (See also my nod to Pedernales Brewing under "Awesome Austin Foods" linked below.)

Outside at a table, eating my sandwich, and reading a book, I saw this girl come up and ask the other really old guy what those birds are.  “Grackles,” he replied. He told her way more about them than anyone needs to know. If you ask me, they are worse than pigeons, just noisy rats in feathers.  But she was interested in the natural history of grackles.  It was a moment at the co-op.

The next day, on my way to run errands, I crossed a pair of street-level railroad tracks. There, I saw a camera on a tripod. I had seen it before, but this time, I stopped.  The train cleared the crossing, and I pulled ahead and pulled over.  Right after I got out of the car, the gates came down again.  I introduced myself and Stuart told me that this train had been waiting for 45 minutes.  

He has a YouTube channel, “myrailvideos”. (See here.)  I was wearing a Taggart Transcontinental t-shirt.  He probably did not get the reference, but a train is a train; and we chatted while he recorded the rolling stock.  About 15 minutes later, I caught up with it on the Mopac.  The signs on the highway all say “Loop 1”, but everyone local calls it the Mopac.  Even so, many do not know of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, which merged with the Union Pacific in 1980.  (Government regulations and lawsuits delayed the completion of the merger until 1997.)   Wikipedia here but also Missouri Pacific Historical Society here. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Awesome Austin Foods  

South by Southwest 2013  

Around Austin(2012) 

Hook ‘em Horns! (2011) 

Stadtluft macht frei

"City air makes you free" is a secular prayer from the Middle Ages. If a serf could evade re-capture for a year and a day, the manor lord's bond was broken. Freedom is the ability to choose; and the city offers a multiplicity of choices. You can make yourself anew in the city. We do not question the fact that in our popular culture, all of the superheroes have secret identities and live in cities: Superman's Metropolis; Bruce Wayne in Gotham; The Green Arrow in Star City; Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen in Keystone City... 

Frost Tower from the Scarbrough Building

Bank of America Building from the Scarbrough Building

The Littlefield Building from the Scarbrough Building.
In 1910 they competed to be the tallest,
though limited by law not to surpass
the State Capitol.  The Littlefield is Beaux Arts.
In 1930 the Scarbrough was updated to an
Art Deco interior.

The German word is Wolkenkratzer: Cloudscraper.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Around Austin
Austin at Night
Formulas for Success
South by Southwest 2013
Images from SXSW 2013
South by Southwest 2012