quinnchr

Why would corporations not just move consumption offshore too? What happens when Ireland has 0% sales tax on software?

This is silly, there are plenty of counterexamples. See Santiago, Chile and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for examples of large multi-ethnic cities with efficient, safe, and clean public transportation systems.

This is specious reasoning at best unless you've done an exhaustive study of all public transportation.

Isn't CGAL a dependency for PostGIS? When would you choose to use CGAL directly rather than something built on top of it (e.g. PostGIS or pgrouting)?

My use case is mostly for routing and I'm currently using a heavily modified version of OSRM. If there's potential for even more speedup I'd appreciate any resources ou can point me towards.

Except we do know, we have a pretty darn good idea. We know how many people self-report mental illness. We know how many people actually seek treatment for mental illness. We know the self-reported rate of mental illness amongst other populations and can compare the two.

It's literally like any other disease. We don't know how many people actually get the flu every year. We only know how many people self-report getting the flu, and how many people seek treatment. Self-reported surveys are used all the time in epidemiology and we manage to form effective public policy based on that.

So sure, there's definite bias when it comes to self-reporting, but your suggestion is to ignore what data we do have and form public policy based on what? How you feel? First principles?

Yes this is true of any mental health issue in any population, we can only rely on self-reporting. If you have any sources that show "almost all" homeless people in SF are mentally ill, I'd be interested to read them.

From what I've read, at the national level the incidence of serious mental illness in the homeless population are around 20 - 25%. So the numbers for San Francisco seem reasonable.

True, but as far as I know California has never funded homeless programs at the state level. The only thing listed in the 2015 budget is:

"Housing Support Program — The Budget contains $35 million General Fund for CalWORKs Housing Support Program services, an increase of $15 million, which provides additional support to CalWORKs families for whom homelessness is a barrier to self‐sufficiency."

Which leaves medicaid spending, which according to my previous source only 20% of the homeless population in SF receive. Assuming medicaid pays the same amount poer person as in NYC that would bring the per capita homeless expenditure to about $35000.

Actually most homeless people can be helped. The chronically homeless only make up about 15% of the homeless population.

The vast majority of homeless people are homeless for months not years, and the many programs to aid them in finding housing and preventing homelessness in the first place have a significant measurable effect on the average number of homeless shelter entries and length of stay.