Helping the Homeless

The problem of homelessness seems to be increasing in certain metropolitan areas. Politicians representing those areas should be considering plans to alleviate homelessness.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has relocated 2,226 homeless families from New York City to 62 New Jersey towns. Additionally, 1,781 homeless families have been relocated to New York City.

This NJ.com article details some negative effects on the recipient families. 

1. Because the rent is paid a year in advance, the landlord may not be leveraged by next month's rent to make repairs to the property. 
2. Some of the properties have not been properly inspected before being rented (as required by law in some municipalities).
3. The families relocated in this manner are disconnected from the family support system they may have shared in the location they lived previously.

Rivka Cubine suggested that closed malls could be retrofitted to house homeless families. We spoke about this together and determined the following details:

• Every Mall has been built to manage thousands of people.
• Every Mall has sufficient bathroom facilities.
• Every Mall has some form of foodcourt support for feeding hundreds of people.
• Closed Malls are available.

Of course, there is no infrastructure to feed the thousands of people that could be housed in the Malls. There are many individuals who would be willing to donate time to operate a food pantry and a soup kitchen.

I am not a social worker or a philanthropist or even an event organizer. I am certain that people with the ability and knowledge to organize and implement a mall reorientation and rehabilitation can plan such transformation to create an environment for homeless families.

Consider compartmentalizing a large floorspace into apartments; using foodcourt space for soup kitchens; making small business spaces into schoolrooms, adult retraining centers, and small businesses based upon the skills of the people being housed; food pantries manned by the families using the living space and those pantries filled by individual gifting and by philanthropy. Salvation Army could have an office in one of the spaces for those who would like to interface with their organization. The people living in the RetroMall could accept furniture, clothing, and electronic donations. 

There are many skills among the homeless community that could become more effective in their lives if they can shift their focus from staying warm and out of the elements. 

What a change it would make if the population currently homeless could be allowed to make their home in abandoned malls or other structures with the help and support of the politicians, charitable organizations, and philanthropists in the area where they live.

Shipping people off to other cities may not be the only solution to homelessness. We may already have the infrastructure in place to assist. Someone with knowledge about how to make this happen should read this, change it to fit reality, and get to work.

Thanks for listening. Comment if you would like.

Previously Published on Quorum – What vegetable do you eat like a fruit?

What vegetable do you eat like a fruit?

John Cubine · Add Credential

Answered just now

It is easy to understand this question backward. Answers have been provided to this question that better answer the question “What fruits do we think to be vegetables?”.

To truly understand the presented question, we need to know what constitutes a fruit and what constitutes a vegetable. In Botany, no classification indicates a vegetable. Botany does describe what constitutes a fruit—the growth formed by the ovary of a flowering plant after flowering. There is also the consideration that a “fruit” contains seeds This means that many of the “vegetables” we buy from the store and eat in our meals are fruits. Some examples are tomato, squash, green beans and peppers. These fruits grow from the ovary of the plant after flowering.

In Botany, an accessory fruit is one that develops the edible flesh from tissue adjacent to the ovary rather than from the ovary itself. Examples are strawberries, mulberries, pineapples, pears, apples, and common figs. In Botany, any portion of the plant not defined as fruit is part of the vegetation of the plant, therefore vegetable. This includes fleshy portions generally considered “fruit” but not developed from the ovary of the flower of the plant.

Thus accessory fruit can technically be considered botanically vegetable tissue. In this view, strawberries, mulberries, pineapples, pears, apples and common figs can be said to be “vegetables” that we eat as “fruits”.

If this is considered too much of a stretch of credulity, please consider rhubarb. Rhubard looks like red celery. It is used because of its fruit-like flavor in pies. The stalk is definitely vegetable tissue, yet we eat it as fruit with a vegetable-type accessory fruit in the form of Strawberry-Rhubarb pie.

DACA and the DREAMERS

DACA is a US Federal government program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, created in 2012 under then-President Barack Obama to allow individuals brought to the US illegally as children the temporary right to live, study and work in America. Those applying are vetted for any criminal history or threat to national security and must be students or have completed school or military service. If they pass vetting, action to deport them is deferred for two years, with a chance to renew, and they become eligible for basics like a driving license, college enrollment or a work permit.

DREAMER is the label for a person covered by the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. [Note: this Act never became law.] Those protected under DACA are known as “Dreamers”. By the time President Trump announced his decision to rescind the program, 787,580 had been granted approval under DACA. To apply, they must have been younger than 31 on 15 June 2012, when the program began, and “undocumented” - lacking legal immigration status. They must have arrived in the US before turning 16 and lived in the US continuously since June 2007. Most Dreamers are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and the largest numbers live in California, Texas, Florida and New York. They range in age from 15 to 36 (according to the White House)
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The Trump administration announced that it plans to scrap DACA. Attorney general Jeff Sessions said the US would end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in March 2018. Congress was given up to six months to find a legislative alternative. Sessions announced that new DACA applications would no longer be accepted.

This proclamation stimulated almost 800,000 people into turmoil and fear. Keep in mind that these are people who have come to the USA illegally, and may have no intention to rescind citizenship in their former country. They want to work in the USA, but they may not be interested in citizenship. The majority may only desire green-card worker status.

The question should be whether those who broke the US immigration law to live and work in the USA should be provided special dispensation to remain in the US ahead of those who have adhered to the US immigration law in seeking to live and work in the USA. Should law-breakers get special treatment in preference to law-keepers?

The DACA program was a compromise devised by the Obama administration after Congress failed to pass the so-called Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have offered those who had arrived illegally as children the chance of permanent legal residency. This bipartisan act was introduced in 2001 and has repeatedly failed to pass into law.

There is no bipartisan support for allowing law-breakers special dispensation regarding immigration. However, the Obama Administration enacted Presidential Executive Order(s) providing such special dispensation even though the US Congress has not allowed such dispensation to become law.

The Trump Administration has announced that it would begin “an orderly, lawful wind down” of DACA, including “the cancellation of the memo that authorized this program”. This referenced memo was sent from Obama Administration Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to immigration chiefs in 2012, telling them not to enforce deportation of Dreamers.

Because President Obama created the DACA program as an executive policy decision, President Trump has the power to simply reverse the policy. He indicated that the government will “generally not take actions” to remove law-abiding DACA recipients. President Trump gave Congress six months to come up with a legislative solution.

Under the Trump administration, new applications under DACA will no longer be accepted. For those currently in the program, their legal status and other DACA-related permits (such as to work and attend college) will begin expiring in March 2018. Those with work permits expiring between 5 September 2017 and 5 March 2018 will be allowed to apply for renewal by 5 October. Unless Congress passes legislation allowing a new channel for temporary or permanent legal immigration status, Dreamers will all lose their status by March 2020.

Technically, as their statuses lapse, they could be deported and sent back to their countries of origin. These individuals may have no familiarity with the country of their origin because many of them came to the USA as children when they and their parents managed illegal entry into the USA. It is unclear whether this will or will not happen. Fear had been rising in the US illegal-alien community due to the announcement that the program will be ending. There is as yet no alternative to the current DACA-DREAMER provisions that will completely expire by March 2020.

President Trump has said (according to The Guardian) "...he wanted to “work something out” for Dreamers. “We don’t want to hurt those kids,” he said. “We love the Dreamers.” On the day the end of Daca was announced, he said: “I have advised the department of homeland security that Daca recipients are not enforcement priorities unless they are criminals, are involved in criminal activity, or are members of a gang.”"

It is estimated by un-documented sources that there may be as many as 11 million undocumented persons in the USA at this time.

Most of the Information for this article is taken (and somewhat rearranged) from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/04/donald-trump-what-is-daca-dreamers

Better Eyes Without Surgery

Orthokeratology: 

Reshaping Your Eyes With Contact Lenses

This certainly surprised me, probably because I had decided years ago that I wanted to wait to find out about the long-term effects (if there are any) of Lasik Surgery. I stopped looking for the magic method of reshaping the eyeball that might make the image correctly focus on the retina.

Now, as part of my work, I speak with Contact Lens Technicians. Today, I was waiting for a call, and listening to the advert series while on hold: I became very interested when the speaker began telling about non-surgical lens correction refractive therapy.

I "googled" refractive therapy, and chose a website to visit.

http://www.allaboutvision.com/contacts/orthok.htm

The results are temporary, so you must continue the treatment with these lenses, but the results are phenomenal.

This seemed like something other people might also be interested in learning about, so I have posted the link to the article I read. For anyone interested in better eyesight, but disinclined to undergo permanent surgical procedures to enhance their eyesight, this might be a desirable alternative approach. Talk to your eye doctor.