While you were all bracing for the pending Zombie Apocalypse, some malicious hackers have assembled an army of zombie machines to attack the internet itself, and the machines are inside your own house!
You probably thought if your home security camera was hijacked it was going to put videos of your private activities with your spouse, your mail carrier and your pool cleaner online for all to see. And you’re right. But what you never suspected was that when you were all away at work or shopping and the camera had no one to video, an evil genius was giving it assignments to pester companies doing business online.
An internet user clicks a link asking to read an online book, “please.” The provider asks the user to identify him- or herself to establish that he or she is not a robot. The user says, “Um, hello. Ciao. I am, um, John J. Jones’ personal home security camera. Mr. Jones really needs me to read this book in order to do my job, OK?” “Gender?” “I don’t know.” “Well you can pass this time, but next time you should have worked that out.”
That may not sound very sinister to you, but I can assure you that if 100,000 home security cameras, DVRs, wireless routers and Talkee Talking Robot Toasters were to all ask to read “Lolita” online at the exact same time something would explode.
This principle is important to understand. The usual fear you have associated with a Zombie Apocalypse is that the zombies will fill the streets and that if one of them manages to catch you they will eat your brains.
In reality, it is quite unnecessary for the zombies to eat your brains in order for it all to be very bad. It’s just necessary for there to be way too many zombies walking around. When it’s zombies to the max, that’s when things are already awful. How do you get anywhere? There’s zombies to the max.
This is one of the reasons we have anti-homeless laws and no-sitting ordinances etc. The trouble isn’t that homeless people eat brains. I can assure you that they do not. Not one homeless person that I have ever met ate brains. Not one. I have myself been homeless, but I never once ate brains. Well, human brains. I have never ever eaten human brains.
No, and homeless people aren’t zombies, either. They’re human like I assume you are. But the thing is, it gets to be a problem anyway because there’s just so many of them. There’s homeless people to the max.
So people get their governments to come up with what sound like solutions to the large number of homeless people wandering around “in our way,” “being lazy,” and “taking our jobs.” They don’t realize that, instead of solving the problem, they are making it worse by actually increasing the length of time any one homeless person is going to be homeless and thereby increasing the number.
Now our precious little government wants to throw money at a new “solution” called Rapid Rehousing. The name makes it sound like it has to work, because it promises to put homeless people into housing rapidly. And of course once a homeless person is in housing they are not homeless anymore, so this is bound to reduce the number of homeless people at large, right?
Hahaha. NO. Because the word “rapid” in the name Rapid Rehousing also refers to the length of time it lasts. Three to nine months. You get vouchers for the housing for that length of time, and then you have to make your own way. In other words, you are back where you started, with no help and probably no housing after enough time passes that they evict you. Being in housing for even as long as nine months isn’t long enough for most people to land that great one or two jobs it’s going to take to afford market-rate housing in this area.
We don’t have enough private housing in this area that’s affordable for low-income workers. Minimum wage still isn’t enough in spite of the increases.
All Rapid Rehousing offers is a sabbatical from homelessness for the ones who get it, followed by Rapid Re-homeless-ing when the sabbatical runs out.