I have no 1st-hand experience with being homeless but Belgium appears to be on the ball with welfare. They have shelters, social housing, and food. I would be surprised if anyone was starving.

I think the homeless shelters exclude drunks. So I can see how a alcoholics might fall through the cracks on that and I believe this is why we see some people sleeping on the street. If the shelters were open to drunks, that would fail to incentivise fighting the addiction. But I don’t imagine that drunks are denied food. In any case, I don’t see how giving to beggars is a good solution. I would sooner look for a charity that tries to address any shortcomings and give to them because they will ensure the aid is better allocated than ad hoc begging.

Expect to see signs like “need money to pay my €500 begging fine”.

The rules also prohibit “aggressive, intrusive or intimidating” begging across the entire city for a two-year trial period, after which the policy will be reviewed.

WTF? Why is that just a trial? I have been sitting at a restaurant and had beggers get in my face when I ignore them, waving their hand in front of my face as if to check whether I am blind. That kind of shit should carry the highest penalty.

Also when they find a high-traffic bottleneck, they sit right in the bottleneck to make it even harder to walk along with a crowd of tourists who have to squeeze through a choke point. Tolerance should be lower in those cases.

Opposition parties, including Greens and left-wing groups, voted against the measures.

Yikes. Should be the other way around. Right wing groups oppose welfare but advocate begging because it puts the payers in power. Left-wing groups are smarter, and advocate for fair distribution of wealth. Giving to beggers is contrary to that, as those who create the biggest eye sore get paid, not those who need help the most. As a liberal, I want to see a fair distribution. Every payment to a begger is unfair.

Good news. Let’s put this to the test.

For some reason I thought Brussels had no gov, which would make petitions useless. OTOH, it was a competition. Perhaps no gov outperforms the rest of European democracies after right-leaning autocracies took power.

“the non-profit that has been campaigning for years for places to swim outdoors in the capital.”

Interesting to see what an uphill battle a simple and non-controversial change is.

It’s bizarre that a liberal party politician is praising this, considering Deutsche Bank is relatively evil for anyone who is progressive. It has ties to Bank of America and heavily finances fossil fuel.

Grabbed the PDF and commented over here with:

The Norweigans missed the most important (and easiest!) action:

• Public services themselves need to get off Facebook & Twitter. If they can’t walk the walk and take their own advice, it’s not just an optical embarrassment. As someone who already boycotts the shitty gatekeepers (Cloudflare, google, ms, fb, apple, twtr), I am already free from enshittification --- except when I must interact with a public service.

WTF?! The only unmanagable evil force I must deal with comes from the gov itself, who imposes shitty gatekeepers in the course of doing public tasks. I can’t boycott the government.

Belgian public services ALL use Microsoft for their email. So you should do everything on paper in Belgium. But what do they do? They scan paper letter/form/submissions and then they email it to themselves via Microsoft’s server. I shit you not. Microsoft is inescapable even by the most disciplined. And it’s only because the government itself will not ditch the motherfuckers.

Exceptionally, it’s somewhat redeeming that the Norweigans mention that public services should use open source. But that just scratches the surface. The very first thing they should do is get off Facebook and Twitter.

I gave some feedback here, but wanted to give video ideas (in vain of course because the Norwegian Consumer Council is not here in Lemmy.

Would have been great if one of the high-up enshitifiers were giving a seminar to the staff to emphasize how consumers are pushovers. They really missed something important. He could have said “just throw more CAPTCHAs at them.. they will solve them... the consumers have no spine, which is great for us!”

Would also be cool if they did a more serious Michael Moore style documentary, where they cover historic enshitification, such as British mail delayers (that is, there used to be a job where a human would look at how fast postal mail was being delivered and if lower class mail would be delivered as fast as 1st class mail, they would deliberately hold it back). And Intel who deliberately crippled their CPUs to clock at slower speeds than the chips were capable of. There are countless examples like this.