Canada

He lives out in the sticks, I can't undo 15 years of skipping out on education (he's 38).

I do argue it in moderation, but I prefer to tackle critical thinking in general, and hope he learns to draw his own conclusions. He recently got over that the earth is not flat and that those conspiracies don't hold water. He's even starting to identify content on tiktok that is framed in a certain way.

Maybe we'll get there one day!

Edit: Tbf he's a mechanic, and a good one at that, so flat earth was an easy topic. He managed to understand we can't make oldschool carburators with flat earth physics, and he knows how those work. It's like if I tried to convince him displacement in an engine isn't real, just invented by big oil.

There is way more than 400 homeless people in Ontario.

No forced rehab, lol.

You're talking about housing first policy, and it has nothing to do with addiction. Well except the policy explicitly doesn't care about addiction.

I know people addicted to opiates in Finland who didn't get into care because they couldn't "prove" they had a problem since the healthcare wanted a supervised piss test and he had shy pee so bad he couldn't. So he didn't get into rehab.

You're idolising the Finnish systems a bit. A lot of them are great... on paper.

I'm not saying they don't work in real life, I'm saying the implementation is shit but the policy is still so good that despite the fucktard bureaucrats, it's still achieving a lot compared to some other countries. (Cough USA COUGH COUGH)

I've genuinely been basically blocked from life because here in Finland even recreational weed smokers are treated as complete junkies by the healthcare. Complete and utter junkies, and I'm not exaggerating. No matter how much I quote the laws and produce doctor's notes and therapist notes. It's crazy how archaic the attitudes towards even mild illegal drugs are. And the amount of hypocrisy in that, because most Finns consume quite a lot of alcohol to the point of often disabling themselves for a day or two every week.

But yeah we live so far North allowing homeless people to live on the street would literally kill them. So that's probably why we've got this covered.

After getting clean, many addicts say giving them free drugs was the worst thing you could do for them, it just helped prolong their problems and delay their treatment. This stuff is hard because those drugs and the lifestyle that can come with it will often change people beyond what they want for themselves.

But even when arguing from a practical standpoint it’s next to impossible to find a job that will hire a person with no address and possibly no government ID (need an address to get documents!)

There are ways around that part, if we cared enough to implement them. There's a street in—I think it was Italy?—that actually has no physical existence. Addresses on that street are used to give people with no permanent housing something to write on forms that ask for an address, so they can collect mail, including legal documents and government support checks, or apply for jobs. That doesn't solve the problem of living space directly, of course, but it might be enough to provide a starting point for some people. Or it would if we had enough reasonably-priced housing.

There are a number of words in English that have different meanings depending on where you're from, such as flat or boot, but the political definition of table is its own antonym depending on the region. In Canada and the UK to table a bill or subject means to pay attention or deal with it, while in America it means to set it aside. There is an apocryphal story about the leaders of Canada and America meeting with him during WWII and they wish to discuss some subject. The Canadian says to table the discussion, the American gets upset and says it's an important topic and needs to be discussed, and Churchill says we are nations divided by a common language.

I honestly thought it would be more prevalent on the internet, but I couldn't find a reference to it.