This by an artist, Foka Wolf. You can check out his other stuff on his website or insta.
Here’s an article about him.
Thank fuck it’s not real… but also fuck for it being believable
I was gonna say this looks like satire. If nothing else, the zip ties and painted metal give it away.
Can I print these out to put on benches around my city? We get a lot of tourists and I want to fuck with them.
Add some small wires from the bench into the ground for a realistic effect.
Bonus points, and possibly jail time, for actually electrifying it.
Okay this is pretty good art I definitely got mashed 👌👌
I say this as someone who fully supports my tax dollars going to help fund services for the homeless:
At least where I live, homeless people are a menace. They treat the neighborhood like a giant trash bin (and I mean that literally), are verbally and sometimes physically confrontative with residents, and generally respect the area as little as they respect themselves. Until I bought a condo here I never felt the need to carry a weapon, but now I do, after having had some scary brushes with our local homeless.
They make it very hard for people to want to support them.
That said, I’d still much rather see our public funds go to provide housing and mental health facilities for them rather than fund a new stadium or some other dumbass billionaire bullshit. The added bonus is that providing for the homeless costs much less than enforcement.
I sympathize with your view. We can I understand that their situation is a result of conscious policies and not their own moral failings while also expressing frustration at the heavy imposition their neglect imposes on families and neighbors that also had nothing to do with their situation.
Liberals love to mythologize the unhoused suffering as some noble burden to deflect from the gross injustice that it is.
But if you think about it, those people didn’t magically appear there. They came from somewhere before being homeless…they came from homes. Those people are sometimes drunk or drugged and pissed at the same time. Because they used to have a house. It could have been your neighbor at some point. You could be homeless one day. Our system allows that and works towards that…a revolving door between the haves and the have nots…but it’s a one way churning door. You know get to go towards haves not.
The state spends tons more money on making it harder for these people than it does on making them easier. If that reversed, this would not be an issue.
Yup.
We Americans love our law code to reflect our cruelty, and in the case of homeless people, we pay more for it sadly.
Prisons are designed, outside the scope of entrapment, to house, clothe, and feed a dense resident population. The resources spent on security could easily be diverted to quality of life improvements.
The organizations that run private prisons off tax subsidies could easily be retooled, in part, to the logistical administration of homeless shelters. They already have on-site detox programs.
You could even retool the current exploitative work programs into trade training.
At least where I live, homeless people are a menace.
It’s possible there are more around that you can’t see. I check out r/homeless subreddit occasionally, and the people there say that the obvious, mess-making and rude homeless population gives the rest a bad name. Many unhoused people choose to stay out of sight, stash their belongings somewhere and then clean themselves up when going out and about. Many even have jobs.
And yeah, more funds should go towards getting housing and other help to all homeless people, regardless of who they are and how they act.
That’s the difference between facing a problem in real life, versus discussing a problem in the abstract online. The ugly truth of the situation is quite often a lot more difficult to face IRL than it is from the comfort of our couches. It’s easy to say “defund the police”, it’s quite another thing to face the mentally ill who refuse all of the services offered after defending the police, who desire nothing more than to shit on the sidewalk in front of your condo, and yell at the street signs all day.
You think more money for cops is going to solve homelessness?
Absolutely not.
Louder! I often get the impression that most people have never had to actually deal with the homeless, and I don’t mean passing them on the street.
When I worked downtown I was constantly on guard. About got into a fist fight 3 times. Downtown is one of the rare places I always carry a gun.
Mostly, people are homeless because they can’t handle the bare minimum of living in society. Of course there are all the exceptions we care to being up, but they almost all have one more more of these qualities: antisocial, aggressive, substance abuse problems, mental problems, or are flat out too stupid.
So what do we do with such people? It’s a sticky problem. Seems we could go a long way by simply housing them and giving them money. That easily gives the hard luck cases the boost they need. But others are always going to be a problem.
It’s solvable, and we’ve seen Finland do it. There are only roughly 1,000 willfully homeless people in all of Finland, and there will always be a small sliver of them anywhere, because some people are nomadic by nature.
Two independent studies in California both found around 70% of unhoused were productive members of society before accident or illness caused them to lose their job, insurance and home. Structural impediments prevent the unhoused from getting back into employment and housing. In majority of cases substance abuse came as a response to their situation, not as the cause.
To people saying don’t believe every image you see: given many US municipalities’ war against homeless people, signs like this are all too plausible. I’m surprised some city hasn’t done this already.
To people saying, effectively, “gotcha har har”: stop posting plausible satirical signs without explanation, in other contexts we call that “lying.”
Yeah, any good art is provocative. It’s not so much that people are gullible enough to believe it. It’s that it’s so possible that you have to think about it in the first place.
I mean, the bench is painted. Paint isn’t usually known for being an electrical conductor. While conductive blends exist, I don’t think they’d be very viable nor cost effective for an outdoor application such as this. That’s just speculation though. There are also the safety and liability issues with something like this, for insurance if the electricity were turned on by accident during hours it should be safe.
If a city government can pay $20k extra per unit to ensure it causes needless suffering to homeless ppl (and get away with it), I wouldn’t hold my breath on them not spending it. That said, we should probably reserve our ire for actual anti-homeless atrocities committed by PDs and city councils. Art projects making an apt social commentary are thought provoking but should be recognized as such.
Of course, as you mentioned it’s entirely possible something like this exists already. I haven’t seen any proof of that, but in such a case it would probably be easier to just not paint the bench and leave it at that.
So you’re basically saying “I can’t be bothered to think or do anything beyond knee jerk reactions to images. I can’t even take a minute to check comments or other sources to see what this image is about. I’m going to blame everyone else but me for me believing this. In the future, instead of me taking a moment to quell my knee jerk reactions, the internet should spell things out for me.”
Not to be a negative ninny, but I dont think that’s gonna work out. Instead, I recommend checking sources before having knee jerk reactions to things on the internet, especially images. It really makes life easier to navigate.
Has it been pointed out yet that this is fake? I’m too lazy to look.
I genuinely don’t believe this is real. If it was something as simple as “spikes extend at 11 pm” or something I might, but electrifying? No way.
Not to mention how there is paint insulating any electrification so if this is real it must be nothing more than a scare tactic to scare people from sitting on it on those times
Idk, but fake like how? The image is fake and made by AI? Or it is a real bench with a real sign but the information on the sign does not reflect reality? Or some other combination of fake? I’m too lazy to read past your comment to find out.
I’m too lazy to read past your comment to find out.
And I’m too lazy to even consider which particular fake it is, much less reply to you about it. Have a great day!
I think we all need a vacay.
I’d wager someone made the sign and put it on the bench either as a joke or to deter homeless people, but the bench isn’t actually electrified.
Free power and a bench. Just gotta figure out what voltage the bench is and adapt it to charge things.
Checkmate Corporate
If we’re going to insist on screenshotting an image and uploading that screenshot instead of just saving the image and posting that, can we at least crop the fucking reddit watermarks off?
This IS saving the image. Screenshotting it would’ve not produced the watermark.
Reddit’s app adds the watermark when you save on mobile, it’s not a screenshot of the app.
Literally just downloaded an image from the Reddit app and it doesn’t have a watermark. Maybe it’s a setting in a menu.
It is, and it’s on by default. At least, it was for me.
On by default makes sense. I couldn’t imagine many people willingly turning it on.
I remember that there was an option that was enabled by default, when you save the image it would add the watermark automatically.
Pee on it
Jesus christ there are so many stupid people on lemmy.
by what, is zeus gonna snipe somebody ass or something?? 💀
Joke’s on you, I got in before 11.
Now when does it turn off…? ⚡☠️
So? Just ground it … and hope nobody steals the wire
How is this even legal?
I’m surprised i have to say it, but apparently i do:
Don’t believe every image you see on the internet.
Sadly these days, it’s harder than ever to distinguish satire and genuine right wing policies. Admittedly this one breaks the laws of physics a bit, but republicans firmly reject science as a source of information so again, this is much more plausible than it would have been before Trump.
Putting signs on random benches is probably petty vandalism.
To believe everything you see so readily? I dunno!
