Montreal shopping mall plays “Baby Shark” on repeat to prevent unhoused people from loittering
Montreal shopping mall plays “Baby Shark” on repeat to prevent unhoused people from loittering
A shopping mall and office complex in downtown Montreal is being criticized for using the popular children's song 'Baby Shark' to discourage unhoused people from loitering in its emergency exit stairwells.
This is from the city where it's illegal to be homeless. One man even collected over $100,000 in fines for being homeless.
Yeah, that'll help.
Man that sounded wild to me, so I dug around a bit and it's fucking true. Although the amount is closer to $110,000 it's still insane.
Hey, we heard you can't afford a house, so we're charging you fines in the amount of what it would have cost to buy a house.......we're so cool! We solved homelessness! Because now if you want to be homeless, it actually costs more to NOT buy a house. So you may as well just buy a house!
We did it guys! We ended the concept of homelessness! High five!
Yeah, it was from awhile ago. I couldn't remember if it was one or two hundred thousand. I've corrected my comment to be more accurate. Here's an article on it.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-homeless-man-100k-fines-1.3473707
Aaaah, I love living in a capitalist hellscape
What happens if the man does not pay? Will they put him in jail?
Canada does not have debtor's jail. Nothing will really happen except that more fines will keep racking up. No collection agency is going to take on a homeless person's debt, so eventually those debts will just disappear, assuming he makes no effort to pay them off.
In the meantime, if he tries to escape homelessness, it's a lot harder nowadays to find an apartment with a landlord that doesn't check your credit, and 100k+ in unpaid debts looks really bad.
In the ultimate act of irony… Maybe they’ll put him in a house.
It's not "being homeless" that is illegal, though. It's drinking in public, begging or sleeping in the metro. And it sure is tough not staying in the metro during winter. There are some organisms that can provide shelter, but not enough for everyone, and it usually cost a couple dollars, which not everyone have everyday. And it's a real problem on both sides, as the metro was not meant to become a shelter for the homeless, and people have been complaining more and more they feel unsafe there.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." - Anatole France
La Maison du Père costs 1 dollar a night, and they'll let you in if you explain that you can't pay the $1.
Some just don't like shelters. They don't like the rules, other people, or fear getting their stuff stolen.
Here they made being homeless illegal so they can force people into shelters/mental help/rehab/etc.
Much better than letting them shoot up heroin in parks all day.
What a fucked up country.
I mean every country has it's problems but jeysus wept.
Unhoused? Has homeless as a word been banned?
Not sure about Canada, but in the US:
Homeless = no permanent residence, which also includes couch surfing, parents and children who just fled an abusive family member and are temporarily ltaying with friends or relatives, and people who are living in their car. All people without a home.
Unhoused = homeless people that don't have a roof over their heads. Might include living in a car.
They are synonyms. Please don't make things up.
Edit: to all the knee-jerk downvoting. This is literally a quote from an article the user himself supplied as proof that there is a difference.
Unhoused is probably the most popular alternative to the word “homeless.” It’s undoubtedly the one I see most often recommended by advocates. But it doesn’t have a meaningful difference in connotation from the more common term, “homeless.”
It's literally just a pc synonym of homeless.
Welcome to the euphemism treadmill
In the US they mean different things, as homeless includes people living in other people's homes. That can include people whose house just burnt down and are living with friends or family because they lost their permanent residence (home). Unhoused is about where they are staying.
People on the street are homeless and unhoused.
Language has power. You'll notice successful effort on the right to get pundits to refer to Oil as Energy. Oil has negative implications, energy has positive. Homeless has negative implications for the person, unhoused has negative implications for the government.
There’s also the difference in how the word is used more as an adjective than a noun. In the same way calling someone a disabled is a lot more dehumanizing than saying they are a person with a disability.
What about the people who work there? Are they trying to make them quit then become homeless and leave the mall too?
No they are supposedly insane already.
Icecream van
We can solve homelessness once and for all by making every part of civilization just suck as much as possible. If literally no part of our society is capable of supporting safety and life, then all the homeless people will just move along
My highschool did this with classical music to make us fuck off after school was over. Jokes on them in into that shit
Everyone likes at least some classical music, most people are far too cool to admit it though.
Growing up I absolutely did not like classical music. Turns out it was the recording (bad micing of the orchestra) and mastering (the old "super quiet, super quiet, super quiet, briefly louder, super quirt thing). For mastering you could claim you're being true to the original performance (lots of dynamic range), but when you're listening to a live performance that's all you're doing and there's no background noise.
Turns out I do like classical music, I just really didn't like the way it was recorded and mastered back when I would be exposed to it as a kid.
What's with the wording of this title? "Unhoused people" instead of "Homeless"/"Homeless people"
It's like the difference between calling someone wittless and uneducated.
One implies that's just how the person is, the other implies a failing of society/family.
I like the word unhoused, it implies they should just be housed if they are homeless. Everyone should be housed, even if they don't own a home
A home is an abstract thing, a house is a quantifiable object.
Also it kind of implies that society should provide a house for them.
Homeless and "actually sleeps on the streets" are different things.
If you are crashing on someone's couch then you are housed but still homeless. It's a bit of a dilution of the usual meaning of homeless but it also emphasises that housing is very precarious for the homeless.
It's another one of those whack a mole words people are pushing. Once everyone gives in and we start using unhoused, it will suddenly switch to uninhabited because it's racists to houses or something!
It's annoying as hell, because instead of fixing the issues we're mastrubating about words and alienating people that we need to fix the issue.
@madcaesar There are plenty of people I block just for being needlessly tiresome, on the logic that they will probably never say anything that will make anything better for me or anyone else, but will still fill up the world and my life with pointless, irritating noise.
You're today's winner.
I heard a really good explanation of this on NPR. Homeless is a label put on a person, similar to saying a person is a redhead. The implication of saying that someone is homeless is that it defines who they are, that it cannot be easily changed.
Unhoused is more descriptive of the situation that a person is in. This is a condition that can be changed, it isn't who the person is.
As I revisit this and think it through though, it seems like another way of pushing the goal. There are absolutely negative connotations with the word homeless, but the same venom will eventually attach to unhoused as well.
At least its music, though this does confirm that Baby Shark is something they'd have played at Gitmo if it'd been around 2 decades ago.
I have been to many places where things like these are everywhere:
Imagine this but diesel powered, a bit chonkier, and they just emit this high pitched scream (there are other versions called 'mosquito alarms'), and has extremely bright, blue strobing lights that will induce seizures in anyone susceptible.
JFC, the cruelty really is the point...
I always feel an urge to sabotage those things when I see them, were only they not covered in literal cameras
IR LEDs + Disposable, thick framed novelty glasses
Clothes you can toss or donate
Ingress and Egress method about 1/2 mile away from target, different locations and methods for each.
Ability to sprint for 10 minutes
Above average situational awareness
Do not bring your phone
Don't return to the area for 3 months
Oh if baby shark had been around two decades ago…
They have one of those outside the Home Depot in DC playing classical music to pacify all the day laborers hanging around hoping to pick up work.
Just in case people do not fully grasp the amounts of "doo"s in this song:
Baby shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Baby shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Baby shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Baby shark!
Mommy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Mommy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Mommy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Mommy shark!
Daddy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Daddy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Daddy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Daddy shark!
Grandma shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Grandma shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Grandma shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Grandma shark!
Grandpa shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Grandpa shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Grandpa shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Grandpa shark!
Let's go hunt, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Let's go hunt, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Let's go hunt, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Let's go hunt!
Run away, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Run away, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Run away, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Run away!
Safe at last, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Safe at last, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Safe at last, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Safe at last!
It's the end, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
It's the end, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
It's the end, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
It's the end!
I love that song doo doo doo doo doo doo.
The last two verses on repeat are I think my new sound track to the end of times
That's a lot of doo doo
I mean, this will keep me away too, and I'm "housed" and even occasionally legitimately go to malls with money to spend on things. You play even one loop of that song and I'm Swayze.
I am willing to bet most people going wouldn't even notice because it is only being played in emergency stairwells. Glad it made the news, this shit is infuriating. However, I believe most people agree with it, even if they won't admit to it.
Dirty dancing.
Road House
The article says the music is played to keep the emergency stairwells empty. If you haven't lived around unhoused before, they can take up a lot of space with their belongings and can be pretty unresponsive.
Exactly the kind of thing you don't want in an emergency stairwell.
Honestly if the owners of a building CAN'T keep the emergency stairwell clear then the building should be shut down for everyone for safety reasons.
Yeah, if this were a problem with teens they would likely threaten to trespass them.
Jokes on them. The homeless loitering are veterans that lost their hearing in the wars we’ve been fighting since 2001.
In Montreal?
40,000 Canadian troops were in the US war in Afghanistan from 2001-2014
Interesting case of military tatics in a civilian settings. First Decide is blasted at the Vatican embassy, then born in the USA is looped at Guantanamo Bay, now this
- Fuck these greedy, utterly insensitive, bastards.
- Malls are generally owned by large corps in the business of owning malls. Anyone know offhand who owns this one so I can avoid their other properties?
- How many “housing first,” programs could we run using a year of the company’s profit?
- I love the baby shark song. It would take months for me to get sick of it.
Some of the remixes are real bangers. Like the one where they do the Finger Family song and mix in the baby shark song chef's kiss 😘🤌
Fuck the people who work there, amirite?
Yes, that is the basis of the economic system.
Ah that's a joke.. Ah hahaha. puts away rubber socks
Feel like that's just the message of the "Baby Shark" song. A big "Fuck You" to anyone unlucky enough to hear it
You mean those who work in the emergency exit stairwells?
Jokes on them, noise canceling headphones are cheaper than a house
I honestly don't know if this is better or worse than the ear murdering high pitched screeching they play in the stairwells at a mall in Ottawa
laughs in Deafness
So as a worker with a house, can I sue when I go insane from hearing that song over and over? Didn’t they do this in Guantánamo to torture and break people?
They only had death metal and industrial goth music back then. Nothing as terrible as Baby Shark existed at the time.
They used the Barney theme song as a torture device, it's gotta be equally bad
The article said they play it in the emergency exit stairwells. Odds are you aren't going to be in that emergency exit long enough to go insane.
Reminds me of when I briefly worked in an office upstairs from the Seattle Mariners headquarters. Every time I went up or down the stairs I could hear the Mariners theme song playing in their lobby, so presumably they had it looping nonstop. I don't know how that receptionist didn't run screaming from the building by the end of the day.
homeless
Great way to lose customers
Having said that, what's up with the "unhoused" thing? It homeless. Are we now calling it differently because homeless is now all of the sudden insulting? How long until "unhoused" suddenly is a bad word?
Can we please just stop pushing changing words? Homeless is fine, you're without a home. It sucks, people should support you, not shun you, but changing words is just virtue signalling that doesn't do anything to make anything better for anyone
but changing words is just virtue signalling that doesn’t do anything to make anything better for anyone
.... And if you are the type of neoliberal politician that wants to pretend they care about people while never actually doing anything to help anyone other than the megacorps when you get into power -- Then this is literally all you'll ever do for people. Linguistic fuckery. Making up new words for things. Fucking around with definitions. And you know that there will be an army of people who will defend this, and shoot down people who actually want to do something on grounds that they said the "wrong" words.
The argument for 'unhoused' is that it humanises the person -- But it's really pushing it.
Homeless what, exactly? Sorry, you're gonna need to throw in the word "person" just to be clear.
I'll asume y'all are stupid and privileged and not just cruel. Home can be a public shelter, it is about people. A house is a thing you rent or own.
Not everything is politics, virtue signaling or about you. We use different words because language changes, because society changes. That is why you don't speak Anglo-Saxon anymore.
It's about precision. The condition people are talking about is not having a house, regardless of whether they have a home. This is why unhoused is being used more often.
It's not part of an agenda, it is not about you. Grow up.
The gas station near me blasts very loud opera music at the area surrounding the building. I think it's also to prevent kids from loitering as there is a school nearby as well as plenty of homeless.
Classy
Having been in areas where homeless people gather, they can be an unpleasant bunch, if not outright hostile. I get why things like that happen.
Ugh how did this super old song become a thing.. I swear people are getting dumber. I hated it when they sang it at summer camp, and I still hate it now.
they have been doing this along market street in san francisco for years
Decades