Just this past week I was watching the two-part Deep Space 9 episode Past Tense[1][2]. It's a time-travel episode set in San Francisco from 1 September – 3 September, 2024. Current events and fictional history in collision.
that pair of episodes gutted me when I watched it. it's so realistic how the "gimmies" fold into all the rhetoric we have today. and how the system is just utterly broken - there's no single bad guy, everyone's just doing their job or following their own incentives as society sweeps people into the trash heap.
I can't really see the Bell riots changing anything, though. maybe if we're lucky enough to have Sisko organizing.
Vancouver Police gives the most obnoxious bums, the bearded baseball cap guys with the bikes and tow trailers and german shepherds one way tickets to Victoria and a bag lunch to unload them. Been doing that since the Olympics. It was hilarious. They were infesting all Vancouver then suddenly about two or three months before the Olympics they disappeared and at the same time what cries of lamentation from Victoria, afflicted with their unexpected odious presence...
Social services offices in the US used to, and perhaps still do, practice what is called Greyhound Therapy. Walk in, show yourself sufficiently undesirable, walk out with a Greyhound bus ticket to any destination in the continental US.
1 https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Past_Tense,_Part_I_(epi...
2 https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Past_Tense,_Part_II_(ep...