Thank you for summing up why people hate successful people: you think you're a loser because someone else made you a loser. The reason you believe this is that it's a lot more comforting than the truth: you're a loser despite the fact that amazing business leaders like Elon created hundreds of thousands of jobs and paid billions upon billions in taxes. In other words, the reason you're a loser is you, your shitty, envious attitude and the fact that you don't understand that the way to achieve what you want is to provide something other people want so they're willing to pay you for it.
Dear LA (again),
One out of ten homeless people in the entire country live in our city.
Despite whatever statistic our mayor claims to the contrary, things are getting worse around here.
The biggest challenge to solving a problem is accepting that you have one, and that starts with admitting that our problem isn’t money, it’s corrupt leadership.
Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Nithya Raman, and Governor Newsom have built a political web so financially entangled with homelessness NGOs that the dysfunction isn’t a failure, it’s their business model.
I’ve spent nearly 20 years studying the chronic homelessness epidemic and no matter how many new gold plated condos Gavin Newsom promises to build on the back of our tax dollars, the root cause has NEVER been lack of housing, and housing itself will never be the primary solution.
As my friend Paul Shirley would phrase it, if “housing first” worked, it would have worked.
The only reduction in homelessness that housing first deserves credit for is the 30% of overdose deaths in San Francisco that came from their “supportive housing” initiatives.
I’m sorry if that is shocking to read, but many of you need to wake-up & smell the fentanyl.
The one thing housing first is good for; however, is financial scheming.
Recently Karen Bass’s office was complicit in a grift involving the Weingart Center Association, a Los Angeles based homeless non-profit, to take a massive grant of LA taxpayer funds to convert properties into homeless housing as part of California’s Project Homekey.
Sounds lovely, right?
The mayor’s ingenious plan involved a property which had originally been purchased for $11 million that was then immediately flipped to Weingart on the city’s dime at nearly TRIPLE the price.
I’m sure Mayor Bass has lots of clever talking points for why $20 million magically disappeared into thin air, and she’ll need to perform them convincingly as this act of service is now facing a federal probe.
We will never know how truly bad the corruption is as Gavin Newsom has blocked the audits of countless related projects that have vanished billions of dollars, all in the name of homelessness.
If you can help Gavin come up with a good reason why we shouldn’t audit how tax funds are being used then you’ll probably have a job waiting for you at the LA Times.
Our media needs to do better. They once did…
So why do I care about this so much?
In 2006 Del Bigtree (formerly of Dr. Phil & The Doctors, currently host of the High Wire) took me on the misadventure of a lifetime when I agreed to help him document a group of homeless men who had just survived a tough winter in Denver.
What we captured, acquired by Merv Griffin Entertainment & later titled “Under the Cardboard,” was ultimately dubbed “too difficult for audiences to watch.”
What began as a light-hearted expose seeking the sort of wholesome temporarily down-on-their-luck tale we often naively attach to the homeless, instead crash landed into an honest glimpse of what life is truly like for the humans suffering mental illness & crippling addiction in plain sight.
The best thing that came out of our docuseries was that it inspired a man named Kevin Adler to begin his own experiments to record the experience of our brothers and sisters living in the streets, while fruitless as a documentary, the countless conversations that ensued led to his creation of “Miracle Messages,” a charity focused on another underappreciated cause of homelessness: “relational poverty,” and is an inspiring example of the first of what I see as the three primary solutions to ending the homeless epidemic:
REUNITING FAMILIES
I am forever honored & humbled that Kevin asked me to become his first advisor.
Kevin’s breakthrough came in asking people he interviewed on the streets two incredibly important questions.
1). “When did you first feel homeless?”
The more conversations he had the more he heard the same answer…
Part 2 👇👇👇
It's been a while since I reminded you that if you have recently turned Israel-skeptical, anti-Israel, isolationist, or anti-Jewish, you have been taken by Leftist and Islamist psyops designed to produce that result. You probably don't like being a useful idiot, but you are one.
Sure! none of this is written to be hostile and I hope I sincerely answer your question if it is not purely rhetorical. @HarrisonHSmith
First, they are not at all new: If you have used the internet for storage in your life, you have been using datacenters. No data centers, no internet storage. Email, bank accounts, photos, etc. No internet storage = no internet commerce. The entire idea of records for accounts and transactions not being on paper in file cabinets would go away. Americans would largely not survive a world without Internet commerce and have been leading the way in using it as consumers and entrepreneurs for 40 years.
On water use: don’t mean to “old man you” on this but people also used to be very concerned about paper waste and forest destruction. Old growth forests are very sad when cut but almost all commercially used paper came from nurseries. The waste management and energy of printing and storing and transmitting going away with editing being free is what people wanted.
All datacenters in the US combined use water (for evaporative cooling) at the same rate of about a medium sized city. They’re also getting more efficient and plenty of new ones are closed loop.
Building on farm land is bad, I do not defend it at all. I think they should be build in cities on top of or under parking garages and things like that. Equinix has one like this in Miami.
Energy use is an interesting thing: Americans use WAY more energy per capita than even other developed countries. Compare just the US household’s energy use to a German one. We don’t accept backsliding there, do we? I think the solution is to just produce more energy, specifically with nuclear, which, if we really committed to mass energy production, would also lower all costs of living, not just the cost of electricity for running the internet.
Content needs to be either timely or timeless — and the bar for both has gotten much higher.
Timely has to be *right now* and timeless has to be an instant classic.
There are two options if you want to have things available:
1. You allow people to profit from bringing it to you
2. You force them to be slaves with violence of some sort.
That’s it.
Anyone who has “all of the sudden” went against Israel since Oct 7, 2023 has fallen for a Leftist/Islamist psyop that was pushed and funded by the American left, the Russians, the Chinese, and absolutely the Islamic Theocracy of Iran.
You abandoned your country and your President, the one you fought so hard to elect to save us—the one they tried to assassinate twice—because you believed fake and gay podcasters pushing the talking points of our enemies that simply modernized propaganda made for illiterate peasants in Russia over a hundred years ago…
That’s the reality you are scared to confront.
There hasn’t been a “great noticing.”
There has been a great brainwashing, and so many of you have fallen for it.
Congrats, you are now no different than the people that fell for COVID or the troon ideology push from the rainbow brigade…
But hey, at least you can blame all of that on the Jews now too, right?
I am once again telling you that if you turned against Israel since 2023, you fell for a Leftist psyop. You can hate the fact, but you cannot deny it. You're their tool.
Israel signed peace with Egypt in 1979.
Not a single Israeli bomb on Egypt since then.
Israel signed peace with Jordan in 1994.
Not a single Israeli bomb on Jordan since then.
Israel signed peace with UAE in 2020.
Not a single Israeli bomb on UAE since then (not that it did before).
Israel signed peace with Bahrain in 2020.
Not a single Israeli bomb on Bahrain since then (not that it did before).
Israel signed peace with Morocco in 2020.
Not a single Israeli bomb on Morocco since then (not that it did before).
Israel signed peace with Sudan in 2020.
Not a single Israeli bomb on Sudan since then (not that it did before).
There is a very weird phenomenon where extremely expensive cities are extremely hard to afford to live in for the middle class and the affluent, but then municipal and state authorities give free money and apartments to junkies and felons.