A Boring Dystopia

NANCY BRIER: My name's Nancy Brier (ph). I have four properties. The biggest property that we have is six units. So, you know, really small-time landlords. We sort of know all of our tenants. You know, so I've been doing this for 30 years now and have really seen every kind of housing situation that you can think of.

LUIS EDWIN SANCHEZ: Luis Edwin Sanchez (ph), born and raised in San Francisco. I'm 62 years old, journeyman union carpenter, retired. I had to take early disability retirement a couple years ago and had a pretty decent life until I got hurt (laughter), and things changed dramatically. But, yeah, so I know what the people who are sleeping on the city streets in tents right now are going through because I've been there - three times. And I'm not happy to say that it's a very good possibility it may happen again. I'm currently on the Section 8 waitlist for a voucher. It'll probably take me another 10 years, if I live that long. I mention that because of how huge the need is.

BRIER: Can I say one quick thing? My last Section 8 tenant just moved, and that family was in this unit for nine years. And I'm very happy that we were able to provide them with nice housing for all that time. But I swear, when that family moved out, I could hear the angels singing. I have another tenant I've had for over 20 years. The piece of paper that we have with our rental agreement is one side of one page. And for the Section 8 family that we housed, I have boxes and boxes and boxes of papers. It was insane. So, you know, maybe the reason that you can't find a Section 8 house, which I wish you could, is because the system makes it too hard for somebody like me to give it to you.

Nancy, there is literally nothing stopping you from giving this injured homeless worker a place besides your own self interest.

Of course, American society will eat you alive if you don't relentlessly pursue your self interest almost all of the time and all of us are just one illness and a few years of bad luck from being where Luis is at, but let's just be honest about what the situation is here.

BRIER: If I could wave the magic wand, I would want the government to make renting housing less risky for small-time landlords. How can we provide housing that isn't crazy expensive?

And If I could wave a magic wand the government would take all of Nancy's non-residential properties from her and just start running them as free public housing with onsite social workers and maintenance technicians.

Also, they'd provide taxpayer funded nutrition support and education for anyone who wants it, including Nancy.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250116182141/https://www.npr.org/2025/01/16/nx-s1-5252827/a-landlord-and-man-seeking-section-8-housing-have-an-unexpected-moment-of-connection

The chairman of Larsen & Toubro, SN Subrahmanyan, has come under fire for saying that employees should work 90 hours a week.

Prepare for all the liberal newspapers suddenly discovering Israel has been doing war crimes and feeling a lot of sympathy for Palestinians.

Link to video

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/52524285

https://x.com/Jaybefaunt/status/1878482335236001939

And in case you want to read the article without giving the NY Post any ad money: https://archive.is/h8SHL

Here's some mind-bending stuff from the article:

Luckhurst, 42, now serves as a cop in Benavides, about 150 miles from San Antonio, according to Benavides Police Chief Andre Hines, who said the 2023 hiring “reflects the department’s commitment to honesty and accountability.”

[...]

Bizarrely, that same year, [note: not 2023] Luckhurst was accused of defecating in one of the San Antonio police department’s female restrooms before wiping a brown, feces-like substance on one of the toilet seats, reported the San Antonio Express-News. He reportedly never denied being behind the bathroom incident.

[...]

Hines said Luckhurst’s record in Benavides “has been exemplary, with no complaints or issues reported, and said “a thorough background check” helped ensure “all aspects of his history were carefully considered.”

Apparently "honesty and accountability" is when you harass women and the homeless with your weird poop fetish.

Economic consolidation is killing us. Robbing us of value, dismantling the financial fabric of our society, and disconnecting us from one another. From Walmart to Uber to Amazon and beyond, everyone loses: consumers, workers, and ultimately even the heartless profiteers orchestrating this disaster.

An excerpt from the article:

Ms. Jones has been scouring the West Los Angeles rental market to find a house that the family could rent for the next eight months, or longer. On Friday morning, she noticed something disturbing on the rents of at least three of the properties she had been tracking: 15 to 20 percent increases overnight.

The sudden surge in rental costs took Ms. Jones by surprise, but aligned with what she has noticed since wildfires started to tear through the Los Angeles area on Tuesday. Ms. Jones was touring a rental house in Beverly Hills with her client on Thursday when the listing agent raised the monthly cost by $3,000 — on the spot. Agents and landlords are aware that some displaced Angelenos might be willing to pay given the circumstance.

“People are so panicked and desperate to get into a house right now that they’re just throwing money into the wind,” Ms. Jones said. “People taking advantage of this. It’s horrendous.”

And now, totally unrelated to this, the definition of "parasitism":

Association between two different organisms wherein one benefits at the expense of the other.

... When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade. In the past sixty years, ten of these frequent events have turned into all-consuming firestorms. The latest conflagration, the Woolsey Fire, has incinerated 1,500 homes and killed at least three people. It started in dry grasslands just south of Simi Valley, the site of the notorious trial of Rodney King’s assailants, then crossed a freeway to ignite dense coastal sage vegetation on the northern flank of the Santa Monica Mountains. The range’s deep canyons, perfectly aligned with the seasonal Santa Ana Winds, once again as bellows, accelerating the fire’s rush to the coast where it burned beach homes. The large number of residences lost attests not only to the ferocity of the conflagration but also to the amount of new construction since the 1993 firestorm.

Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills? Because of a perverse fact: after every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed. Thus the recently incorporated City of Malibu and the County of Los Angeles responded to the 1993 disaster with aggressive regulations about brush clearance and fire-resistant roof materials. Creating ‘defensible space’ became the new mantra, and it was soon echoed across California in the aftermath of other great fires, such as those that swept San Diego County in 2003 and 2007, burning 4,500 homes and killing 30 people. So instead of a long-overdue debate about the wisdom of rebuilding and the need to prevent further construction in areas of extreme natural fire danger, public attention was diverted into a discussion of the best methods for clearing vegetation (rototillers or goats?) and making homes fire-resistant. And if edge suburbs and backcountry subdivisions, in fact, could be fire-proofed, then why not add more? Since 1993. almost half of California’s new homes have been built in fire hazard areas. Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, ‘still it burns.’ In the last eighteen months 20,000 homes and perhaps a 1,000 lives have been lost in one super-fire after another.

Such fires are both old and new. Two different causalities are involved. First vegetation and topography, annually orchestrated by our dry hurricanes, define persistent fire patterns and frequencies. Without human intervention, however, lots of small fires ignited by late summer lightning create an intricate patchwork of vegetation of different ages and combustibility. The one-hundred-thousand-acre firestorms that we now experience annually did occur occasionally in the aftermath of epic droughts, but in a ‘natural’ fire regime they were rare. Fire prevention in the twentieth century, however, nurtured large areas of chaparral and forest into old age, creating perfect conditions for great fires. But as long as so many California towns were surrounded by citrus groves and agricultural land, fire even in its new, larger incarnation was usually stopped before it encountered housing. Today our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.

Climate change, meanwhile, is coming to California in the form of drought and extreme summer heat, along with episodes of record torrential rain. Although scientists debate whether or not median annual precipitation averaged over decades will actually decline, more of it will fall as rain not as snow, a serious concern given that our water system depends on the Sierra snowpack to store and modulate the release of the water that irrigates cities and agribusiness. Moreover, rainfall is no longer an accurate predictor of fire risk. The winter of 2016-17 was the wettest in the history of Northern California, and spring brought the most glorious wildflower display in generations. But July was torrid and coastal temperatures, usually in the 70s, broke 100°F for a week. The greenery of spring was punctually baked into a bumper crop of brown fire-starter. When the winds began to blow in October, first Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and then Montecito, just south of Santa Barbara, caught fire. Three thousand homes were lost and several dozen people, mostly elderly and unaware of the approaching menace, died. But nature in California saves one last act and when the heavens opened up on Montecito’s bare burnt hills in January another 25 people disappeared in the fast-moving debris flows. This same encore awaits Malibu and the Sierra foothills over the next few months...

The destruction of OkCupid by Match Group looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.

OkCupid used to be the best place to match diverse people.
They crowdsourced thousands of multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter:

• Which answers you accept
• How important each is to you
• Your answer for the other side of the match equation
• Voluntary explanation

The match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex. "Friendship" contained ethics and communication style, so it also worked for business partnerships.

Then Match Group bought it.
For a while they let it be, but then they:

• Removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
• Removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
• Removed keyword search - no more finding niche interests not included in the questions, like "furry"
• Removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
• Deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
• Deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
• Deleted all accumulated likes, which were the best matching people around the world with maximal couple/friend/sex partner potential except, for example, location for now. They broke the profile links, so bookmarks became useless.
• They delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven't been messaging in a while, as if that meant they're not a match - no, they have a temporary problem, such as life situation
• They police inconvenient statements in the users' introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer healthcare insurance CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing (for months) "fuck the healthcare system - make a better one" was deleted without sending me a copy to edit

Avoid dating services owned by Match Group.

It cheats you in through a back door, looking like an ad-covered kiosk. The main entrance is on the other side.

In stalls, there are two screens playing ads, sound coming from the one you're facing.

Toilet paper brands advertise on dispensers, all brands owned by the same conglomerate.

Softest toilet paper has printed portraits of the toilet company's political enemies.

Facial recognition measures usage, you pay at exit.

Exiting after 5 minutes is expensive, but a monthly plan is cheaper.

So all we need to do is find a way to put people in prison!

Win-win!

I just find that there's something really dystopian about this, even beyond just the grim reminder that climate change is already here and it's only going to get worse...

https://x.com/luckytran/status/1877182460733096213

In a retaliatory lawsuit, Exxon says claims against it are motivated by “sordid for-profit incentives and outright greed.”