Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 06, 2025, 09:20 PM.... ancap filth pollutes our forum.

What is ancap?

And what forum? This is like 2 or 3 old farts, in the back of an old bar no one has ever heard of in a dead town with sagebrush blowing through and the last family left for greener pastures 3 years ago, sitting around doing what old farts do. Pretending what they say matters...while never acknowledging that it does matter...just not to anyone except them. And maybe not even then.

But ancap! New cool terminology! ...maybe...

Anarcho - Capitalism => ancap 


Which is an accurate description of your propaganda.

Cooler time for insulting the forum.

RE

Quote from: RE on Jan 07, 2025, 01:08 PMCooler time for insulting the forum.

RE

Thank You

Los Angeles Has a Housing Crisis. These Fires Will Make It Worse.

The fires raging in Southern California offer a tragic preview of how the climate crisis will exacerbate homelessness.

The fires sweeping through Los Angeles are going to leave hundreds or perhaps thousands homeless. The speed at which the fires have spread has forced major evacuations across several neighborhoods; the Palisades fire alone is already believed to have burned over 1,000 homes, schools, and businesses, while the Eaton fire has now passed 10,000 acres, endangering an estimated 13,000 buildings. More than 150,000 people have been told to evacuate, and many more are being told to prepare in case. In a county that already has a massive homelessness crisis, that is short on housing, and has recently taken several measures to punish unhoused people, the people left displaced by these blazes—particularly those with fewer resources—face a rough future.

Climate change is a housing issue. Housing is a climate issue. And these fires are a clear preview of the disasters to come. The fallout of these blazes is going to strain an already struggling effort to help those on the streets. While the 2024 Los Angeles homeless count saw the amount of homelessness stay even, it's still very high for one of the densest and most populated counties in the country. There's not enough construction, services are overstretched and underfunded, and the area is not exactly kind to unhoused people. The more disasters we see like this, the worse the crisis is going to be.

Right now the focus is rightly on safety. The fires show no signs of stopping, and people are fleeing. Many are trying to make sure their friends and loved ones got out of evacuation zones safely. Every resource should be spent on getting people to safety and containing the fires. But it's also worth considering what comes next. Once this is over, hundreds if not thousands of Angelenos are going to be newly homeless. The fires that are burning indiscriminately are destroying neighborhoods that are home to everyone from working-class people to wealthy individuals. Money and privilege are not making a difference here. Those displaced are going to find themselves dealing with limited services and city and county governments and officials who favor punitive measures against unhoused Angelenos. What's happening and will happen to Los Angeles is what's happening nationwide.

Whether it's hurricanes like Helene in the southeast or fires on the Pacific Coast, climate change–intensified disasters are exacerbating the rise in homelessness, which saw an 18 percent increase nationwide in 2024. A massive drought has left the area primed for a fire. The intense Santa Ana winds made things worse. And this is January—not even what used to be considered the official fire season.

Once the fires stop, the biggest danger is going to be time. The longer it takes to get help, to get the resources and housing and services to people, the more apathy and resentment will grow. The second-largest city in the country, with its large metropolitan area, is going to have thousands of displaced people to help in a county where more than 75,000 people were unhoused even before the fires, per the 2024 point-in-time homeless count. More than two-thirds of those Angelenos are unsheltered. Many of the people forced to flee burning neighborhoods will be joining them. Many are among the most vulnerable too—seniors and people in low-income households among them. Even with major federal and state assistance or large insurance payouts—which, given insurance companies having canceled many policies, are not guaranteed—it's likely that many displaced by the fires won't have a place to go.

Issues including pandemic-related logistics and local pushback have delayed or increased the costs of some projects the county was undertaking prior to the fires for new construction. New housing units are opening, and hundreds are in the pipeline, but they aren't enough to meet demand, nor are they opening fast enough. And they're now endangered by the fires like any other home. This is a region with not enough permanent housing and not enough shelter beds. People are already getting priced out by rising rents; the fires are going to put even more strain on limited options.

People who can't find family or hotels to stay with will face city ordinances that bar them from sleeping in public spaces; they'll face fines, risk having what few belongings they were able to save being taken from them, and be met with police responses quicker than homeless services. This isn't an abstract worry, it's happening now. The City of Los Angeles has focused on trying to push struggling people out of sight, often without providing any housing or services that could actually help unhoused Angelenos. Los Angeles has tried to arrest and punish its way out of the crisis because actually helping people takes time and resources—many in privileged positions have opposed the shifting of resources that truly meeting the homelessness crisis would require.

Similar dynamics have prevailed with regard to the climate crisis. Despite increasingly bad fire years, the city and county did not put extra resources into firefighting this year. It did however boost funding for police, even as crime fell. "No, L.A. County and all 29 fire departments in our county are not prepared for this kind of widespread disaster," L.A. County Fire Department head Anthony Marrone said at a press conference on Wednesday morning.

The political sentiment behind these questionable budgeting decisions is another problem. The disdain for unhoused Angelenos in recent years, fueled by conspiracy theories that they are not locals, that they are all addicts or criminals, has led to a reactionary electoral backlash and increased anti-homeless actions. It's cruel and shortsighted in the face of what's to come with climate change. Even in the best-case scenario for the current fires, it's going to take time to rebuild and provide help to those hurt by the blazes. California has some recent examples of how long that recovery can take, such as the fallout of the 2018 fire that destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Both the climate crisis and the housing crisis are going to take major resources and time to effectively address and provide assistance to those already experiencing the worst and those falling into homelessness. These fires are a preview of what's to come. The main question here and in any future disaster is whether those in power want to actually help those displaced, or instead continue to go after the most vulnerable.

Nicholas Slayton is a journalist in Los Angeles covering inequality, and a contributing editor at Task & Purpose

The fires that are burning indiscriminately are destroying neighborhoods that are home to everyone from working-class people to wealthy individuals. Money and privilege are not making a difference here.

I'll dispute that claim right off the bat.


People with Money & Privilege won't be going homeless here.  They'll be in hotel rooms or in the mansions of friends whose houses did not burn.  The house that burned up probably wasn't their only house, at the very least they have a condo at a ski resort or a sailboat moored at a marina.  If they are truly rich and privileged and not one of the many who "own" everything on credit, they can at the very least simply sell off $300K worth of their stock portfolio and buy a Class 1 Diesel Pusher Motor Home.



What is true however is that many of the people who SEEM rich live beyond their means, and that is particularly true of movie and rock stars who are often "nigger rich" and spend their high incomes on fancy cars, big houses and a Coke habit.  While some of them are smart enough to take part of their big paychecks and invest it, others go to a bank and based on the $1M paycheck they got for their last movie take out a mortgage on a $20M mansion.  If they don't stay on the A-list and keep getting the big paycheck roles, in a couple of years they burn through the money and they're broke.

In any event, most of the high income people will be OK in the short term, they're not gonna be street level homeless.  However, people who were mid-level in the entertainment biz who were making $150-200K and had a nice Mercedes might be among those who find themselves truly homeless pretty quick.  They may not be able to find a place in the neighborhood to live and they might not be able to hold on to the high paying job they had.  Folks in that situation can fall off the cliff quickly, but they aren't truly "rich & privileged".

RE

Historic Black neighborhood of Altadena reduced to ashes in Los Angeles Wildfires

Amongst the thousands of acres set aflame by the Los Angeles wildfires, Altadena, a historically Black neighborhood, is left incinerated.

Los Angeles County is engulfed in flames as a series of devastating wildfires rage from the coastline to the city's heart. While the media often paints Los Angeles as a haven for celebrities and the wealthy, these fires have displaced thousands of working-class families, leaving many uncertain if they will have homes to return to.

Among the four active wildfires tearing through the region, the Palisades and Eaton fires have collectively scorched over 30,000 acres, destroying an estimated 10,000 structures. The Eaton fire, burning on the east side of the city near Pasadena, has completely obliterated a vital piece of Black history.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/historic-black-neighborhood-altadena

East LA is of course the slum side of town, like the Bronx and Harlem in NY where all the poor folks live and where you have all the gang and drug related violence.

You can be pretty sure most of these folks do NOT have fire insurance and that many if not most of them WILL be homeless for quite a while, if not permanently.

You also gotta wonder who will rebuild there?  Will they build affordable housing?

RE

Quote from: RE on Jan 11, 2025, 11:15 AM The fires that are burning indiscriminately are destroying neighborhoods that are home to everyone from working-class people to wealthy individuals. Money and privilege are not making a difference here.

I'll dispute that claim right off the bat.

RE

It's useful to understand that there's a difference between the average (the number you get by dividing the sum of a set of values by the number of values), and the median which means the middle point

The average net worth in American households in 2022 was $1,059,470 but the median was only $192,700.

That is a ratio of 5.5.  If entire neighborhoods are gone simple math shows the poor must suffer more than the rich will because income inequality is so damn huge.

More people than not are shit out of luck. In the end we all are.

A good script with text and voice generated by AI.  The human who picked out the stock footage did a great job, and I am not saying that just because half the footage is in Seattle.

It documents our cities well.

This kind of video is something anyone can do with the right tools and a bit of practice.  Essentially it is the equivalent to a magazine article in the video medium.  Many will disparage these types of videos.  I do not.  The message is what matters and if I wrote the script in this video taking the trouble to put an AI voice behind it with generated text and stock footage is just a new way to publish.

I rate the facts presented as reliable based on my other explorations.

Like many (most) current You-Tube videos this cover pic and title are meant to get you to click.  The content is not so ghetto.

I'd find it just as intolerable to spend an afternoon at a city bus stop shelter as I would a typical suburban backyard get together bbq. Both sets of crazy ideas and beliefs can do nothing but annoy.

Might be kinda fun to spend a weekend with the elites, though :-D

[quote author=K-Dog
A good script with text and voice generated by AI.  The human who picked out the stock footage did a great job, and I am not saying that just because half the footage is in Seattle.

It documents our cities well.
[/quote]
Has the local ACP club decided to do anything about this situation? It would seem like a natural organizational method to begin recurigin from? Those with nothing to lose would really like a little "leveling of the field" I'd bet.

MT not very friendly to the homeless.  Kind of surprising since it's home to many Survivalists.  Of course, survivalists try to be invisible so you don't see them.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/27/kalispell-montana-homelessness

RE