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How a century of decisions wrought L.A.’s homeless crisis

The first seeds of the current crisis were sowed in the early 1950s, at the height of the nation’s anti-communist panic, when Los Angeles halted the construction of public housing because it was “socialistic.”

Then, roughly 15,000 units of single-room occupancy hotels on Skid Row were demolished as part of a national “urban renewal” movement, severely restricting shelter options for the poorest of the poor. The loss coincided with the razing of more than 7,000 low-income units in Bunker Hill’s aging Victorian homes.

Beginning in the 1970s, a slow-growth movement spread across California that led to planners slashing L.A.’s land use capacity — in other words, the city’s maximum functional size — from 10 million to 4 million people.

It’s never just one thing. Redlining and racist de-zoning—good grief LAT for calling it a “slow growth movement”—coupled with another form of early NIMBYism (often coupled with it’s own racist tendencies in “urban renewal”), dovetailed with America’s unfortunate and bizarre fascination with a form of imaginary socialism and our inability to acknowledge the possibility of a public good that lifts society and make everyone’s lives collectively easier… all just for starters.

None of this is new to me, but this piece does an excellent job of putting it all in one place and connecting the dots.

Homelessness is a systemic and societal issue. Maybe we treat it that way and stop blaming individuals?

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“Alpha Males” Are Making Men Lonelier (with Ryan Broderick)

This episode of Matt Bernstein’s A Bit Fruity is a fantastic conversation on men, loneliness, and how our current cultural definition of masculinity falls so short as to be laughable (if it weren’t so broadly dangerous to society).

But the concept that has stuck with me is Broderick’s broader theory on video content: he suggests that no matter the motivation at the genesis of a specific category, it will all eventually be optimized into a kind of porn. His definition is loose here—it doesn’t require sexual content (though the skin creep happens), let alone explicit sexual content. He’s arguing that it all gets optimized into a form of visual triviality that plays to our instincts for attention and emotion, and has absolutely no intellectually-nutritional value. That tracks with what I see, even in niche circles you don’t normally associate with influencers, like product design.

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Adam Curtis on the BBC, Politics & AI

“It’s the ghost of our time.”

Curtis has an interesting theory: because of how LLMs are trained on existing content, GenAI is actually a reflection of our past that we’ll need to culturally escape from, rather than a vision into our future. It’s a compelling argument. Time will tell, but I think it’s worth consideration.

The segment starts around 39:41 and the link above begins at that timestamp.