SB 50: How Wall Street Speculators Plan on Destroying Single-Family Homes
Anyone who lives in or visits Los Angeles can see we have a humanitarian crisis on our hands. More than 60,000 people are without homes, and…
Category: Luxury
The Fable of Sybaris
Long ago, more than 2,500 years in the past, the city of Sybaris flourished on the heel of what is now Italy. Situated on a bustling line of Greek trade, Sybaris was where seagoing merchants unloaded their precious cargo for distribution along the Western coast. The customs and tolls from the Greeks’ inexorable enterprise made...
Confessions of a Luxury Hotel Concierge
For more than 15 years, she’s worked behind the Concierge Desk at several of the finest hotels in Los Angeles. Sabrina [her name has been changed at her request] will get you anything (well, almost anything) you want, because that’s her job, and she does it well. Securing dinner reservations at “fully booked” restaurants, hiring...
Indexing L.A.’s Affordable Housing Crisis
The Coalition to Preserve LA, proponents of last year’s failed Measure S, which would have drastically re-made Los Angeles’s broken City Planning process, are in the weirdly unsatisfying position of being able to say “I told you so.” Nearly everyone familiar with housing development in Los Angeles agrees that the current system is utterly corrupted,...
Draining the Los Angeles Swamp
Although most of us are acquainted with one or two reasonable and intelligent people who, on Election Day, found a way to rationalize their fears and resentments into a vote for a genuinely vile person, Los Angeles, by and large, didn’t go for Trump. We like to think we’re “better” than that. As he and...
Shiva Singh-Schlimovitz Knows Best
Go to her official site. Right there on the Home Page: “I may not know how to pick husbands, but I know what’s best for our country! I think she’s being funny? #irony Facts: The marriages. She’s had three of them, so far. None of these husbands has lasted longer than two years. Kept first-husband’s...
Zombies Are Blameless, and So Are We
Excerpted from “How the Revolution Started: Essays and Impertinent Thoughts.” If you voluntarily buy burritos from Chipotle or pay for TV programs owned by Discovery, companies whose CEOs earn 1,000 times more than the average employee they oversee, then you probably don’t have any problem with wealth and income inequality. You’re certainly not going to...
We Didn’t Know
If, like us, you don’t watch much television and, therefore, effectively shield yourself from the indignities of all the marketing/messaging/propaganda used to sell products and “lifestyles,” when you come face-to-face with the fire-breathing beast, your ignorance of Basic Ideas might take your breath away. It did ours. We were forced from our hermetically sealed cave...
Poem: The Abiding Benefit of Employing Servants
Employing a staff, you see, Betters all mankind, not just me. Look, the man who drives my car Was born unlucky, not a star Like me and Angie, Anne and Mike, All us worthy of your thumbs-up “like.” Meet the girl who cleans my home: Born unlovely, brownish gnome With moles unsightly, hair unkempt, She’s never...
Keeping Our Commanders Comfortable
New information came to light this week about the quarters our top Generals enjoy at taxpayer expense. The Pentagon acknowledged that even though the Offense Department’s budget is slated for a 20% cut that will cost 800,000 people their job, important war planners like General John Kelly of U.S. Southern Command live rent-free in mansions,...
