A Photo Blog of the San Fernando Valley. With comment.
Wasco, Kern County: Almonds, opiates, unbuilt subdivisions, and the Merced-to-Bakersfield High-Speed Rail line, still under construction, soon to be…
a) a carcass, abandoned for lack of funds
b) a fully funded anachronism offering service between farm towns
c) history’s most expensive bike path
d) the most Instagrammable spot in the San Joaquin Valley
e) Caligula’s horse
A masked brigade of thugs descended on a Van Nuys homeless encampment Saturday and administered an indiscriminate, day-long beatdown on garbage.
Wielding shovels and white uniforms they laid waste to waste, detritus of all forms: syringes, month old sweet and sour pork, used batteries and piss jugs fattened by sunlight.
No one invited them. Some brazenly wore MAGA hats, in defiance of local codes.
“I figured if I was ever going wear mine in LA, this would be the day”, said a woman from Santa Clarita.
Patrick, a self-described “red-pilled black man” drove from Loma Linda to get in on the action.
Looking at moments like a post-apocalyptic religious cult, they shamelessly swarmed the garbage field in plain view of its creators, the people of the tent favela a short distance away.
By afternoon, eight tons of garbage were dispatched into two giant containers. The field was scraped down to the gravel.
As their eco-system shrank by the minute, newly homeless rats burst from bags and scampered in circles in search of safety. Fresh dank dark places were in short supply.
Looming over the fascistic process of cleanliness was a mysterious leader named Scott who exerted a Svengali-like hold on the garbage beaters. “Thank you for helping out”, he would tell them as they removed their hazmat suits. “Thank you, Scott, for organizing this”, they would reply.
Then they touched elbows in lieu of shaking hands, as though speaking in code.
*before photo courtesy of Pacific Pundit
This is what war to the death for market share looks like from inside my car when dropping off at LAX. Free=$195/week lease rate. Fair=Anyone with a license is eligible to drive for Uber. In California, legal status is irrelevant. If you complete 125 rides/Eats deliveries in a week, the lease is paid by Uber. That’s one way to take a $5 billion write-down in a single quarter and bleed veteran drivers at the same time.
Make no mistake, the rideshare model is ubiquitous and profitable in the major cities. No one is going back to buses and cabs. The ancillary businesses: delivery, freight, scooters and bikes, overseas markets are fiscal sinkholes. So are endless recruitment incentives.
If Uber can agree with Lyft how to divide the market, each could raise fares one dollar per ride, use it to retain the current driver fleet and pad their bottom line.
But that’s not what they’re doing. Los Angeles is shaping up as the Gettysburg of the gig economy. We are in the bloodletting stage before Pickett’s Charge. There will be one dominant market player at the end of the horsemeat.
In another century we had Will to Power. Now we have the Will to Bezos.