Musings of Old Man Joe

There and back again!

politics

How Long does a Retrofit Take?

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empty parking lot
Fenced off parking lot

In this world of Los Angeles where persons buy up properties then do them up and rent them at crazy prices. I now have personal knowledge of the way this can go.

Over a month ago we the tenants were informed our building had been sold, the new persons had looked at the place during the pandemic and were going ahead with their evil plans. At the time we the tenants were unaware of what the evil plan was. During the lockdown it wasn’t easy to evict tenants so we figured there was some time before we would have to be evicted. And it’s not allowed to mess directly with the tenants (cutting off electrics and water).

So the plan goes like this, you say you’re going to do a retrofit for earthquakes to bring the building up to standards. Then you hire a company to do the retrofit. Seems normal and even though it is annoying there isn’t much the tenants can do when the permits have been approved.

Then what you do is the crafty bit, you fence off the parking so you have to find street parking when everybody and their cousin is home during a Pandemic and then NOTHING! It’s been over a month and the parking is the same since the day they fenced it in.

The company who is aiding the persons who bought the building in behaving like ass holes is https://www.optimumseismic.com.
I have called them, first time I called they said the work would take six weeks and not twelve, even though on their website they say it takes about three, this is not a big building! The second time I called and asked when they would be starting the work again they just put me off with some BS and never got back to me. I was surprised a company would be so complicit in helping to kick tenant out of their homes. Some have been in this building for more than thirty years. I have heard people say it’s just business, I disagree and the people being forced from their home would agree with me.

Greed has been kicking out the tenants in Los Angeles for years, the people who lived and work in Los Angeles when people think of it in its heyday have all but left. I am leaving soon as I am done with the BS and dirty streets, lack of empathy from the people who run the city. I am lucky that I can and I have somewhere to go. But many are not as lucky and having to do this during a Pandemic makes it just a bit more stressful.

I don’t know what Los Angeles will look like in years to come. I see lots of fancy apartments with lots of apartments vacant as regular people cannot afford the money they are asking. Maybe it will end up like a Chinese Ghost City.

Los Angeles City Services?

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Sleeping not so Rough

Update below!

I admire using resources to make the best of any situation, and this guy was smart and used a tarp and rope to make himself a nice sleeping place.
I do feel for the thousands who are struggling because society in the United States thinks that social services to help anyone including healthcare is bloody socialism. At some point people decided that social services were too much money and now we have this problem. Self inflicted bad economics by greedy people in the 1980’s.
Of course my street guest had departed late morning and took his creation with him. What he left behind was the pole that was now dangling and was obviously a danger if people hit it!

Busted

Of course this was bad so I contacted the city using my handy 311 app and let them know what was wrong and even sent the picture above to let them know this was not safe. A blind person with a cane would not notice this metal pole dangling, or a person engrossed in the bloody phone might also get a surprise.

Well after two weeks I can honestly say the City has proved to be crap, not only has this not been fixed but the temporary fix is a joke. Not even sure the City has been out and this fix may have been done by a local who saw this and felt the urge to do something. To be honest I am surprised and thought this would have been sorted quickly under the circumstances.

kind of fixed

I was wrong!

My other question would be what function does this really have when propping up the pole. Is it dangerous that this support isn’t supporting?

Well if the pole does fall over I will take a picture and send it in, because that is the right thing to do!

Then wait!

Update January 14th 2020
Case Closed no action taken
I received an email from the city telling me how to report a damaged pole.

How to report damage to a telephone pole, wire or cable If a damaged telephone pole, wire, cable or pedestal is affecting your phone service, call us at (800) 573-1311 to report the problem. Tell us about the situation When you speak with the repair agent, you will be asked: Your name and telephone number Which services are affected — telephone, Internet How the services are affected — noisy, no dial tone It will be helpful if you can also provide: Address, directions and/or landmarks to damaged equipment Identifying numbers or marks on damaged equipment Description of equipment (Is the wire smaller or larger than a pencil?) Cause of damage — termites, lightning strike, car crash, tree limb, construction Person/company responsible (if applicable) Description of damage — leaning pole, drooping/cut wire, equipment missing door When damage likely occurred — days, weeks, months Any other information — emergency personnel on scene, additional damage imminent.

I must admit to be at a loss, the metal has not been fixed and it would seem contacting the city is a waste of time.
I actually didn’t see that coming!

More important than Impeachment.

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Love-Fest in Helsinki 2018

So what happened this month, well Putin has a news conference and who does he defend, No Collusion buddy Donald Trump read here.

I always wondered why Putin favored Trump so early in the GOP debates, he was helping him regardless of all the other GOP candidates. Which tells me this was never a Conservative VS Democrat thing. This was always a Trump and not Clinton thing. Clinton knew Putin was not our friend, Trump is Putin’s Pawn. Why is that?

As soon as Trump was in office he tried to get the sanctions lifted, probably because Trump gets financing from Russian banks as his credit in the united states is crap. Trump tried and failed to get Putin back into the G7.

Trump pulled US forces out of Syria and two weeks later who was in the bases, Russian troops! Putin is playing the game and gaining power through the region, and Trump is helping him do just that!

Trump has attacked the CIA and FBI since he became president, that is a Putin move to make sure your resistance opinion is diminished.
Trump has attacked the media because he doesn’t want the people to have the truth as a reference, only his lies.

Putin’s goal has always been to bring back soviet power and diminish the United States power, and he is doing just that. NATO alliance is broken thanks to Trump, Dictators are having a field day since Trump took office.

The Russian intelligence campaign that put Trump in office is still working on Putins behalf and because the GOP put Party over country nothing is being done to stop it.

And now Putin is testing a totally separate internet just for Russia and while Moscow Mitch decides nothing needs to be done to protect the American voting system this leaves Putin with the capability to shut down or cripple the internet and leaving himself totally ok!
Career intelligence officers are saying out load this is a threat and the people vote in morons who for some reason have their heads up there ASS and do nothing!

Oh and merry Christmas!

Today algorithms rule our lives, this needs to change!

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Everybody who doesn’t watch Fox News (state TV) will know by now how much the Russians helped the Donald get elected President. The question I still have with this today is why him? They were helping him way early in the republican election process, why not one of the other republican candidates? Is it because they knew he could be manipulated? he has rich Russians staying in Trump tower New York & has for years. Why they decided to use social media to help Trump eludes me, yet they did!

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

FaceBook, Twitter, Google all use algorithms to determine what to show you when you log on or do a search. The search results are created to show you what the company thinks you want to see! that’s all well and good, but when you are looking for unbiased information this is not the way to go. You will be fed exactly what you need to keep thinking what you want to believe. The bubble that has politics so polarized can be said to have been create by a computer program. With ten likes on FaceBook the computer knows you as well as a member of your family.
There are many articles TechCrunch and this one CNBC that have mentioned the devil that is FaceBook. I actually deleted my account because it freaked me out when you look for something on your phone on Amazon, then go to Facebook and guess what you will see come up on an add?
Yup!

I know from reading Teri Kanefield that what is going on with Trump and the GOP is fear of change, the white ones are losing their dominance and they are fighting back. They feel that progress will leave them behind, and it is true. They want to take us back to a time that existed for only a rich few. It’s an idea that has no place in a modern society. But with the help of Fox News (state TV) the average person who alas chooses to watch (state TV) has been bombarded with propaganda that only
Paul Joseph Goebbels would be proud of. It’s the difference between Fox News (State TV) & NPR (News).

But what has made this much harder to fix, because fixing it is going to be very hard. The computer companies have to figure out a way to not only give results in search but also give credence to the results. Or at least fake news should be labelled as such, with citations as to why. FaceBook needs to get out of news period! It was the reason the Russians were so easily able to manipulate the American public against Clinton. When the Autocrats are in charge we don’t have a democracy. Legislation is being done by people who were not voted in as such but have manipulated the system so much that we weren’t able to vote them out!

In the end this all comes down to trust, I trust the news media, NY Times NPR, BBC, because that’s their job. Fox News is not a news outlet (State TV). When I lived in England I knew the Sun was a conservative newspaper, the mirror was more liberal. So you could read both and get a gist of what they were saying. I preferred the times or the independent as I liked my news more neutral. NPR is the equivalent of the BBC, which means you get news.
Bottom line is never trust just one news source, they can sometimes make mistakes. Because that’s life, it happens. But not everyday not every story, and most of the time it’s a fairly accurate account.

And so can computer algorithms, they can also make mistakes. they need to be tweaked every so often. As a web developer when google changes its algorithm which it did not too long ago. All the web developers were checking their websites ranking to see what changed. All the tech companies that we rely on for our information need to be more responsible of the outcomes of their business models. It’s not good enough any more to blame Russia because they could. We should be asking why did we let them?

Of course it’s true, I saw it on the internet!

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Sharing what?

I remember when I was living in Ireland and reading the news I would be able to watch and listen to Irish news, English news and read American news. It was great to get a perspective rather then just one news source. it’s something I will say to anyone today is read alternate news sources so you don’t exist in a news bubble.

What has happened since the 1990’s has been a revolution in social media. What I believe this has done is create a world where we/us are able to exist in a bubble we create and due to a algorithm set up by Google and Facebook we are fed articles and media to prop up the story of belief we are trying to prove to ourselves, whether it’s a fact or not.

So let’s look at say ten years of social media has achieved for us, are we particularly more sociable than we were before we had these things. I would say probably not, it’s true to keep in touch with loved ones is cheaper and easier than it was ten years ago. Is the quality of the social experience better?

I think the worst part of the whole thing is the deviation from facts, the way we no longer use trusted sources for our information. These are for myself trusted sources.

  • BBC news
  • RTE news
  • NPR news
  • Any Times newspaper

I know there are many more but my point is to read multiple sources to get a better picture. And avoid news posted on social media that is not from a trusted source. And remember opinion pieces are just that, somebodies opinion. What happens when you don’t rely on trusted sources for news?

  • Anti-vaccinations
  • Brexit
  • Alt-Right
  • Anti immigration
  • people actually don’t believe in climate change
  • Trump

I am also wary of local stations after this report on Sinclair came to light!

It’s amazing to me that in the age where we have more knowledge at our fingertips than any time in the history of our planet, that so much crap is shared and believed. The Russians from 2015 started a media campaign to influence the election in the United States. What I wonder about is why did the Russians not only want Trump to beat Hilary Clinton (who was maligned badly by the Russians through Facebook), but they also picked him among the other GOP candidates for President. As a failed business man he couldn’t get credit in the United States so it was Russian banks that financed his business schemes. Which is why the sanctions were not popular to the Trumps. Trump is a conspiracy theorist who can do great damage in the oval office, maybe that was the plan overall, to destroy the united states from the inside.

The us against them is straight out of the fascist playbook, which is also propagated by the algorithms of Facebook and Google so we see only what we want to see be it fact or not. In society today there are points of contention that were not in existence thirty years ago. This is due in part to the internet and outlets like Fox News that has led to the creation of radical views through social media.

Apple has recently opened it’s news app, I am not an Apple fan boy although I use and love their products, I try to keep an open mind to these things. But to create an app which will give us news from real sources is genius and my hope is that they will at some point allow sharing to social media to counter the effect of fake news from Russia and propaganda from Fox News & the Sinclair Group.

Peace!