There are a lot of layers involved with what's happening in Hollywood with regard to the strike and other issues. 30 years ago, a colleague defined the motion picture business as "high school with money". That's pretty accurate.
Another apt comparison would be France before the revolution. There's an aristocracy that considers itself above all considerations other than their wants and sharing the wealth isn't part of it. Whether this social structure will change in any meaningful way remains to be seen.
I love California, but it isn't tenable, given the state's failure to come to grips with its housing "crisis" which has been a growing crisis for going on 40 years. Housing costs are spiraling out of control.
It's been a long held belief that most of the homeless were either people with mental illnesses, or drug addicts. Turns out, after a couple of years of interviewing thousands of homeless people, the main cause isn't either of these. In a landmark report delivered a couple of months ago, it turns out that the vast majority became homeless because their income simply couldn't keep pace with the rising cost of shelter. Simple as that. A couple of hundred dollars a month difference in housing costs and they're in the street.
My neighborhood, along with many neighborhoods has been overrun with increasingly desperate homeless people, who will do what they have to do to survive. Until basic human necessities are met, nothing will get better.
Just yesterday I got an email from a neighbor a few doors down the street, who let me know that his window had been smashed by someone trying to break in, and the Nextdoor feed is increasingly filled with stories of theft, invasion, and assault.
Seems as good a time as any to get the hell out of Dodge.
So far, Oregon is beautiful, and I'm enjoying getting familiar with my area, and am looking forward to discovering more as time allows. People have been great. A lot of them are folks who left California decades ago. And in a perfect case of small world, the woman living in the townhouse next to mine is the widow of my high school US history teacher.
