Letter to the Editor:
Technological progress implies the eventual, absolute inevitable use of the word “obsolescence”. Burbank’s City Council’s effective governance can be publicly “measured” when it allows incoherent or polarized citizenry the final chance to make coherent civic decisions at low coordination costs through elections.
In effect, members of the City Council are self-anointed persons, people who think of themselves as especially qualified and socially positioned to render judgment and chart a course for the lives of Burbankers who are not government employees. no desire to overpower the wishes of other people. So, current members of Burbank’s City Council often exhibit their flights of lofty thoughts and as-vague-as-possible determinations of what is best for other citizens. And, too often, City Council members defer to their preferred bureaucrats also affected by an elitist mentality.
Together, the present-day perched Council (and its ever more numerous unelected servants) form a kind of real-world duplication of the post-1946 children’s toy, the Drinking Bird, which bobs up and down, moved by two evaporation regimes. Hot air does the job!
AI is in the process of overwhelming Hollywood’s status, yet Burbank still financially supports a highly altered industry. Why? Would it not be helpful, instead, to Burbank to use those funds to attract AI firms to establish cinema worksites IN our City?
The 2013 movie ELYSIUM showed AD 2154 Los Angeles as a shantytown, even its suburb of Hollywood, and considering its demonstrably bad near-perpetual governance by dippies, that state of affairs may arrive far earlier, before mid-21st Century!
Burbankers ought to grab ahold of a profound, once-in-a-lifetime, economic opportunity by closing off its taxpayer furnished money succor for Hollywood. It is time, now, for a replacement, an AI industry with the potential to bring big payrolls on the monetary scale of Lockheed.
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
