Consider This Algorithm After Thanksgiving Feast

0

It’s the week of Thanksgiving – just the time to pull on your heart strings.

We’ll instead seek to challenge your minds, and even throw in some buzz words, using the photo you see here as the basis for some data analytics that speak to the condition of the labor pool – keeping in mind that human capital is now more than ever a key asset of our community of business.

Marketers the world over lean on data drawn from our digital existences, compiling information and putting algorithms to the task of guessing what a click here or there says about our eating habits, sense of style, travel preferences, etc.

We’ll draw data from this image of the back of a modest sedan that recently sat parked in a middle-class neighborhood in the heart of Los Angeles, stuffed with personal belongings. It’s a bit blurry on purpose, for privacy’s sake, but here’s a rundown of what’s there, and some guesses on what the items mean: Some portrait-style photos of individuals indicate there was likely once a home where they could be properly displayed; a couple of hard hats suggest a work history, and perhaps a skilled trade; an artsy mask seems to point up a sense of political disappointment.

A walk around the front of the vehicle offered other data points: a religious book, a child’s shoe.

Now let’s apply our street-level logic to make some algorithmic assumptions: A one-time working adult appears to have slipped from his or her place in the middle class, is barely hanging onto family ties, and has lost faith in government – although it seems faith in a higher power remains.

What to conclude from this data?

This is yet another layer of homelessness in our city – folks who have slipped and are trying to keep links alive as their worlds narrow.

We’ve heard the talk, we’ve voted to raise taxes on ourselves to address this matter.

Yet we see more and more evidence of homelessness reaching deeper and deeper into our community.

Perhaps it will be time to talk turkey about accountability after we’ve enjoyed this Thanksgiving’s feast.

No posts to display