Digging through the summer photo backlog, a report on a June trip to San Diego where I slaved away as an expert witness on a software case in federal court (the jury stuck around to be interviewed by the attorneys after the trial and said that they understood and enjoyed my testimony!).
The local public library sends travelers off from FLL with free music and movies:
If you don’t download these on the airport WiFi, JetBlue will prepare you for California’s state religion on the flight out with movies classified as “Pride Picks”:
I saw more homeless people, pit bulls, homeless people with pit bulls, pit bull poop, and trash in the street in my first two days in San Diego than during nearly a year in the West Palm-FLL-Miami area. Here are a couple of sidewalk-dwellers just steps from where the laptop class enjoys $50/person meals:
San Diego presents a huge challenge to those who believe that a market economy is efficient. There are gleaming new skyscrapers next to lots used for surface parking or other low-value activities. If the land isn’t valuable, why would people build up 15 or 20 stories? If the land is valuable, why is so much of it still not developed in any significant way?
Whatever the real estate values might be, one great thing about California is the Chinese food. While waiting for a table at the San Diego outpost of Din Tai Fung, we learned that Lucid has dog mode:
The shopping mall reminded us to observe Rainbow Flagism:
Back downtown, the official city art shows Mexican-Americans taking the bus while rich white people yacht in the background:
My favorite images from the trip depict a debate between saving Mother Earth via light rail or via battery-electric vehicles that turned violent:
I suspect that the Tesla 3 in the image was rented to the driver for $390 per week by Uber, as was a Tesla 3 in which I rode (“horrifyingly bumpy and uncomfortable compared to the Hyundai Sonata I was in yesterday,” I wrote to a friend at the time). The drive says that he must do 30 trips per week in order to keep the car and that this corresponds to 1.5 days of Ubering. I posted about this on Facebook, which helpfully added some editorial content of its own: “Explore Climate Science Info”. In the same vein, Google ran a big animation for Juneteenth:
Californians did manage to steal some great land from the Native Americans and Mexicans. Here’s some topiary:
Old Town featured a CDC reference work on how to prevent an aerosol respiratory virus with a cloth mask:
Compared to southeast Florida, it was much more common to see fully covered women:
Aside from observant Muslims, it was rare to see someone following the Science by wearing a mask, despite a raging COVID-19 epidemic at the time. A jammed street fair, with no masks:
It was outdoors, though, right? In my courthouse experience, only one juror and one chubby clerk wore masks. The guards in the lobby were unmasked. The judge was unmasked. More or less everyone in the building was unmasked. These folks will say that they’re preventing COVID-19 from spreading by behaving in a more scientific manner than residents of Florida, but I couldn’t figure out what they were doing differently.
Circling back to the observant Muslims depicted above… they were just a few steps from an official city-flown rainbow flag:
If they were to need to transact some business at the bank they would have to walk under the sacred symbol of Rainbow Flagism:
I recommend the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park:
But of course my favorite tourist attractive was the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier launched just as World War II was over. The ship is now a museum and Navy veterans, including aircrew, give fascinating lectures on how everything works.
San Diego is a great place to spend 7-10 days as a tourist, hitting all of the museums and parks while enjoying great weather and great food. If one were to live there, however, the contradictions would eventually begin to rankle. Why are there so many unhoused people if rich Californians say that they want to provide housing to the unhoused? Why isn’t there enough civic spirit and agreement that people will get organized to pick up trash and dog poop in their city? (Florida has almost no litter by comparison and dog pick-up bag dispensers are common anywhere that people want dog owners to clean up.) If California wants to welcome millions of migrants from conservative societies, which Californians say that they do, how does it make sense to have Rainbow Flagism as the state religion?
I must have one to display with my People’s Cube. Target (and others) sell them.
https://www.target.com/p/magical-unicorn-science-hardcover/-/A-84028577?
Wonder if the expert witness business is as good as it was from 2000-2005 when the browser wars, the streaming wars, & the introduction of the DMCA created a windfall of lawsuits. Now FUTO is trying to restart the glory days of the browser wars by creating another open source clone of Android.
lion: the one thing that Americans seem to agree on is that litigation is the best way to resolve any dispute so there is no shortage of patent litigation!
When finishing my MBA at the University of FL in 2000, I had a series of three job interviews at Intel in San Diego – three Intel-funded trips from FL to San Diego to interview w/ a bunch of managers for a Marketing Engineering position. I was impressed with the paid 8-week sabbatical offered to every employee after every seven years of service! After the third trip, thinking a job offer was forthcoming, I looked at nearby apartments. Ultimately, I was glad no job offer ever resulted, what, with San Diego rent prices double what the $600/mo. I was paying in Gainesville, FL!
Kudos on the jury’s comprehension of your testimony. That’s pretty rare when it comes to arcane and “boring” subjects like this and your ability to do it…well, I think it shows that you were at least partially a “born teacher.” I’ve only known a few people like that in my life. One was an Organic Chemistry professor at a pretty good school, in a galaxy far, far away. He does Teaching Company videos now. Maybe you should do that too?
Now I wish I was there to hang around in the courtroom and listen. “Things Fall Apart” when good people don’t try, or don’t know how to communicate what they’re saying.
We won’t start calling you “Felix Greenspun.” Lol.
Where are the pictures of San Diego pit bulls?
thankfully no pathetic pits pictured, it is disgusting enough that draped women who elect to partake of this disgusting oppression are depicted, we need not see the sadness of the excessively overbred and abandoned pits who can only hope to be loved and cherished samoyeds or golden retrievers in their next doggy life
https://www.newsweek.com/pit-bull-kiss-toddler-tiktok-video-1733575
perplexed: I should have taken some photos, but the sight was so common that it didn’t occur to me.
From my subjective anecdotal observations, immigrants from more conservative/traditional cultures have no problem with the locals having what they think of “deviant” behavior because they don’t see it as affecting themselves.
How does one get into the expert witness gig? I’ve always been interested.
one must become an expert first!
Andrew: the two most important skills are not laughing when someone calls you “Dr.” and when someone calls you “an expert”!
Most of my engagements have started with a lawyer finding my web site, e.g., https://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ when looking for a database expert or https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ when looking for a web-based application expert. An alternative pathway is to put one’s resume out with a bunch of the headhunting firms that find experts for law firms. The problem there is the usual chicken and egg one. The experts that are sought are those with experience testifying. Usually that first testifying job then comes from a lawyer who gets into a crunch for whatever reason and needs to hire an expert at the last minute.
In the software world, one way to get into the expert industry is as a source code reviewer (not testifying). That results in what old people call a Rolodex of attorney contacts.
@philg, how would advanced alien civilization that for sure will read you blog some light years from now would be able to reconstruct life in the long defunct USA if they do not have detailed description of pit bulls roaming streets of San Diego? 🙂 One picture worth a thousand words. But your description the aliens could assume that pit bull are bear-like.
Looks like NYC has solved the homeless problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAfncqwI-D8
While San Francisco knows it is leftist, San Diego still clings to its old identity as a conservative Navy town filled out with defense contractors and retirees (in other words, very Republican). That’s my guess about some of these contradictions, like the the surface parking lots and lack of dog bags (the city always imagined itself fiscally prudent although this turned out to be a delusion abetted by fraud). That said San Francisco’s homelessness problem is certainly no better despite its lack of identity crisis and despite a charismatic mayor stepping up with a nice sounding plan decades ago (Gavin Newsom).