I was chatting with a guy who works at a Los Angeles-based manufacturer about the challenge of building back up to full production. “One issue is that if you got COVID at any time during the past two and a half years,” he said, “California assumes that you got it at work. Then if you say that you have Long COVID you will get years of Worker’s Compensation payments. Especially older workers were prone to making Long COVID Worker’s Comp claims. and, if you add up their Social Security, Worker’s Comp, and 401k, it wouldn’t make any sense for them to return to the factory.”
Fact check: this law firm says “with COVID-19, there is a rebuttable presumption of a workplace connection. An employer has the burden of proving that a claimant was not exposed to COVID-19 in the relation to their employment.”
Let’s look at the California labor force participation rate. California has one of the nation’s youngest populations (one reason the COVID-tagged death rate was lower than in some other states) and we’d therefore expect the labor force participation rate to be higher than the U.S. average. Yet it isn’t:
We see participation rising as women entered the labor market (70s and 80s) and then falling as women were offered the opportunity to earn cash via divorce litigation or simply having sex with a married dentist (state child support formulas guaranteeing profits were introduced around 1990; history and also “Divorce laws and the economic behavior of married couples” (Voena 2016)). Then we see the downward trend from all of the enhancements to the welfare state that started in 2009 (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession for how Americans could find themselves in a higher-than-100-percent tax bracket as a consequence of means-tested programs, including mortgage relief). And right now we are bumping along at 62 percent in one of the best labor markets for workers in history. That’s the same as the national rate despite California being 1.5 years younger (median) than the U.S. overall.
We are informed that the San Francisco police, presumably armed with guns and clad in bulletproof vests, were spectators as a violent attack on a taxpayer occurred. From the New York Times:
In the early hours of Friday morning, the intruder entered through a back door of the stately home in San Francisco’s upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood, yelling, “Where is Nancy?”
Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, was thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., protected by her security detail, but her husband, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, was home. By the time police officers arrived after being dispatched at 2:27 a.m., they found the assailant and Mr. Pelosi wrestling for control of a hammer. The intruder then pulled the hammer away and “violently attacked” Mr. Pelosi with it in front of the officers, said William Scott, San Francisco’s chief of police.
In other words, if we are to believe Pravda, at least for a period of time, the police took no action to stop the crime in progress.
Chief Scott said in a late-afternoon news conference that when the officers arrived, they saw Mr. Pelosi and the suspect, each with a hand on a hammer. They ordered both men to drop the hammer, he said, and the suspect pulled it away and struck Mr. Pelosi “at least once.”
There are multiple officers (plural). One of the guys involved in the struggle is 82 years old. The other one is probably not a prime specimen of physical fitness (see below). Why wouldn’t the police officers have rushed in to take the hammer away instead of waiting for the struggle for hammer possession to be resolved?
More aggressive policing in Los Angeles 30 years ago:
DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree. … Neighbors described DePape as a homeless addict with a politics that was, until recently, left-wing, but of secondary importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior. “What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists,” said one of DePape’s neighbors, a woman who only gave her first name, Trish. “They seem very left. They are all about the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay pride.”
A November 27, 2008 article in the Oakland Tribune said Taub and DePape were married with three children. But DePape’s stepfather, Gene, told AP yesterday that Taub was his stepson’s girlfriend, not wife; that David and Taub had two, not three, children together; and that David’s third child was with another woman.
(At least two generations of children growing up without two biological parents.) The family structure evolves to become more complex over time:
Taub was in the news again five years later when she, then 44, married a 20-year-old man, Jamyz Smith, naked, at City Hall in San Francisco. A photo in the December 16, 2013 edition of The San Francisco Chronicle shows DePape, Taub, Smith, and the three children huddled under a blanket watching television together. The caption describes DePape as “a family friend.” … Ryan La Coste, who lives in an apartment directly behind the Taub-DePape house, said that the day after Taub’s wedding to Smith, “There was a huge fight. The guy [Smith] that she married got locked up. And so Taub married somebody else. My understanding was that David [DePape] was the best man to her husband at the wedding.”
Based on Twitter and Facebook, it is primarily Donald Trump who is to blame for this attack and, after Trump, Republicans generally. Let’s assume that this is correct. But why aren’t the San Francisco police at least partly responsible for not stopping what Donald Trump told David DePape to do? The Pelosis pay property tax on their Pacific Heights mansion. Aren’t they entitled to police protection rather than police spectators?
(Note that the disintegration of public safety in San Francisco is not a bad thing from the perspective of the Florida real estate industry or from the perspective of a Florida taxpayer. We would be delighted if everyone who owns a mansion in Pacific Heights (“the most expensive neighborhood in the United States”) sold it and moved to Palm Beach County to start paying property taxes to the school system here.)
After receiving strong bipartisan support in the Legislature, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation earlier today authored by Senator Connie M. Leyva (D-Chino) to establish legal protections for technology users when they receive unsolicited sexually explicit images and videos, also known as ‘cyberflashing.’
Also known as the FLASH (Forbid Lewd Activity and Sexual Harassment) Act and sponsored by Bumble—the women-first dating and social networking app—SB 53 would create a private right of action against any person over 18 years of age who knows or reasonably should know that the lewd image transmitted is unsolicited.
During its legislative journey, legislators in both the Senate and Assembly signed on in support of the FLASH Act, including Senator Lena A. Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) and Assemblymember Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) as principal coauthors and Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters), Senator Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara), Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine), Assemblymember Luz Rivas (D-San Fernando Valley), Senator Susan Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) and Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) as coauthors.
The article includes a photo of the bill’s author:
The image is a good example of “lewd” by Islamic standards. The woman shows part of her chest, all of her hair, all of her face. Maybe a prostitute would do that in Kabul, but who else? There are a ton of immigrants from Afghanistan to California. Can they now sue if they receive images like the above? If not, why not? I hope that nobody will say that non-Islamic standards of modesty are somehow superior to Islamic standards.
New census data is shining more light on the Bay Area’s pandemic exodus: The region saw the largest drop in median income of any big U.S. metro area as wealthy people moved away — and current residents of all incomes are more likely to relocate soon than in any other major population center.
Household income in the San Francisco metro area fell 4.6% from 2019 to 2021 to $116,005 a year, according to a census report released this month.
The article highlights rich people moving, but, given that some percentage of Americans move every year, the drop in median income could just as easily be caused by no-income and low-income people staying. The article does not note that someone who is signed up to the full package of means-tested benefits (not to be characterized as “welfare”!), i.e., free housing, free health care, free food (SNAP/EBT), Obamaphone, and the new free broadband, is extremely unlikely to move (since it could take 10-20 years on waitlists to get the same package in a different location or state).
So a city or state is guaranteed to hold onto its lowest-income citizens (not to say “poorest” because they may enjoy a median earner’s lifestyle; see below) even when everyone else seeks to move, e.g., due to lockdowns, school closures, social disorder, and high crime.
Ignore the pre-Biden dollar figures and concentrate on the “percentage of median salary” column, which should be valid despite inflation. Prior to the 2020-2022 coronapanic enhancements to welfare, in other words, being on welfare in California yielded roughly the same spending power as working full time at the median wage (and with no risk of exposure to a virus at work and no need to wear a mask for 8 hours per day).
I think it is interesting from the point of view of journalism that the situation is characterized by rich people disproportionately moving rather than by welfare state beneficiaries disproportionately staying.
Here in Paris, I met a guy who works in real estate development in Los Angeles. Assuming that you’ve already got the land, what does it cost to build a McMansion-grade house? “$500 per square foot,” he responded. How about an apartment building for the middle class? “Closer to $400 per square foot,” was the answer (same as levelset.com). So the 2,500-square-foot house costs $1.25 million to build and the 1000-square-foot apartment will cost $400,000 to build… assuming that land is free.
“Rents have a long way to go up before they cover these kinds of costs for new construction, plus the land and all of the permitting,” he said.
I am not sure how California is going to house all of the migrants that it says it wants to welcome. How many folks who show up in the U.S. not speaking English will earn enough to pay $2 million for a house (construction plus land costs) or $600,000 for a condo (construction plus land costs)? At current interest rates, the nerdwallet calculator says that a Californian earning $200,000 per year can afford a $675,000 house (Census.gov says that median household income in California is less than $80,000 per year).
From these same folks, I learned that the cost of a suite in one of Paris’s nicer hotels is normally $2,800 per night, but they were paying $2,100.
the venue where the conversation happened, a house that would cost a lot more than $500/sf to replicate. Note the visitor using a cloth mask to protect him/her/zir/theirself against an aerosol virus in one of the world’s most crowded indoor environments whose ventilation system was put in by Louis XIV and got its last significant upgrade in 1698. Was the trip to Versailles actually necessary or could he/she/ze/they have stayed home and saved lives?
cloth masks again… outside in the bright French sunshine:
and, because I know Mike will want to see this, one last Warrior for Science in a hall depicting heroes in various French battles (note failure to shave beard while attempting to seal out aerosols with a mask):
Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day, everyone! I hope that you’re celebrating with a new land acknowledgment.
Any time that we think about Native Americans we can also think about immigration, a process that certainly did not in any way replace Native Americans on what is today U.S. territory.
We are informed that low-skill migration into an advanced economy makes all native-born residents richer. At the same time, we are informed by low-skill migration into an advanced economy with ever-higher rents can lead to homelessness. See “From violence to homelessness: Colombian migrants’ journey to Silicon Valley” (San Jose Spotlight), for example.
Arias and Castillo, with an 8-year-old daughter and 1 1/2 -year-old son, had no option but to flee their homeland.
Arias and Castillo said they were sent to San Jose by ICE, which funded the trip. Others were led here by dishonest “guides” who claimed there would be resources for them, according to county officials.
It is “dishonest” to say that Californians who have “migrants welcome” signs on their lawns will actually welcome migrants?
With a language barrier and no idea where to find shelter or food, the family became homeless and ended up in Roosevelt Park in San Jose.
The county said many families arrive under a false impression that designated resources and housing are available. County officials have been working with the Colombian consulate on an education campaign.
“For folks who do not have status, there are limitations on what they’re eligible for—in housing or otherwise,” she said. “They should expect long waitlist on just about everything.”
Following a backlash from neighbors, city workers are recommending that San Jose back down from a proposal to build tiny homes for homeless residents on a controversial piece of land across the street from an elementary school — the latest indication of the daunting difficulties in combating homelessness.
As part of its goal to build more much-needed shelter for the city’s growing homeless population, the San Jose City Council voted this summer to move forward with tiny homes on Noble Avenue near the Penitencia Creek Trail that winds between the Dr. Robert Gross Ponds. But the city employees tasked with vetting the project now want councilmembers to reconsider. Citing “additional associated challenges” with the Noble Avenue site, Deputy City Manager Omar Passons said the location is not feasible.
… Passons’ findings are likely to elicit applause from neighbors who objected to the plan.
San Jose, which has more than 6,700 homeless residents, is leaning heavily on tiny homes as a strategy to mitigate its worsening homelessness crisis.
Nearly 3,500 people have signed a Change.org petition titled “Say NO to the homeless tiny homes on Noble Ave,” citing the need to preserve the “safety and peace of our children.” The site is across the street from Noble Elementary School.
Think of the children!
Speaking of Martha’s Vineyard, here are some members of the Vineyard Poverty Relief Committee walking over the Thames (from last week’s trip to London):
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?
California has some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation. Pre-coronapanic data from the New York Times:
California kids were nearly a year behind Texas kids, adjusted for demographics, even before California urban schools shut down for 1.5 years while Texas schools remained open.
One of the excuses that my California friends give for the poor quality of government services is that the state is starved for property tax revenue due to Proposition 13. Yet in this ranking of states by property tax collected per capita, California is at #14:
In addition to a state income tax that can reach 13.3 percent of income, in other words, California has a robust property tax revenue stream and a total state and local income tax burden of 13.5 percent (Tax Foundation), which is close to the highest in the nation.
Why is this interesting? Californians are the folks who like to say that they’ve figured out how government should work!
A friend teaches at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He described the continued impact of coronapanic at the school. Half of all class meetings can be via Zoom. Vaccine papers are checked to make sure that everyone has had at least three shots of the Sacrament of Fauci. Masks must be worn in the classroom by the triple-vaccinated teachers and students.
Masking is currently optionalexcept that it remains required in all indoor classroom/instructional settings, clinical areas, and on Triton/university transportation until further notice.
In addition, all students (regardless of vaccination status) must wear face masks within their residential unit except for their personal bedrooms or in the shower. Masks are also required when inside residential buildings and outside of students’ personal residential units in halls, elevators, lobbies, etc.
No need to wear a mask except when in a classroom or a dorm or some other places!
Professor Doctor My Friend, Ph.D. subscribes to receive text messages when there is a serious on-campus emergency, e.g., a fire or a chemical spill. Here’s one that woke him up a few days ago:
On 06/16/2022 at 11:28pm, the UC San Diego Police Department received a report of an Intimidation – Sexuality Orientation Bias, that occurred at UCSD Hillcrest Hospital on 06/13/2022 at 3:10pm. The reporting party stated that a person left multiple notes in their work space threatening their person and made derogatory comments toward their sexual orientation. The reporting party stated their co-worker received similar intimidation in a previous incident.
The middle-of-the-night message regarded an incident that occurred at a UCSD-owned hospital more than 10 miles from the main campus.
Happy Juneteeth, everyone! Last year, a reader pointed out that this is a holiday that celebrates white saviors so let’s look at Chesa Boudin, who became the ultimate white savior as the San Francisco District Attorney who wouldn’t prosecute anyone because prosecution is inherently racist. (Comment: “Juneteenth is the ultimate holiday for White Supremacy — it signals that blacks were incapable of independently securing their own freedom. They needed white men to fight other white men to free the hapless blacks from slavery.”)
On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.
A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.
Do we blame Chesa Boudin, though? Why not the Covidcrats that mostly shut down the city with no plans for a restart? It wasn’t Chesa Boudin who made it illegal for a person to be an office worker or for a tourist business to operate. What do the health stats look like when a city follows Science?
San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID.
How about the stats on redistribution of wealth?
About 70 percent of shoplifting cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15 percent did.
Immigrants are working hard in San Francisco’s best-known retail sector:
[Chesa Boudin] has suggested that many drug dealers in San Francisco are themselves vulnerable and in need of protection. “A significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco—perhaps as many as half—are here from Honduras,” he said in a 2020 virtual town hall. “We need to be mindful about the impact our interventions have … Some of these young men have been trafficked here under pain of death. Some of them have had family members in Honduras who have been or will be harmed if they don’t continue to pay off the traffickers.”
The author, who is generally hostile to the direction that San Francisco has taken, follows this paragraph by stressing her agreement with the principle that all migrants must be cherished:
Of course there is good in what Boudin was trying to do. … No one wants immigrants’ relatives to be killed by MS-13.
Being 2SLGBTQQIA+ is not sufficient. A person must be 2SLGBTQQIA+ and of color in order to be selected:
One night in 2021, the [school board] meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee. Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white. “My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”
San Franciscans came up with a good name for the University of Xbox:
In February 2021, [school board] board members agreed that they would avoid the phrase learning loss to describe what was happening to kids locked out of their classrooms. Instead they would use the words learning change. Schools being shut just meant students were “having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” Gabriela López, a member of the board at the time, said. “They are learning more about their families and their cultures.” Framing this as some kind of “deficit” was wrong, the board argued.
New York City collapsed financially and from a quality of life point of view back in the 1970s. But Wall Street generated so much money that eventually NYC got it back together. The city government couldn’t waste every dime. San Francisco also has near-infinite money so presumably it should be able to recover from any missteps (even if the children who were denied a year of education will never fully recover from that).
What does the recovery look like, though? And what are our criteria for determining if a recovery has occurred? No more tents on the sidewalks? No more open-air drug markets?
My prediction is that the current residents of the city never recover from the mess that they’ve made for themselves. They never learn that all of the stuff they’re complaining about is actually stuff that they voted for. What happens is that they get replaced. Not only the Honduran drug dealers mentioned in the article move in, but also young nerds to slave away for the tech companies. The replacement process takes 7 years and then maybe it takes another 3 years for the city government to change. So the things that today’s white Progressives in SF complain about are mostly gone by 2032.
