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The Luddites Are Back Again
What would you say if someone figured out a way to reduce congestion by taking vans off the roads, reduce pollution, increase convenience, and reduce costs while helping the elderly and disabled by delivering groceries and meals to their doors? Maybe a gesture of gratitude or a pat on the back for making life better
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Midtown Park Apartments Belongs to its Residents
It’s a unique property in the city. Not a public housing project, but controlled by the city government, which collects rent from the folks living there. Resident tenents say their units are supposed to have been transferred to tenant ownership, and according to a 2015 SF Weekly story, they are correct: “The Midtown Park Apartments,
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Exclusive Extortion
Did you read about AB 119, signed into law by Governor Brown on June 27? Probably not, even though California voters clearly voiced their preference for transparency when they overwhelmingly approved Prop 54 last year, which was supposed to give the public a 72-hour notice before a bill became law. AB 119 was one of
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Non-Existent Neo-Nazi Threat Was An Overtime Bonanza
What a boon the recent, fizzled, right-wing protests in San Francisco turned out to be in providing municipal authorities with a ready-made excuse to waste a bunch of taxpayer money paying overtime wages to government employees – “The fascists made us do it!” SFIST reports that the excessive police response to the non-event cost the
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A Man’s Castle
When is your property not really your property? If you don’t pay your property taxes, you’ll soon discover a lien has been placed on your property by the county assessor, so in a sense, your property is only yours if you pay your property taxes. Now, what if you decide to rent out your property?
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One-Stop Shopping?
What is the City & County of San Francisco’s solution to the problem of its bloated bureaucracy? Consider cutting back to essential services and lowering taxes and letting The City’s residents pick and choose the projects they choose to support? No, our leaders feel hiring more bureaucrats and paying them high salaries makes more sense.
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The Politics of Algebra
Is the college algebra requirement a “civil rights issue”? Eloy Ortiz Oakley, Chancellor of California Community Colleges, thinks so. He wants to eliminate the requirement for non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors to get an AA degree or transfer to a four-year college in California. He said, “If you think about all the underemployed
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“Finishing The Job”
For a change, we have something good to report: SB 562, The Healthy California Act, a bill proposed to make single-payer healthcare a reality in California, was shelved by Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon on June 23 when he decided that the proposed bill will remain in the Assembly Rules Committee until further notice. The bill,
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The Banning Board
As usual, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors feels the need to act like our mothers and fathers. Recently they voted unanimously to ban the sale of flavored nicotine-based liquid used in e-cigarettes and flavored tobacco products in San Francisco. The justification of the ban is that nicotine masked in fruity flavors like cotton candy, banana
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Disorderly Astronauts
“From the first day of the first congress at the moment of the passage of the first law, we became weaker. The extra-large B. Franklin said it well that you can test the strength of a society by the paucity of the pages in its book of laws. Today we are surrounded by laws—Tax Law,