Tag: san francisco

How stupidly obvious WAS this end result of the San Francisco minimum wage hike?

So stupidly obvious that the English major was telling you* this would happen ahead of time.  That’s really stupidly obvious, for those following at home: we’re widely known for being not very good at math.  At any rate, let us go now to AEI, which is shaking its darn head over what happened to Chipotle restaurants in San Francisco:

• San Francisco, however, saw across-the-board price increases averaging over 10%, including 10% increases on chicken, carnitas (pork), sofritas (tofu), and vegetarian entrees along with a 14% increase on steak and barbacoa.We believe the outsized San Francisco price hike was likely because of increased minimum wages (which rose by 14% from $10.74 per hour to $12.25 on May 1) as well as scheduled minimum wage increases in future years (to $13 next year, $14 in 2017, and $15 in 2018).

Continue reading How stupidly obvious WAS this end result of the San Francisco minimum wage hike?

San Francisco cop accused of running inmate fight ring.

If this is true: …what the Hell? “San Francisco sheriff’s deputy Scott Neu is accused of leading a ring of corrupt jail guards who coerced prisoners into gladiatorial combat with threats of rape and violence.” I mean, what the pluperfect Hell?  Is civilization optional in California, or something?

More here, including a defense attorney making a lot of noise about how all of this is untrue.  For for the benefit of Western society, let’s hope so. Just don’t… count on it.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

PS: Seriously, can we have this one be BS? Pretty please, with sugar on top? – Because that would be spiffy, thanks.

Nancy Pelosi – Shock! Surprise! – to profit from San Fran Light Rail deal.

As they say: it’s not what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal.  This probably was legal:

The top Democrat in the House of Representatives steered more than a billion dollars in subsidies to a light rail project that benefitted a company run by a high-dollar Democratic donor and in which her husband is a major investor.

When cloud computing giant Salesforce sold a large plot of land to the Golden State Warriors in April, it had House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) to thank for helping to swell real estate prices in the area.

Pelosi has worked for more than a decade to steer taxpayer funds to a light rail project in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, where Salesforce had planned a new campus. Experts say the project boosted the value of Mission Bay real estate.

…and while I could even be persuaded that it wasn’t the most awful thing in the world (real estate deals involving new roads and railroads have not always stood up under scrutiny, to put it so mildly I don’t even know that there’s actually any ‘it’ there to put), I will be damned if I will simply accept Nancy Pelosi doing this, and then lecturing me on… well, OK, everything.  But good governance in particular.  Of course, I originally wrote ‘tolerate:’ but unfortunately I kind of have to, at least until the woman retires…

Bureaucracy triumphant, San Franscisco ice cream parlor edition.

I’m not sure that Cory Doctorow quite understands the true message of the video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QOreHYVTHGA

…although I’m pretty sure that Glenn Reynolds does. Doctorow linked to this as part of his rapid-blink reaction to the number of hoops (both in terms of time and money) that small businesses have to go through in order to start a business in the iconic-Blue city of San Francisco.  To summarize: would-be small business operators can expect delays of years and several hundred thousand dollars in costs.  It’s so bad that the San Francisco planning department itself hates the process: yes, that video is from an official city government office.  But changing it… well.  They’re considering changes to streamline the process. Continue reading Bureaucracy triumphant, San Franscisco ice cream parlor edition.

#rsrh No, wait, this is the QoTD.

Jeff Goldstein, on the… Foreskin Man… comic book, which is precisely as bad as a cynical reader of the Internet might wearily supposed it to be.  If you’re wondering why the heck that I’m showing you that, by the way – it’s because banning male circumcision is on the ballot in San Francisco, and one of the groups pushing it produces the aforementioned comic book.  Really, it’s not satire: as RS McCain noted, Andrew Sullivan is a noted anti-male circumcision advocate, which should tell you right there that they’re reliably nuts.

Anyway, Jeff writes:

Incidentally, when we said never again? We meant it.

Fair warning.

The hope is that San Francisco isn’t quite this inane – I originally meant to write ‘insane,’ but this works too – but then, hope is not a plan.  God bless ’em, but that city thinks up the most damfool things, sometimes.

Moe Lane

PS: Don’t bother: it’s just going to go right to spam.

“ROGUE SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION EMPLOYEES!”

…Hey, don’t blame me (or Ed Driscoll); I’m just quoting the San Francisco Chronicle. And, let me tell you: the scam that the Chronicle is… chronicling… is stellar, for its kind.

This is how it works: say you’re a company that wants to do business with the city of San Francisco.  But there’s a small problem; San Francisco is full of not only liberals, but very, very earnest liberals who want to be engaged in the political process.  This leads to a certain mindset* that thinks that it is just dandy to make government conform to the wishes of its populace in things like procurement and acceptable vendors – whether or not the wishes of the populace have any bearing on modern economic realities.  To give just one example: San Francisco insists that corporations doing business with it disclose if they were ever involved with slavery… which would be an impressive moral stance to take if it weren’t for the minor detail that they never seem to require that sort of thing from, say, the Democratic party.

But I digress.

Continue reading “ROGUE SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION EMPLOYEES!”

SF throws a protest and everybody comes.

Good God but this hurts my head:

If you can’t watch that video, it’s of the San Francisco protest against Obama… which had freaking everybody. And I mean everybody: they had the full protest spectrum out*. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard conservatives chant “Hey hey ho ho: Barbara Boxer’s got to go.” At least, I think that’s what they were chanting.

Fausta also links to Zombie, who has more pictures of the protest. The very, very surreal protest.

Moe Lane Continue reading SF throws a protest and everybody comes.

Vision past, vision future: San Francisco 1906.

What struck me about this video….


(Via Car Lust, via Instapundit)

…was the way that people kept apparently stopping to stare at the viewer. It puzzled me, until I realized that they were staring at the motion picture camera, which of course in 1906 was this marvelous new technological wonder that promised to change the world… and didn’t it, just? We’re just so used to the effects now that we don’t really contemplate what it’s like to have a history that can be replayed and re-experienced…

An update on the San Francisco Shoeshine Man.

I suppose that I should be happy about the update to Larry Moore’s situation – after all, they’re letting the man work – but, frankly, I’m still missing how life is improved by requiring Mr. Moore to shell out five hundred dollars for the privilege of being allowed to rejoin Western civilization. I think that we should be curing the disease, not the symptom – and while it’s nice that they’re being accommodating about the paperwork, I’d rather that they gave some serious thought to why they have the paperwork in the first place.

I’d also like to note that if Mr. Moore was less pleasant he’d probably be still stuck in this mess. Not to be bone-crushingly naive about the way things work, but just because that does make a difference doesn’t mean that it should, or that it’s right that it does.

Alerted to this from the guy over at Technomancy for Fun and Profit.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Ensuring that the poor are always with us, San Francisco edition.

(Via Don Surber, via Glenn Reynolds) Witness what happens when a San Francisco beggar gets ideas above his station:

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It’s a reminder of how he has turned things around.

In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month’s rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.

[snip]

The bureaucrat told Moore that she found out about his business after reading about his success in this paper.

The article goes on to write this line: “Christine Falvey, spokeswoman for Public Works, said the department’s contact with Moore was meant to be “educational.”” – and truer words were never written. It is very educational to see that Jerry Pournelle‘s observation that bureaucracies formed to help poor people end up with a vested interest in making sure that there will always be poor people is as cynically true as ever.  I would also like to note that if the San Fransciscan permitting system requires that people trying to claw their way out of alcoholic hell to rejoin the rest of society jump through these kinds of hoops, then the San Franciscan permitting system has failed, and needs to be taken out to an abandoned field and set on fire.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.