Posts Tagged ‘Alameda County’

LinkSwarm for May 26, 2023

Friday, May 26th, 2023

More woke going broke, San Francisco is (still) a shithole, and Baggage Claim Fight Club. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!


  • “FBI Concerned Jan. 6 Footage Would Expose Undercover Agents, Informants.” You don’t say.
  • “Layoffs are hitting HR and DEI teams at a disproportionately high rate.” Couldn’t happen to a nicer profession. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Target loses $9 billion in market cap for trying to tranny dress toddlers. I would boycott them over that, but I was already boycotting them over the tranny bathrooms.
  • “Innocent Multi-Billion Dollar Corporation Ruthlessly Attacked By People Not Giving Them Money.”
  • Bud Light sales drop another 25%.
  • Soros-backed Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price lets man off with no jail time despite him setting a man on fire with a blowtorch. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “‘There’s Poop Everywhere’: San Francisco’s Office District Not Only A Ghost Town, It’s Also Covered In Sh*t.”

    Everyone knows that San Francisco is the nation’s largest public toilet – requiring the city to employ six-figure ‘poop patrol’ cleanup team, however a new report from the city Controller’s Office really puts things in poo-spective.

    For starters, feces were found far more often in commercial sectors, covering “approximately 50% of street segments in Key Commercial Areas and 30% in the Citywide survey,” second only to broken glass as can be seen in the ‘illegal dumping’ section.

    If you’re wondering about the city’s fecal methodology, look no further than a footnote on page 43;

    Feces also includes bags filled with feces that are not inside trash receptacles. Feces that are spread or smeared on the street, sidewalk, or other objects along the evaluation route are counted. Stains that appear to be related to feces but have been cleaned are not counted. Bird droppings are excluded.

    As far as where most of the poo is found, Nob Hill takes the top spot, followed by the Tenderloin and The Mission districts.

    (Previously.)

  • “After California health authorities in 2014 imposed a mandate requiring requiring churches to provide elective abortion coverage to its employees, four churches sued, and after a long court battle, have now won a $1.4 million settlement.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “The University of Texas at Austin spends more than $13 million on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) salaries for close to 200 jobs.”
  • Cycling bans men from women’s competition. Another sentence that shouldn’t have to be written…
  • FDA bans farmers from caring for their own animals with antibiotics. Man, it sure seems like our elites are trying to destroy the food supply… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The DeSantis campaign raised $8.2 million raised within 24 hours of announcing his presidential run.
  • In a classic case of bad timing, Tim Scott also announced that he’s running for president. I don’t see him making much headway against Trump or DeSantis, but he’s a serious veepstakes contender.
  • C. Boyden Gray, RIP. Among his most important tasks was spearheading the campaign for Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court.
  • Sudden Putin Death Syndrome strikes again.
  • It’s weird to be on the same side of an issue as Taco Bell. Namely that no one should be able to trademark “Taco Tuesday.”
  • Citing air-worthiness concerns, the FAA grounds the…B-17? Good to know they’re finally working through that 1946 backlog… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The first rule of baggage claim fight club is you don’t talk about baggage claim fight club. The second rule of baggage claim fight club is that the blue zone is for loading and unloading only.
  • What is it like to cross the Darien Gap by car? A green hell.
  • A really amazing BattleBots match.
  • “Dodgers Summon Satan To Throw Out First Pitch At Pride Night.”
  • Elon Musk Threatens To Move Tesla To Texas

    Sunday, May 10th, 2020

    Elon Musk has finally had enough of California’s business-hostile tax and regulatory environment:

    Recall just days ago we reported that Tesla was sending people back to work at its Fremont factory in Alameda County before the area’s lockdown expired.

    Late last week, Alameda County responded by telling Musk that he could not re-open his factory. “We have not given the green light. We have been working with them looking at some of their safety plans. But no, we have not said that it is appropriate to move forward,” Erica Pan, interim health officer for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said on an online town hall meeting on Friday.

    That was enough to trigger a total Elon Musk meltdown. The CEO, who has been going off on diatribes about civil liberties on conference calls and podcasts alike, Tweeted out on Saturday that he is going to be suing Alameda County for not allowing him to re-open

    The question is what took him so long. Thanks to one party Democratic rule, California constantly ranks as one of the worst states to do business in. High taxes and a brutal regulatory environment made California prohibitively expense to do business in long before the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown provided the final straw.

    Musk’s tweet attracted some attention:

    Is this just a negotiating ploy to pressure the county into allowing Tesla to resume manufacturing? Possibly. But plenty of companies have already moved operations from California to Texas, including Toyota, Kubota, and Charles Schwab. And that exodus just keeps continuing.

    I used to do a regular Texas vs. California update, detailing how bad California’s business climate was and detailing all the California businesses going bankrupt or moving to Texas. Eventually I got so far behind that the in-progress post simply got too huge to finish. (And this was right around the time I started doing the Clown Car Update, which sucked up huge amounts of my time.) And then the Wuhan Coronavirus came along to wallop everyone’s economy, so most of those links are probably moot. I have a very strong suspicion that ending the unreasonable lockdown conditions earlier than most states will help Texas recover more strongly, and increase it’s lead as a business-friendly environment over California.