Pro Commerce

What happened to citywide wi-fi?

Remember a few years ago when a dozen cities around the United States were excited about being entirely wired for wi-fi?  It was supposed to be a big draw for high tech, a big plus for urban appeal.

We also had half a dozen private companies and groups of hackers promising to do the same thing.  What happened?

Its not here yet. 

Maybe this is one of those things that it is best to leave to private citizens dealing with private utility companies. Maybe this is one of the many things government just can't do.

Pure pleasure for me

Some people are ecstatic about mushrooms, others about chocolate and still others about high heel shoes.  For me my kinkiest pleasure is vote counting.

Therefore I have to thank the Wall Street Journal for bringing me one of my greatest pleasures: Karl Rove.  This week Karl gives us the vote count for the 2012 redistricting.

In my early life in politics I was an important vote counter.  I learned the skills from Mary Lou Green (who died last year). Mary Lou was a regal San Franciscan with a national reputation.

I did the vote count for  three state Republican conventions and one national convention.  The vote counter is the focal point of all gossip, tactical planning and messaging.

Rove gives us the state by state vote count. He makes it clear that the current Obama meltdown will bolster the Republican party for the coming ten years after re-apportionment. Far more important than the mid-term reversal that looks so imminent.

What does law enforcement do?

A recent columnist in San Francisco reminded me that this city has had a variety of police chiefs, the most recent one, Fong, was completely incompetent.  The city has had two pathetic District Attorneys for a total of 14 years, one a complete fall down drunk, both running a totally incompetent DA's office.

And yet, like every other city in the U.S. crime has gone down for nearly 20 years, except for a blip in gang related homicides.

The San Francisco police force was limited to 1,500 officers by city charter until the 1980s (I can't find the date the limit on police was removed) and is now 2,300. The number and competence of law enforcement has been erratic and barely competent if it existed at all.

From my understanding of law enforcement, based on experience, we need a a core of police administrators to take phone calls reporting crimes and report statistics (maybe 50 people) and we need a group of uniformed officers to respond to crime reports and citizen calls (maybe 150).  A total police department of 200.

The D.A.s office could operate similarly with a core of administrators and a group of hired private attorneys. Maybe 50 administrators.

I doubt that crime or crime data would be any different with tiny numbers of police and a small District Attorney's office.

Apologies to my fellow citizens

The citizens I'm apologizing to are my fellow San Franciscans.  We have the most dysfunctional local government in America, excluding Detroit, Oakland and New Orleans.

But my fellow citizens who created this mess, inadvertently, know the way out. 

"The poll of 500 San Francisco voters was conducted by David Binder Research (a good researcher).... asked people whether they would support a hybrid system of electing supervisors, in which seven would be elected from districts and four citywide. The finding: 48 percent in favor, 36 percent opposed."

We now have 11 supervisors elected by district.  The hybrid, which I have been proposing locally for many years, would fix most problems in a a few years.

Photo of Phil Jones

Here is a photo of Phil Jones, former head of the East Anglia climate Research Unit CRU.  It was his emails to and from Michael Mann that have embarrassed every honest scientist on the planet.

Worse, if you are still in the rapture of global warming hysteria you should think about two statements Phil Jones made on BBC last week: the global temperature has been flat for 15 years.  (That is 3 years more than I saw in his data.) and the hockey stick (showing the first steep rise in temperature in thousands of years) was wrong, global temperatures may have been higher than today in the medieval period. 

Understand? Global warming is not human caused and to the slight extent it may have occurred it is transient.

What is/are the immigrant value(s)?

America has always been schizophrenic about immigrants and immigration. On the one hand we welcome immigration because it means we are an open country, which the people of the world dream of and which offers opportunity for hard work and persistence.

On the other hand we believe immigrants take jobs from residents and are disproportionately indigent.

The first is true, the second is not, but no amount of studies will convince Americans, it is an ideology first generated by labor unions.  Apparently no amount of reliable data will change it.

The chart on the right shows the ten most common names on the home titles in the San Francisco Bay Area in the past year (and ten years earlier).  It isn't just Asians who have taken advantage of American society's rewards for hard work, There is a Garcia on the 1999 list.  the most amazing names are Nguyen and Tran.  These are Vietnamese names.  These are the people and their descendants who came to the Bay Area after the end of the Vietnam War in 1970.  That is astounding success. 

We should be proud of America and we should welcome immigrants... openly and unabashedly and particularly from Asia.

America in recession

I have been a fraction off in keeping my readers informed on the nature of the economy.   I have been living in San Francisco where business was steady in late '08 and started growing in '09 for the entire year.  I called the rise in the stock market correctly in February '09 and the turn around of the economy at the same time.

One of my errors was looking at the GDP in current dollars.  The economic peak was August of '08 and the bottom was February '09. The drop was no greater than 3%. Insignificant by historic standards.

Trouble is, when we adjust for inflation, the downturn began in June '08 and lasted to the same February '09.  The drop, inflation adjusted was 4%, still not much.

I came across these chart in Forbes which calls to my attention what we all know, that employment fell off more than in the past and has risen much slower than in past recessions. Particularly slow for younger people, those with only high school educations, men and blacks.

That tells me what I have been saying for some time.  We are now reaping the rewards of astounding increases in productivity that occurred in the past 15 years, which is why people with fewer skills are the ones who were laid off first and are being replaced last. 

The Forbes chart on fixed capital investment says two things: the major productivity gains occurred in the past 15 years, there aren't many fresh new ones immediately available.

And, most importantly, the Federal stimulus package, which passed in mid-February 2009, passed after the bottom of the recession had happened.... certainly the economy used Federal dollars to compete with private dollars.  In short and in plain English, which we don't hear from the current liars in Washington, the stimulus package made the economy worse and the labor market much worse.