The Racism-Free Utopia Is Rural MAGA Land

April 13th, 2021

Funny how social justice warrior types always claim they’re fighting racism, but John Nolte says the most racism-free areas of America can be found in rural MAGA Land:

Life in Rural America (which is where Republican Trump voters live and govern), is clean, safe and racially tolerant. Most places in America where life is dirty, polluted, dangerous, violent, and plagued with racial hate and race riots, are cities that are almost exclusively populated by and governed by Democrats.

Outside of these Democrat-run cities, America is peaceful, safe, clean, and racially tolerant.

What’s more, if you remove these Democrat-run cities from our national statistics, you will find an America that is overwhelmingly peaceful, safe, clean, and racially tolerant.

Nevertheless, Democrats and their fake-media allies still blame Republicans for all of their problems.

According to them, it is Republicans who are responsible for racism, pollution, and gun violence — even though, out here where we all live, our air, water, and streets are safe and clean… We all own guns, but where we live there is no gun violence crisis… We are all supposed to be racists and responsible for all the hate crimes, but out here where we all live, there is no hate crime crisis.

Now, there will be exceptions, but those exceptions only serve to prove the rule.

Let me lay this out for you…

Leftists say they want to live in a Utopia free of gun violence, free of pollution, and free of racism…

Well, that place already exists.

It’s called Rural MAGA Land.

Out here in Rural America the environment is clean, no one worries about getting shot, and there are no racial tensions.

Let me start with a personal example…

For a total of 20 years now, I’ve lived in rural North Carolina. My wife is a Mexican immigrant. Our interracial marriage has never been a problem with anyone. My wife has never had a problem with anyone.

For six years, my next door neighbor was a mixed-race family. Black and white. They never had a problem.

On the other side of me is a couple with mixed-race grandkids. Black, white, and brown. They’ve never had a problem.

Riddle me this fake-media and Democrats: If Rural America is where all the racists are supposed to live, where’s all the racism in Rural America?

Everyone I know out here in Rural MAGA Land owns guns (plural), and yet I can’t remember the last time we had a shooting in my county, a county where shoplifting still makes the front page.

He also includes some eye-opening hate crime statistics:

According to the Department of Justice, out here where I live in rural North Carolina, throughout all of 2019, there were a total of only 20 hate crime allegations in our 13 rural counties where the population adds up to 668,000. That means that throughout 2019, there were only 2.9 hate crime allegations per 100,000 people.

Guess what the hate crime number is in some of the most progressive, left-wing cities in America? Well, you don’t have to guess, because I have those numbers for you….

  • Portland, OR = 5.75 reported hate crime incidents per 100,000
  • Boulder, CO = 7.9 incidents per 100,000
  • San Francisco, CA = 7.2 incidents per 100,000
  • Portland, OR = 5.2 incidents per 100,000
  • Alexandria, VA = 3.1 incidents per 100,000
  • Arlington, VA = 4.7 incidents per 100,000
  • Seattle, WA = 40 (not a typo) per 100,000
  • Washington DC = 29 (not a typo) incidents per 100,000 (this is where the elite media live LOL)
  • I think you are starting to get the point, but let’s close with my personal favorite…

  • Berkeley, CA = 6.5 per 100,000
  • Keep in mind that I think “hate crimes” are mostly bunk. But clearly, such crimes are far more prevalent in SJW hotbeds like Seattle and Portland than they are in rural America.

    Clearly social justice warriors make race relations worse.

    Plus some eye-opening statistics on crime:

    Except for Jacksonville and Indianapolis (which have had both Republican and Democrat rule in recent years), every one of America’s most murderous cities has been run exclusively by Democrats for decades, and not a single one of those cities — not one! — has been run exclusively by Republicans.

    Here’s a list of 2020’s top ten most dangerous cities per capita (violent crime incidents per 100,000 residents) and which party runs those cities… Spoiler alert: Democrats.

    1. Detroit – 1,965 per 100,000 – Democrats have run Detroit since 1962
    2. St. Louis – 1,927 per 100,000 – Democrats have run St. Louis since 1949
    3. Memphis – 1,901 per 100,000 – Democrats have run Memphis since 1992
    4. Baltimore – 1,859 per 100,000 – Democrats have run Baltimore since 1967
    5. Springfield (MO) – 1,519 per 100,000 – mayoral office is non-partisan, but the city is left-leaning
    6. Little Rock – 1,517 per 100,000 – ruled by Democrats for decades
    7. Cleveland – 1,517 per 100,000 – Ruled by Democrats since 1990
    8. Stockton – 1,397 per 100,000 – Alternates between GOP and Dem mayors.
    9. Albuquerque – 1,352 per 100,000 – One Republican since 1985
    10. Milwaukee – 1,332 per 100,000 – Only Socialist and Democrat mayors since 1906

    Read the whole thing.

    The Building Austin Policing Crisis

    April 12th, 2021

    Many of the cities that defunded police last year in a fit of social justice warrior-endorsed madness have reversed course once crime rates started spiraling. But Austin’s hard-left City Council seems stuck on stupid.

    After the Austin police budget cut on top of the repeal of the public camping ban, Austin crime and disorder has gotten measurably worse. Austin police are also leaving in droves:

    After the Austin city council voted unanimously to defund its police department by about one-third of its budget, in August 2020, many predicted that once the cuts kicked in a flood of officers would leave the force as soon as they could. The new district attorney’s policy of re-investigating police officers for closed cases is also expected to cause officers to resign or retire.

    The city council’s cuts officially kicked in and have been in place for a few months.

    PJ Media reports exclusively that APD is now suffering a huge surge of officer departures putting it on pace to shatter 2020’s record.

    In January 2021, sources tell PJ Media 20 officers retired from APD and eight resigned, for a total of 28 departures.

    In February 2021, five officers resigned and six retired, according to multiple sources, for a total of 11 departures.

    In March 2021, 24 more officers left APD, with 20 officers retiring. Additionally, three officers resigned and one was terminated.

    To put this into perspective, 2019 was the last non-pandemic year and the year before the city council cut APD’s budget. APD averages about 50 retirements or separations in a calendar year, and replaces them with cadets who have graduated from the police academy or officers who join APD from another force.

    APD saw 46 officers retire with another 22 resigning in 2019, according to local TV news station KVUE.

    2020’s numbers were exacerbated by the George Floyd riots; 78 officers departed or retired from APD from the beginning of those riots to the end of 2020, for a total of 89 separations, according to KVUE.

    Official 2021 numbers provided to PJ Media by the Austin Police Retirement System (APRS) break down as follows:

    • Prior to 2020, retirements averaged 50-52 per year over the last 5-6 years
    • Record number of retirements in FY 2020: 97
    • First-quarter 2021 retirements: 45

    Add to those 45 retirements the 18 resignations or terminations, for a total of 63 separations in just the first quarter of 2021. If the current pace continues, APD could lose approximately 252 officers — about five times the average number of separations for a year. This will impact public safety across the board, and according to the APRS, can impact retirees’ benefits as well. APRS raised the alarm about the impact the city council’s cuts could have in September of 2020.

    March 2021’s retirements hit all over the department, including tactical intelligence, gang crimes, narcotics enforcement, investigations, and the bomb squad, according to a full list provided to PJ Media. Traffic enforcement — both warnings and citations — has declined by more than 60% in the first two months of 2021, a source tells PJ Media.

    At the same time, the city council’s cuts have forced the cancellation of police cadet classes. The department is losing experienced officers in droves and is unable to replace them with new officers.

    Fewer officers means fewer officers to cover 911 calls, to the point that some 911 calls now result in “NUA”s: No Officer Available:

    The situation is made worse by the fact that hard-left Travis County DA Jose Garza has announced he’s not prosecuting drug crimes, but is keen on indicting Austin police officers on even minor infractions:

    Indicting police officers who have committed crimes is proper. Referring every allegation against a police officer to a grand jury—a promise Garza repeatedly made as a candidate–is not. It is not proper because it is not how allegations against all others are handled. Singling out persons based on their status is discriminatory and, ironically, itself an abuse of power. Such overt antagonism against law enforcement undoubtedly will erode cooperation between APD and the DA’s office and impact adversely criminal justice in Austin generally.

    Garza clearly wants to promote a perception that police misconduct will not be tolerated and successfully indicting APD officers might serve that purpose. Failure to prosecute after indictment, however, ultimately will undermine public trust and confidence in Garza and his office. Garza’s hostility toward police can also engender public animosity toward APD as an organization. Effective policing requires community support. To the extent Garza persists in attacking APD as racist and corrupt, social and racial divisions will worsen and impede cooperation.

    Snip.

    Garza’s anti-law enforcement campaign closely resembled those of other Soros-backed socialist candidates for district attorney around the country. He promised to abolish the requirement of bail, to ignore laws he does not like and violations of those laws. He promised immunity to persons for conduct he considered status crimes. He promised to discriminate against police and to treat immigrants more favorably than citizens. Based on the actual policies of those DA’s elected in other large cities, it was entirely predictable that Garza would follow suit. My campaign sought to warn voters of the threat to public safety and security as evidenced by deteriorating conditions in cities like San Francisco, Portland and Chicago. Because Garza is an ideologue, he will not be deterred by the harm his policies will surely cause our community. He is more committed to his ideology than the rule of law.

    Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? Some. Face with rising murder rates, the Austin City Council finally relented and is allowing a new APD cadet class to be trained, though it looks like they’re going to try to cram “more community involvement” (a codeword for more far-left social justice warrior meddling) into the curriculum. And various bills are winding their way through the Texas legislature to address Austin’s idiocy.

    A huge improvement, of course, will happen if Proposition B passes on May 1st. But expect Austin policing to continue to get short shrift as long as Garza, Austin mayor Steve Adler and the current City Council remain in office.

    .50 BMG SLAP, Raufoss Rounds vs. Body Armor

    April 11th, 2021

    In my continuing series of “Videos of .50 BMG Rounds Hitting Things Make Great Lazy Blog Fodder,” here’s Kentucky Ballistics testing SLAP, Raufoss, and other exotic .50 BMG rounds against body armor plates.

    Other entries in the series:

  • .50 BMG vs. Body Armor
  • .50 BMG vs. Heavy Metal
  • .50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs.
  • .50 BMG vs. Lock
  • .50 BMG vs. Printer Paper Reams
  • Dan Crenshaw Undergoes Eye Surgery

    April 10th, 2021

    Texas Republican U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw has undergone emergency surgery on his remaining good eye:

    Representative Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) announced that he received emergency surgery on his left eye on Friday, which will leave the congressman “effectively blind” for the next month.

    Crenshaw said he noticed blurry spots in his vision over the past few days, and was informed by an ophthalmologist that his retina was detaching. The congressman’s right eye was destroyed in an IED explosion while on a 2012 deployment in Afghanistan, and his left eye also required surgery after being injured in the blast.

    The Friday surgery “went well, but I will be effectively blind for about a month,” Crenshaw said in a statement on Saturday morning in which he thanked the medical team who conducted the operation. “During the surgery they put a gas bubble in my eye, which acts as a bandage for my retina. This means I have to be face-down for the next week or so, unable to see anything.”

    Crenshaw added that his congressional offices in Washington, D.C., and Houston would continue to operate normally.

    Here’s Crenshaw’s tweet about the surgery:

    “This is a terrifying prognosis for someone with one eye, and the nature of the injuries that I sustained in Afghanistan. Anyone who knows the history of my injuries knows that I don’t have a ‘good eye,’ but half a good eye.”

    Best wishes to Rep. Crenshaw for a speedy recovery.

    LinkSwarm for April 9, 2021

    April 9th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Lying media and Biden’s Border Crisis dominates news this week:

    

  • 60 Minutes proves that they’re lying scumbags again:

    CBS’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an exchange that reporter Sharyn Alfonsi had with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) two weeks ago about the way the Sunshine State has rolled out its vaccination program.

    In the clip, Alfonsi suggested that Publix, the largest grocery store chain in Florida, had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with DeSantis where they donated money to his campaign in exchange for him awarding a contract to the grocery store chain to host vaccinations.

    CBS edited the interaction between DeSantis and Alfonsi when she showed up to a press conference a few weeks ago and repeatedly confronted the governor. The network cut out a lengthy portion of DeSantis’ response in which he explains what happened and how decisions were made.

  • The editing hit job was so egregious that even Palm Beach County’s Democratic Mayor Dave Kerner slammed it. “The reporting was not just based on bad information — it was intentionally false.”
  • What is it about tranny panders that it makes Republican governor’s destroy their careers defending them?

    The Arkansas General Assembly voted Tuesday to enact a ban on gender transition surgery for minors, overriding a veto by Governor Asa Hutchinson.

    Arkansas is the first state to ban transition surgery for minors, although similar legislation is under consideration in other states. The bill also prohibits doctors in Arkansas from administering hormones or puberty blockers to residents under age 18.

    Here’s a word to every single Republican office holder in America: this is not an optional fight. You fight on this hill or we’ll replace you with someone who will.

  • Remember how President Trump “detaining kids in cages” was the Worst Thing In The World? Well, Joe Biden is detaining 18,000 illegal alien minors, almost seven times as many. And Democrats aren’t uttering a peep of protest because they never really cared about those kids anyway, they just wanted to: A.) Bash Trump, and B.) Open up the border so they can amnesty a new wave of illegals as Democratic Party voters.
  • “Texas Governor Greg Abbott Orders Texas Rangers to Investigate Joe Biden Detention Facility for Sex Crimes Against Children.” It’s like Abbott has been in hibernation for six months and finally woke up last week.
  • Speaking of illegal aliens: “New York is reportedly going to spend $2.1 Billion on a fund to give illegal aliens COVID relief payments up to $15,600 per person.” Did any of these Democrats actively campaign on giving taxpayer money to illegal aliens? It’s like they want to live down to the most outlandish Republican parodies of Democrats.
  • Since Democrats will cry “racist!” no matter what, you might as well pass the strongest election reform and Voter ID laws you possibly can.
  • Related: “MOVE Texas Launches $100,000 Ad Campaign To Fight Against Election Integrity. Is this MOVE related to the crazy Philadelphia MOVE? I wanted to do some research into this but haven’t had the time.
  • Pennsylvania finally agrees to remove the dead from its voter rolls. Presumably the Pennsylvania Democratic Party will now removed BRAINS from their list of promised subsidies. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Trump adviser Stephen Miller (AKA “Not RedSteeze”) wants to launch his own lawfare group against Democrats. Good. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Liberal writer Thomas Frank says that fellow liberals are deluding themselves if they think “misinformation” is the source of all their problems and censorship is the answer:

    In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.

    What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.

    (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.)

  • 48 Of 79 ‘Catastrophic Climate Change’ Predictions Have Failed…The Other 31 Just Haven’t Expired Yet.”
  • Hmmmm:

  • New York wants to raise its tax rates higher than most European countries.
  • Largest Meth Seizure In Miami History Brings Cartel Arrests.”

    Authorities have charged Adalberto Fructuoso Comparan-Rodriguez, whose nickname is “Fruto,” the former mayor of Aguililla, Mexico, and the reported leader of the United Cartels in Michoacán, Mexico, with drug trafficking crimes, according to the indictment.

    Alfonso Rustrian, of Mexico, has also been charged as a co-conspirator. Another four defendants were charged for their roles in the alleged methamphetamine scheme.

    According to court filings, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian met in Cali, Colombia, with whom they believed were members of Hezbollah but were actually undercover DEA agents. Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian agreed to send 1,100 pounds of methamphetamine from Mexico through Texas to the Miami area, according to the charges.

    Once the meth arrived in Miami, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian allegedly cracked open the concrete tiles and dissolved the meth inside 5-gallon buckets of house paint. The men are alleged to have extracted the pure crystal meth from the paint.

  • The woke monster has come for Obama! Activists label him an ‘oppressor’ in their quest to rename Jefferson school.”
  • Another day, another fake hate crime hoax.
  • The mysterious case of “Dr. Jialun,” an anti-Trump Twitter troll who got his account verified despite having a fake profile and all of 100 followers.
  • Legal Insurrection is suing SUNY Upstate Medical University for refusing to comply with a New York Freedom of Information Law request on information related to Critical Race Theory training.
  • Man tells his estranged girlfriend he’s driving to Florida to kill her, is shocked when he gets there and gets arrested.
  • Sgt. Charles H. Coolidge, previously America’s oldest living Congressional Medal of Honor winner, went to his final muster. I previously mentioned him here. That makes Hershel Woody Williams America’s last living Congressional Medal of Honor winner from World War II.
  • Jordan Peterson jujitsus Red Skull.
  • Heh:

  • Heh II:

  • We expect nasty hit pieces on Republicans. But why did NBC publish this nasty hit piece on Paul Simon?
  • New MST3K Kickstarter.
  • “Biden Bans High-Capacity Assault Stairs.”
  • Google removes Georgia from Google maps.
  • Golden Retriever has had enough of your fake news:

  • Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Is Insane

    April 8th, 2021

    People reading yesterday’s piece on China’s semiconductor industry have been asking “Wait, are you saying every semiconductor maker in the world relies on one Dutch firm?”

    For new, cutting edge fabs, the short answer is yes. If you’ve bought a new computer or smart phone in the last year, the chances that at least some of the layers in some of the chips went through an ASML EUV stepper approaches 100%.

    The technology required to produce EUV sounds like something a crazy person would dream up:

    Earlier generations of kit employ lasers to produce light directly. But as wavelengths shrink, things get trickier. Inside a cutting-edge EUV machine 50,000 droplets of molten tin fall through a chamber at its base each second. A pair of lasers zap every drop, creating a plasma that in turn releases light of the desired wavelength. The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre. Because EUV light is absorbed by almost anything, including air, the process must take place in a vacuum. To get into the production facilities, your correspondent had to don a special suit and leave his notebook behind, lest it shed unwanted fibres.

    The machines, weighing 180 tonnes and the size of a double-decker bus, are themselves a testament to the electronics industry’s tangled supply chains. ASML has around 5,000 suppliers. Carl Zeiss, a German optics firm, fashions its lenses. VDL, a Dutch company, makes the robotic arms that feed wafers into the machine. The light source comes from Cymer, an American company bought by ASML in 2013. ASML is, in turn, one of hundreds of firms that supply the chipmakers themselves. But it is so vital that Intel, Samsung and TSMC have all chipped in to finance its research and development in return for stakes in the firm.

    The Wikipedia entry is even crazier:

    The tool consists of a laser-driven tin (Sn) plasma light source, reflective optics comprising multilayer mirrors, contained within a hydrogen gas ambient. The hydrogen is used for keeping the EUV collector mirror in the source free of Sn deposition.

    EUVL is a significant departure from the deep ultraviolet lithography standard. All matter absorbs EUV radiation. Hence, EUV lithography requires a vacuum. All optical elements, including the photomask, must use defect-free molybdenum/silicon (Mo/Si) multilayers (consisting of 40 Mo/Si bilayers) that act to reflect light by means of interlayer interference; any one of these mirrors absorb around 30% of the incident light.

    Current EUVL systems contain at least two condenser multilayer mirrors, six projection multilayer mirrors and a multilayer object (mask). Since the mirrors absorb 96% of the EUV light, the ideal EUV source needs to be much brighter than its predecessors. EUV source development has focused on plasmas generated by laser or discharge pulses. The mirror responsible for collecting the light is directly exposed to the plasma and is vulnerable to damage from high-energy ions and other debris such as tin droplets, which require the costly collector mirror to be replaced every year.

    Also:

    An EUV mask consists of 40 alternating silicon and molybdenum layers; this multilayer acts to reflect the extreme ultraviolet light through Bragg diffraction; the reflectance is a strong function of incident angle and wavelength, with longer wavelengths reflecting more near normal incidence and shorter wavelengths reflecting more away from normal incidence. The pattern is defined in a tantalum-based absorbing layer over the multilayer. The multilayer may be protected by a thin ruthenium layer.

    Got that? Good. That Wikipedia page is worth scrolling all the way through once for for the humbling realization of just how complex and precise dozens of different areas of chemistry, physics and optics combine to allow this one semiconductor tool to function.

    “Sure, we’re zapping droplets of molten tin with high energy lasers in an atmosphere of pure hydrogen to create pulses of light reflected off eight impossibly smooth mirrors of 40 layers each to pattern billions of lines on a tiny patch of silicon at the heart of a $120 million, 180 ton machine, but it’s actually a lot more complex than I’m making it sound. Also, we do it 96 times on a single pass on a single 300mm wafer, and we handle 170 wafers an hour.”

    Here are a couple of videos showing how large and complex an EUV stepper is:

    China’s Semiconductor Industry: Shell Games All The Way Down

    April 7th, 2021

    I’ve written about China’s semi-illusory semiconductor businesses before: “In China the question is always how much of that investment is real, and how much is illusion. A lot of those ‘under construction’ fabs never materialize, either unable to attract investors or having their funds magically siphoned off to some other enterprise.” While researching yesterday’s piece on the current semiconductor shortage, I came across this Emily Feng NPR piece on more multi-million dollar shenanigans in that space:

    In 2019, the U.S. sanctioned two major Chinese telecom firms, temporarily cutting them off from a vital supply of semiconductor chips — bits of silicon wafer and microscopic circuitry that help run nearly all our electronic devices.

    Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. promised a way out, toward self-reliance in the face of increasingly tough U.S. curbs on this technology. The private company once boasted on its website that it would raise a total of $20 billion to churn out 60,000 leading-edge chips a year.

    None of that would come to pass.

    Hongxin’s unfinished plant in the port city of Wuhan now stands abandoned. Its founders have vanished, despite owing contractors and investors billions of yuan.

    The company is one of six multibillion-dollar chip projects to fail in the last two years. Their rise and fall is a cautionary tale in an industry that is flush with state cash but still scarce on expertise — and a preview of the expensive and winding road China will have to take toward semiconductor self-sufficiency, now a national security priority.

    Hongxin Semiconductor began in November 2017 as a joint venture between Wuhan’s Dongxihu district government and a company called Beijing Guangliang Lantu Technology.

    The venture got off to a good start — on paper — but a closer look shows there were a number of issues. One of the co-founders of Guangliang had only finished elementary school and was allegedly using false credentials and a different identity, Cao Shan, according to 36Kr, a Chinese tech news outlet. Another co-founder, Li Xueyen, dabbled in selling Chinese traditional medicine, alcohol and tobacco before starting Hongxin, according to corporate records reviewed by NPR.

    These are not the profiles you look for in semiconductor startup founders.

    The two could not be reached for comment.

    Yeah, I bet.

    To balance out their lack of technical know-how, the Hongxin founders lured in one of Taiwan’s most famous semiconductor engineers, Chiang Shangyi, to serve as director. He left the company in 2020 to become the deputy chairman of China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., telling Hong Kong paper South China Morning Post that his time at Hongxin was “a nightmare.” Chiang did not respond to NPR requests for comment.

    Hongxin made headlines in December 2019 when it managed to buy an older model lithography machine made by Dutch company ASML, despite American lobbying to prevent its sale to the Chinese chipmakers.

    OK, on the face of it that sounds pretty impressive. If you want to have a cutting edge fab, you have to have one of ASML’s top of the line Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) steppers. In almost every other segment in the semiconductor equipment market, there’s competition between the three big players (Applied Materials, LAM Research and Tokyo Electron) and occasionally other companies (like Axcelis for ion implanters). But while you might be able to get away with lesser Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines from Nikon or Canon for some tasks, for the smallest features on cutting edge 7 and 5nm nodes, you simply can’t do without an ASML EUV stepper. (More background here.)

    Well, guess what? The vaunted ASML tool Hongxin bought is apparently an older 1980 model (presumably this one, which dates from 2015, not 1980) which is DUV, not EUV.

    Back to the NPR piece.

    ASML sold the multimillion dollar piece of equipment — used to etch semiconductors — because of Jiang’s top-notch reputation, according to two people familiar with the sale who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. ASML declined to comment.

    Feng (or her editors) goofed here. ASML makes lithography machines, not etch tools.

    Hongxin’s timing was opportune. Chinese chip companies still rely heavily on European, American and Japanese technology — much of which, in turn, relies on American intellectual property, which the U.S. appears determined to keep out of Chinese hands. China’s semiconductor demand continues to surge beyond what it can supply itself; trade data show that in 2019, Beijing imported around $350 billion worth in chips.

    Given that reliance, China’s central and local governments have been pumping money into the sector to accelerate domestic chip design and manufacturing. The country’s latest five-year economic planning document released in March identifies integrated circuits — semiconductors — as a priority sector for research and development funding.

    When governments starts pumping big money into private companies, you can be sure multiple scams are never far behind.

    The all-out approach has notched achievements. Successful chip design companies such as Cambricon and Huawei’s HiSilicon have allowed Huawei to replace some of its U.S.-designed chips in its mobile phones.

    Cambricon and HiSilicon are both fabless design houses, and both get their chips fabbed at foundries like TSMC. Huawei is one of the largest electronics companies in the world, with over $100 billion in annual sales, and they don’t own their own fab.

    Not far from Hongxin is Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), a partially state-owned company that plans to double its output of memory chips to overtake South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix, which currently dominate production.

    Memory is a tough business. SK Hynix exists because Hyundai and LG (aka Lucky Goldstar), two huge Korean chaebols who hate each other only slightly less than rival Samsung, found the sledding too tough to go alone and had to combine their respective semiconductor operations to survive. Memory makes money hand-over-fist in boom times, but barely breaks even during busts. It’s less technically demanding than some other semiconductor segments, so China could conceivably make some headway there.

    YMTC is a subsidiary of Tsinghua Unigroup, a wholly owned business unit of Tsinghua University. Hu Haifeng, Communist Party secretary of Tsinghua Holdings, is the son of Hu Jintao, former CCP General Secretary and President of the People’s Republic of China.

    Hongxin sought to capitalize on this momentum. It rented a discreet office on the 25th floor of Wuhan’s Dongxihu district government headquarters.

    “Cao” and his partners promised to pitch in 1.8 billion yuan ($276 million) in investment on top of 200 million yuan ($30.7 million) in starting funds from Dongxihu district.

    Wuhan’s city government was, around the same time, also beginning construction on a cybersecurity park to provide office and residential space for technology businesses, and it was looking for a flagship company to anchor the complex. In 2018 and 2019, the city named Hongxin its most important “critical construction project” and the company began building its factory next door.

    As early as late 2019, even while Hongxin was being lauded by Chinese media for securing an ASML machine, several Wuhan-based construction crews were scrambling to get paid for millions of dollars of work for Hongxin.

    “Four months ago, [Hongxin’s] payments to us started to be short, and now we are missing 18 million yuan [$2.76 million],” one contractor, Lu Haitao told another, Wang Liyun in December 2019, according to phone recordings NPR obtained. Wang confirmed the authenticity of the recordings when reached by phone. Lu did not respond to several texts and calls from NPR. Wuhan’s municipal government did not respond to a request for comment.

    Meanwhile, two other semiconductor companies — Tacoma Semiconductor Technology Co. Ltd. and Dehuai Semiconductor Technology Co. Ltd. — were also running out of cash.

    Tacoma was over 350 miles from Hongxin along the Yangtze river, in the port city of Nanjing. There, the Taiwanese entrepreneur Joseph Lee had initially found a welcome harbor for his own ambitions, starting Tacoma in the city in 2015. He pledged to raise $3 billion to make wafer chips, with consultation from Israeli company Tower Semiconductor (formerly TowerJazz). Tower declined to comment for this story.

    Lee continued pitching other local governments. In 2016, he co-founded a second company in Jiangsu province’s Huai’an city, named Dehuai Semiconductor. (Lee sold his stake the same year, citing a clash in vision with the firm’s other managers.)

    In 2017, Lee invited Chinese media to tour Tacoma’s facilities, declaring the company had somehow scored 200 million yuan ($30.7 million) in sales. Tacoma had yet to even finish construction on its manufacturing facilities.

    Lee initially agreed to an NPR interview for this story but later retracted it, citing state pressure. “Officials have told me not to talk to the media,” he said by text.

    Yeah, I bet.

    By 2018, Tacoma’s employees were blasting an online forum run by the Nanjing mayor’s office with complaints about unpaid salaries. Chinese corporate records show at least 50 legal complaints have been filed against Tacoma in provincial court, all seeking to recoup construction costs or unpaid wages. Lee disputes owing employees 20 million yuan in unpaid wages.

    “Real or fake, the truth is in the hearts of the people,” Lee wrote shortly after these allegations, on Wechat, the Chinese messaging app, and cited a verse from the New Testament: “Now faith is the certainty of things hoped for, a proof of things not seen.”

    Citing bible verse when rumbled for his scam. Classic.

    Hongxin, Tacoma and Dehuai were able to secure billions of yuan in state funding on the condition they would match that with investment of their own — a commitment that never materialized. Tacoma eventually raised only a fraction — 250 million out of 2.5 billion yuan — of what it promised.

    “We never imagined that when our cash flow dried up, we would not be able to find new [cash flow sources], that we would get in so deep,” he told Japanese broadcaster NHK this March.

    And this is the problem with doing business in China in general: it’s shell games all the way down. At lot of times, loans and investments are siphoned through four or five different entities from the purposes for which they were originally obtained. Everyone’s trying to get rich, and they hope to survive on smoke and mirrors long enough to get profitable. Imagine if Kleiner Perkins invested $25 million in a software startup, only to find that money was spent on a noodle shop, a used car dealership and a golf club manufacturer.

    Sometimes it works. You can build a company on margin, get profitable quickly, and be paying off investors and contractors before anyone realizes how shaky the entire enterprise is.

    But you can’t do that with semiconductor manufacturing. The startup costs are simply too high, easily in the billions. Very, very few companies can afford to be in a game that expensive. China’s two biggest semiconductor manufacturing success stories, SMIC and Tsinghua Unigroup, all have have CCP direct government investment.

    In this game, little hucksters working the margins have no chance.

    A Good Explanation of the Semiconductor Shortage

    April 6th, 2021

    A semiconductor shortage has been plaguing the automobile industry for several months, and this piece explains why:

    To understand why the $450 billion semiconductor industry has lurched into crisis, a helpful place to start is a one-dollar part called a display driver.

    Correction: The semiconductor industry itself isn’t in crisis, it’s making money hand-over-fist right now. It’s certain industries relying on semiconductors that have the problem.

    Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry, with the flashiest ones from Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp. going for $100 apiece to more than $1,000. Those run powerful computers or the shiny smartphone in your pocket. A display driver is mundane by contrast: Its sole purpose is to convey basic instructions for illuminating the screen on your phone, monitor or navigation system.

    The trouble for the chip industry — and increasingly companies beyond tech, like automakers — is that there aren’t enough display drivers to go around. Firms that make them can’t keep up with surging demand so prices are spiking. That’s contributing to short supplies and increasing costs for liquid crystal display panels, essential components for making televisions and laptops, as well as cars, airplanes and high-end refrigerators.

    “It’s not like you can just make do. If you have everything else, but you don’t have a display driver, then you can’t build your product,” says Stacy Rasgon, who covers the semiconductor industry for Sanford C. Bernstein.

    Now the crunch in a handful of such seemingly insignificant parts — power management chips are also in short supply, for example — is cascading through the global economy. Automakers like Ford Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG have already scaled back production, leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry this year.

    A bit of background here: Back in the dim mists of time, some major car manufacturers used to have their own captive wafer fabrication plants for automotive components. They were more art-of-the-state than state-of-the-art, as well as heavily unionized. (Your etch machine broke? Better figure out whether you need the union plumber or the union electrician to fix it…) GM shut down their last semiconductor plan in Kokomo, Indiana (which I think was running a 500 nanomemter process, which was beyond old even then) in 2017.

    The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. A rare winter storm in Texas knocked out swaths of U.S. production. A fire at a key Japan factory will shut the facility for a month. Samsung Electronics Co. warned of a “serious imbalance” in the industry, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said it can’t keep up with demand despite running factories at more than 100% of capacity.

    “I have never seen anything like this in the past 20 years since our company’s founding,” said Jordan Wu, co-founder and chief executive officer of Himax Technologies Co., a leading supplier of display drivers. “Every application is short of chips.”

    The chip crunch was born out of an understandable miscalculation as the coronavirus pandemic hit last year. When Covid-19 began spreading from China to the rest of the world, many companies anticipated people would cut back as times got tough.

    “I slashed all my projections. I was using the financial crisis as the model,” says Rasgon. “But demand was just really resilient.”

    People stuck at home started buying technology — and then kept buying. They purchased better computers and bigger displays so they could work remotely. They got their kids new laptops for distance learning. They scooped up 4K televisions, game consoles, milk frothers, air fryers and immersion blenders to make life under quarantine more palatable. The pandemic turned into an extended Black Friday onlinepalooza.

    Automakers were blindsided. They shut factories during the lockdown while demand crashed because no one could get to showrooms. They told suppliers to stop shipping components, including the chips that are increasingly essential for cars.

    Then late last year, demand began to pick up. People wanted to get out and they didn’t want to use public transportation. Automakers reopened factories and went hat in hand to chipmakers like TSMC and Samsung. Their response? Back of the line. They couldn’t make chips fast enough for their still-loyal customers.

    Here’s the crux of the problem:

    Wu explained that he can’t make more display drivers by pushing his workforce harder. Himax designs display drivers and then has them manufactured at a foundry like TSMC or United Microelectronics Corp. His chips are made on what’s artfully called “mature node” technology, equipment at least a couple generations behind the cutting-edge processes. These machines etch lines in silicon at a width of 16 nanometers or more, compared with 5 nanometers for high-end chips.​

    ​The bottleneck is that these mature chip-making lines are running flat out. Wu says the pandemic drove such strong demand that manufacturing partners can’t make enough display drivers for all the panels that go into computers, televisions and game consoles — plus all the new products that companies are putting screens into, like refrigerators, smart thermometers and car-entertainment systems.

    There’s been a particular squeeze in driver ICs for automotive systems because they’re usually made on 8-inch silicon wafers, rather than more advanced 12-inch wafers. Sumco Corp., one of the leading wafer manufacturers, reported production capacity for 8-inch equipment lines was about 5,000 wafers a month in 2020 — less than it was in 2017.

    Hell, there are people still running some four inch fab lines out there, though usually it’s for something funky like gallium arsenide, old analog signal processes, etc.

    The problem is, no one is building any new capacity in those old geometries because fabs are too expensive to build and need 2-3 years of lead time to get up and running. Moore’s second law states that the cost of a new, cutting edge semiconductor plant doubles every four years. You can’t just take an existing building and turn it into a fab, it has to be specially built from the ground up with exacting standards for cleanroom air filtering, concrete slab level uniformity, etc. And equipment manufacturers like Applied Materials and LAM Research aren’t going to sell you old technology machines to build older geometry chips because they’re not making them anymore. And if you have to pay full price for the equipment, you might as well fab higher-value chips in current geometries anyway.

    TSMC is already spending $100 billion for expanded manufacturing capacity over the next three years, and Intel another $20 billion. That spiraling fab cost is why so many former integrated device manufacturers went to a fabless model, designing chips but letting the manufacturing be handled by foundries like TSMC, UMC and Global Foundries. (And Intel is expanding their own foundry business at the same time they’re paying TSMC to fab some of their top-end chips. You can’t tell the players without a scorecard…)

    The other problem is the extremely cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry. In booms, fabs make money hand over fist. During busts, some segments (like RAM) barely break even. The foundry model has smoothed the spikes out somewhat, but as the current shortage shows, not entirely.

    Just-In-Time delivery was one of the great disruptive business innovations. Leaner, more tightly-coupled computerized inventory lead to decreases in unused parts and faster times to market. But when there’s a hiccup in the supply chain, it makes it more immediately disruptive. It’s hard to obtain additional semiconductor parts if everyone’s fab is already at full capacity, so expect shortages to extend into the year.

    Texas vs. California Update for April 5, 2021

    April 5th, 2021

    After a long hiatus, the Texas vs. California update is back!

    The update, focusing on news about the two biggest states in the union, and contrasting the the red and blue state models of governance for each, was a regular staple of the blog a few years ago, but as I got busy I fell behind, and the links kept piling up. As a result, this update is extra huge and some of the news here is very old indeed, with some links dating back to 2017. Recently I’ve been updating and triaging so I can finally publish this. I’ve tried to put the newest and most important stories at the top, but there is stil some old news of note further down.

  • New Yorkers and Californians can’t stop moving to Texas:

    According to a new U.S. Census Bureau report, of the 15 fastest-growing cities larger than 50,000 people, seven are in Texas including the top three: Frisco, New Braunfels, and Pflugerville. Frisco’s growth rate was 8.2 percent, some 11 times faster than the national rate of 0.7 percent.

    Of the cities with the greatest population gain from July 1, 2016 to July 1, 2017, San Antonio, Texas, took the prize, adding some 66 people every day. Texas had the most cities in the top 15 of this category as well with five making the list and three of the top five overall in addition to San Antonio: Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco, and Austin.

    San Antonio now has more than 1.5 million people and ranks as the nation’s seventh-largest city, just behind Philadelphia. Fort Worth, meanwhile, knocked Indianapolis, Ind., out of the top-15 with a population of 874,168. Houston is America’s fourth-largest city and is also the most diverse large city in the nation.

  • In fact, Texas was he number one state for net in-migration in 2020, while California lost the third most residents of any state.

  • Why high tech companies are leaving California:

    In a stunning procession in December, California lost the leadership of three iconic firms — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle and Tesla — all to Texas, which this year even took the Rose Bowl’s place in hosting the college football playoff. In addition, many California tech firms, including Uber and Lyft, as well as Apple, have been shifting jobs outside the state.

    This has been widely described as California’s “tech exodus.” Though it’s still less than a torrent and more a steady, long-term drip, it augurs some very bad trends. In recent years, California has been losing market share of innovative industries compared with 11 states with high concentrations of innovation-oriented firms, according to research by Ken Murphy, a professor at UC Irvine’s business school.

    Since 2005, California’s share of the number of firms in the innovation sector (composed of 13 of the nation’s highest-tech, highest R&D advanced industries) has shrunk while competitors like Florida, Oregon, Arizona and Utah have expanded their share slightly.

    The pandemic-induced push to move work online could hasten this shift. With 2 out of 3 tech workers willing to leave the Bay Area if they could work remotely, Big Tech could readily spread talent and wealth to other states.

    Increasingly, California’s cities must compete with metro areas in Texas, Tennessee and even parts of the Midwest. Housing prices are a particularly critical concern: California has all three of the most unaffordable metro regions for first-time home buyers, according to a recent AEI survey, and six of the top 10. The flow of tech workers during the pandemic has gone to places like Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth and Raleigh, N.C., and away from big coastal cities with higher living costs.

    Software-based tech companies can access knowledge workers outside California, and often at lower costs. At the same time, states like Texas and Arizona have been sought to replicate the California formula for tech industry growth — public university expansion, more suburban housing and public investment in downtowns, all meant to appeal to workers and their bosses.

    Snip.

    But more recently, as the tech industry becomes more virtual and services-based, the companies’ workforces have less of a need to all be in one place. While these companies create vast wealth for a relatively small group of people, this is not a formula for broad-based economic prosperity.

    In contrast to the old Silicon Valley, the Bay Area has become “a region of segregated innovation,” as described by CityLab, where the upper class waxes, the middle class wanes, and the poor live in poverty that is unshakable.

    The state leadership’s cavalier response when major employers depart is to assume that California will continue to create new businesses to replace the high-paying jobs lost.

    Yes, venture capital is piling into tech startups, driven by the low cost of money and pandemic disruption, and the state is expecting $26 billion more in revenue this year in part because of the roaring initial public offering market. But brushing off recent departures as part of a routine industrial cycle is naive and allows politicians to avoid making choices that would keep entrepreneurs, their businesses and good jobs in California.

    California already has the nation’s highest income tax, with the top marginal tax rate at 13.3%. A new proposal, Assembly Bill 1253, would add three new tiers of surcharges on people earning $1 million a year and above. Lawmakers also introduced Assembly Bill 2088, which would apply a 0.4% wealth tax on net worth above $30 million. Neither bill passed the Legislature last month, but both may come back in the new legislative session.

    Tech companies may be adept at avoiding taxes, but their top managers, investors and most skilled employees could see these measures as more reasons to leave — particularly when competing states like Texas, Tennessee, Nevada and Florida have zero state income taxes.

    Another law, Assembly Bill 5, which limits contract employees, could prove damaging to small startup business that cannot afford many full-time workers. And for some industries, particularly those involved in energy-intensive industries like cloud computing and advanced manufacturing, California’s energy prices — one of the highest in the continental U.S. and double the cost in places like Texas — are another incentive to move commercial activities elsewhere.

  • Indeed, California is so desperate for tax revenue that they want to tax residents even after they’ve left the state:

    As the catastrophic state of California’s finances finally begins to set in among politicians, anti-tech media personalities, and far left cultural influencers, the narrative on California’s techxodus — that is, the migration of California’s technology industry out of the state — has shifted from mockery, and “we’ll be better off without you,” to a far more sober, and increasingly-desperate “leaving California is immoral.”

    As it is simply too embarrassing for politicians to admit the state needs the technology industry after more than a decade of antagonizing the men and women who built it, and as it is political suicide for incumbent politicians in a one-party state to admit that every one of the problems we’re facing has been created by our elected leaders, a moral argument for tech’s responsibility to California, and specifically the Bay Area, has recently been produced. It goes something like this: young ambitious people moved to the state, and struck gold. But rather than “give back” to the land, they’re leaving with resources they “took” from the region. Like the milkshake guy from There Will Be Blood, sucking oil from the earth. Like the evil army people from Avatar, and their unquenchable thirst for unobtanium.

    Snip.

    “Extracted,” she says. Smh. A week or so later, in the psychotic San Francisco Board meeting where our local representatives voted 10 to 1 to officially condemn Mark Zuckerberg for donating 75 million dollars to a hospital (really, this happened), the word came up again. When the floor was opened to the public, an activist downplayed what was, as Teddy Schleifer reports, “the largest single private gift to a public hospital ever,” and accused Zuckerberg of “extraction.” Our local politicians did not think this strange.

    Snip.

    I take extreme issue with the notion that industry leaders have taken something from the “community,” defined here as the “talent,” the “incubators,” and the “mentors.” This is precisely the opposite of reality. The men and women leaving are the talent, they have started the incubators, they have built the companies, they have funded the startup ecosystem, and they have mentored countless young people. This is the “network.” They are the network. Technology workers do not “extract” value from the region, they are what makes the region valuable.

    California is beautiful — San Francisco is truly, I think, one of the most beautiful cities in the world — but the soil isn’t made of magic, there’s no such thing as digging for microcode, and the Bay Area’s nativist, anti-immigration political climate has certainly not created the tech community, which is populated largely by immigrants, be they from out of the state or out of the country.

    Among many things, including talent, opportunity, and soft power, the technology industry has brought tremendous tax revenue to the Bay Area. The budget of San Francisco literally doubled this decade, from around six billion to over twelve billion dollars. With our government’s incredible, historic abundance of wealth, the Board of Supervisors has presided over: a dramatic increase in homelessness, drug abuse, crime — now including home invasion — and a crippling cost of living that can be directly ascribed to the local landed gentry’s obsession with blocking new construction. This latter piece is important, as it appears to be the only thing our Board cares about. This is because significantly increasing the local housing supply would decrease the value of the multi-million dollar homes almost every single one of our Supervisors owns, and we could never have that.

    These past ten years I often wondered where the city’s money went. Could the leadership really be this stupid, or was there corruption? Turns out both. We’ve recently discovered our politicians are literally criminals, but they’re also bad at crime.

    Snip.

    The Bay Area housing, homeless, and drug crises are all exacerbated by the state government, which is as incapable of managing its finances as it is incapable of managing its public land; we are now teetering on the edge of true financial ruin in a state of endemic, constant wildfire. But let’s take a closer look at this issue of money. On one hand we have insane, nativist property tax codes, which punish new homeowners at the expense of longtime landlords, and on the other our income taxes have skyrocketed. Since income taxes are structured progressively, the state has backed itself into a position of extreme uncertainty, as the top one percent of earners pay half the state’s taxes — while politicians argue the state’s wealthiest men and women, who already pay more in taxes than the wealthiest men and women of any other state and most free countries in the world, are not paying their “fair share.” As if rudimentary economic threats were not enough, politicians have made cultural platforms of their anti-technology, anti-industry attitudes, and have done everything in their power to drive our top one percent of earners out of the state. In this, our politicians are succeeding.

    Such success in driving top earners from the state only further exacerbates the state’s political disasters, with our government of bloated, corrupt services now starving for income. This has in turn increased the political appetite for all manner of draconian, anti-business practices among politicians with no apparent ability to conceive of the second order effects of their legislation, a deficiency in basic intelligence that led, for example, to the unmitigated disaster that was AB5. In other words, everything is structured to further deteriorate.

  • “S.F. restaurant owners say rise in property crime is making dire situation worse.”

    Beleaguered San Francisco restaurants are struggling with a recent citywide rise in burglaries, including a slew of brazen break-ins at popular restaurants between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. It’s a situation many restaurant owners say is exacerbating an already bleak outlook for the local food scene.

    San Francisco Police Department data shows burglaries in the city climbed from 4,918 reported incidents a year ago to 7,248 as of Dec. 27. The data does not specifically show how many restaurants have been affected, but the rise in burglaries is reflected in the stories being told by business owners in interviews and on social media. It’s a hard reality for local restaurants that have now gone almost 10 months with diminished revenue, forced hibernation periods, and only occasional approval for indoor and outdoor dining service.

    In mid-December alone, San Francisco’s nostalgic Toy Boat Dessert Cafe posted on Instagram about having had its door kicked in during an attempted burglary. Also in the Richmond District, Cassava took to social media to post about losing roughly $3,000 worth of equipment, including iPads, after a break-in. And Epic Steak and Waterbar on the Embarcadero each lost a similar amount when thieves stole alcohol and damaged property.

    Owners say the shelter-in-place order provides thieves with opportunities to break into businesses. Streets are empty because people are staying home. The ghost-town effect is increased as a growing number of restaurants and other businesses are either permanently or temporarily closed. The break-ins are all the more painful when restaurants aren’t even bringing in income to cover the cost to repair or replace stolen or damaged items.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of government officials being stupid crooks: “SF City Administrator Naomi Kelly Resigns Over Bribery Allegations. Husband Harlan Kelly, SF PUC Manager, had been arrested after accepting international trips, vacation to China, meals, jewelry, and personal car services.” As with the Biden clan, graft, corruption and shady links to China all seem to be part of the family trade for Democratic power families…
  • How California’s catch and release approach to crime kills.

    Jerry Lyons, 31, had spent his entire adult life committing crimes. He had dozens of arrests in California — attempted robbery, burglary, evading police, driving a stolen vehicle, weapons charges, drug charges, shoplifting, trespassing, etc. — but kept getting turned loose until Thursday, when he finally killed somebody. Sheria Musyoka, 26, was an immigrant from Kenya who had graduated from Dartmouth and moved to San Francisco with his wife and three-year-old son. Lyons was behind the wheel of a stolen car when he killed Musyoka.

  • 2018: Poverty in California:

    Despite improvements, the official poverty rate remains high.

    According to official poverty statistics, 14.3% of Californians lacked enough resources—about $24,300 per year for a family of four—to meet basic needs in 2016. The rate has declined significantly from 15.3% in 2015, but it is well above the most recent low of 12.4% in 2007. Moreover, the official poverty line does not account for California’s housing costs or other critical family expenses and resources.

    Poverty in California is even higher when factoring in key family needs and resources.
    The California Poverty Measure (CPM), a joint research effort by PPIC and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, is a more comprehensive approach to gauging poverty in California. It accounts for the cost of living and a range of family needs and resources, including social safety net benefits. According to the CPM, 19.4% of Californians (about 7.4 million) lacked enough resources to meet basic needs in 2016—about $31,000 per year for a family of four, nearly $7,000 higher than the official poverty line. Poverty was highest among children (21.3%) and lower among adults age 18–64 (18.8%) and those age 65 and older (18.7%). The overall poverty rate went unchanged between 2015 and 2016, following two years of decreases.

    About four in ten Californians are living in or near poverty.

    Nearly one in five (18.9%) Californians were not in poverty but lived fairly close to the poverty line (up to one and a half times above it). All told, two-fifths (38.2%) of state residents were poor or near poor in 2016. But the share of Californians in families with less than half the resources needed to meet basic needs was 5.6%, a deep poverty rate that is smaller than official poverty statistics indicate.

  • 2018: “LA Doubled Homeless Budget, Doubled Homeless Crime.” Bonus: Homeless people were behind many of the big California fires.
  • Los Angeles is seeking a $3.9 billion coronavirus bailout. “Last year, roughly 20,000 city employees’ average pay exceeded $147,000, costing taxpayers $3 billion, Open the Books auditors found. Nearly 2,000 employees out-earned California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s salary of $202,000.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • “2 out of 3 tech workers would leave SF permanently if they could work remotely.”
  • “In California, Illegals Come First; Californians Don’t Matter.”

    The number of homeless Californians in the Los Angeles county has reached 58,936, New York Times reported this weekend.

    But Californians don’t seem to be the priority of democratic governor Gavin Newsom.

    Under an agreement between Gov. Newsom and Democrats in the state legislature, low-income adults between the ages of 19 and 25 living in California illegally would be eligible for California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal.

    State officials estimate that will be about 90,000 people at a cost of $98m a year.

    This decision will make California the first state in the US to pay for illegal immigrants to have full health benefits.

  • Gavin Newsom’s Property Taxes Are Chronically Delinquent and There’s No Excuse.”

    For the 2018-2019 tax year, the bill was sent to the Newsoms on September 28, 2018. The two installments were due in December 2018 and April 2019, and the bill became delinquent on July 1, 2019. They finally paid their second installment, along with about $3,000 in penalties, on September 3, 2019. This is significant because the Newsoms’ Fair Oaks mansion was purchased for $3.7 million cash in November 2018. Newsom’s spokesman claims it was the Newsoms’ cash even though there is no documentation of that; the home was purchased in the name of Gavin Newsom’s cousin and longtime PlumpJack business partner, Jeremy Scherer.

    If the Newsoms had $3.7 million in cash lying around, why wait to pay $22,000 in property taxes until the next year and incur a $3,000 penalty? Wealthy people aren’t in the habit of paying thousands of dollars in penalties.

    In 2018 the Newsoms were sent a supplemental property tax bill on May 15, covering a revaluation and some school and health bonds. That bill was due in two installments; the installments became delinquent June 30 and October 31, respectively.

    He finally paid them on December 10, 2018, along with $750 in penalties.

    The last time their property tax bill was paid on time was when they received the “sweetheart” cashout refinancing deal in December 2017 ($3,225,000 cashout on a home worth $3,500,000) – presumably because the bank would only close the loan if the property taxes were paid at the same time.

  • “Many people are moving from California to Texas. The cost of living, as well as high taxes and red tape, are precipitating the push.”

    “EVERYONE IS FROM California. Are they kicking y’all out?” asks a curious bureaucrat at the Department of Public Safety in Plano, a city near Dallas. In the previous week she had helped 20 people from California apply for a Texas driving licence. Those keeping score in the contest between the two states do not have to look far to notch up points for Texas. On the way to the state Capitol building in Austin to interview Greg Abbott, the governor, your correspondent discovered that her driver had recently relocated from southern California to start a family in a more affordable city.

    Between 2007 and 2016 a net 1m American residents, or 2.5% of the state’s population, left California for another state. Texas was the most popular destination, attracting more than a quarter of them. More Americans have left California than moved there every year since 1990, though immigrants still arrive from abroad.

    Companies are also moving. Last year McKesson, a medical-supplies company, and Core-Mark, a supplier to convenience stores, shifted their headquarters from California to Texas, as did Jamba Juice, a smoothie company. Many Californian firms are also adding jobs outside the Golden State. Charles Schwab, a financial-brokerage firm based in San Francisco, received more than $6m in incentives from Texas, and by the end of this year will have more employees there than in California.

    What explains the one-way traffic? There are four reasons for California’s weaker position. First, it has become very expensive, especially for housing. “If there’s one risk factor in this state, it’s affordability,” says Gavin Newsom, California’s governor. “The thing we most pride ourselves on—the California dream, a notion of social mobility that we export around the world—is in peril.” A third of Californians are thinking of moving out of state because of the high cost of housing, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, a non-profit research firm. Most of those leaving California for Texas earn less than $50,000 a year and have only a high-school education…

    The middle class is also struggling. In California home-ownership rates are at their lowest level since the 1940s and among the lowest in America, with black and Hispanic families particularly hard hit. In the past ten years around 75,000 new housing units received permits annually, only 40% of the projected need. “From the perspective of a young, upwardly mobile family, California is nearly impossible, unless you have rich parents, rob a bank, or get money from your firm going public,” says Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University, who believes that the state is experiencing a new kind of “feudalism”, where the ultra-rich thrive and others suffer.

    As a symbol of how out-of-reach the once accessible state has become, last year the small house that was the setting for “The Brady Bunch”, a television show in the 1970s about a middle-class Californian family, sold for a whopping $3.5m, nearly double its asking price. Companies expanding elsewhere find that many employees are happy to give it a go in a state where they can afford to buy a house and raise a family.

    The states also have wildly different tax regimes, which is a second reason for Texas gaining favour as a destination. With a top rate of 13.3%, California has the highest state income-tax rate for top earners. Texas does not charge residents a state income tax. Instead, they pay higher property taxes to local governments, and the state gets most of its money from a sales tax. Because of recent changes to the tax code, residents of California and other high-tax states will no longer be able to deduct all of their state and local taxes from federal payments, which could further dampen people’s willingness to remain in the state.

    Taxes on businesses are increasing, too. In the past six elections California voters have approved more than 800 local taxes on businesses and residents, according to Larry Kosmont of Kosmont Companies, an economic advisory firm. (This does not include voters’ decision to raise the income-tax rate on the state’s highest earners.) For example, last year voters in San Francisco approved the controversial Proposition C, which taxes businesses with more than $50m in gross revenues to fund services for the homeless. Companies with fat profit margins can afford higher taxes, but lower-margin businesses cannot, and these are the ones most likely to consider an alternative location.

    Third, Texas has pursued a concerted strategy of wooing and cultivating businesses, whereas California has not. This began with Rick Perry, who served as Texas’s governor from 2000 to 2015. He travelled to California and other states on “hunting trips” to poach businesses, ran ads on radio encouraging people and companies to move, and offered large incentives to create jobs in Texas. Mr Abbott has continued with these pro-business policies and still operates a “deal-closing fund” to incentivise businesses to come. He is a cheerleader for his state’s advantages, including low costs, a central location with good airports and a convenient time zone for doing business with both coasts. He describes Texas as “the quintessential free-enterprise state”.

  • Midland County, Texas was the fastest growing county in America in 2018.
  • “Meet the Dallas-area woman shepherding a ‘Move to Texas from California!’ migration.”

    Here’s what the “liberal Californians, go home” crowd misses: The vast majority of West Coast dwellers who make up Bailey’s more than 11,500 Facebook followers lean conservative.

    And after spending a few days perusing Bailey’s page, I’d say this comment best sums up its audience: “We fell in love with Texas immediately … we’re conservative Christians who love God, country, freedom, family, gun rights and barbeque.”

    Bailey said cost of living and taxes are hot buttons for commenters, but so are gridlocked roads, the homeless and illegal immigration.

    The Realtor welcomes people of all political stripes onto her page — after all, she’s in this to make money. And she and her husband, Scott, identify as libertarian.

  • 2019: Can California be saved?

    Our state debt is over $1.5t. We have the highest gasoline prices in the nation. Oh, and we are a sanctuary state that protects all manner of illegal immigrants, no matter how serious the crimes they’ve committed. Think Jose Garcia Zanate who killed Kate Steinle. He had been deported seven times but was out and about on the streets of San Francisco with the blessings of SF law enforcement; they aim to protect the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding. ICE is the enemy in sanctuary cities and states, the thugs are victims.

    State taxes in California are the highest in the nation, as are our sales taxes. We fall nearly last in education. We have the most homeless, the most illegal migrants. The state spends $30.b on illegal immigration per year. Like all cities run by progressives, our entire state is a disaster of Democratic making. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego have been overrun by homeless people, most of them drug addicted and/or mentally ill. Entire areas of these cities are befouled by used needles, feces, trash, garbage, rats and now diseases long-thought to be extinct in the West. Persons who work in downtown Los Angeles have contracted typhus! As true in other cites long run by Democrats (Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit, Flint) it is the implementation of ridiculous utopian Marxist policies so beloved by progressives that has destroyed these once grand cities. Socialist strategies always fail. Democrats cheat, (ballot harvesting) are re-elected, and the state continues to decline. Venezuela is the current example of the massive failure of socialism on the world stage. What is happening there is beyond tragic; the people are starving in every sense of the word. But will our own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemn socialism? Absolutely not. She, Bernie Sanders and their fellow travelers mean to take this country the way of Venezuela, the road California has already been on for too long; possibly too long to ever recover. This state is slowly becoming a third-world nation. But, as in Venezuela, the rich and politically powerful stay rich, keep their mansions and their private planes unperturbed by the devastation they generate.

  • How California could be saved:

    First, the problem of corruption must be addressed. It’s no secret that public unions rule the legislative process in this state. They’re even funding the redecorating of the Lieutenant Governor’s office, using money confiscated from the state’s lowest-paid workers. De-funding the unions through an “Uncheck the Box” campaign aimed informing union workers that they can opt out of union dues (opt-outs made possible by the Janus decision) should be a top priority for activist groups in the state. De-funding the unions will have a positive domino effect on everything in California.

    Corruption in the regulatory process, at the state and local levels, is rampant and an open secret. Lately the Los Angeles Times has done a great job of investigating the problems with homelessness and trash piles, but their investigations stop short of fully placing blame where it belongs. People who are truly fed up with the condition of our state need to put their money where their mouth is and fund true investigative reporting (because you know Silicon Valley won’t be capitalizing any non-socialist journalistic startups).

    Next, laws which prioritize criminals, homeless bums (as opposed to those who are homeless because of mental illness), and illegal immigrants over the state’s children and families must be revised or abolished. Did you know that a homeless bum’s shopping cart (which they stole from some business somewhere) is considered their “home” or “property” and cannot be taken away from them? Homeless people with true mental illness should be treated with the dignity they deserve (as Kurt Schlichter said on KABC today), and not left on the streets to fend for themselves.

    The true causes of the third-world conditions in Los Angeles and San Francisco must be addressed. Some well-meaning laws or programs relating to homelessness are causing negative unintended consequences. In Los Angeles, some of the blame for the massive trash piles can be placed directly on City Hall – their RecycLA program resulted in massive increases in sanitation costs for businesses and missed pickups.

    The state’s ballot harvesting law must be amended. Currently anyone – without ID or training – can pick up a ballot from any voter and turn it in to elections officials. The harvester has to sign their name to the outside of the ballot, but there is no process for elections officials to verify that the person turning in the ballot is the person who signed the outside, or that the name they used is actually their real name. The process is ripe for fraud.

    These are all from 2019, and we’re no closer to any of them being implemented…

  • Get paid to move your business out of California.
  • “Data company Harmonate announced it will relocate its corporate headquarters from San Jose, California, to Austin.”
  • Military eyeware provider Wiley X moving from livermore, California to Frisco in Texas.
  • In fact, a nunch of companies are moving to the Metroplex:

    Lion Real Estate Group LLC, which has about 150 employees and $1 billion in assets under management, is moving its headquarters into office space at 3811 Turtle Creek Blvd., the company’s co-founders said in an exclusive interview with the Dallas Business Journal in January. The fast-growing real estate firm focuses on multifamily investment and is relocating its corporate headquarters to Dallas from Los Angeles.

    The company will keep its Los Angeles office to support West Coast operations.

    Lion Real Estate Group’s decision to relocate its headquarters to Dallas aligns with Lion’s strategy of acquiring multifamily assets outside of the urban core, both in Texas and in other high-growth cities across the Sunbelt and Southeast, said Jeff Weller, co-founder and managing principal of the firm…

    The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, has retained Colliers International to help it scout space for a new corporate headquarters in DFW or elsewhere in Texas in the event it opts to pull the trigger on a prospective relocation from Northern Virginia.

    The nonprofit intends to restructure as a Texas-based organization and has formed a committee to explore the prospect, which could include a headquarters move.

    In court documents, the NRA asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas, the venue for its Chapter 11 reorganization, for permission to retain Colliers to help it find office space for rent or purchase. The search will mostly likely be focused on the “Dallas-Fort Worth region,” the court documents say.

    The first few months of 2021 has sustained the momentum the area saw in 2020 when several companies decided to relocate to North Texas. Last year, one of the biggest corporate relocations to DFW was CBRE Group Inc. (NYSE: CBRE), the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, which moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas.

    Financial services giant Charles Schwab moved its San Francisco headquarters to the North Texas community of Westlake at the start of this year, in a relocation announced in 2020.

    Hundreds of small and midsize firms like Lion Real Estate and Wiley X have relocated to DFW over the last few years.

    According to Dallas Regional Chamber, there are 102 major corporations considering headquarters relocation or expansion to North Texas currently.

  • “Texas is tops in the U.S. for commercial development impact,” contributing more than $65 billion to the Texas economy. (Usual DMN paywell disclaimer.)
  • “Jim Breyer, CEO of venture capital and private equity investor Breyer Capital, announced in August 2020 that Breyer Capital would be opening a second office in Austin. While Breyer Capital’s original office and interest in Silicon Valley remain, Breyer himself has also moved to Austin and is investing in what he sees as the city’s potential as an emerging tech hub.”
  • Speaking of which, here he is on why Austin will be the next Silicon Valley:

    after lots of planning and due diligence, I decided that Austin was the best place for the next era of my venture capital and venture philanthropy career. With early, but compelling, signals that Austin is emerging as the next great tech hub, I couldn’t be more excited to play a role in helping another part of the country reach its potential. I believe there is an opportunity to get in near the ground floor and build something truly enduring.

    Other friends from the Bay Area, like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have made similar moves, along with many other tech industry leaders, so I’m not surprised that a so-called “Bay Area exodus” has become a widely reported trend.

    But instead of focusing on the positives of Austin, many exodus narratives have focused on problems with the Bay Area. While critics make some fair points about rising living costs and government overreach, I would argue that Silicon Valley and Austin both have bright futures ahead. The things that made Silicon Valley special are not going anywhere. The Bay Area will continue to be a global hub of innovation that attracts courageous entrepreneurs, benefits from world-class institutions and nurtures talent from leading tech companies — even as Austin offers a remarkable new frontier of opportunity.

    New Austinites all have different reasons for why they moved here, of course. My decision to start Breyer Capital Austin, for example, has more to do with Austin’s strengths than any of the Bay Area’s flaws.
    For starters, Austin, more than any other city in the country, encourages a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Because the city has catered to so many types of professionals, and not just technologists, the depth of talent here is unique. Artists, entrepreneurs, doctors and professors, all at the top of their trade, frequently choose to build things together. By breaking down silos and embracing novel approaches to company-building, Austin’s diverse entrepreneurs will usher in a new era of growth for the city, state and country. I couldn’t be more excited to be investing in health care AI companies and fin-tech companies that have a consumer media backbone. The best founding teams are multifaceted and versatile, and Austin has every type of entrepreneur that a great company needs. This kind of interdisciplinary entrepreneurship will help Austin companies flourish.

    Austin has attracted and will continue to attract young, brilliant talent because of its comparative affordability, outdoor culture and professional development opportunities. This vast pool of expertise is contributing to a remarkably robust climate of innovation. With Tesla, Facebook, Apple, Google, Oracle and other leading companies moving to or expanding in Austin, the entrepreneurial ecosystem will be bolstered when talent from these companies breaks away to start new ventures. Some of my best investments have been in entrepreneurs who gained valuable experience at an outstanding established company before starting their own. Five years from now, Austin will benefit from many tech company alums eager to leverage their expertise to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

  • “Why some tech companies and billionaires are leaving California.”

    While it may be an overstatement to say California is hemorrhaging people, some of the state’s major companies and wealthiest residents are leaving for states like Texas, Arizona and Florida. In 2020, Oracle, Palantir and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise were among the companies that announced they’re relocating their headquarters out of the Golden State. Wealthy individuals from the tech industry moving recently include Larry Ellison, Drew Houston, Joe Lonsdale and Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man.

    California’s population and job growth have both slowed to a trickle, with many citing concerns about high taxes, cost of living and heavy regulations. With the rise of remote work in 2020, over 135,000 more people left California than moved in — the third largest net migration loss ever recorded for the state. Although some big names have committed to stay, one recent survey found that two of every three Bay Area workers would leave the area permanently if they could continue to work from home indefinitely.

  • “As California Declines, Texas Is The Heir Apparent To Big-Tech Looking To Flee Progressive Laws.” (Hat tip: Color Me Red.)
  • Retireees are fleeing California as well:

    It’s not just businesses that are moving out of California. Retirees are leaving in growing numbers.

    For whatever reason they move, the retiree exodus is taking knowledge, wealth, patrons of the arts and potential philanthropy out of communities in the Golden State to the benefit of other places.

    The trend dovetails with larger concerns about California’s affordability, business climate and economic disparities.

    “It’s not just retirees moving. It’s companies. It’s rich people and poor people,” said Sanjay Varshney, professor of finance at California State University Sacramento and founder of Goldenstone Wealth Management LLC in El Dorado Hills.

    Poorer people are leaving the state because “they can’t make ends meet” with the high cost of living and housing, he said. “And extremely wealthy people are moving because they are fed up.”

    Varshney said a migration of wealthy people are leaving the Bay Area in particular, and “you are seeing that with people like Elon Musk and corporations like Oracle, Tesla and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”

    Retirees can easily leave California, as they are no longer tied to jobs in the state. “Retirees are a very mobile part of the population,” Varshney said

    The trend appears to be growing. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System tracks where it sends benefits, and more of its members no longer call California home. Some 85% of CalPERS retirees lived in the state 2013. That dropped to 84% in 2018 and to 82.3% in 2020, according to the pension system.

    The Greater Sacramento Economic Council’s mission is to attract companies to relocate to the Sacramento area. By the time companies decide to move out of the Bay Area, they are often soured on California taxes and regulations, and they tend to move out of the state completely, said Barry Broome, Greater Sacramento’s CEO.

    The same can be said for individuals, he said.

    “A lot of this is tax,” Broome said. California has higher business taxes and higher individual tax rates than most other states.

  • What the radical left has done to San Francisco.

    To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.

    The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.

    And yet, it’s not really American inequality. It’s the kind of inequality produced by failed leftist policies. Picture today’s San Francisco:

    Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute.

    Manjoo emphasizes that San Francisco is run entirely by Democrats. It has become difficult to blame it on Republicans when there are no Republicans.

  • “Two deaths a day: S.F. drug overdoses fueled by fentanyl are spiking.”
  • California to settle claims that it can’t even teach students to read.
  • “Rats at the police station, filth on L.A. streets — scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control.”

    The good news is that two trash-strewn downtown Los Angeles streets I wrote about last week were cleaned up by city work crews and have been kept that way, as of this writing.

    The bad news is that I didn’t have to travel far to find more streets just as badly fouled by filthy mounds of junk and stinking, rotting food.

    Then there was the news that the LAPD station on skid row was cited by the state for a rodent infestation and other unsanitary conditions, and that one employee there was infected with the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever.

    What century is this?

    Is it the 21st century in the largest city of a state that ranks among the world’s most robust economies, or did someone turn back the calendar a few hundred years?

    We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news and an army of rodents is on the move.

    On Thursday I saw a county health inspector on rat patrol between 7th and 8th streets on skid row. He was carrying a clipboard and said he had found droppings and other evidence of rodents, and I asked where:

    “Everywhere,” he said.

    Well, it’s nice to know somebody is doing something, but you don’t need a clipboard. I’ve seen so many rats the last two weeks in downtown Los Angeles, I have to suspect they’re plotting a takeover of City Hall, which vermin infiltrated last year.

    The city of Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle. It used to be that illegal dumpers were a little more discreet, tossing their refuse in fields and gullies and remote outposts.

    Now city streets are treated like dumpsters, or even toilets — on Thursday, the 1600 block of Santee Street was cordoned off after someone dumped a fat load of poop in the street. I’m not sure when any of this became the norm, but it must have something to do with the knowledge that you can get away with it. Every time sanitation crews knock down one mess, another dumpsite springs up nearby.

  • “Top California high-speed rail executive under investigation in ethics probe.”
  • Those having children are leaving California in droves:

    California is the great role model for America, particularly if you read the Eastern press. Yet few boosters have yet to confront the fact that the state is continuing to hemorrhage people at a higher rate, with particular losses among the family-formation age demographic critical to California’s future.

    Since the recovery began in 2010, California’s net domestic out-migration, according to the American community survey, has almost tripled to 140,000 annually. Over that time, the state has lost half a million net migrants with the bulk of that coming from the Los Angeles-Orange County area.

    In contrast, during the first years of the decade the Bay Area, particularly San Francisco, enjoyed a renaissance of in-migration, something not seen since before 2000. But that is changing. A recent Redfin report suggests that the Bay Area, the focal point of California’s boom, now leads the country in outbound home searches, which could suggest a further worsening of the trend.

    One of the perennial debates about migration, particularly in California, is the nature of the outmigration. The state’s boosters, and the administration itself, like to talk as if California is simply giving itself an enema — expelling its waste — while making itself an irresistible beacon to the “best and brightest.”

    The reality, however, is more complicated than that. An analysis of IRS data from 2015-16, the latest available, shows that while roughly half those leaving the state made under $50,000 annually, half made above that. Roughly one in four made over $100,000 and another quarter earned a middle-class paycheck between $50,000 and $100,000. We also lose among the wealthiest segment, the people best able to withstand California’s costs, but by much smaller percentages.

    The key issue for California, however, lies with the exodus of people around child-bearing years. The largest group leaving the state — some 28 percent — is 35 to 44, the prime ages for families. Another third come from those 26 to 34 and 45 to 54, also often the age of parents.

    (Hat tip: TPPF.)

  • Texas is among the most recession-proof states in the country:

    Every day, Texans are reminded why letting liberal democrats take over this state would be a terrible idea.

    In a new report released by S&P Global Ratings, Texas has been ranked among the most recession-proof states in the country, according to a variety of factors.

    Texas’ fiscal strength stems from conservative state legislators’ insistence against implementing a personal income tax or increasing other taxes. Also important has been the push by Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to slow the rate of spending growth and refusal to dip into the state’s “rainy day fund” for non-emergency spending.

  • Dispatches from San Francisco’s decline:

    Magnificent in the distance, San Francisco is now shockingly ugly up close. In the decade I have lived here, the city has achieved the seemingly impossible: It has combined the expensive and the bland and the appalling into a new form of decadence. To the untrained eye, it looks magical: a city of the future, a city of gasps. Then, slowly, it reveals itself to be a city of lies, one that dismisses the idea of city living.

    Snip.

    Running a venture-capital fund that invests as early as possible in startups, I now see fewer and fewer companies choosing to come launch here. When we opened our doors in 2015, maybe 80 percent of our investments were in Bay Area companies. Last year [2018], half of them were, and we expect to see that number decrease even more in the years ahead. Andreessen-Horowitz, the famed Silicon Valley VC firm, has announced that it’s becoming more or less a hedge fund, presumably to focus on later-stage opportunities. Peter Thiel, who had lived here since the mid 90s, has now decamped to Los Angeles, and says there is a less than 50 percent chance the next great tech company will arise in an increasingly expensive, conformist Silicon Valley.

    “Silicon Valley is now more fashion than opportunity,” Thiel told the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “The heads are the same.”

    Lack of independent thought aside, the Economist has identified the source of the problem: You can’t build a successful startup from a garage if a garage costs a million bucks. The flow of new creations is being choked off first and foremost because there are fewer cheap places for new things to start.

    The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco recently hit $3690 per month, 30 percent greater than in New York City. Over the last decade, the Bay Area has added 722,000 jobs but built only 106,000 new homes. Proposition M, passed in the 1980s to avoid “Manhattanization,” limits the supply of office space. The city’s average Class A asking rent has risen 124 percent since 2010 to over $80 per square foot.

    The legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs once remarked that new ideas come from old buildings, the types of places you can alter without permission because no one cares about them. This is one reason why so many garage startups and garage bands and artists spilling paint in discarded warehouse lofts have left their mark on the world. The true creative class can’t afford to rent expensive new studios.

    But in San Francisco, the true creative class can’t afford to rent any space anymore.

    Snip.

    Up and down the city’s disorienting hills, you notice homeless men and women — junkies, winos, the dispossessed — passed out in the vestibules of empty storefronts on otherwise busy streets. Encampments of tents sprout in every shadowy corner: under highway overpasses, down alleys. Streets are peppered with used syringes. Strolling the sidewalks, you smell the faint malodorous traces of human excrement and soiled clothing. Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.

    The confused mumble, the incoherent finger-pointing tirade, the twitch, the cold daemonic stare, the drunken stumble and drool — these are the rhythms of a city on the edge of a schizophrenic explosion.

  • A list of rules for making it home in California:

    1) Assume that a state with among the highest income, sales and gas taxes has commensurately among the nation’s worst roads. Therefore, do not become depressed by blood alleys, potholes, bullet-holed and graffiti stained road signs, or roads unchanged from a half-century ago when the population was less than half of what it is today. You are an adventurer on the frontier, not a complacent commuter or traveler. Approach the next few hours as a challenge rather than a nightmare. Envision a California road trip like Odysseus did his on voyage on the Aegean.

    2) It is wiser not to use the restrooms on any California cross-country drive. Excrement can be many places other than in the toilet. Also, fill up before starting. Don’t count on finding gas stations that are not overcrowded or have all their pumps working—even the ones with national affiliations that look as inviting from the off-ramp as Circe’s smile.

    My favorite is one where all the tiny glass windows at the pumps where the electronic instructions guide you are either broken or scratched out. My second favorite one was where the pump had no hose and no sign saying it had no hose. In California, you often fill up by holding the pump handle down nonstop, given the automatic levers are broken or missing. A state law requires emergency free air and water services for all gas station customers; perhaps because it’s mandatory, the air and water dispensers usually do not work.

    3) Assume “Mad Max” conditions at any time. Contraptions can pose as vehicles in the most regulated vehicle state in the nation (there is a reason why the California DMV is dysfunctional). Cars can still tow each other, 1950s-style, with sagging rope. Expect a piece of lumber or a mattress to go Frisbee on every other trip. Anticipate that a quarter of the drivers have bad brakes, worse tires, and ignore or cannot read signs and posted warnings. The person who passes you at 90 miles per hour likely does not have a license, or registration, or insurance—or, perhaps, any of the three.

  • One reason companies are abandoning California in droves: “A Mountain View tech CEO is beyond frustrated after he says his vehicles have been broken into four times in the past 18 months while parked in the same city lot.” That was from 2019. I doubt it’s gotten any better.
  • 2018: California wants to run the world’s most expensive bullet train, but can’t even run a competent DMV.
  • Chuck DeVore does his own Texas vs. California comparison. “Texas: Less crime, lower taxes and cleaner air.” (HTPT)
  • More from Chuck DeVore on California’s minimum wage hike:

    In April 2016, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15-an-hour minimum wage law into effect.

    As a consequence, the minimum wage went from $10 an hour to $10.50 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees on January 1, 2017. On January 1 of this year, the minimum wage was hiked again to $11.00 an hour for larger employers and $10.50 for businesses with 25 or fewer employees.

    Federal jobs data for 2018 suggests that California’s rural manufacturing base might be getting hammered by the higher mandated minimum wage.

    Unless a future governor waives the scheduled increases due to economic weakness, the government mandated hourly wage hikes will keep coming—$1 per hour every year—until they reach $15 an hour four years from now for large employers with smaller employers hitting $15 in 2023. After that, future increases are pegged to national consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers.

    Many factors affect regional job creation and wage growth. Availability of suitable labor, energy and land costs, infrastructure, including access to clean water and well-maintained roads, as well as state and local taxes, the regulatory burden and the lawsuit environment. Measured against these factors, California has significant challenges.

    Snip.

    California’s 2017 retail electric prices were 89 percent higher than in its peer competitor, Texas. California’s gasoline prices remain the highest in the contiguous 48 states, at $3.619 per gallon of unleaded, some 26 percent higher than the national average of $2.865.

    California’s once-vaunted water storage and conveyance system has been essentially frozen in time for decades, as the state’s politicians spend billions on environmental programs and studies and precious little on expending and securing California’s water supply.

    California’s highway system, once the envy of the world, has similarly been put at the bottom of the priority list, regularly being ranked at the tail end of national surveys. Further, the state’s union labor agreements and environmental approval maze contribute to the state’s road maintenance costs being almost 40 percent higher than the national average.

    As for state and local taxes, Forbes ranked California as 45th-worst in 2016.

    The U.S. Chamber of Commerce meanwhile rated California as having the 47th-worst lawsuit climate in the nation last year.

    The regulatory burden on small business was studied in a report authorized by the California legislature 10 years ago which found that small businesses faced a complex puzzle of state and local rules that cost about $134,000 per year in compliance costs.

  • “From well-funded pensions to basket case, San Francisco’s voters are to blame.”

    Voters approved retroactive pension increases 10 times between 1996 and 2008, thus leaving the San Francisco Retirement System underfunded and a drain on the operating budget.

    The city and county of San Francisco owes the retirement system a massive $5.8 billion – more than half the city’s entire general-fund budget.

    (Hat Tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • “Californians fed up with housing costs and taxes are fleeing state in big numbers.” “Census Bureau data show California lost just over 138,000 people to domestic migration in the 12 months ended in July 2017.”
  • 2017: “Thanks to the declaration of being a Sanctuary City, San Fran L.A. and other criminal cities have done what is not possible. ICE has announced it is sending hundreds of agents to these cities—that means illegal aliens are now in greater danger of being deported, thanks to the policies of the Democrats. Yup, now the illegal aliens in these cities have a reason to fear deportation—De Leon, Mayors Lee and Garcetti have put a target on their backs.”
  • What life is like on the dirtiest block in San Francisco:

    The heroin needles, the pile of excrement between parked cars, the yellow soup oozing out of a large plastic bag by the curb and the stained, faux Persian carpet dumped on the corner.

    It is a scene of detritus that might bring to mind any variety of developing-world squalor. But this is San Francisco, the capital of the nation’s technology industry, where a single span of Hyde Street hosts an open-air narcotics market by day and at night is occupied by the unsheltered and drug-addled slumped on the sidewalk.

    There are many other streets like it, but by one measure it is the dirtiest block in the city.

    Just a 15-minute walk away are the offices of Twitter and Uber, two companies that along with other nameplate technology giants have helped push the median price of a home in San Francisco well beyond a million dollars.

    Snip.

    According to city statisticians, the 300 block of Hyde Street, a span about the length of a football field in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood, received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the past decade, more than any other. It is an imperfect measurement — some blocks might be dirtier but have fewer calls — but residents on the 300 block say that they are not surprised by their ranking. The San Francisco bureau photographer, Jim Wilson, and I set out to measure the depth of deprivation on a single block. We returned a number of times, including a 12-hour visit, from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. on a recent weekday. Walking around the neighborhood we saw the desperation of the mentally ill, the drug dependent and homeless, and heard from embittered residents who say it will take much more than a broom to clean up the city, long considered one of the United States’ beacons of urban beauty.

  • San Francisco is now so filthy that “a major medical association is pulling its annual convention out of the city — saying its members no longer feel safe.” From 2018, back when people still had conventions. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • More residents are leaving San Francisco than any other US city. For as expensive as it is to live in San Francisco, it’s just as expensive to leave. The migration’s so intense that U-Hauls are scarce and people are paying thousands in rental fees.” (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore’s twitter feed.)
  • The latest “benefit” of California’s “high speed rail” boondoggle: Longer traffic delays for “blended” traffic that isn’t high speed at all. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • 2019: Amazon adds 600 jobs in Austin.
  • In 2019, the Texas Permian Basin became the world’s largest oil-producing region, pumping out more oil than Saudi oil fields. Who knows if that will change under Biden…

    “If everyone in the middle class is leaving, that’s actually a good thing. We need these spots opened up for the new wave of immigrants to come up. It’s what we do. We export our middle class to the United States. You guys should be thanking us for that,” Singam said to a stunned Carlson.

    Of course, he also says that “Soon enough Texas will be a blue state,” so there’s an unusually high degree of “talking out your ass” going on here… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • It’s not just Tesla: Elon Musk has shifted his SpaceX work from California to Texas as well.

    The SpaceX South Texas launch site, which first broke ground in September 2014, is a rocket production facility, test site, and spaceport located at Boca Chica approximately 20 miles east of Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. The South Texas Launch Site is SpaceX’s fourth active suborbital launch facility, and first private facility.

    By March of last year, SpaceX had over 500 employees working at the Boca Chica site, Ars Technica reported. Four shifts work 24/7 — in 12-hour shifts with four days on and three days off followed by three days on and four off — enabling the continuous manufacturing of his Starship flight rocket with workers and equipment specialized to each task of serial Starship production.

    According to a 2014 Brownsville Economic Development Council report, the facility was projected to generate $85 million worth of economic activity in Brownsville and eventually generate roughly $51 million in annual salaries from new jobs created by 2024.

    Part of this money is coming directly from Musk. Musk tweeted that he is donating $20 million to schools in Cameron County and $10 million to the city of Brownsville for revitalization efforts, both of which are near SpaceX.

    “Please consider moving to Starbase or greater Brownsville/South Padre area in Texas & encourage friends to do so! SpaceX’s hiring needs for engineers, technicians, builders & essential support personnel of all kinds are growing rapidly,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday. “Starbase will grow by several thousand people over the next year or two.”

  • “Companies Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.”

    Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for Austin. Palantir, Charles Schwab and McKesson are all bound for greener pastures. No less an information-age avatar than Elon Musk has had enough. He thinks regulators have grown “complacent” and “entitled” about the state’s world-class tech companies. No doubt, he has a point. Silicon Valley’s high-tech cluster has been the envy of the world for decades, but there’s nothing inevitable about its success. As many cities have found in recent years, building such agglomerations is exceedingly hard, as much art as science. Low taxes, modest regulation, sound infrastructure and good education systems all help, but aren’t always sufficient. Once squandered, moreover, such dynamism can’t easily be revived. With competition rising across the U.S., the area’s policy makers need to recognize the dangers ahead.

    In recent years, San Francisco has seemed to be begging for companies to leave. In addition to familiar failures of governance — widespread homelessness, inadequate transit, soaring property crime — it has also imposed more idiosyncratic hindrances. Far from welcoming experimentation, it has sought to undermine or stamp out home-rental services, food-delivery apps, ride-hailing firms, electric-scooter companies, facial-recognition technology, delivery robots and more, even as the pioneers in each of those fields attempted to set up shop in the city. It tried to ban corporate cafeterias — a major tech-industry perk — on the not-so-sound theory that this would protect local restaurants. It created an “Office of Emerging Technology” that will only grant permission to test new products if they’re deemed, in a city bureaucrat’s view, to provide a “net common good.” Whatever the merits of such meddling, it’s hardly a formula for unbounded inventiveness.

    These two traits — poor governance and animosity toward business — have collided calamitously with respect to the city’s housing market. Even as officials offered tax breaks for tech companies to headquarter themselves downtown, they mostly refused to lift residential height limits, modify zoning rules or allow significant new construction to accommodate the influx of new workers. They then expressed shock that rents and home prices were soaring — and blamed the tech companies. California’s legislature has only made matters worse. A bill it enacted in 2019, ostensibly intended to protect gig workers, threatened to undo the business models of some of the state’s biggest tech companies until voters granted them a reprieve in a November referendum. A new privacy law has imposed immense compliance burdens — amounting to as much as 1.8% of state output in 2018 — while conferring almost no consumer benefits. An 8.8% state corporate tax rate and 13.3% top income-tax rate (the nation’s highest) haven’t helped.

  • Haywood, California is very, very upset that ICE officials deported an accused illegal alien child molester.
  • Meet California’s working homeless. Thanks, Democrats!
  • This 2018 piece didn’t anticipate oiur winter storm problems: Texas vs. California on energy policy:

    The third and most ignored reason California doesn’t use much electricity is that their tax and regulatory policies and high costs of doing business have steadily driven out industries that use a lot of energy to manufacture things such as steel and cement.

    There’s irony in this, of course, and it’s this: California’s environmentally-minded leaders like to tout the virtue of their post-industrial policies, but in deindustrializing wide swaths of their economy, they have merely outsourced the energy use—and pollution—to other places and then, to add insult to injury, pay to have it shipped to California in carbon-emitting ships, planes, trains, and trucks.

    In terms of electric production, California is the nation’s biggest importer of electricity. In the past, this meant a lot of coal-fired power from places such as Arizona and Utah.

    But a law passed in 2006 alongside the state’s more famous AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, effectively banned the renewal of power contracts from traditional out-of-state coal-powered generators.

    As a result, “electron laundering” has arisen to fill the gap. This occurs when Californians, in the quest for green electrons to power their grid, pay British Columbians for hydropower, which the Canadians are happy sell, as they backfill their own power needs with coal power from Washington State and Alberta. It works out for everyone: California gets higher-priced power that they can claim is green, while the Canadians get American greenbacks to fund their national health care system.

    To cover their tracks and keep the green mirage intact, California authorities invented a new category of imported power called “Unspecified Sources of Power” that magically provided 9.25% of California’s electric needs last year. Prior to becoming politically incorrect, these power imports were simply labeled “coal.”

    In the meantime, Californians paid an average of 18.41 cents per kilowatt hour for their electricity in July 2018, 67% higher than the national average and more than double the cost of electricity in Texas. In August, California’s rates jumped to 19.08 per kWh, 110% higher than Texas’ rates. In fact, Californians’ July and August electric rates were the highest in the contiguous 48 states.

    Snip.

    In contrast, Texas pursued a market-based electric policy through deregulation. While liberal consumer advocates were quick to claim failure in the first couple of years after the 2002 electric competition law passed as higher prices signaled more producers to enter the market, in the years since, Texans have seen their retail inflation-adjusted electricity prices decline by 32 percent from 2008 to 2017.

  • It’s not just Texas: “California secretly struggles with renewables“:

    California has hooked up a grid battery system that is almost ten times bigger than the previous world record holder, but when it comes to making renewables reliable it is so small it might as well not exist.

    The new battery array is rated at a storage capacity of 1,200 megawatt hours (MWh); easily eclipsing the record holding 129 MWh Australian system built by Tesla a few years ago. However, California peaks at a whopping 42,000 MW. If that happened on a hot, low wind night this supposedly big battery would keep the lights on for just 1.7 minutes (that’s 103 seconds). This is truly a trivial amount of storage.

    Mind you this system is being built to serve just Pacific Gas & Electric. But they by coincidence peak at about half of California, or 21,000 MWh, so they get a magnificent 206 seconds of peak juice. Barely time to find the flashlight, right?

    There is no word on what this trivial giant cost, since PG&E does not own it. That honor goes to an outfit called Vistra that does a lot of different things with electricity and gas. But these complex battery systems are not cheap.

    This one reportedly utilizes more than 4,500 stacked battery racks, each of which contains 22 individual battery modules. That is 99,000 separate modules that have to be made to work well together. Imagine hooking up 99,000 electric cars and you begin to get the picture.

    The US Energy Information Administration reports that grid scale battery systems have averaged around $1.5 million a MWh over100% renewable deception the last few years. At that price this trivial piece of storage cost just under TWO BILLION DOLLARS. At 103 seconds of peak storage that is about $18,000,000 a second. Money for nothing.

    Mind you the PG&E engineers are not that stupid. They know perfectly well that this billion dollar battery is not there to provide backup power when wind and solar do not produce. In fact the truth is just the opposite. The battery’s job is to prevent wind and solar power from crashing the grid when they do produce.

    It is called grid stabilization. Wind and solar are so erratic that it is very hard to maintain the constant 60 cycle AC frequency that all our wonderful electronic devices require. If the frequency gets more than just a tiny bit off the grid blacks out. Preventing these crashes requires active stabilization.

    Grid instability due to erratic wind and solar used to not be a problem, because the huge spinning metal rotors in the coal, gas and nuclear power plant generators simply absorbed the fluctuations. But most of those plants have been shut down, so we need billion dollar batteries to do what those plants did for free. Nor is this monster battery the only one being built in California to try to make wind and solar power work. Many more are in the pipeline and not just in California. Many states are struggling with instability as baseline generators are switched off.

    There is even an insane irony here, one that is perfect for Crazy California. This billion dollar battery occupies the old generator room of a shut down gas fired power plant. Those generators used to make the grid stable. Now we are struggling to do it.

  • “San Francisco: A string of drug stores close after shoplifters strip the shelves bare.”

    The drugstore, which serves many older people who live in the Opera Plaza area, is the seventh Walgreens to close in the city since 2019.

    “All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters, ” said longtime customer Sebastian Luke, who lives a block away and is a frequent customer who has been posting photos of the thefts for months. The other day, Luke photographed a man casually clearing a couple of shelves and placing the goods into a backpack…

    Snip.

    he Walgreens clerks can’t do anything about the theft because the company has a policy preventing them from interfering in shoplifting. Allegedly this is for their safety but I suspect it’s really because if they didn’t have this policy and anyone got hurt, they would be sued.

    And trying to stop this wave of thieves would be like throwing a pebble in a stream. It wouldn’t make any real difference anyway. A theft of less than $950 is a misdemeanor in California and even if the shoplifters get arrested they would likely be back on the streets almost immediately.

  • “Nearly 200 women have signed a letter denouncing a culture of rampant sexual misconduct in and around the state government here in Sacramento.” Remind me again which party controls California’s legislature…
  • Cal State system to drop remedial English classes, even though “nearly 40 percent of freshmen arrive each fall unprepared to do college work in English, math, or both.” Maybe they plan to move to entirely Emoji-based classes…
  • California bill proposes jail time for using the “wrong” pronoun. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Texas places six cities among the top 20 fastest growing in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016. But they’re probably not the ones you’d think: Odessa, Pearland, Brownville and Midland all make the top 10.
  • California employee suing GrubHub for wrongful termination and to be reclassified as an employee rather than an independent contractor, isn’t exactly the ideal plaintiff, admitting he didn’t read the entire employment contract and lied on his application.
  • California invents middle class homelessness, with people forced to live in their cars.
  • California teachers unions push a teacher shortage myth:

    The myth that America suffers a scarcity of teachers is promulgated by the teachers’ unions and their supporters in the education establishment. On the California Teachers Association website, we read that “California will need an additional 100,000 teachers over the next decade.” But this statistic simply means that CTA expects about a 2.8 percent yearly attrition rate, and will need to hire 10,000 teachers per annum over a ten-year period to maintain current staffing levels—more of an actuarial projection than an alarming call for action. (The union adds that California must hire even more teachers to “reduce class size so teachers can devote more time to each student.” The claim that small class size benefits all students—another union promulgated myth—means more teachers, which translates to more dues money for the union.) In reality, California is following the national trend in overstaffing. According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, California had 332,640 teachers in 2010. By 2015, there were 352,000. But the student population has been virtually flat, moving from 6.22 million in 2010 to 6.23 million in 2016.

    True, legitimate general shortages exist in some school districts, while other districts may lack teachers in certain areas of expertise, like science and technology. Workers in these fields can earn higher salaries in the private sector; one solution would be to pay experts in these subjects more than other teachers as a way to lure them into teaching. Unfortunately, that’s not possible: throughout much of the country, and certainly in California, salaries are rigorously defined by a teacher union-orchestrated step-and-column pay regimen, which allows no room for flexibility in teacher salaries.

    What’s necessary is to break up the unaccountable Big Government-Big Union education duopoly. More school choice, from privatization to charter schools, could go a long way toward solving the teacher glut. The government-education complex will always try to squeeze more money from the taxpayers, irrespective of student enrollment. Its greed has nothing to do with teacher shortages, small class sizes, educational equity, or any other rationale it can come up with: paramount to the interest of the educational bureaucracy is more jobs for administrators, and more dues money for the unions, which they use to buy and hold sway over school boards and legislators. While there is a surfeit of teachers and administrative staff, clarity and transparency regarding the reality of union control of the schools are scarce indeed.

  • People are fleeing the bay area in droves:

    From Santa Rosa to San Jose, more and more residents are making the bittersweet decision to leave the Bay Area, abandoning its near-perfect weather, booming economy and thriving arts, culture and food scenes in favor of less-glamorous destinations like Austin, Boise and Knoxville.

    Some are fleeing the Bay Area’s sky-high housing and rent prices, both among the most expensive in the nation. Others are cashing out, selling their homes to get more for their money in a less expensive city. Nearly all of them are fed up with miserable, hours-long commutes on snarled freeways.

    More people are leaving the Bay Area than are moving in, according to a 2018 report by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Community Foundation. An average of 42 people left San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties each month in 2016, the most recent year for which data was available. That’s a sharp uptick from the year before, when the region gained an average of 1,962 residents per month.

    Snip.

    The couple will miss the church and community they’re leaving behind. But Pullen and Preuss, who describe themselves as politically moderate, won’t miss the Bay Area’s “super progressive politics.”

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and ‘general lawlessness’:

    Kieran Blubaugh dreamed of living in California when he was growing up in Indiana. He played the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game and envisioned himself skateboarding down San Francisco’s crazy hills.

    After paying off his student loans four years ago, he landed a job with a tech company and moved to San Francisco. At first, life was heavenly. He had a seven-minute commute on his motorcycle. He could pay $30 to see Incubus, one of his favorite bands, a short walk from his apartment.

    Soon, however, his California dream soured. Thieves broke into his locked garage and did $8,000 worth of damage to his motorcycle, doubling his insurance rates. His dog nearly died after eating human feces on the sidewalk. Seeing people either getting arrested or being treated for an overdose outside a nearby building was a regular occurrence.

    “And I live in a nice part of town,” said Blubaugh, 33.

    Not anymore. On Saturday, Blubaugh moved out of the $4,000-a-month two-bedroom apartment he shared on Russian Hill and moved to Dallas, where he will pay $1,300 a month for a place the same size.

    It’s not that he set out to ditch San Francisco for Dallas. “But it was the financially responsible thing to do,” he said.

    Also: “We need more police. There’s a general lawlessness that’s just scary.”

  • 2018: California’s Democratic Party goes hard left: “The rejection of Feinstein reveals the eclipse of the moderate, mainstream Democratic Party, and the rise of Green and identity-oriented politics, appealing to the coastal gentry . It offers little to traditional middle-class Democrats and even less to those further afield, in places like the industrial Midwest or the South.”
  • 2017: “San Diego is awash with ‘fecal matter’ due to lack of public toilets and surging rates of homeless people, health officials warn as they try to control the hepatitis A outbreak.”
  • 2017: Housing costs in San Francisco that “a law firm bought a $3 million plane to fly its people in from Texas” instead of having them live there.
  • 2017: Los Angeles would rather people camp under overpasses than let them live in tiny SRO apartments.
  • Everybody wants to leave California: “The taxes are higher here, the services are worse, educations worse, the roads are poor. You go to Texas – they have no personal income tax, they have great roads, they have a free government encouraging innovation.”
  • LA County spend billions on homelessness. Result? More homeless. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • It probably doesn’t help that they’ve made sleeping in your car illegal.
  • 2017: “Security robots are being used to ward off San Francisco’s homeless population.”
  • 2018: “Cost for California bullet train system rises to $77.3 billion.” Also this: “The rail authority also said the earliest trains could operate on a partial system between San Francisco and Bakersfield would be 2029 — four years later than the previous projection. The full system would not begin operating until 2033.”
  • At some point I stopped collecting links for the doomed high speed rail project, but guess what? It still clings to undead life:

    California’s bullet train has become a nearly forgotten source of trouble, eclipsed in the public eye by Covid-19, a gubernatorial recall, and out-migration from the Golden State. But it’s still out there, sucking up time and money, and as empty as it ever was.

    The California High Speed Rail, its formal name, was a hobby-ego project for former governor Jerry Brown that was supposed to move passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 220 mph by 2020. Instead, the project is moving at the speed of the museum piece it sometimes appears destined to be. Not a single train has run, with train testing still six to seven years away, amid seemingly never-ending delays.

    The news regarding the project is, as usual, dismal. As the Los Angeles Times reported in January, Ghassan Ariqat, vice president of operations at bullet-train contractor Tutor Perini, sent a “scorching” letter to California officials criticizing persistent construction delays, “contradicting state claims that the line’s construction pace is on target,” and warning that the project could miss “a key 2022 federal deadline.” “It is beyond comprehension that as of this day, more than two thousand and six hundred calendar days after [official approval to start construction], the authority has not obtained all of the right of way,” Ariqat wrote. Because of the sluggish construction pace, he added, his company “will have to lay off a significant number of its field workers in the very near future” after already letting 73 walk.

    Ariqat has good reason to be agitated. If there’s been a more poorly run public works project in California history, nobody can remember it. Two years ago, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan think tank, called California’s high-speed rail an outright “failure” that has “suffered from at least seven identifiable ‘worst practices,’” causing it “to be indefinitely delayed.”

  • San Francisco wants to ban corporate cafeterias to force people to eat at local restaurants. Because who doesn’t want to be forced to walk San Francisco’s scenic, feces-festooned streets to eat lunch?
  • “California Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-San Fernando). The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ Bold PAC since 2014, who took fundraising from $1 million to $6 million in just one year, is accused of drugging and molesting a 16-year-old girl in 2007.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Evidently the lawsuit was dropped in 2019.
  • The USC Medical School Dean who was also a drug addict.
  • “California DMV worker fell asleep at desk for nearly 4 years.” (Hat tip: Andy Wendt’s twitter feed.)
  • More California Flu Manchu craziness: “Los Angeles bans televisions in restaurants because that’s something they can do apparently.”
  • 2019: Mitsubishi moves North American headquarters from California to Tennessee.
  • “Maryland Firm Relocates Headquarters To Round Rock.”

    The Round Rock Chamber announced Friday that Ametrine, Inc. has selected Round Rock as the company’s new U.S. headquarters in a move that will create some 140 good-paying jobs.

    Founded in 2011, Ametrine is a manufacturer of unique, advanced multispectral camouflage systems with its current headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. Ametrine produces patented nano-technology materials and is consistently awarded research and development projects through the U.S. Department of Defense.

    “We started the search for our new U.S. headquarters almost a year ago,” Ametrine CEO Brandon Cates said in a prepared statement. “We compared thirteen cities in five states using twelve evaluation criteria and came to the conclusion that Round Rock would be the best fit for the future of our business. Round Rock has been very forward-thinking when it comes to supporting the defense industry, and we anticipate future collaboration with the city, the chamber, and the other innovative companies that Round Rock attracts.”

    (Hat tip: Rep. John Carter on Twitter.)

  • NBA 2K maker planning Austin studio after acquisition. Visual Concepts said it will bring hundreds of jobs after acquiring Austin-based software design and gaming applications studio, HookBang.”
  • Three tweets on Californians moving away from their mess of a state:

  • A tour of senic Oakland:

  • Can even California officials learn from experience? “Los Angeles County ups police funding by $36 million after rise in crime.” (Hat tip: StillGray.)
  • Hopefully the next update will be a little more timely…

    Breaking: 2 Shot, 1 Stabbed in Austin Park

    April 4th, 2021

    Here’s some breaking news for you:

    Police are responding to a shooting with ‘multiple injuries’ Sunday evening.

    Police say an initial call of shots fired came in a little after 7 p.m.

    Police have confirmed multiple people have been injured at 1600 Nash Hernandez Sr. Rd. near Edward Rendon Sr. Metro Park.

    That’s in east Austin just east of I-35 in a park just north of Ladybird Lake (AKA the Colorado River). It’s a little ways east from Chicano Park and near a recreational ball field/tennis courts/etc. area, just south of a working class Hispanic neighborhood that’s been gentrifying.

    APD says to avoid the area for the time being.

    I don’t know whether there are significant homeless camps in that park or not.

    Developing…

    Update: Suspect was reportedly shooting into a crowd at a time when multiple Easter celebrations were going on in the park. Police report none of the injuries seem life-threatening.

    Also: “Police report they have located and detained the shooting suspect, who is suffering from a gunshot wound.” (Hat tip: Teddy Brosevelt.)