West Hollywood is the first city in California to adopt a policy of “gender neutral” public restrooms, giving businesses 60 days to change the little male and female stick figure signs on bathroom doors.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, businesses must comply with a new city law prohibiting gender identifications.
“City leaders said that the old school “men” and “women” restrooms were outdated and puts transgender people in the difficult position of having to “out” themselves simply by picking a door.”Yes, implying that women and men may appreciate a little bit of privacy from their opposites while doing their business is "outdated," according to the city council. Next, they should eliminate the enclosures around the toilets, the doors, and even the walls. I think that would be best - just place the toilets right out there on the sidewalks.
Roughly $145,522 for every maker in the US. That's right. Not only do you lucky 123 million Americans have to support the other 124 million American adults that are not producing anything, (and the 70 million children), you also have to pay interest only payments on this very large loan you don't get to spend!
Yay for big government!Where else on Earth do they spend nearly $2 Billion dollars a day over their budgets? Oh, right. Nowhere.
China and Russia signed a three-year currency-swap line of 150 billion yuan ($24 billion) in October, a contract that allows Russia to borrow the yuan and lend the ruble. While the offer won’t relieve the main sources of pressure on the ruble -- which has lost 41 percent this year amid plunging oil prices and sanctions linked to Russia’s annexation of Crimea -- it could bolster investors confidence in the country and help stem capital outflows.
Funding from China has helped raise Argentina’s foreign reserves to a 13-month high of $30.9 billion, a boost for a country that has been kept out of the international capital market since defaulting on foreign obligations in 2001.China is clearly positioning to take over as the lender of last resort. With the US mint printing presses running at full steam and with China the only real winner with crashing oil prices, perhaps they will soon be offering up their Yuan to replace the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world. The Captain is prescient, as always.
Argentina received $1 billion worth of yuan earlier this month as part of the three-year currency-swap agreement with China, a central bank official in the South American country, who asked not to be identified because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly, said Dec. 11. That extended the funds transfered to Argentina to $2.3 billion since October. The swap is for a maximum of $11 billion over three years.
In Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro last month added $4 billion he borrowed from China to the country’s reserves after they fell to an 11-year low. The country now has about $21 billion in its coffers, equal to the amount of debt it has coming due in 2015 and 2016.
We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.
- Barack ObamaIf not Obama, then the next president, or the next. It's coming, folks. Be ready.
The NYPD will launch a unit of 350 cops to handle both counterterrorism and protests — riding vehicles equipped with machine guns and riot gear — under a re-engineering plan to be rolled out over the coming months.
The Strategic Response Group, or SRG, will be devoted to “advanced disorder control and counterterrorism protection,” responding to the sort of demonstrations that erupted after the Eric Garner grand jury decision and also events like the recent Paris terror attacks.
“It will be equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not,” Commissioner Bill Bratton said Thursday.
“It will be equipped with all the extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and the machine guns that are unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.”
I took a look at St. Louis Fed data today, both the civilian employment to population ratio and the working age civilian population. I then combined the data into a chart of deltas with their initial values pegged to Dec-2007. The result is the following:Today I decided to revisit this. Using the same methodology, but extending out a year further. Take a look at the updated chart. We can unequivocally say that the number of employed people has improved. In June, (a year after my previous analysis), we finally caught up to, and passed, Dec-07 employment. It took 6 and a half years to recover the jobs lost in the recession.
What does this chart mean? It means that whilethere are about 2.5 million fewer people employed than in 2007, but that we've also got 12.5 million more people of working age - that is, 15 million more unemployed today than we did five and a half years ago. This is due to an increasing population that has completely given up trying to find work. It means, that though the recession destroyed something like eight million jobs and the post recession has created around five million jobs, we've added more than twelve million non-working civilians in the same time.
That's staggering - utterly and completely staggering. That means - follow me here - that means that not a single working age person added to our population since 2007 is working. We've added twelve million takers but not one new producer. Not one.
IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif. – Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant's concentrated sun rays — "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.
Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer" every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger version.
The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group.
The deaths are "alarming. It's hard to say whether that's the location or the technology," said Garry George, renewable-energy director for the California chapter of the Audubon Society. "There needs to be some caution."
The bird kills mark the latest instance in which the quest for clean energy sometimes has inadvertent environmental harm. Solar farms have been criticized for their impacts on desert tortoises, and wind farms have killed birds, including numerous raptors.
...
Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a "mega-trap" for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays.
Federal and state biologists call the number of deaths significant, based on sightings of birds getting singed and falling, and on retrieval of carcasses with feathers charred too severely for flight.
Environmental Protection Agency workers have done some odd things recently. Contractors built secret man caves in an EPA warehouse, an employee pretended to work for the CIA to get unlimited vacations and one worker even spent most of his time on the clock looking at pornography. It appears, however, that a regional office has reached a new low: Management for Region 8 in Denver, Colo., wrote an email earlier this year to all staff in the area pleading with them to stop inappropriate bathroom behavior, including defecating in the hallway.This rampant decadence reminds me of the drugs and sex scandal that rocked the Minerals Management Service before it was shut down and it's directives rolled into other departments.
A coalition of activist groups took the rare step Monday and appealed to the United Nations over reports that cash-strapped residents in Detroit are being left without access to water.
The appeal to the U.N.’s special rapporteur comes after reports that nearly half of the Detroit Water and Sewerage customers are delinquent on their bills and owe the department about $118 million. The department has reportedly started shutting off water to these delinquent customers.It's clear that some people want services for nothing. They want to make virtual slaves out of working folk. I hope honest folk don't put up with it.
As I recall, we were something like $12 million in debt.
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We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.And they want her to be President? When she outspends her household income by almost 1600%? Will she propose a $40 trillion budget for FY 2017?
California's teacher tenure statutes are unconstitutional and shouldn't be enforced, a judge said in handing a victory to a group of students in the broadest legal challenge to date against laws that guarantee public school teachers' jobs.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu, who heard two months of evidence, agreed in a tentative ruling today with the nine students who brought the lawsuit that the statutes violate their right to equal educational opportunity under the California constitution.
The ruling, when final, will prohibit the state from enforcing a law that gives teachers permanent employment after less than two years on the job, as well as laws that the students say make it too expensive and too time-consuming to dismiss ineffective teachers. Treu put the order on hold until any possible appeals are resolved.
Perhaps this will open the door to some serious reform, such as I discussed two years ago in my San Diego school post. Lord knows California needs it! If we ever want a good and efficient school system, free market ideas, such as performance based hiring and advancement, must be allowed to permeate through them."Both students and teachers are unfairly, unnecessarily, and for no legally cognizable reason, let alone a compelling one, disadvantaged by the current permanent employment statute," the judge said.
Here is how I would change the school system in order to evaluate instructors' abilities:
- K-12 changes to year round quarter system with no elevator (Students must take a comprehensive test to pass each grade).
- Test the students at the start of the quarter. No curves.
- Test the students at the end of the quarter. No curves.
- Evaluate their degree of improvement.
- Rank instructors from A to F.
- Send D instructors to retrain for a weekend every month of the quarter.
- Send F instructors to retrain for an entire quarter.
- Fire FF (2 Fs in a row) instructors. (No more tenure.)
- Send DF (D followed by F) instructors to retrain for an entire quarter.
- Rotate classes so all instructors are tested with all students.
- Repeat.
1 would prevent students who didn't know earlier material from being pushed into material they won't understand. 2 gets a baseline for every student. 3 establishes their new level of knowledge, and 4 documents their improvement during their studies. 5 ranks the net improvement of each instructor's students against the other instructor's statistics, while 6 & 7 try to salvage failing instructors. 8 eliminates bad instructors and 9 gives failing instructors one last chance to be salvaged. 10 and 11 ensure "good instructors" won't be "stuck with crap students."
You could also sweeten the deal by giving bonuses to AA instructors. This would take time, but continual review on a quarterly basis like this might work.I'll bet the Captain will be ecstatic; I know I am.
"I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore."And here's one of the things drives me crazy with these people:
- Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who is unable to afford her property taxes.
A key problem, critics say, is that the current system has shifted a disproportionate share of the burden of paying for schools and local services on homeowners, in favor of commercial and corporate interests who can afford to appeal their values and win big reductions year after year. The share of property taxes from homeowners to support public schools grew from 45 percent to 54 percent over a 12-year period, while commercial and industrial owners’ share has declined to less than 20 percent. (Other sectors, from oil and gas to personal property, make up the rest.)A "key problem"? It's a problem that homeowners are paying for more of the services they demand, such as the education of their children? No! If there's any problem it is that businesses are taxed at all for the public education system. In fact, I think only homeowners who have children should be taxed for public education, and they should bear 100% of that cost. If anyone else, individual or business, wants to contribute, it should be through voluntary donations.
In the same vein of thought, one could tie student enrollment to parents' social security numbers, and tax the parents directly for their children's education. Make it a local tax withholding. That would work for me! I am certain, absolutely certain, most single men and women would appreciate the burden of paying for other people's babysitters be borne by those who need them. Perhaps we can make a campaign issue out of this?Here's a novel idea. Tie tax votes (tax votes only) to SSN. If you voted for it you pay it, if you voted against it you don't.
I know it would never work, but it would be fun to see all the liberals bay 3-4 times more taxes than others.
Toyota Motor Corp. plans to move large numbers of jobs from its sales and marketing headquarters in Torrance to suburban Dallas, according to a person familiar with the automaker's plans.
The move, creating a new North American headquarters, would put management of Toyota's U.S. business close to where it builds most cars for this market.
Jerry Brown must think that the only things businesses care about is the humidity, but he's wrong. You can't beat low taxes.North American Chief Executive Jim Lentz is expected to brief employees Monday, said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Toyota declined to detail its plans. About 5,300 people work at Toyota's Torrance complex. It is unclear how many workers will be asked to move to Texas. The move is expected to take several years.
The automaker won't be the first big company Texas has poached from California.
Occidental Petroleum Corp. said in February that it was relocating from Los Angeles to Houston, making it one of around 60 companies that have moved to Texas since July 2012, according to Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Perry last month visited California to recruit companies. The group Americans for Economic Freedom also recently launched a $300,000 advertising campaign in which Perry contends 50 California companies have plans to expand or relocate in Texas because it offers a better business climate.
Like these other companies, Toyota could also save money in an environment of lower business taxes, real estate prices and cost of living.
Frank Scotto, Torrance's mayor, said he had no warning of Toyota's decision. He said he did know that the automaker planned a corporate announcement for Monday.
"When any major corporation is courted by another state, it's very difficult to combat that," Scotto said. "We don't have the tools we need to keep major corporations here."
The mayor said businesses bear higher costs in California for workers' compensation and liability insurance, among other expenses.
"A company can easily see where it would benefit by relocating someplace else," Scotto said.The temporary reprieve California experienced by boosting taxes only lasts until everyone with money leaves. After that it's adios muchachos. My plan is to wait for California to go feral like Chicago, and then buy up Beverly Hills for a couple of hundred bucks. Till then, I will laugh at the news and at astute cartoons like this.
we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.In other words, live within our means, not above our means, or soon we'll live beneath our means. We've become slaves to debt, both private and public, and we cannot escape this if not a single one of our elected representatives or the majority of our voters decide to cut the unsustainable spending. We need to cut $2 Trillion out of the annual budget, and maintain a $1 Trillion surplus to pay the national debt off in 30 years. Well, it isn't going to happen. Instead, we're going to experience an economic catastrophe unlike any thing this planet has ever experienced.
