Remember the Mamas and the Papas? You know, about 55 to 58 years ago depending on if you heard it when first released or a bit later?
Well, time moves on…
In the mid-’90s I was working at Charles Schwab in down town San Francisco and also had a contract at Sharper Image a bit north of Market. Lunch at The Embarcadro was a “sometimes thing”. The Clock Tower has BART (the local subway) running underground, and underwater, across the bay behind it. Across the busy tourist road in front if it, was (is) a very fancy always crowded shopping center and lunch area. Embarcadero Plaza. (When I was there it was called Justin Herman Plaza). In any case, you can see it full of people and thriving in the Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_Plaza
Near Market Street & The Financial District (why we could walk to it with our sack lunch when working at Schwab…) it was always busy. Either with tourists or with office workers swarming the place on nice summer days.
Well, it’s different now…
From my reading of the shadows, this is about dinner time. Sun setting in the west so the Clock Tower in direct sun. Shadows a bit long, but not dark. Behind the Clock Tower is S.F. Bay and across the bay to the east is Oakland. This place in July ought to be swarming with tourists and folks from the rest of the Bay Area heading to The City for dinner and a night out. Instead, it is empty. Thanks, Gov. Nuisance… who prior to being California Governor was Mayor of San Francisco. Desolation and poverty follows in his wake… But what do you expect from Nancy Pelousi’s Nephew…
In over 1/2 Century of visiting and working in San Francisco, I can not remember the streets near the Financial District and The Embarcadero being as empty as they are in this video. There are even open parking spaces (something to kill for in S.F.O….)
My last visit was over 5 years ago, a bit before the Chinese Wuhan Covid Scam hit. Clearly things have changed. Office Workers “working from home” and tourists staying away in droves as S.F. becomes more known for the Poo Map and druggies on the street than for Flower People…
From 2 days ago:
So Strange… it does look a lot more like a Post Zombie Apocalypse S.F. than anything I remember. Streets with few cars? Never have I seen it in Real Life… (well, except maybe that time about 1974 when I backed a ’62 Chevy Impala UP Lombard Street at 3 AM…
it’s a long story… but I still passed my Chem 1D Final the next morning… barely ;-)
Lombard Street San Francisco
(from the Wiki)
Given the lack of revenue from the Vigorish on store sales, and the lack of Tax Revenue (both property and sales taxes) from the closed stores: It is my opinion that San Francisco and California are in a spiral decent into destruction and default. You just can’t support their debt level, their deficit level, and their rampant expenditures on Woke Crap if the stores are not selling and the tourists are not dropping $$$Dollars on them. San Francisco and California are doomed. I’m not sure that it could be fixed even if anyone were trying. Way to go DNC & Gavin Nuisance!
Musings from the Chiefio 
California Dreamin’ is about LA. The same writer also wrote the song San Francisco.
Which song I personally dislike. I would mark that song as Year Zero of the decline of SF. Or maybe when the Little Boxes song came out, even more dreadful.
Peak SF was Bullitt (Steve McQueen).
@YMMV:
I disagree!
California Dreaming is about all of California. Not just the beaches of L.A., though they are prominent in the theme of California always warm in winter… but even then, San Diego is even warmer…
Per “Little Boxes”: There’s a kind of a suburb you can see from I-280 up the peninsula headed from San Jose to San Francisco. Off to the ocean side, you can see rows of tract houses all touching wall to wall in pastel colors. THAT is the inspiration for “Little boxes” (all the same). IMHO, it is a glorious song that captures the essence of that era and place. “And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they look just the same!”… The reason for the song may be dreadful, but the song itself captures the gestalt just fine…
Then again, this is all “of my context” and “of my being” growing up in that era in California… so literally “YMMV” ;-) not being from there / then…
But for me, all those songs capture the zeitgeist of my life… there and then…
It has shaped my desire to never be “put in a box”…
I went to SF last in 2012. We took the BART in from the airport, and on seeing Daly City the song just jumped into my mind. I had no idea little boxes was actually ‘inspired’ by Daly City but it was, it seems.
I can’t stand Pete Seeger, never could. I have no problem with the other left/folk crowd from Guthrie through Dylan and Baez and Springsteen, but not Seeger.
It turns out all of the above singers were promoted by one man, a manhattan lefty from a rich family, John Hammond. Here’s what wiki says:
Hammond was instrumental in sparking or furthering numerous musical careers, including those of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Big Joe Turner, Pete Seeger, Babatunde Olatunji, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Freddie Green, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Russell, Jim Copp, Asha Puthli, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike Bloomfield and Sonny Burke.[2][3] He is also largely responsible for the revival of delta blues artist Robert Johnson’s music.
Wow.
Another round of “Gradually and then suddenly” by the sound of it
Let’s hope the Cali toilette handle gets pulled before Nuisance has a chance to run. He acts like he’s God’s gift to humanity. He has no self awareness whatsoever.
I lived in California for a time in the Woodland/Davis area. Left in 1962. I last visited in 1983. Visited some relatives in Venice not far from the beach, Oakland, San Fran, and Woodland. I am happy that we left when we did and well before the “shocking” decline; though there were some signs of decline even then, I’d say.
Up to date version :-)
The people who helped Nuisance ruin Cali.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2023/gavin-newsom-friends-advisors-staff-interactive/
Hooboy! I got to drive down Lombard Street in the early ’70s. It’s something you just had to do if you visited S.F.
My brother went to Uni in So. California and married a California girl from S.F.. I went with him up to San Francisco, ummm… 3 times I think to visit her family.
I did all the touristy things when not hanging out with my brother’s in-laws and family. It was a very neat place to go.
Now? 🤣🤣🤣🤣 No way.
Metal Leo has a couple of other views of San Francisco. From one month ago, closed stores at Market & Powel. That is THE center of the downtown. There’s a cable car run, and in summer, historically, you could not hope to get on a Cable Car. He shows several of them parked and empty and a very small queue for the limited number still running. Then a LOT of closed store front retail. Where a couple of high end stores are open (Tiffany & Louis Vuitton) he finds 4 cops in one block…
He does find an open Walgreens, but IIRC, the Walgreens are all scheduled to close.
Yeah, from 8 days ago, all the Walgreens are closed:
Hilton & Parc55 both let their lease go, several thousand rooms – empty doesn’t pay the mortgage… I’ve worked trade shows at the Moscone Center in South Of Market. It is huge and a big source of revenue as thousands of booths are set up and even more thousands of convention workers and booth staff move in for weeks…
No need to “hit this link” as it demands $4 since Chrome on Chromebook sets off it’s “You have an ad blocker” tingly feeling; https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2023/07/05/red-hat-inc-summit-moscone-sanfrancisco-convention.html but notice that Red Hat and Meta both have cancelled shows at Moscone Center.
Then this one: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/moscone-center-is-13-conventions-shy-of-pre-pandemic-levels/article_92127ec0-1a76-11ee-850f-83ebddd3477f.html
Got that? ALMOST and SLOWLY creeping back to the levels of 4+ years ago… They mention the number of the conventions, but not the size or importance. Oh, and 300K rooms short? Call it $200 a night, and $150 for meals (S.F. restaurants are expensive and then the expense account … ) So not counting any (optional?) taxi / Uber costs, we’re talking about $350 x 300k =
$1.5 Million$105 Million shy… Just from the conventions…From 3 weeks ago:
Yeah… slowly then suddenly…
Were I booking a convention, I’d not choose Moscone Center nor SF now either… Dallas was great for Usenix and Las Vegas is very nice…
@Ossqss: “Up to date version :-)” Superb!
@EM: “I disagree!”
Well, I am glad we disagree about something, but I have to stand firm on that one. Wiki says Pete Seeger did the first version, yet somehow I had never heard that version. I know the Malvina Reynolds version, the original author. It’s a song sung the way you would sing for children. If only. It rubs me the wrong way.
The story of California Dreamin’ is interesting. Of course the part where Michelle was homesick for LA, and the part about praying — John could not stand churches and hated that praying was in the lyrics. Some say the lyrics are “pretended to pray”.
Agreed that it is not too specific to LA.
But I always liked SF better than LA. You’d have to do more than twist my arm to get me to go back there. I have some nostalgia for the time and place, but it does not exist anymore. Instead of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”, I would leave my corazon elsewhere, somewhere more romantic.
Here is a Peak SF song. It has the great line (for the times): “Summer had inhaled and held its breath too long.
In the old days, even Oakland was nice.
Oh well, a bonus Bee!
Good to see all those businesses shut down. Now our wise Chinese Overlords will get a better deal when they buy California.
(Just for the record, I am not sure if I am being sarcastic or simply pragmatic.)
$350 x 300k = $1.5 Million
Say what?
– – – –
I haven’t been to San Francisco in 40+ years. I don’t recall much about the visit although there were lots of people. I do remember going down the “Crookedest Street in the World,” Lombard Street, and going to Coit Tower, and riding a cable car and visiting Ghirardelli Square — not remembering buying any chocolate.
That $4.00 one had an interesting observation (there are freeways to read it) which pretty much reflects a lot of “CA Escapees” views:
” ‘One of the loudest buzzes at this convention (in Boston) are the people of California who are here that notice you can walk into a CVS and not see locked up items or people stealing right before your eyes. You can walk on the street and not trip over the homeless or needles or excrement — not only in Boston, but in south Boston and other suburbs,’ Hastings wrote in a text to the Business Times.”
While looking for more from the Bee, Gargle suggest this interesting video of an interview with an ex-Levi’s exec (Jennifer Sey) who was “cancelled” due to her views on the SF lockdown of schools, playgrounds, and the SF/Kalifornistan groupthink in general. She says she’s a former (recovering?) left-of-center person, but I think there’s some red-pilling going on. Pretty down-to-earth for someone who was next-in-line for the top spot at Levis. And a pretty damning picture of what has happened to the once-great city of SF.
(And yes, there used to be a “there there” in Oakland… Moonbeam did his bit to damage that just like WilliBrown™ and a few others, in particular Gruesome Newsom damaged SF with his disastrous homeless policies and ideas).
Interesting vid (even if it seems to run long and has an ad in the front). I have to wonder what long-long-long-time residents of SF would think, e.g. those from the 30s and 40s…
@John H.:
My Bad, was doing some “fast math” and got it wrong. 1 oh 5, 1 point 5… $350 per day x 300,000 would be $105 Million… lost to the hotel and restaurant businesses just from the empty beds and plates of the reduced Conferences & Exhibits bookings (not counting things like air fare, buss fare, taxis, Uber, Metro fares, shopping – where would they shop for junk anyway? /snark;)
@Jeff;
Used to walk past the Levi’s building and HQ of Folger’s Coffee at lunch time… wonder if they are still there…
Worked some sites over in Oakland too. Up on the Oakland Hills were some exceedingly expensive and very nice homes… Watched it go from Hippy Friendly to whatever it is now… Sad.
@TTN:
I have wondered if this whole D.I.E. (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) and ESG (Extremely Stupid Guilt) might be due to Blackrock or their ilk wanting to drive things to ruin so they can buy the land cheap… IF you have a generation long perspective it could be a huge earner… Get $Billion properties at auction for nearly nothing… How else could you acquire all of the San Francisco Business District for pennies on the dollar?
“You will own nothing and you will be happy” has to start with prying the land and buildings out of the hands of those who own them now…
Did someone mention the Mamas and the Papas?
I own two shirts and some neckwear that used to belong to a guy who was in ‘The Mamas & The Papas’
All the sleeves are brown, and the tie is grey.
Before the earthquake…
@E.M.: “How else could you acquire all of the San Francisco Business District for pennies on the dollar?”
Catherine Austin Fitts has made some interesting claims about the destruction, lootings, and burnings that took place during the 2020 BLM riots. I forget the exact numbers, but it was something like out of 57 riots locations, 54 of them were either in designated Economic Development Zones or within a couple of blocks of a Federal Reserve Branch Headquarters. The Economic Development Zones allow investors to buy and develop property with either no or very low taxes for a number of years. So, you want to invest $100M in a large city? Bus in criminals, pay them to burn down the area with the greatest potential, buy it up for literally pennies on the dollar, and then pay no taxes for ten (or whatever) years! As for the areas near Fed Reserve Branches, Fitts seems to think that those areas may be slated for some future fiscal or monetary policies. My guess? If they implement a Central Bank Digital Currency the best place to have regional data processing and clearance would be in close association with the current Federal Reserve Branches.
I don’t always agree with Fitts — but she is enormously bright, even more enormously familiar with the system, and it is always a bit dangerous to bet against her.
@Keith Macdonald: “All the sleeves are brown, and the tie is grey.”
Owwww! Further comment I have none… :)
@Beth re the 1906 Market street video:
We have had a recent major influx of H1B workers and their families to our area that came from India.
That video looks like it could be the Indian drivers around here. Not only have nearly 100% of the Indians never driven a car before – and many have never ridden in one either – but they have CELL PHONES!!! Yikes!
Watching the Indians drive can be scary, entertaining, and puzzling all at the same time.
–
–
Great clip. by the way. Nice.
@HR
That video looks like it could be the Indian drivers around here. Not only have nearly 100% of the Indians never driven a car before – and many have never ridden in one either
Have you ever been to India? I recommend it to all. Until say 20 years ago, the cliché personal urban transport in India tended towards scooters, motorbikes, tuk-tuks and 1950s style Hindustan copies of UK Morris Oxford cars. That’s the background memory for most Indians that moved west, along with their memories of how they drove/rode in India back then. Old habits are hard to shake.
My first experience of riding a motorbike in India was “bowel loosening”. Lane discipline was non-existent, it seemed like you were about to be impaled at any second from any direction. But magically nearly everyone missed each other, despite the apparent chaos and noise. Gradually you came to accept that everyone drove in the faith of their gods and their good kharma. It actually seemed to work. Well, it did for me. :-)
Ride the streets of Mumbai
https://www.google.com/maps/@19.0967117,72.8942769,3a,75y,149.94h,95.92t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1syWye7FMLfgWxfNu2d5EhDg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu
More on my hope that people from India may yet save us from ourselves. Not just via BRIICS++
Here’s a Quantum Physicist on how we create our own reality through the quantum field. It’s significant (to me) that this is an Indian Physicist, not attached to a materialistic view of the world. Our rational academic intelligentsia simply do not or cannot grasp, understand or live this reality, it is beyond their comprehension. Academic theories like The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory are just one stream of that deformed/malformed intelligentsia. With a divisive/destructive view of reality, not one that is inclusive and integrates.
Closer to the O/T, cities dying.
The chaos that western ‘experts’ were expecting, ‘with libidinous excitement’, to unfold in Russia “which was certain to feature “Russians … killing Russians”, and with Putin “probably hiding somewhere.” – did arrive – except that it exploded in France, where it was not expected, with Macron on the ropes rather than it being Putin in Moscow.
And then something that touches in the BRIICS++ significance.
Paradoxically the flaw to this unfolding economic conundrum had been perceived by Friedrich List and the German School of Economics, as early as the nineteenth century. He saw the flaw to the ‘Anglo’ debt-led, consumption-based model: That (in a nutshell) a society’s well-being and its overall wealth are determined not by what the society can buy, but by what it can make.
Our (non-BRIICS) countries produce less and less, while our governments depend on debt to fuel government expenditure, coupled with inflation to devalue the government debt, while impoverishing private citizens.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/07/13/tale-of-two-cities/
The UK is now reaping the kharma of destroying its own manufacturing base, thinking it could “create wealth” through financial services instead. Until other countries realise that in an interconnected online world, the financial services can be based anywhere. But industry and manufacturing does have to be somewhere, preferably in counties that want it.
@Keith Macdonald: Good comment, and sounds like the same thing that the Austrian Economics crowd has been saying as well. ( I have to think that the German School and the Austrian School must be close cousins.) To boil it down even more —
Money is not wealth.
Chairman Mao once said “All political power flows from the end of a rifle.” I think we can equally say “All wealth flows from the end of an assembly line.”
@TTN and Keith M: Or as I learned it (a shorthand version), the only sources of wealth are mining, manufacturing, and agriculture.
Wealth does not flow from an assembly line. It flows from the human that came up with the idea that resulted in any other good or service (not money, not facilities, nor labor; that’s capital) that others want at a price they’re willing to pay.
That said, the collective West, being hostile to innovation, business in general, and Nature’s God; have eaten their seed corn and pushed out the ideas and customs that made them blessed.
@cdq – Ideas are worthless unless they are made via mining, manufacturing, or agriculture.
The human aspect is a given. Humans are the reason for digging up things, making stuff, and growing food.
When was the last time zebras or giraffes had a hankering for an iPhone? No? The only things animals seem to fight over is nookie.
Yeah, that’s when the trouble begins. When somebody creates something, other humans want it, too. So, they either come up with something to trade for it or just take it by force. Civilization tries to minimize the latter option. The 10 Commandments were a good basis for civilizing people.
I blame it all on opposable thumbs. 😉
Animals fight over territory and possessions. Any UN/WEF/whatever agenda which seeks to deny humans property is bound to be trouble. It seems to me that those people, Soros and Schwab and the rest, have some mental picture of a world where you can own nothing and be happy. They plan to change human nature.
Here’s something I commented elsewhere in January about Schwab’s book ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’..
I got Schwab’s book for Christmas. A joke by my son. I have read it. Which I suspect is rather more than Schwab participated in the writing of it. The book is awful. Not merely in the ideas and failing arguments but in the prose itself. Many of its assertions are just plain wrong.
Try this: “The first industrial revolution spanned from about 1760 to around 1840. Triggered by the construction of railroads and the invention of the steam engine, it ushered in mechanical production.”
Check those dates against those inventions. What railroads in 1760? Why no explicit mention of fossil fuel power being the trigger? Because we might have to admit that it all came from coal? The difference being that we no longer had to rely on wind and water to power our mills and pumps.
That is where he skims through history and cherry-picks the things that support his four revolutions narrative. Personally I can’t see the second, third or fourth revolution, to me it look like evolution all leading from the first. If it WAS the first. Against critical arguments the narrative might have a hard time standing up, but those arguments are not forthcoming, just assertions which make the unwoke reader scream out ‘That’s just not how it is!’
It is impossible to critique in detail if only because it is so badly written. It reads like the notes from a Powerpoint presentation made by an aspiring manger out to please his bosses. Full of buzzwords and non-sequiturs. And that is the clue. It is the higher-level version of just that. The Ne Plus Ultra of the managerial class. That is who wrote it and that is who believes it. The top level of management of the Golga-Frincham B Ark. In a sensible world we would have nothing to fear from these people because they can’t make or organise anything. What we have to fear is the position we have allowed them to take up and their sheer inability to understand that they are NOT the masters of the universe but a bunch of over-promoted tossers.
Keith – the UK changed focus from industrial manufacture to financial services, since it was thought that there was more profit in doing that. At the time, the logic may have seemed good, since like a casino there’s a lot of money flowing around and if you take a small percentage of each transaction it adds up. Easy money. Somewhat of a confusion of wealth and money, but importing stuff was cheap and was expected to be reliable. Outsource the manual work to somewhere cheap, put your percentage on top (where that percentage could be 300%), and sell it in the UK cheaper than it could be made there. I recall Viners of Sheffield saying that they couldn’t buy in the stainless steel to make cutlery at the cost they could buy in the boxed and finished cutlery from Taiwan. AFAIK that also applied to ships.
As you say, they didn’t notice that financial services can be based anywhere. The workers in the financial industry can work from home wherever they are in the world, too.
Skills in making stuff build up in an area over time, and if the companies employing those people can’t make a profit, those skills disappear a lot faster than it took to grow them.
CDQ – you need the ideas, but also the people who can put those ideas into practice. Costs come into it, but if there’s only one place you can get something, and you really need it, you’ll pay the price. Now the Chinese are the only source for a lot of things, I’d expect the prices to go up until it looks more cost-effective to make those things locally again.
Rhoda – coal-based power was just so much more reliable than water-power, and though it cost more initially than draft animals or water-wheels you could easily get as much power as you wanted. The cost went down as newer designs came in and the machinery to make the steam engines got better. Helped along by paying the coal miners a pittance…. The big thing was however mass-production and getting precise measurements so that you didn’t need skilled people to spend a long time trimming things to fit with each other. Just take the parts from the end of the production line and assemble them. Today, we’re so used to getting parts that fit together properly we forget that there was a whole skillset of “fitters” who took in not-fitting parts and made them fit. Few people these days have experience of using engineers blue and scrapers to adjust flatness and fit.
Maybe useful to remember that Golga-Frinchan civilisation ended with a plague that was passed on by non-sterilised telephones…. The telephone sterilisers were all on Ark B. Irony. Also maybe a nudge that we should explore all the consequences of an action, rather than only the obvious ones.
As I see things, the industrial revolution is a continuous process, and there are small advances happening all the time as someone finds a better (and cheaper overall) way to do what needs to be done. I’ve known and know some pretty brilliant people who are adding their own advances. I don’t see the West as being hostile to innovation, though maybe for some things there’s too much belief that we already know all of Physics and just need the extra decimal points in measurements (that was also the view of Lord Kelvin around 120 years ago, and boy was he wrong!). I’m expecting some pretty dramatic inventions to appear in the next few years, and the importance of some others to be recognised rather than being regarded as impossible by right-thinking people. Of course, I also know a number of people who are trying to do things that I consider are actually impossible, and where their data shows it doesn’t work. It’s a pretty fine line between something that is just possible, and can thus be improved to be useful, and something that isn’t actually possible.
Here’s an excellent example of what an “emerging” country can do when it invests in its own science and industrial base.
Of course, India is not an “emerging” country, it’s a “re-emerging” country.
Our school children are usually told that Mathematics as we know it (the very language of science and industry) came from the Greeks. Pythagoras’ Theorem, etc. Usually with careful ignoral that the Greeks got most of it from Egypt, Mesopotania (Iraq) and India.
In the 7th century, Brahmagupta identified the Brahmagupta theorem, Brahmagupta’s identity and Brahmagupta’s formula, and for the first time, in Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta, he lucidly explained the use of zero as both a placeholder and decimal digit, and explained the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. It was from a translation of this Indian text on mathematics (c. 770) that Islamic mathematicians were introduced to this numeral system, which they adapted as Arabic numerals. Islamic scholars carried knowledge of this number system to Europe by the 12th century, and it has now displaced all older number systems throughout the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics
Anyone reading “The History of Mathematics” will have to pay close attention to notice that the currently oldest undisputed mathematical documents are from Babylonian and dynastic Egyptian sources ~ Babylonian mathematics refers to any mathematics of the peoples of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from the days of the early Sumerians through the Hellenistic period almost to the dawn of Christianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation
With no mention that the earliest Babylonians / Sumerians / Mesopotanians were almost certainly refugees from the even earlier Indus Valley Civilisation. Officially “lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE”, but again with careful ignoral, because that’s just the part that is still on dry land, above sea level. The even older, earliest part, of the Indus Valley Civilisation is now underwater and offshore.
https://grahamhancock.com/underworld/
@Rhoda re the Schwab book: Thanks for taking one for the team, the review, and the warning.
As for animals fighting over territory, yes, but I was just messing around with the possessions thing and wasn’t going to go into territory. Territory really was the first possession for early hominids and animals and there was much clunking on the head and taking of lives over territory. It continues to this day.
The other people, facilities, materials, etc.; are all *capital*. Valuable ideas plus capital result in wealth. To me, that’s the gist of the Austrian School. No zero sum game in it and it can be shared to the benefit of all who see how it can be beneficial. Capital in itself isn’t wealth, nor is stuff wealth. Ideas that are not valuable are not wealth. It is the human factor that sets in motion the whole chain; grounded in a sound philosophical (and religious ;p) civilization. He that Is Being must exist by logical necessity; and that the physical universe that we are a part of exists is proof of the same.
What makes it valuable? That it promotes life and life more abundantly.
@ Rhoda Klapp re:
“It reads like the notes from a Powerpoint presentation made by an aspiring manager out to please his bosses. Full of buzzwords and non-sequiturs. And that is the clue. It is the higher-level version of just that. The Ne Plus Ultra of the managerial class. That is who wrote it and that is who believes it.”
What a great summary! I come to the same conclusion, not about the book (which I haven’t read), but about the antics of TPTB. Either it’s written by some kind of AI, or the ones who wrote are so far removed from the real world and free-range humans that they think their high tech make-believe world is real. They can pull whatever stunt they want without repercussions to anyone.
One thing I would like to pull the plug on is the tendency for TPTB with lots of money and/or power to impose their idea of “perfection” on everyone else, but not themselves. They give themselves license to break the rules (or make new ones at will), while they are liable to cancel anyone else who violates their latest version of the rules.
Example: One mid-level administrator that I was once associated with was working late one time. This was back in the days when networking of personal computers was pretty primitive, compared to these days. He outfitted his crew with Apple computers and used telephone wire to network them together. The secretarial pool had one computer they saved their documents on, which was sort of an ersatz “server”. Well, this night the hapless administrator thought he needed to free up space on their “server”. He took to deleting the work of the secretarial pool, willy-nilly. Not the best way to “make friends and influence people”. I get the same sort of feel from events of, especially, the last 3 years.
One question that keeps coming to my mind is how they think they can continue to surveil and control people to the nth degree if they make the electrical infrastructure so intermittent and undependable that their IoT and IoH has only partial data to work with.
If TPTB think they’re really going to reduce the population of the planet to a few specimens kept in glass cases (i.e., “15-minute cities”), and then have a way to restore civilization after something like an EMP or nuclear device detonated in just the “right” place, they’re deluded. Well, I reckon they’re deluded anyway.
Or maybe that’s not a “bug” for them, maybe it’s a “feature”…?
@rhoda clapp: “What we have to fear is the position we have allowed them to take up and their sheer inability to understand that they are NOT the masters of the universe but a bunch of over-promoted tossers.”
There is a great similarity between the very upper parasitic class and the lower parasitic class. Neither seems to understand the complexity of a technological civilization, nor realize the conceptual tools needed for its creation and maintenance.
They may have some vague conception that fields such as calculus, organic chemistry, thermodynamics, metallurgy and digital electronics exit, but they tend to simply lump them all together as “science” and they have no conception of the effort it takes to excel in them. They place them somewhere equal to dance theory, political science, and “physics-for-poets”. They think experts in the hard sciences can just be cranked out by any university with a four year lead time. It would never occur to them that destroying an industry (as we did with much of our semi-conductor manufacturing industry) destroys the human knowledge base which it requires. It is the technological equivalent of eating our seed corn — but of course they don’t know what “seed corn” means.
@Keith Macdonald: “Babylonians / Sumerians / Mesopotanians were almost certainly refugees from the even earlier Indus Valley Civilisation.”
Don’t forget the fertile plains lying beneath the Persian Gulf.
in San Francisco, “residential is dead, commercial is deader.”
https://www.foxbusiness.com/real-estate/san-francisco-real-estate-market-disaster-expert
For those that thought “It just can’t get any worse“. Let’s be grateful we’re not in Germany.
Confronted by a toxic cocktail of high energy costs, worker shortages and reams of red tape, many of Germany’s biggest companies — from giants like Volkswagen and Siemens to a host of lesser-known, smaller ones — are experiencing a rude awakening and scrambling for greener pastures in North America and Asia.
Germany’s biggest companies are ditching the fatherland. Chemical giant BASF has been a pillar of German business for more than 150 years, underpinning the country’s industrial rise with a steady stream of innovation that helped make “Made in Germany” the envy of the world. But its latest moonshot — a $10 billion investment in a state-of-the-art complex the company claims will be the gold standard for sustainable production — isn’t going up in Germany. Instead, it’s being erected 9,000 kilometers away in China.
A related problem is that Germany’s most important industrial segments — from chemicals to autos to machinery — are rooted in 19th-century technologies. While the country has thrived for decades by optimizing those wares, many of them are either becoming obsolete (the internal combustion engine) or simply too expensive to produce in Germany. Take metals. In March, the company that owns Germany’s largest aluminum smelter, Uedesheimer Rheinwerk, said it would shutter the plant by the end of the year due to the high cost of energy.
https://www.politico.eu/article/rust-belt-on-the-rhine-the-deindustrialization-of-germany/
Re that about the ICE “becoming obsolete” – I’m not so sure. Just last night, while doing some house painting, I had the radio on, listening to middle-of-the-road music on a commercial radio station. Within just one hour, I heard adverts for massive discounts on electric cars from three different makes of cars, from Nissan, Renault and Fiat. Have a lot of car makers “bet the factory” that everyone would buy these electric cars? Maybe they’re starting to get desperate to shift stock?
RE: EVs. Musk has cut prices twice lately and is selling his EVs. The others are way more expensive, such as Ford which is losing money, and not moving. Looks like a CF to me.
Metal Leo does a walk down Market Street. This is THE main drag from the bay (and the Embarcadero building) up through the center of Down Town. It is unrecognizable to me. People walking in the street and riding bikes anywhere any time. This ought to be packed with cars and tourists. Instead it is something out of a Zombie Apocalypse movie. This is the town that Gov. Nuisance “managed” before the Dimocratic RULERS of California appointed him Governor. This is what every city in the USA will be, should they ever appoint him POTUS.
Everyone in SF Market Street owns nothing, but they do not look happy to me.
I am trying to imagine how much money the GEBs will make once downtown SF is declared to be an Economic Development Zone. They will buy the buildings at auctions for back taxes or perhaps pennies on the dollar. They will get government backed low rate (or even no rate) loans, maybe outright grants, low (or no) property tax, clean the place, and refurb the buildings. They will tell the police to once again enforce the laws, remove the homeless, arrest the addicts, and chase off the riff-raff, muggers and loiterers. And because of the tax advantages, they will sell out to the Chinese and probably not pay capital gains. They will take all that profit and send 5% or 10% back to the politicians who made it all possible. Rinse and repeat.
And when they are finished, the officials will say “Look what a good job we did! We saved the neighborhood!” and very few will remember that the officials are the ones who destroyed the neighborhood in the first place.
@TTN – You got it, matey!
A few years back, I was wondering why the GEBs would want to succeed in destroying the West and particularly the USA, only to reign over ruins.
And then why force farmers out of business either through the sheer impossibility of doing anything with their land or just bankrupting them?
We may have kicked it around here and I have no doubt picked up dribs and drabs on other blogs, but the only answer that makes sense is Fire Sale! As you say, pick up assets for back taxes or even just, “Sign it over to me and I’ll improve it and have tax-paying tenants in X years.” In any case, it’ll be as close to theft as you can legally get.
“You will own nothing and be
happylucky to stay alive somehow.”@ HR:
Same here. That’s the only reason I could come with, too.
But that doesn’t make it right…or good.
What does it profit a man if they gain the world and lose their soul?
@Power Grab: “What does it profit a man if they gain the world and lose their soul?”
But if they already sold their soul, what do they have to lose?
@TTN:
Yeah, there’s that. :-(