Antonio, with a Bay area native’s perspective, lists all the reasons why New York City will never be a tech center in a very amusing rant.

Thinking the New York tech scene will ever equal Silicon Valley is as foolish as thinking San Francisco’s puny theater district will one day take on Broadway. Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed. So far, no one’s managed to do it, and New York sure as hell won’t either. …

$2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.

There, that’s how much my first apartment in New York cost (in 2005).

Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return. My career salary high-water mark is still working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk, and I lived worse, from a quality-of-life perspective, than I did as a Berkeley graduate student. ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere. If YCombinator existed in New York, they’d have to dish 5x more than their already slim initial funding to keep new startups in Cheetos for three months.

Basically, startups flourish in the Bay Area the same reason the homeless do: decent weather, relatively cheap living, and no stigma attached to your lifestyle.

Read the whole thing.

Serpentine

Newly arrived on the enemies list of the perennially concerned is California’s state rock, serpentine. A bill to oust serpentine is making its way through the California State Legislature, and geologists are flocking to the Magnesium Iron Silicate Hydroxide’s defense.

The bill to defrock the rock — which recently passed the full State Senate and is awaiting a vote in the Assembly — is sponsored by Senator Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, with the strong support of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

Declaring that serpentine “has known health effects,” the bill would leave California — one of roughly half the states in the nation with an official rock or mineral — without an official rock. (According to the bill, California was the first state, in 1965, to name an official rock.) Asbestos occurs naturally in many minerals, and indeed some serpentine rocks do serve as a host for chrysotile, a form of asbestos. But geologists say chrysotile is less harmful than some other forms of asbestos, and would be a danger — like scores of other rocks — only if a person were to breathe its dust repeatedly.

“There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock,” said Malcolm Ross, a geologist who retired from the United States Geological Survey in 1995. “Unless they were breaking it up with a sledgehammer year after year.”

Dr. Ross and other opponents of the bill are concerned that removing serpentine, which is occasionally used in jewelry, as the state’s rock would demonize it and thus inspire litigation against museums, property owners and other sites where the rocks sit; they cite the inclusion of a letter of support from the Consumer Attorneys of California with the bill as evidence.

“If they keep the asbestos issue bubbling,” Dr. Ross said, “it means money for politicians, more money for lawyers and money for scientists to investigate.”

J. D. Preston, a spokesman from the consumer lawyers group, said the group had nothing to do with drafting the legislation and was just responding to a request from the awareness organization for a support letter. “We just thought this was a good fit in our mission of consumer safety,” Mr. Preston said. “It is certainly not the intent, and we don’t even see where it opens the avenue for litigation.”

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated no position.

We were unable to interview Virginia’s state rock, as none has ever been appointed. Virginia’s state fossil Chesapecten jeffersonius, being naturally conservative, expressed mild chagrin at California’s radical politics, but was happy that California is so far away.

How did California go broke? In the Wall Street Journal, David Crane how democrat giveaways to unionized state employees created an early retirement leisure class whose maintenance was soon consuming the bulk of the Golden State’s budget.

In 1999 then California Governor Gray Davis signed into law a bill that represented the largest issuance of non-voter-approved debt in the state’s history. The bill SB 400 granted billions of dollars in retroactive pension boosts to state employees, allowing retirements as young as age 50 with lifetime pensions of up to 90% of final year salaries. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System sold the pension boost to the state legislature by promising that “no increase over current employer contributions is needed for these benefit improvements” and that Calpers would “remain fully funded.” They also claimed that enhanced pensions would not cost taxpayers “a dime” because investment bets would cover the expense.

What Calpers failed to disclose, however, was that (1) the state budget was on the hook for shortfalls should actual investment returns fall short of assumed investment returns, (2) those assumed investment returns implicitly projected the Dow Jones would reach roughly 25,000 by 2009 and 28,000,000 by 2099, unrealistic to say the least (3) shortfalls could turn out to be hundreds of billions of dollars, (4) Calpers’s own employees would benefit from the pension increases and (5) members of Calpers’s board had received contributions from the public employee unions who would benefit from the legislation. Had such a flagrant case of non-disclosure occurred in the private sector, even a sleepy SEC and US Attorney would have noticed.

Eleven years later, things haven’t turned out as Calpers promised. While state employees have been big winners from the bet, the state budget has been, and will continue to be, a huge loser. Far from being “fully funded” as promised, Calpers has already required $15 billion more from the state budget than projected in 1999 and $3.5 billion is budgeted for this year, a figure that is more than five times the expense projected by the state legislature in its SB 400 analysis.

“As goes California, so goes the nation,” boasts this Tea Party video by Lipstick Underground.

5:33 video

I heard about it from a liberal classmate who was not pleased by this video’s high professional quality.

Stop Taxing Us web-site

Hat tip to Norman Zamcheck.

European Grape Vine Moth, Lobesia botrana

The California Department of Agriculture has quarantined 162 square miles in the heart of California wine country, including portions of Napa, Sonoma and Solano counties. A larva of the European Grape Vine Moth (EGVM – Lobesia botrana) was captured in a trap near Oakville last September 15, marking the first appearance in North America of a pest native to Southern Europe, North Africa, Anatolia, and the Caucasus.

Suitcase smuggling of clone cuttings from top European vineyards in order to avoid sclerotic seven year USDA quarantines is rumored to have been used to create top-rated new vineyards during the 1980s, and informal evasion of the same regulations is rumored to be responsible for the recent arrival of EGVM.

AP and USDA officials are scolding and blaming scofflaws for the outbreak, noting that if the moth had arrived innocently via container ship, you’d expect to find the first examples around a port, not in the heart of Napa.

But Greg Clark, deputy agricultural commissioner for Napa County, actually hinted at deliberate introduction aimed at intentional sabotage of rival producers. “”Even small percentage or a fraction of a percentage in market share has the potential to benefit someone financially,” said Clark.

Quarantine map 1 – Napa

Quarantine map 2 – Napa, Napa/Solano

Quarantine map 3 – Yountville

Barbara Boxer’s swollen head is turned into a Monty Python-esque blimp in this amusingly destructive 7:43 attack ad done for Carly Fiorina.

Is Fiorina at all conservative? I tend not to think so, but at least she did use to work in business. I’m afraid I do not recall her being terribly successful as CEO of HP. Still, she would be bound to be an improvement over Barbara Boxer. I do like the attack ad.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

UPI reports that the cops in Oklahoma City received an interesting offer.

Authorities in Oklahoma said a man who crashed into a parking lot walked into a jail and offered a stick he called the “last tree in the universe” as payment.

Oklahoma County sheriff’s deputies said Rondell Bailey walked into the downtown Oklahoma City jail with a stick and told deputies he wanted to offer the object, which he called the “last tree in the universe,” in exchange for dropping any possible charges against him, KOCO-TV, Oklahoma City, reported Wednesday.

The deputies said Bailey left after being told the stick was not an acceptable form of payment and threw a brick through a jail window.

Investigators said they discovered a white powder suspected to be methamphetamine during a search of the suspect’s truck.

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Steve Hoefer made a glove which will play Rock, Paper, Scissors against its wearer. The glove was winning in this 1:36 video

Hat tip to Rosa Golian and Karen L. Myers.

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Satire of typical news report (Warning: lots of off-color language). 2:02 video.

From Vanderleun via Karen L. Myers.

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“Just buy me a sun dress and put me in a Prius!” Hitler declares angrily on learning that Jerry Brown is again running for governor of California in the latest “Der Untergang” take-off.

3:49 video.

Hat tip to Kenneth Grubbs.

Mickey Kaus

Relatively rational liberal commentator Robert Michael “Mickey” Kaus has filed his nomination papers to run against Barbara Boxer in the democrat primary in California for that party’s nomination to the US Senate.

Kaus went to Harvard and has been a prominent blogger since 1999. Although he’s a liberal, he fairly frequently posts well-reasoned analyses I agree with and link.

Investor’s Business Daily describes his politics as follows:

Kaus is a strong supporter of national health care, though he harshly criticized the White House “cost control” marketing strategy. However, he is a harsh critic of labor unions, a skeptic of affirmative action and an opponent of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Kaus is known for his honesty about the motivations of his allies, his opponents and himself.

I’m not sure that Mickey Kaus is any worse than Carly Fiorina overall, and either of the two would be a definite improvement over Barbara Boxer. I think Kaus has a chance of winning the primary, and is bound to make it an interesting race.

A typical Sunnyvale vampire (Spike) preying on a typical female citizen (Willow).

Brian Dalen Thomas addresses the vexed question of human vampire ecology in the Sunnyvale, California of Joss Wheedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Excerpts:

(W)e know from the sign in “Lover’s Walk” that the human population of Sunnydale is 38,500. …

Sunnydale’s human population growth rate is 10% annually, which is certainly at the high end for a budding California community.

A vampire feeds every three days, and encounters about one hundred potential victims in the course of a day, meaning that 1 out of every 300 encounters involves a little refreshment.

An individual vampire sires a victim every other year, or once per 240 feedings.

Buffy and her Slayerettes, busy little beavers that they are, annually stake about 1/3 of the vampires plaguing Sunnydale.

Vampires are flocking to Sunnydale, since the Hellmouth is the underwordly equivalent of Silicon Valley, and the demon labor market is just too good to be true. Thus, we’ll assume a yearly migration rate of about 10%, or the same as for the humans.

A Model

What follows is based on some of the simpler theoretical understandings of predator-prey population dynamics. I’m assuming that human populations are not controlled solely by vampire predation (i.e.- in the absence of vampires, the human population would still eventually be limited by some other factor, like food supply, disease, or access to a well written weekly news magazine. I like The Economist myself, but that’s clearly a digression).

If we let H stand for the size of the human population and V stand for the size of the vampire population, then we can represent the changes in each population over time with a pair of differential equations:

dH/dt = rH (K-H)/K -aHV

dv/dT = baHV + mV – sV

where r is the intrinsic growth rate of the human population, incorporating natural rates of both birth and death as well as immigration

K is the human carrying capacity of the habitat in question

a is a coefficient that relates the number of human-vampire encounters to the number of actual feedings

b is the proportion of feedings in which the vampire sires the victim (i.e.- this is the vampire birth rate)

m is the net rate of vampire migration into Sunnydale

s is the rate at which the Scoobies stake vampires (assumed to be the only important source of vampire deaths).

The following graph shows human population sizes on the horizontal axis and vampire population sizes on the vertical axis. Each line represents a trajectory through time (the tail of each line, scattered around the outer edge of the figure, shows the “initial population size” where we started the model in motion). Any point on a line represents a combination of human and vampire population sizes – a step, if you will, in that beautiful dance between Buffy and the Minions of Evil. Notice that wherever we “start” the trajectories, they all spiral in towards our equilibrium state, indicated in the center by an
asterisk.

Hat tip to Robert M. Breedlove.

Capitol Weekly reports on an interesting recent political dialogue in California.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, famously told the governor to “kiss my gay ass” at a Democratic fundraiser last month. Two days later, the governor responded in the veto message of one of Ammiano’s bills.

Earlier in the month, the San Francisco Democrat was at a boisterous Democratic fund-raiser when Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by to say hello. The governor, a guest of former Mayor Willie Brown, said a few words of greeting and extolled the virtues of bipartisanship. But Democrats, unhappy with the governor in their midst, booed loudly.

“Kiss my gay ass!” Ammiano shouted out.

Schwarzenegger smiled and left. But he was plotting his move.

On Oct. 11, the governor vetoed Ammiano’s AB 1176, with a seemingly innocuous and vague veto message.

Innocent enough. But when read on the governor’s Web site, the first letter of the last two paragraphs line up to spell out a clear, if crude message.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said the hidden message was a “strange coincidence.”

“When you veto so many bills, something like this is bound to happen,” he said with a straight face.

How did a state with as many things going for it as California manage to go broke? Unions, Environmentalism, and a politics consisting of trying to have it both ways, Troy Senik explains.

California politics has given expression to the public’s contradictory political impulses. Liberals have won their campaign for bigger government and runaway spending, and conservatives have usually succeeded in keeping tax hikes at bay. The Golden State’s signature optimism may be to blame: How else to explain the delusion that Californians could be taxed like libertarians, but subsidized like socialists? The result, of course, has been a fiscal crisis addressed with slashed spending on public services and increased taxes in the midst of a deep recession — a recipe for yet more discord and trouble. In a grim irony, Californians are now being taxed like socialists and subsidized like libertarians.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

A Kern County Animal Control crackdown on unlicensed pets targeted 83-year-old Dottie Elkins over her dog Wolf.

Unfortunately, the dog authorities spied sitting near her door was a stuffed toy.

1:45 MSNBC video

Hat tip to Smartdogs for the better link.