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Meanwhile, in the People’s Republic of California
The Governor of the one-party state of California has designs on running for president in 2024. Newsom claims to be a big proponent of ‘freedom.’ And touts his state’s efforts to protect the freedom to kill unborn babies up until the minute of birth. But his California is also a place where one has the freedom to loot a local business without consequences. Californians have the freedom to defecate in the street of any major city. Thanks to the ruling party’s reforms, people with HIV have the freedom to spread the virus to others. California, it seems, is just bursting with freedom.
Oh, but you won’t have the freedom to buy a gasoline-powered car. That will be illegal as of 2035. Oh, and if you own a hotel, the city of Los Angeles may soon force you to put up vagrants in any vacant room.
Under the proposal, hotels would be required to regularly report the number of vacant rooms they have to the city’s housing department. A program run through the department would then make referrals and pay “fair market rate” for the lodging using prepaid vouchers. Hotels would be prohibited from discriminating against homeless Angelenos “for their participation in this program, or the fact or perception, that they are unhoused.”
So, what do you think? Do you look forward to President Newsom taking his ‘freedom’ policies national? (Or whoever the Democrats run since they all more or less support these policies, and the alternative might be the mean tweets guy.)
Published in General
I understand he has close ties to the French laundry industry or something. Since Biden was the absolute best candidate the Democrats could put forward in 2020, they might not have the coherency left to offer a nominee in 2024.
Something to look forward to after he wins in 2024
Throw in free crack pipes and He’s My guy.
Our Dictator here in Washington has praised the California law to prohibit the sale of gasoline cars, but ours starts in 2030! We beat Newsom by five years.
Newsom vs DeSantis would make an interesting climax to the feud that already seems to have started.
In California, we are free to “love who we choose”. By that, Newsom means free to have anal sex on Market St in broad daylight in front of a school field trip, and if anybody complains they will be charged with a hate crime.
Our best hope is that Gov. French Laundry is the Demo. nominee in 2024. Cannot see any Republican who cannot beat this idiot. Even Cheney.
I think that the LA hotel proposal is a taking under the fifth amendment, and that “fair market value” is probably insufficient compensation for housing a stinking, drug addled, mentally ill homeless person.
You are right CF. But Gov. French Laundry will do nothing until it affects his run for the brass ring in 2024. Like backing off from shutting down the last nuclear power plant.
California is also working to eliminate the freedom of employers and employees to negotiate pay, benefits, and other conditions of employment. Starting in the fast food industry.
A measure passed in the Assembly and now being processed in the Senate would establish a council that would set wage rates, working hours, and other standards that the government would be required to enforce. Here is an article favorable to the proposal, and another article opposed to the proposal. Pro or con, having an entity with the power of government set wages, hours, and other conditions of employment takes a lot of freedom away from both employers and employees. The measure also sets up joint liability between franchisees and franchisor, which will substantially alter if not eliminate the franchise business model many entrepreneurs use to become business owners.
Yet another example of why Newsom’s “freedom in California” pitch was so ludicrous.
The L.A. hotel proposal has so many flaws it’s astonishing the city council vote wasn’t 12-0 the other way with much laughter at such a ridiculous idea.
I’m though even more surprised that it’s being pushed by a hotel workers’ union. I understand that the union might see this as a way to increase hotel occupancy rates and thus maybe more jobs for hotel workers. But how safe are those workers (especially the mostly female maids) going to be and feel in hallways and rooms occupied by homeless people? Some of the homeless people occupying the rooms may be well behaved and legitimately just down on their luck. But a percentage will be the mentally ill and drug addicted. How will the staff feel about cleaning up their drug paraphernalia and the other detritus that many homeless bring with them?
But, just imagine the joys of having a bunch of homeless men joining you at breakfast buffet or greeting you in the lobby or in the lounge. And how overjoyed women business travelers will be to share facilities with men literally dragged in off the street.
It also occurs to me that the hotel workers’ union might push this as a path to force hotels to universally unionize. Require all hotels to participate in a program in which the hotel receives money from the government (becomes a government contractor), then require government contractors as a condition of receiving money from the government to be a union shop.
The available hotel rooms law is easy to circumvent. Always report zero. Have the staff check in and have ghost guests.
The timing of the reporting is a practical issue that the rulers will have to figure out. Although I typically make hotel reservations many days or weeks in advance of my trip, many people do not. Twice I have been around a hotel lobby when at midnight a person without a reservation came in seeking a room. When is a room “vacant”?
A possible circumvention I thought of (at least for hotels that are part of marketing groups like Hilton, IHG (Holiday Inn), Starwood, Marriott, Choice Hotels, etc.) is to declare themselves not hotels but “private clubs” for members of their frequent guest programs. Existing members of their frequent guest programs automatically become members of the private club. Anyone calling up for a legitimate reservation not already a member can be enrolled as a member on the spot. When I was traveling for one employer, my employer had a “membership” in a chain of private clubs that were essentially limited service hotels. They were mostly located in dense business areas and provided employees an alternative to traditional hotels for lodging, especially if hotel rooms were hard to find or absurdly expensive.
So then how’s the electric power infrastructure replacement program going? With less than eight years to go before hundreds of thousands of new electric cars start hitting the road in Washington state, and giventbe length of time infrastructure projects take, I assume significant work is already underway.
Almost every retail electricity supply line in every residential neighborhood will need to be replaced to handle the increased current the houses in the neighborhood will draw when everybody gets home in the evening and plugs in their electric cars. Also the transformers at the edges of those neighborhoods. And probably the regional substations. That’s a lot of wire to replace to be prepared for adding hundreds of thousands of electric cars to the state each year.
Even a few years ago a shopping mall near where we then lived wanted to put in a bank of Tesla “superchargers.” The mall first had to get the electric company to build a whole new substation nearby so that enough current could be supplied to the mall to support the car charging stations on top of the electricity the mall was already using.
How many more power generating plants is Washington (and subsequently California) going to need to charge all those new cars? And what’s going to power them (besides rainbows and unicorn farts)? At least Washington State doesn’t already have a history of not being able to keep the electricity flowing for current demand. So maybe Washington can build enough power plants to stay ahead of the new demand. But California is going to need those extra five years (and probably more) to develop power generating capacity, since California already can’t produce enough electricity for current demand, let alone the additional demand that a bunch of electric cars will put onto the system.
It’s vindictive of me, but if this hotel vagrancy law actually passes I hope all the hotels just pull out of California entirely.
The fish loving wing of the environmental movement wants to tear out four dams on the Snake River. It could very well happen. The dams provide significant power to Washington, Oregon and Idaho.
And Oregon’s governor (the nation’s least popular) announced that her administration is ginning up plans to forbid the sale of ICE cars, too.
If the government is pay competitive pricing then why not just purchase blocks of hotel rooms in advance for their “guests”? Why go through the we will fill empty spaces motions.
Also when will a room be considered vacant? 4pm? 6pm? 8pm? 11pm? I have actually had my paid for room given away if I showed up too late even though I paid for it.
The 2020 Washington state law states that people will not be able to buy or register a gas-powered car after 2030; however, this depends on the state putting into effect a “mileage tax” on all motor vehicles, where drivers get charged by the mile for road use. That, in turn, will require the State to install, in every vehicle, a mileage-monitor so the State will know exactly how many miles you drove so it can levy the appropriate taxes. That might be very difficult, based on the results of a “pilot study” where they got volunteers to have the monitor installed in their cars. The participants in that study discovered that not only did the monitor record mileage, it also recorded speed, braking, and time of day. Many of them were very surprised to receive speeding tickets in the mail, as the state was citing them for speeding just a few miles over the posted limit, where law enforcement on the roads would ignore them. Needless to say, such a program will be very unpopular with the driving public. However, the DOT does not require public approval for their programs.
I predict that the law will not go into effect as promised, due to public objections to the State getting into the passenger seat of every car. As it stands now, the electric cars on the state’s roads (and there are thousands-I see Teslas all over) pay no gas tax, so their owners save a lot of money, while causing the same wear and tear on the roads as gas cars do. The legislature has discussed instituting a use tax on electric cars, but it is not law yet.
And the State does not say whether it will charge residents taxes on miles they drive outside the state.
For those empty rooms, declare it under renovation. If city apparatchiks come around, put in a can of paint and a paintbrush to make it look legit.
I sure wouldn’t want to rent a room after a bum was in there. This will go as well as the Starbucks anyone-can-use-the-bathroom rule.
Here in Western Washington, the counties are buying up entire hotels and converting them into homeless shelters. In fact, there is one a couple of miles from our house that was just purchased by the county with the new sales tax instituted this year. We already have a small encampment on a street-end not far from our house, and we see stolen shopping-carts full of vagrants’ stuff all the time. Regardless of the fact that the homeless do not own their carts, you never see grocery stores repossessing them. I wonder what would happen if they did try.
Why, Front Seat Tabby, what’s wrong with giving everyone a mandated living wage? Plus with so many decisions falling on the shoulders of bureaucrats, we will no longer have to worry that silly economic ideas like supply and demand will interfere with the perfect government forces in Calif making the perfect choices for us all.
When I was a really young kid, some adult explained the Irish Sweepstakes to me. I thought about it for a day or two. Then the lightning bolt hit: we could make life better for everybody by letting it come to pass that the following year, every person on earth would be issued the winning sweepstakes ticket.
I happened to tell my father about this, but he didn’t accept my reasoning. His explanation for why having an entire world of sweepstakes winners wouldn’t work disappointed me. Plus he used a word my eight or nine year old brain could not comprehend. The word was inflation.
I was deflated that my idea wouldn’t work. But he was the grown up and I was the kid, so what did I know.
But apparently my dad was wrong.
Because over the last few years, Lefties on social media state that if everyone gets $ 15 an hour, then it won’t be a problem to have an unlimited number of immigrants, because they would all be paid properly at the jobs the $ 15 an hour rate would surely manifest.
Plus my dad also had that fuddy duddy notion that once everyone won the sweepstakes, no one would want to work. So there’d be no one to build the mansions the newly rich would want, or the fancy sports cars and the expensive wardrobes that people could finally all afford.
But wouldn’t people want to work anyway, for the sheer joy of waking up early, standing on your feet all day, putting up with the pressures of your career and the pressures of interacting with the boss and the coworkers? Because it would be the right thing to do.
Some of those homeless people will resent having a “home” and will be living in the hallways etc.
Years ago, at the start of my disability situation, I got a free studio apartment by being an on-site assistant manager for a small-ish apartment building that had been originally built by an Indian (Feather, not Dot) group as retirement units for some of their elderly. But after a fairly short time there weren’t any of the tribal members actually living there; they had problems with the old people keeping large bags of corn and stuff that would get infested, and a few of them started “camp fires” in their “living rooms”…
Then how do legitimate guests check in? Cities, counties, and states have successfully punished apartment complexes etc when they turn down a “minority” tenant who is actually a government employee, after presenting identical credit history etc as was given by a non-minority tenant application that was accepted.
Unless they somehow take the buildings with them, I expect the state will “condemn” them or something, and turn them into “homeless” housing anyway.
Actually electric cars would cause more wear, since they weigh more.
” ‘Freedom’ is just another word”…for whatever progressives want it to mean. But an Orwellian world has two parts: (1) newspeak (new meanings) and (2) memory-holing old meanings. We are definitely in the first part. The question is when will the second part be complete?
I remember visiting family in Sonoma a while ago and noting with amazement that the power lines were strung from tree to tree through the branches. It always comes back to me when I read about the power grid there. California is a disaster beneath the frothy appearance waiting to collapse, IMO. I bet the EV mandate does go through too.
If Newsome gets nominated, the entire staff of MSNBC, NYT and the WaPo will rush to virtually scrub the poop off every sidewalk, celebrate cleansing California of all the fascists who moved to Texas and California (presaging the effort to drive them out of the country altogether) and lie to an extent that will make the last decade seem like a golden age of media integrity.
Bring it on Gavin. Dude, you damn near got re-called. And it was probably only cheating that saved your bacon.