History Snippet- Commies everywhere!

 

So I drove downtown to make a $339 deposit at the bank..

..but ended up with just a hundred bucks- and still owe $60 for the ticket.

San Francisco’s Auto Return service is very well-run. At the original 2nd Street scene of the crime, I parked my rental car, ran to the bank, made the deposit, and returned in five minutes to see that the car was gone. But about an hour after the tow, the valet attendant at Auto Return brought my car right up to the front of the 7th Street lot for me to drive away.

You can be sure that I made up lost time by some reckless driving back to work!

But two days later, I took Muni Metro to get to the bank.

 

 

San Frisco Needs More Than Congestion Pricing To Ease Traffic, Promote Transit

See http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/19/MNKJS8LM4.DTL 

Toll-charging is bull puckey! San Frisco city administration is already seeping with monopocratic self-indulgent molasses.

 Channeling Jeffrey Skilling’s can-do attitude, here are some ideas: 

 1. North-south and east-west, San Francisco gets in the way. You can’t drive around it, and you can’t get out of it quickly. Plans to build freeway corridors were nixed in the 1950s. No alternatives have been proferred. That’s fifty years ago and you still have to drive streets from 101 and 280 to get through the city.

For South-to-North, just to get through, how about tunnels or sub-level boulevards? For example for 280 from Daly City sink Sunset Boulevard or 19th Ave, through Park Presidio to the Golden Gate Bridge. We need two or three new tunnels to help people get through.

2. San Francisco should be set up like Disneyland. Lots of peripheral parking. Speedy mass transport conveyance to central sites. ..extending this idea- clean and well-maintained public places, fewer grumpy people. All panhandlers have to be trained as entertainers. Substance abusers forced by the courts to take showers and dress up as characters. Troublemakers escorted out.

Maybe even some neat rides!

3. The State of California should consider alternatives to SF’s city and county charter and legal framework, since the current encrustation is abominably disfunctional. Civic problem-solving and strategizing is now just gaming the status quo.

4. And the culture is turning third world corrupt, Russian schizoid- warm deep interiors, pragmatic criminality.

“The generations of people dying now must fight hard to convince younger ones to save and improve what lifetime struggles built.” -J Skilling

 

 

Pouring Salt On Hunters View

Folks in HP likes to name their streets after themselves, but most of them spent their days mau-mauing the flak catchers, gambling, or stealing money from Christian prayer breakfast groups.

“Fixing mess at Hunters View won’t be quick, easy or cheap

Heather Knight, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, September 17, 2007

Tamika Trammell has glorious views of the San Francisco skyline, Treasure Island, sunlight bouncing off the bay. But the picture window she peers through is covered in thick, noxious mold that returns no matter how many times she cleans it. Her 1-year-old son already relies on a respirator to breathe at night.This is Hunters View, the public housing development perched on the hills of Hunters Point recently deemed by federal inspectors to be one of the worst such complexes in the country.Rats and mice infest the crumbling, barracks-style buildings. Raw sewage bubbles up through grates in the cement, creating smelly pools. Shattered glass lies scattered on the grounds. Plywood boards cover dozens of vacant units. And mold is everywhere.…If the initiative proves a success, it could turn around what arguably has been a history of official neglect and broken promises for public housing residents on the city’s southeast side – a history in which the White House, Congress, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the San Francisco Housing Authority and the mayor himself have played a part.…”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/17/MN2KS4OC6.DTL

HERE’S THE ANSWER:

Tear them down! Give out subsidy vouchers and obliterate these rat holes. Ask the police, ask the neighboring homeowners- tear them down! Drive through the Hill. It is a labyrinthe of crime. Cut out these secluded, marginalized abominations. The Housing Authority is a decadent bureaucracy incapable of management. Wipe out this darkness and fear. Tear them down!

Flatten the whole area all the way up and down the shipyard border- tear down the end of Oakdale, a cut-off section government-approved as a clubhouse for criminals. Tear them down! Pour salt over it for forty years, and then sell it off.

 

IT Nazis Attacked By Native Americans!

More News of The Rebellion

excerpted from article on employees’ common circumvention of IT

Gartner Analyst Stephen Prentice said, “The critical thing to understand is that your employees are not doing any of these things … to be awkward. They’re not doing it because they’re trying to break security. They’re simply trying to get their job done… The approach has be to not go in there and stop them from doing it. Go in there and find what constraint have you put in their way that’s forcing them to do something that is out of your control, and then fix your problem. If you gave people the option of using an in-house, secure, controlled environment that meets all of their needs, they simply aren’t going to have the need to go outside. If you fail to give them that — if you give them restrictions that are unreasonable or stop them doing their job effectively — then they will find another way.”

Gartner Fellow David Mitchell Smith added, “If rogue users start to see some flexibility on the part of the IT department — some genuine interest in wanting to provide what they need — they may be more open to go to them first and say ‘Can you help us provide this,’ as opposed to just going out and doing it. [They could] be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. But long term, there’s this unstoppable force which is demographics. New people are coming into the workforce, in IT and in non-IT functions, and they are becoming more open-minded and having more and more of an impact. Over time it’s pretty inevitable that the trend is moving toward the more open way of doing things. It’s just a matter of how long it takes and how well it fits into the culture of each organization.”

Ultimately, this “civil war” is merely a sign of two larger problems that IT must address:

1.) There are lot of IT departments that have policies and attitudes that are stuck in a time warp. The procedures that allowed IT to deploy important technologies while protecting users from themselves are no longer valid in a world where individual users often have newer and more advanced technologies in their homes that the IT department has in the office. IT is now entering into more of partnership with users, and policies and attitudes need to reflect that.

2.)There’s a general disconnect and lack of constructive communications between many IT departments and their users. IT departments need to view themselves as customer service organizations, with their users being their primary customers. IT departments have got to lose their paternalistic approach to users and focus their efforts around serving users and enabling them to become more productive.

The IT departments that make these changes will thrive. The ones that don’t will see their role within the organization diminished and become prime targets for outsourcing.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=548&tag=nl.e101

The IT Job Pool

 

CitiApartments

 San Francisco’s Citiapartments is a group of related Lembi-family partnerships that own and manage over 260 apartment buildings, and a few deluxe short-term residences (CitiSuites) and boutique hotels in the City. Their business plan is to increase rents by making lower-class apartments more marketable to higher-paying renters.

They have rapidly purchased over 200 older (ie, rent-controlled) SF buildings in the last ten years, recently using 5-yr interest-only mortgages packaged (along with unrelated commerical properties) by investment banks into securities for private “collateralized debt obligation” (CDO) bonds divided into sections (“tranches”) with various risk levels and interest rates. These are the same securities which investors had trouble pricing during the recent (and current) liquidity crisis in the financial markets. In addition to such first mortgage financing, second mortgage “mezzanine” loans are obtained to pay for the rennovations and tenant buyouts which bring on higher rents. A lot of the improvements are quick fixups. The SF rental market is tight and the ability to push up pricing and push out low-paying tenants is a real plus for lenders- the real owners.  

The huge amount of debt sometimes causes operational difficulties, and vendors such as maintenance firms and construction crews have had to deal with long delays in payments. This is a bit ironic, since Citiapartments is very aggressive in managing removal and/or buyouts of late-paying or low rent tenants. In fact, they’ve been sued by the City Attorney, who asked that they be barred from property management in the City. In the meantime, the partners have engaged in frequent refinancings,  regularly cashing out their capital gains, squirreling some money away, but also fronting payments in new buildings and out-bidding other buyers. As a hard-working family-run business they also pull out salaries, commissions, and fees that make everybody prosperous.

They are rumored to use the characters in the movie Eraserhead as models when choosing their tenant relations operatives. These commissioned employees, allegedly led by a bullying ex-cop, are involved in various behaviors which assist low-paying tenants decide to accept “relocation” buyouts. In-house attorneys also stay very active.

Citiapartments (aka Skyline Realty, or The Lembi Group) is an enormously successful but highly leveraged outfit which has monoplized purchase of rent-controlled apartment buildings in San Francisco. Look at the rent heat map of the City (craigstats) and you can see what’s going on! And remember, they can’t help any bad behavior- they have to pay all that interest on the loans!

Here are some typical rants. 

Here’s details of a recent financing package, which includes Lembi Group apartments & Chicago’s Sears Tower .  5 yrs, interest-only, recourse, no separate entity opinion.

 David Raynal, CEO

“To be honest about it, if you don’t mind, frankly, we’re really amateurs!”

 

J Skilling Reveals Herself!

“Life has really been shit, recently!”

J Skilling today reveals herself to wordpress as a female from Estonia now living in San Francisco with the nom de plume of the currently imprisoned ExEnron CEO Skilling.

Enron’s Skilling is another of those Ayn Rand syncretists who combine self-empowerment boosterism with the misanthropic psychology of distance: “Losers, losers, they’re all losers!” But this particular Darth Vader got unlucky! Others abound freely, including.. well, see the accompanying blog!

“I like to control my lovers!”

This year we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Atlas Shrugged