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Defending Small Businesses and Residents from SDG&E
RE #3 "Orwellian. Makes me want to live off the grid.": I have a number of posts along those lines... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/encanto-gas… Essentially, I am looking at setting up 10 or more Harbor Freight 45-watt solar panel kits in the backyard, generating about 400+ watts of electricity, enough for a 200+ watt energy efficient refrigerator (without cold beverages, there can be no civilization), some CFL lighting with a few table lamps, and keeping my laptop & printer happy. Total cost for this off-grid setup ought to run about $2500 or less. The reason I don't recommend home improvement grid-connected solar panels is because that's a federal regulatory game I'm not ready to put up with, and by recently amended California law, only the first 5% of all customers who jump through all of the state and federal regulatory hoops to get paid for their excess electricity will actually get paid. I'm pretty sure I blogged about that before as well... On the other hand, the current rate increase proposals by SDG&E and defending residential and small business ratepayers are pretty good reasons to bring it all back up.— July 25, 2010 8:10 p.m.
Defending Small Businesses and Residents from SDG&E
RE #1.1: For those that question the $118 million for advertising and other consumer education measures, see page 6 of the APPLICATION... FOR DYNAMIC PRICING... and take your blood pressure meds first.— July 25, 2010 7:59 p.m.
Defending Small Businesses and Residents from SDG&E
RE #1.2: I previously posted a blog that included a sample voter initiative, increasing the 3% electricity franchise fee to 20% until CPUC or some other responsible agency certified that all power lines were underground, then the fee would return to its current level. http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/encanto-gas…— July 25, 2010 7:53 p.m.
I'm Not "420 Friendly," But "420 Allergic!"
Amusingly, the VA may change or has already started changing its federal policy on medicinal marijuana, allowing VA patients with pain to have access to opioid medications even if the veteran is already using marijuana for pain relief. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/health/policy/2… I wonder how many Californian veterans of Vietnam, Iraq I, and more recent conflicts have some interest in the change in federal policy... "Though veterans of the Vietnam War were the first group to use marijuana widely for medical purposes, the population of veterans using it now spans generations, said Michael Krawitz, executive director of Veterans for Medical Marijuana Access, which worked with the department on formulating a policy." "Veterans, some of whom have been at the forefront of the medical marijuana movement, praised the department’s decision. They say cannabis helps soothe physical and psychological pain and can alleviate the side effects of some treatments." "'By creating a directive on medical marijuana, the V.A. ensures that throughout its vast hospital network, it will be well understood that legal medical marijuana use will not be the basis for the denial of services,' Mr. Krawitz said." "Although the Obama administration has not embraced medical marijuana, last October, in a policy shift, the Justice Department announced that it would not prosecute people who used or distributed it in states where it was legal" (NYTimes, see above link)— July 24, 2010 4:55 p.m.
Ballpark Study Confesses: "We Hastened and Greatly Worsened the Glut"
RE "The more subsidies for private enterprises such as the Padres and the Chargers, the less public infrastructure throughout the city. Period. It has certainly worked that way in San Diego." Earlier in life, not soon after I fell off of a turnip truck, I really didn't have an opinion about the ballpark as it was being bandied about in the late last millennium. Of course, I was still ignorantly tolerable of the level of "coziness" between local developers and our unique complexity of redevelopment agencies and corporations, most prominently RA (AKA City Council members wearing their Redevelopment Agency hats), CCDC, and SEDC. My relative ignorance of the still-ongoing state of civic affairs then I can blame on the general lack of coverage in our distinguished daily paper and other mainstream local media, which, as discussed elsewhere in other Reader comments, has been judged in print form to be worthy of relieving constipation in caged canaries. I've been blogging here for about two years, and I've been observing the contents of CITY LIGHTS and SCAM DIEGO for awhile now. It's been awhile since I fell off of that turnip truck. I assume the east coast transplant blew into town some time after me. Tax Increment kitties held by redevelopment agencies and redevelopment corporations pretending to be government agencies are a good thing WHEN THEY ARE DOING THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER OF US. My rough translation of this is that they need to provide a decent level of true infrastructure, the kind of stuff that increases our own value as individuals in the community AND that protects that value from harm. Now, investors in development of officially-designated and unchallenged "blighted" areas (having a sufficient amount of mandated environmental impact review) are entitled to take a profit or they wouldn't be investing, but I am arguing that them taking a profit AND providing real infrastructure that increases our own value as individuals in the community AND that infrastructure also protects that value from harm is far better than redevelopment that ONLY gives them the chance to take a profit while concurrently driving the local economy into the dirt nose first and taking our communities to hell in a handcart along with it. "Real infrastructure" includes but is not limited to cheap, reliable and uncontested access to power, water, and the other public utilities that make life possible in this chaparral biome, where "chaparral" is biology shorthand for a desert in which the flora and fauna try to act as if it weren't a desert. To the extent that local government AND developers AND redevelopment agencies/corporations AND the public utility franchises do not meet the threshold of providing true infrastructure improvements as discussed above, we are on our own with no paddle up that creek until we all understand where we are and how to manage ourselves by objectives out of the mess that others seem to have put us in.— July 20, 2010 10:30 a.m.
San Diego City Council Revisits $288 Million Loan Forgiveness to Redevelopment Agency
BREAKING NEWS FOR 19 JULY 2010: City Council to put $293 million City Hall on Ballot? See "Tonight, San Diego City Council to Place City Hall Vote on Ballot?" at http://news.stickywebs.com— July 19, 2010 4:02 p.m.
Ballpark Study Confesses: "We Hastened and Greatly Worsened the Glut"
RE "CCDC already dominates city council, which as the redevelopment agency should actually be controlling CCDC. How would formalizing this unholy arrangement improve things?": Maybe I was just wondering how we could get that $9 billion in the CCDC Tax Increment piggy bank out to benefit the rest of us in the now-underfunded remainder of the City of San Diego... but on second thought, maybe it would all go to shoring up Mount Soledad due to recent the City Council vote to extend that state of emergency (Item 118 of July 13, 2010 tentative City Council meeting results). After all, if La Jolla slides into Mission Bay, then La Jolla is not uniquely La Jolla anymore, is it?— July 19, 2010 3:02 p.m.
Cunningham Says Local Economic Recovery Losing Momentum
I understand the criticisms of a comparison between San Diego and New Orleans after their respective disasters, but even in the hardest hit areas of San Diego County during the 2007 wildfire incident complex, local residents in Ramona and Alpine/Crest seemed to rise to the occasion, in some cases defying mandatory evacuation orders to save their homes and those of their evacuated neighbors. This is attributable to the proper prior planning done by those individuals on their own after 2003 (and not necessarily to any prior assistance they may or may not have received from any local government unit). My interest is not in state and local government emergency services that are being cut back now and will probably not be restored to pre-Crash of 2008 capabilities for the foreseeable future. I am much more interested in my neighbors being able to take care of themselves and others in the first critical/vital days after a disaster, the period when the National Response Framework advises ordinary citizens that WE ARE ON OUR OWN. http://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/nrf/nrf-core.pdf In the first hours and days after a major disaster, we stand the greatest chance of death or disability caused by that disaster, precisely when we are still waiting for the cavalry to come charging over the hill to our rescue, something that might be delayed for days, weeks, or in the case of BP in the Gulf of Mexico, months or years. If we don't make more than minimal preparations to survive (going a good distance beyond the minimal recommendations that we receive in our mailboxes from county supervisors), then we are on our own AND up a creek without a paddle... If there was a well-publicized San Diego shortcoming by local government during and after the wildfires, then it was the non-compliant paperwork submitted by two debris hauling contractors, subjecting the City to a loss of million$ in federal reimbursement -- for non-compliance with the NIMS/ICS/FEMA standards that are required for federal response expense reimbursement, coming AFTER published reports that some City employees had been caught cheating on FEMA Emergency Management Institute exams... We all know what firm was hauled up to testify in front of CPUC's Consumer Protection and Safety Division for causing the wildfires in the first place, so that local firm shall go nameless here...— July 19, 2010 2:19 p.m.
Stocks of For-Profit Colleges Zoom on Rumors
Either the bounce is merely speculative or there are investors that see these traded firms as good buys now. I think it's merely speculative. Even with looser student loan standards, those schools will have to also loosen graduation standards or face scrutiny on high failure rates before graduation. Looser grad standards mean that the degrees may potentially devalue themselves into being unacceptable for relatively mundane employment (assuming they are all that great in the first place) as nobody is going to UPhoenix or Bridgepoint to be appointed or even considered as, let's say, a UCSD biochemistry professor.— July 19, 2010 1:21 p.m.
June Unemployment Back up to 10.5%
Personally, my private tutoring business is seeing an upturn lately, on minimal advertising (my "$5/hour" bulletin board posts at San Diego City College). Curiously, I'm getting inquiries whether I can teach Algebra I/II to the point that non-students can jump into the system and challenge those courses through admissions testing ("Yes, I can!"). I've also been asked about and am doing pre-reading in Sociology, Psychology and Anatomy, all on projected Fall Semester enrollments. I suspect that students who skipped Algebra I in favor of direct enrollment in Statistics for Psychology will lead to rather lucrative group tutoring sessions in the Fall Semester as well. I recently received happy news from my Mesa College algebra client regarding his acceptance into the competitive-admission radiology program there...— July 18, 2010 1:15 p.m.