Lee.org

Some fliers made it to the front step of the building. They remind me that I live in San Freaky Cisco.

From the website…

Rent control has been a road block for Landowners, but it does not stop them from taking advantage of renters. For example:

– 2 bedroom apartments being advertised as 4 bedrooms
(calling the living room and dining room bedrooms),
charging twice the value of the apartment to maximize profits.
So, this guy didn’t actually notice he was moving into a tiny city apartment?

– realtors bribing senior tenants to move out so they
can jack up the rent to “market value.”
Hmm, good idea

– renters fixing their apartments themselves instead of calling
the Landowners afraid inspections will force them out.
So this guy would rather continue to live in a place that -should- be condemned rather than use the existing laws and force the landlord to make repairs? Ok… umm…

I like that the website has a (insane) poison pill statement

The FBI in the Bay Area with help from the police have been known in the past to spread disinformation to prevent popular movements from interfering with business as usual, (COINTELPRO era and beyond). DO NOT TRUST any rent strike statement you see that is racist, authoritarian, anti immigrant, sexist, factional, or contradicts anything you read in this statement. With the economy in the state that it’s in today a rent strike could very well scare many wealthy Landowners and realty companies (look up COINTELPRO).

Removing Landowners’ control over properties they don’t live on would be real property reform. They definitely shouldn’t control or profit from land they don’t need (use your imagination). Striking rent could be the beginning of this process. Our ability to organize our community will determine how successful striking rent will be.

I went to his recommended website and found this list of how terrible CitiApartments/Skyline is. From that site:

* Showing up at tenant’s doors late at night with a couple of big guys, for “inspections”
The law says they have to be “announced” and appear at a “reasonable time”. Dude, just tell them to come back tommorrow!

* Snooping around tenants’ apartments on false pretenses like inspections, and then looking for things they can use against tenants
What illegal activities were you hiding?

* Telling tenants “we can do this the easy way, or the hard way”
So you did something that caused the building to be condemned, got caught and the landlord asked you to leave. It was time to quit yesterday. Why didn’t you just leave?

* setting up tables in the lobby with a photo copier and demanding ID from tenants
Huh?

* putting notices up saying tenants aren’t allowed in the building
Wha?

* refusing to repair elevators in buildings full of seniors
If the elevator is in the lease, make them fix it. If not…

* telling tenants they will call the FBI, homeland security, or immigration on them
Ok, what did you do? Really?

* (in at least one case) showing up at a tenants’ door wearing fatigues and a firearm
The landlord has a license to carry in your San Francisco neighborhood? Man, you live in a shitty neighborhood. You should really move!

* pretending they didn’t receive rent and then issuing evictions for lack of payment of rent
You didn’t pay by check and you didn’t get a receipt. Ok.

* issuing evictions for roommates “in violation of lease” when roommates are legal tenants
Are they? What -exactly- does your lease say? Your friends can’t crash on your couch forever, really.

* refusing to pay interest on security deposits
Dude, it’s like 1% interest. $20/year or something. Just let it go.

* telling immigrants or people of color that their “money isn’t good here”
There are serious laws about that. If you can prove those statements, you’re golden.

* videotaping tenants as they walk out of their doors
That sounds like a good thing, since even the landlord, who is packing, got mugged with your rent money.

* letting bedbug epidimics run unabated
Umm…. get a new bed? Bedbugs are hard to get rid of, really. Sorry.

* doing construction on buildings in such an irritating way that tenants are forced to leave
Yes, you’re right, they should use hammer muffs.

* demanding meetings with tenants at the church and market office
Those Bitches!

* trying to impose draconian house rules on tenants
Which one? “Turn off your faucet before you go out of town” or “It’s 11 o’clock, turn down that crazy rap music!”

* trying to require that tenants tell them when they’re leaving town
Huh?

* issuing evictions when tenants leave town for the weekend
Evictions take weeks. And why are you getting evicted? Oh yeah, you left the faucet on for 3 months while you were out of town.

* issuing evictions for messy apartments
Dude, if it smells that bad, you really should clean it up. And yes, you can get evicted for that.

* requiring tenants to hand deliver their checks
The lease has the landlord’s address at the top of it. On the 26th of every month, write and mail a check. Is it that hard? Apparently. That’s why I advocate building in late-fees to leases so when people like you write your rent check late every freaking month, the landlord says, “No problem. If received after the 5th of the month, you owe an extra $20. Pay or get out.”

* failing to fix the heat
San Francisco law is quite clear about how much heat an apartment should get. If it’s substandard, lodge a complaint. But if you want a sauna, move to Iceland. They have lots of those there.

* claiming tenants are “nuisances” and then offering them market rate rooms in other buildings
Well, with your crazy parties and running the faucet for months at a time and that smell, that smell! You should move further away. Or save some money buy your own place so you can do all those things in your own house.

Here’s the new chant for our picket line:

Free Housing! No Rent!

Free Rent! No Housing!

I was wondering today, “What exactly is the purpose of the International Space Station and all those Space Shuttle trips for upkeep? Aren’t those flights really really really expensive?”

A pretty convincing answer comes from Maciej Ceg?owski. In short: government space-cheese. They could be doing potentially useful things, but instead “…the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio.” I want my ten billion dollars back.

This is a really good article. Read A Rocket to Nowhere.

Baking yeast packets at the supermarket: $3 for 3 0.25 oz packets. $64/lb

Bulk baking yeast: $2.29 for a 1lb brick. $2.29/lb

Packets cost 28 times as much. Yipe.

Smart and Final sells packets right next to bulk 1 lb containers. The packets cost $3 for 0.75 oz, the bulk costs $4 for 16 ounces. You do the math. Buy the bulk yeast. It freezes perfectly well after being opened for at least a year (I haven’t ever had to freeze it longer, I use it)

Costco, Sams Club and similar stores also have the 1lb brick of yeast. If you make more than 3 loaves of bread this year, it’s worth getting the large size. With my breadmaker, I make about 30 loaves/year.

Rainbow also has open bulk yeast.  Yeast generally lasts at least 1 year in the freezer… except for the yeast I got at Rainbow. I’m pretty sure it needs to be refrigerated and not frozen because twice now I got yeast there, made a loaf, froze the rest and the yeast was dead after. :-(

I offer this in the spirit of a previous rant of mine, Megan’s Law Wouldn’t Have Saved Megan.

Remember Love Canal, that awful housing development where residents kept dying from Leukemia and shit in unexplainable numbers until someone figured out that the whole place was built on a chemical dump? This case was so serious that the government created a whole series of laws, commonly called “Superfund” to keep horrible things like this from happening.

The trouble is, it was –well known– that it was built on a chemical dump. Hooker Chemical had sold the land to the city under threat of the city just taking it by eminent domain. Hooker Chemical told them there were nasty chemicals down there and suggested that building a school and housing development on it wasn’t the best idea in the world. They even insisted on a disclaimer notice going into the bill of sale saying (I’m paraphrasing) “Dude, there’s some nasty shit down there. But you bought it so it’s not our problem any more.”

So the city turned around, poked some big leaky holes in the (previously) sealed and very dangerous landfill and had a school and housing development built on it, not telling anyone that there was nasty shit down there.

The purpose of Superfund is to clean up toxic waste sites where they couldn’t get the owner to pay for it. Well, we all know who the freaking owner is. There is a deed on record in (I presume) Niagara Falls City Hall. We know who the criminally negligent people are, why are they not in jail?

This originally pointed out to me by TJIC.

Sure, it’s easy to upload your company’s videos and your friend’s videos to Youtube. It’s hosted for free and can stand virtually unlimited downloads. But I can do that right here at my web provider without giving my content to a third party… who -might- be around in 5 years and -might- keep the links to my content the same for 5 years, without selling out to Youtube’s advertising.

Yes, you’ll get more exposure by posting to Youtube. And using their limitless bandwidth for high-bandwidth applications is nice. But you should post locally and then consider posting to Youtube as part of your marketing plan or “emergency bandwidth plan”. Always link back to the original content. It’s just too easy to give the “keys to the store” to too many people.

Update 3-13-08: I just read this article about Youtube. It reminds me of Kozmo.com in the dot com era.

Rex Wong, chief executive of Next.TV (formerly Dave Networks)… says, it costs a provider about $2.50 for every 1,000 views of a user-generated three-minute video clip. But that clip will bring in just $1 or so in banner ad revenue, he says. In other words, says Wong, profit can only be made when clips are getting tens of thousands of views.

So let me get this straight: it costs $2.50 to serve 1,000 views… and that generates $1 in revenue. (1-2.5=-1.5) And if we do that a whole lot, we’ll make it up in volume! Yeah.

At Burning Man, under the man there were a couple preachy signs. Here’s my favorite.

Sorry it’s hard to read. I lost my digital camera at the Albertsons in El Cerrito on my way to Burning Man so all I had was my emergency film camera.

I thought it was ludicrous at the time but it got me thinking a lot.
The problem is: cell phones need a metal called tantalum to make their tiny capacitors, the largest supplies of tantalum are in the Democratic Republic of The Congo which is a fairly lawless place and gorillas and miners are treated poorly there.

Read it for yourself.

Me at work:
>> Do you know how I can allow my Windows and Exchange passwords can be
>> different? If not, say so and I’ll go googling for info.

Him:
>I do not know off hand, I would need to research it.

So does that mean he -will- research it or he -could- research it? And why didn’t he take me up on my offer? Maybe he didn’t read my whole (2 sentence long) email.

This from an email that I decided not to send to a friend

Thank you for writing an intelligent reply to my question.

I’m not referring to you at all in saying that I find it terribly frustrating when when a question in the middle of a conversation is deliberately not addressed.

And I find it a pleasure to deal with people that -do- maintain the conversation.

(unfinished Rant)

No seriously. At the end of the ingredients list of tens of thousands of products it reads “and spices”. So what are they? Pepper? Nope, ’cause I’ve seen things that list pepper separately. Salt? No, they always list that. Oregano? Bug parts? Plutonium? Dirt? What?! I want to know!

[written 5-7-02, updated 2-14-03, put into my blog 8-15-05]

Stop saying “God Bless America” in response to September 11th! That is what got us in trouble in the first place.

Insert rant here. Discussion points:

• Other, positive things that can be said
• Religious separatism is extremely counter-productive for: our society,
  world productivity, burning personal hatred, long term personal recovery 

  example webring text: source
  Christians all over the world, please pray for America and for all
  those involved in the terrifying and horrible tragedy that took place there in
  the USA. Pray also for the service men and women who are in Afghanistan! We
  know that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the only one that can give everyone
  the strength and support…

• Vengeful god vs. merciful god. Relate that to why we say "God Bless
  America"
• Separation between church and state
• Relate my personal internal pain. We’ve got to redirect the energy
  positively
• They take their religion very seriously and literally (IE 72 virgins in
  heaven). We do well not taking ours as seriously. So let’s keep it that way.
• How do you think it makes them feel when we say it?
• sidebar: "Ground Zero" as unfortunate terminology for gestalt.
  Suggest "The Pile", "The Site".
• Discuss the power that words and terminology have.
• Conclusion: It’s bad for everyone involved. So cut it out!

I see signs all over spouting about how great God is. There is this truck that’s been sitting just off the highway in Mount Olive for several months. It has a sign draped over it with a large flag and it says “God Bless Us All”. Another volunteered sign is on Rt. 519. It’s an 8′ x 4′ piece of plywood leaned up against a telephone pole crudely spray painted with the message:

That sign really freaks me out. Everyone is free to voice their opinion but
it really worries me to the core how caught up people are about their gods. And
I worry what terrible things my neighbors are capable of doing if someone or
something offends their sense of the infallibility of their god.

Look at that sign again… Look at the order he put things in.
"God" is first, "Country" last! So when the author refers to
Duty and Honor, that’s to his god and not to his country. It’s true that the
First Amendment of the Constitution refers to the freedom of religion, but he’s
forgotten that it’s an amendment. The Constitution itself (dry as the
text may be) and the country founded by it comes before all of the
amendments!

I suppose the author of this sign is angry at my critical commentary. I’ve
probably offended his Honor and his God. What do you suppose Duty requires him
to do to me?

Bibliography:

• God Bless America webring
  with 400 sites.
• news agencies, CNN, NBC, CBS, etc