1. Rome is Burning.
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From The Ruins
Rome is burning. Everyday our great state slips deeper into an abyss of corrupt local mismanagement, power hoarding, and aristocratic decadence. The same marasmus that eventually eclipsed the eternal flame of Rome is passed down generation to generation, infecting the system of great societies that serve as cultural and economic epicenters, as a sickening brood of bloodthirsty parasites fester and metastasize throughout all the extremities of the host. Speaking as neither a republican or a democrat, the Democratic Party of California is hollowing out what has been a gleaming light of abundance in this country. What used to abound with economic fruit has now been replaced, exodused, and squandered. So many are entwined with the circus of giving and caring and solidarity for this cause and that cause that they feel to see the sinking ship beneath them. They focus wholly what they want to accomplish and not one of them ever consider how they’re going to accomplish it. Homeless corpses litter the streets, steeped in their own feces, rotting in the gutter, half-dead and addicted to narcotics, while billionaires raise taxes so high they’ve eliminated the middle class.
The swine, Gavin Newsom, henceforth referred to only as the swine, in its most recent debacle, raised minimum wage in hopes of securing a livable standard for fast food workers. In this perfect example of wishing without thinking, he has caused dozens of small businesses to close down forever, ending generations of family ownership and community centership. What will soon replace them, as only the largest corporations can afford, will be fully automated storefronts. In the stroke of a pen, the swine has destroyed the careers of close to 500,000 fast food employees in the state of California, good honest people who have clung to these jobs as barely a means to survive. It didn’t act alone since of course there have been protests from fast food employee groups and efforts to unionize that have made an adjustment of minimum wage their top priority. The issue with this tactic of communal protest and unionization is the use of outdated collective bargaining methods with zero consideration of modern effects. In an era of paid research and diversity hires circumventing competence, it is easy to find dozens of paid professors willing to testify any point. No matter how many Stanford economists screech that unions will work, it is simply untrue in industries that are barely hanging on due to automation. Raising the cost of employment for corporations hellbent on securing record profits during record lows in our economy does nothing but rapidly accelerate the complete replacement of workers for robots. And fast food is not the only industry, with robotic forklifts, factory workers, package movers quickly racing to deployment, it won’t be long until the Amazon facilities need only a few engineers to run massive distribution centers.
What can be seen here can not solely be blamed on the innocent wage workers of our great state as they reasonably cry out for a chance to live and escape debt slavery, poverty, starvation, and many other more pressing issues in our society than sending foreign aid to Israel. It has already been mocked 40 times over that the rise in minimum wage contained a special clause to exclude fast food restaurants “that bake their own bread”, noting that Panera Bread is a massive campaign contributor to the swine himself. His aunt Nancy Pelosi and her now dead (thankfully) succubus amicus Diane Feinstein have been camping the seat of power as Matriarchs of the state policy and the Democratic Party for generations. So what exactly led to the demise of San Francisco?
In order for a city to survive it must adapt. Failure to do so will kill it like the Great Barrier Reef. Since its inception, San Francisco has been a world center of a city. Starting first as the main port for Alta California, carrying through the Gold Rush as the main access point and outfitting grounds to rest, buy equipment, and set out for the gold fields. Starting in the 1960s, San Francisco became a main financial center with the invention of Bank of America which made banking available to the middle class, and the establishment of the Pacific Stock Exchange, the iconic Transamerica Pyramid. In the 1990s, San Francisco’s economy diversified to be a hub for tech start-ups and websites during the Dotcom Boom, which gradually continued into the 2010s with companies like Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Dropbox, Instacart, Twitch, Reddit, Salesforce, and more.
The issue being, with the exception of a few buildings now, amidst generations of rampant growth, San Francisco failed to adapt to fit its growing population. Much of San Francisco is dotted with beautiful old century single family houses. Many areas of South San Francisco are humble suburbs with a unique cultural identity that would be squandered and bulldozed if they were to build the effective amount of high-density living structures to accomodate the rising populations in a way that would keep cost of living reasonable. As a result, demand went through the roof and supply went out the window, as increasingly wealthy tech workers flooded the city to contend for less and less housing. Whereas the city once had ample housing and could host a diversity of different income levels all within city homes, long time humble residents were quickly displaced, forced into poverty, and increasingly desperate to survive. Thus, many turned to crime and drug abuse as the population of the homeless spilled into the streets.
The bloodthirsty parasites who used San Francisco as a stage to show off empty displays of their sentimental Democratic leadership abilities, in order to appeal to the state and national audiences whom they saught to charm for governorship, senatorship, or even presidency (a phenomenon I call the Great California Springboard), actually did exactly what they were hired to do. By failing to build new housing they kept the iconic look of the old town around the city. Despite many attempts to build houses, the ability for local residents to veto housing proposals became stronger and stronger, as every resident refused to have their local communities gentrified or degentrified. In order for San Francisco to have avoided this crisis we’re now in, we would’ve had to destroy much of what made it iconic. While cities like New York continue to tear down and build up larger and larger apartment buildings, they lose iconic looks from bygone eras, but they continue to maintain their prosperity. Though their housing costs may be high, they can still afford to attract new residents every year without letting crime get out of control.
In an effort to appear sensible to the sympathetics of the California political circus, the bar of criminality in the city was raised to prevent excessive incarcerations, ignoring the reality of crime in the streets and focusing narrowly on the effects... on the criminals. While abuse of the prison systems is an issue, the answer is never to decriminalize crime. Prop 47 was voted on by California residents in 2014 to degrade theft under $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor. To the sympaths, this can be spun as a Les Miserables defense of Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving children. In reality it is a legalization of pillaging the Dollar Store for 900 packs of gum. As a misdemeanor, it lowers the priority of catching these misdemeanor criminals in place of felons, with repeat offenders quickly getting out of hand and exploding the county jails, they are released quickly or enrolled in alternative programs that are overfunded and mismanaged and put them right back in a place where theft is too lucrative to avoid. While all crime across the board is up, so is law enforcement funding, contrary to popular belief. Rather than being “defunded”, police are now overfunded relative even to account for inflation and population growth with an additional 52% bringing funding to $25 billion. Incarcerations for perpetrators who are caught is up, but the rate of crimes solved has dropped significantly. Police precincts are no longer solving crimes or pursuing perpetrators. This decline may be attributed to increased protection against police pursuit. A new bipartisan bill called the California Retail Theft Reduction Act is aimed at circumventing Prop 47 by punishing “professional retail thieves” with up to 3 years in prison. Professional thieves are evaluated as those who are repeat offenders and who possess an inordinate amount for personal use. It will also make it illegal for people to steal packages from your porch, which apparently was not previously illegal.
- Missing funding
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