It's called Public Service

I was a little bored so I decided that I would look through the City of San Francisco's budget. Really I was just pissed about having to pay for parking so I wanted to see what that was all about. What I found really shocked me. I am shocked that such a liberal, forward thinking city has lost its way so dramatically. I read everyday about the "Google Bus" and how tech is ruining this city. I see everyday how expensive it is to live in the city. The outrage that these "Tech" companies are driving the decent, hardworking people out of the city. Well, I guess there is another category that needs to be lumped into the mix. "Tech and Government" well they are really the demons here. I took this from page 26 of City and County of San Francisco
Consolidated Budget and Annual Appropriation Ordinance. http://sfcontroller.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=2390

Average Per Employee (FTE)
Personnel - Salaries & Wages			$93,329 69.3%
Personnel - Fringe Benefits			$41,362 30.7%
Personnel -Subtotal			$134,690 100.0%

   What? Am I reading this correctly? On average a city employee makes as much if not more than a lowly tech worker? I have been to the DMV, waited in line to register my car, get a drivers license. Was treated rudely by the guard, and the lady that could only handle 10 people every hour and then go on break. And they are making 134k a year. Oh, wait, that doesn't mean they actually get all of that, there are benefits, and other deductions, and oh yeah, the pension that they get when they retire. Can you show me a tech company with a pension that guarantee's their employees salary for life? Yeah, that is a pretty short list. I think that there is exactly none of them that do that.
   Next, show me a tech company that you can treat your customers like crap, not solve their problems, not be innovative and change the way that the world operates and spend more time on break then you do at actual work that is still in business and not scale your opex. Hey, we can use the same list as the salary for life, zero.
   Public Service, the reason, very reason that people get into the government sector was historically to help their country, state, city without out the promise of a huge pay check but the promise of not getting fired for being a crappy employee and getting a pension. The Kenndy's, Rockerfellers and Roosevelt's got into government work because they could afford to be. The had the resources to be able to take a small paycheck in return for helping the country become a better place. That seems to have been replaced by overpaying people that have no desire to help us but expect to be paid as much as someone that is changing the world. Granted Facebook and Twitter probably won't stand the test of time and in 50 years the fact that we are enamored with useless conversations about nothing but currently it's a big deal.

  Looking further into the wonderful budget shows that 73.9% of all the money that our city government collects goes to pay people. I am no expert but if that number holds true then we are in a pretty said state as a city.
   The thing that originally got me started thinking about this was when I read about the highest paid public official. That honor fell to the person in charge of the fire department. A valuable group to say the least. According to the budget, they have 475,000.00 budgeted for our Fire Chief, she should feel short changed over the 169,000.00 that she left on the table since she is bringing in only a partly 308,250.00. I did a quick search and the largest fire department in the states is in New York run by Sal Cassano.
http://nypost.com/2009/12/21/sal-cassano-named-new-fdny-commish/
"Cassano, an Army combat veteran of the Vietnam War, will be paid $205,180 a year, sources said, a slight increase over his current salary of $200,096. He’ll be eligible for a $172,000 yearly pension when he retires."
I was hoping that maybe the complexities of running the city by the bay would have a really good reason for the huge discrepancy. I know that we feel New York is in love with us and really wants to be like. Maybe there are some hidden costs, a chauffeur, special car, uniform costs, body guards, until I remembered that our Fire Chief has all those things too. I know that it's probably not the best idea to piss of the person in charge of sending people to your house when it's on fire but it has to start somewhere.
                Government is a non profit, it's roll isn't to make as much money as possible to make way for more jobs to pay people even more money. It's job is to provide basic services to it's citizens and help out when it can. We have lost our way, big government isn't the solution, smart government is, as long as it's efficient I don't care of everyone is employed by the government as long as they keep their hand out of my pocket anymore than it is. As I said, I orginally wanted to look into the parking, parking the bane of everyone that has a car. There was a movement to let us all park for free on Sunday. The city came back and said it would cost 8 Million a year if they didn't collect money on those four or five days a month. What it would really do is take the over 100 Million that they collected in parking and fines and reduce it by some random number. I think it's time that we as the citizenry start thinking about the fact that we are funding this and not getting anything but problems because of it.

Maybe we should start making some better choices before we blame a big bus driving some techies around as the source of the real problem.

                                                                                              

A Modest Proposal

Ok, I totally stole that from Swift and I am not going to preach the upside of cannibalism. Really? Yes, eating children, that just isn't right, they are all stringy and can't have much flavor. Probably mostly grisly, and no one likes grisl, except maybe dogs, they love that crap anyway. So I live in a City that seems to feel the best way to solve things is to take a logical premise and then turn it upside down so it makes absolutely no sense.
I play RoShamBow, Rock, paper, scissor its an elegant game, rules are simple, rock beats scissor, scissor beats paper, paper beats rock. I would like to propose a new game called, Car, Bike Pedestrian, CaBiPed. Normal rules would be, car beats bike, bike beats pedestrian, and pedestrian beats car. Absurd you say, well it sort of is because it really wouldn't work that way, because Pedestrian beats Car, Pedestrian beats Bike, Bike beats car and well, car doesn't really beat anything. I know, how can a 2000 pound vehicle not win in all of them, well in San Francisco they have this law that says Pedestrians have the right of way, yes, you can walk into any cross walk and every car has to stop, you can cross on a green light and in theory the person in the cross walk has the right of way. I think bikes win as well, because bikes are everywhere the only thing they can't beat is a pedestrian, in a cross walk. The absurdity of all this has given us 8 people killed so far this year, probably countless more accidents that don't make the news. Living in the city a driver is bombarded with so much stimulus that it is almost impossible to keep track of everything, lane restrictions, the ability to turn left every five miles in a city that is 7 by 7 miles. Cell phones, taxis, bikes, pedestrians, cell phones, homeless jay walkers, normal jay walkers, dogs on leashes, dogs off leashes, street signs that are hidden behind trees, distractions abound and the city is unwilling to make it any easier on the drivers, that are behind the wheels. So my simple proposal is this, make it legal to run people over. Change the asinine laws and put logic at the for front. Yes it would be very unpleasant at first the implementation of this new law. People getting run over for crossing against the light, random jaywalkers being mowed down. The old lady that decides to start crossing the street when their is 1 second left of the crossing and the light changes. Mayhem would in sue but think of the other perks, morticians and hospitals would have a boom. Car sales would spike up as new buyers get the latest and greatest grills and tires. Autobody shops would have so much work they would have to hire more people to pound out the dents and paint the cars. Yes it would be a very hard transition, new laws would have to be written, camera's installed to make sure that when someone got ran over they laws were followed but the upside would be people would learn that a car beats a pedestrian every time and having the right of way needs to make room for logic. Yes there would be some sad cases where an old lady got mowed down but really travesty happen all the time, but the upside, we would get rid of a whole generation of morons.

Shareholder Pressure

I was going to write about advertising but I think maybe tomorrow I will. Today is all about shareholder value. Reading my normal plethora (pleth·o·ra noun \ˈple-thə-rə\ : a very large amount or number : an amount that is much greater than what is necessary of ) of randomness that fills up my day I came across an article in linked in from Simon Sinek, from his TED talk  called Great Managers Don't Lay Off Employees. I was impressed with the sentiment he expressed, but really it was just another corporate guy talking about how in a perfect world we would keep jobs forever, he notes one company that hires you for life and you can never get fired, if you aren't performing then your manager has to invest their time and resources to fix you. I applaud the effort, I wish when I got laid off with 1500 of my peers we all had managers that cared for us. I was stuck with a boss that couldn't see the coming wave and the myriad of ideas that me and the team proposed to her that would possible save us from the unforgiving red pen slashing across our names but she had bought a ranch, had some horses and plenty of money set aside so she said it was too much work to accomplish and we should just accept our fate. Bad managers exist, yeah they always will, blah blah blah, but the thing that really hit home was when he quoted that shareholders wouldn't stand for companies to do this. I am a share holder, I owned shares in many companies, hundreds of them probably but never once did I feel that the CEO or the board of directors gave a crap about what I wanted. I really wanted one of the companies to stop sending all of their technical support overseas, I felt that it was a bad idea that would eventually lead to the company losing their edge and sales would start to suffer which they did, now they are trying to recover, or the company that decided that getting out of their bread and butter construction business and diving head first into the ultra cutting edge technology of rail roads. The CEO said that it would be the best move for the company since construction was boring and railroads were cool. Needless to say he was wrong, but he got a really sweet golden parachute for like 20 million and my stock became worthless.
 So I guess the question is what do shareholders really want, well in a perfect world they would want their investment to quadruple every day until the 1 dollar they invest was worth one hundred million billion dollars, but since that probably isn't going to happen, unless you got in really early with Bernie, you probably expect a decent return on your investment, most people think you should get 15 to 20 percent returns, which, year over year isn't going to happen. Bonds the normal "safe" investment only returned 2 to 5 percent, so lets say as a normal everyday investor, as a shareholder, I want a 10 percent return. "One of the most popular valuation measures is the price to earnings ratio or P/E. The P/E is the price of a stock divided by its EPS from the trailing four quarters. For example, a stock trading at $20 a share with earnings of $1 per share during the past 12 months has a P/E of 20. The P/E ratio gives a rough idea of what investors are paying for a stock relative to its underlying earnings. It is a quick way to gauge how cheap or expensive a stock may be. Generally, the higher the P/E ratio the more investors are willing to pay for dollar's worth of earnings. Higher P/E stocks tend to have a higher growth rate or the expectation of a profit turnaround. Lower P/E stocks have a lower growth rate and lessor future prospects."
Seems good, if I have a million dollars I would make 100k a year, before taxes. So for a company to return that they need to grow their business by 10 percent, keep costs in line, not go crazy. Seems pretty easy to do, 10 percent, that means a company that is selling 100 million a year needs to sell another 10 million to achieve that. Of course, there are a variety of factors that make up the stock price, i would say made up because it really is made up, the stock price has nothing to do with the financials. What you say??? heresy, I know, burn me as a witch, but I float, I think that makes me a duck, or a witch I can't remember I need to re-watch some Monty Python, but I digress. Here is a list of some companies, I tried to put a couple together that are in similar businesses.

Company	Price	P/E (ttm):
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)	360.62	611.22
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)	76.1	15.55
Google Inc. (GOOG)	1,183.04	31.12
Twitter, Inc. (TWTR)	50.92	N/A
Facebook, Inc. (FB)	67.24	110.05
General Electric Company (GE)	25.4	20.09
Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ)	31.95	11.7
Apple Inc. (AAPL)	532.87	13.24

So what does this show? Well other than Amazon is way over priced, it shows that stock prices have very little to do with the fundamentals of a business. So with that in mind, are shareholders super unhappy at HP vs. Walmart and are the shareholders at Apple looking longingly at Amazon going, "You know even though Amazon is in the almost exact same business as Walmart, even though they don't have a colorful website the mocks the way their customers dress (I tend to shop at Amazon in my underwear but thank god my dog and cat haven't figured out how to share pictures on their smart phones) should I be happy that we are blowing HP out of the water and our stock is so high"? I don't know but from what I have heard their shareholders aren't super happy. Does the CEO of Apple care? I don't think so, he has figured out how to make a cheaper iphone because nothing makes you the industry leader like selling a product super cheap so everyone can afford it and then everyone buys it. Oh wait, I don't think that was what Steve Jobs wanted.
To say shareholder value is the driver for anything in this day and age is asinine (:  extremely or utterly foolish <an asinine excuse> 2:  of, relating to, or resembling an ass ). CEO's have no idea how any policy they implement will affect their stock price, other than giving shit away or overcharging for stuff that some kid puts together in China.. Wait, I guess I can't say that... Well either way shareholder's are idiots just as the guy they are paying millions of dollars to run the company is an idiot. They have no clue what they can do to make the shareholder happy since in most cases the shareholders are millions of people that bought some mutual fund that some dude told them to buy what they can say is that we have a few really powerful people that own or control most of our stock and even though they don't represent the masses, they are powerful enough to make the CEO lose his job so we are going to do what they tell us to do because they aren't really shareholders they just want the people that bought their mutual funds to be happy. Because if the people that bought the mutual funds leave their money in that fund then that fund manager gets a nice bonus based on his return and he can convince more people to invest in his mutual fund so that he can tell CEO's what to do so the mutual fund manager can get a bigger bonus next year, but hey the mutual fund is kind of a shareholder, but then again they aren't.

And so it begins...

     I should have started posting years ago, back when it was hip and cool and everyone was doing it, but I really didn't have much to say. I tried to post, but the words would not come, the images were lame and they just didn't matter, now I find myself with free time and a laptop, well I have a few laptops but this spiffy Dell is the one for me, I hate, despise it, the mouse pad is strategically placed so that randomly as I type it decides to select my entire text and delete it, or move sentences to other places, sometimes words, very frustrating. If I had the gall I would write Micheal Dell, but he is busy trying to turn around his struggling business into another IBM, so I won't bother him. Well maybe, not it's not worth it.
  Well if you read about me you know I live in San Francisco, the Top Hat to the slimy underbelly that is the Silicon Valley, the place were anyone can become a billionaire if they copy the right idea and get the tweens to use their app for long enough to go public or maybe start a revolution with, we will get there but first some disclaimers. I write for myself and my loyal fan base, which is pretty small, my dog, my cat and my partner. I am pretty sure the dog can't read, the cat doesn't give a shit about what I have to say and my partner well, I don't know how they feel about it, they have a fancy degree and tends to be hyper critical of my run ons, sentence fragments, confused tense and random grouping of words so they will stay out of it.
   If you live in the City there are certain things you hate, everyone does, there is no denying it, some will say that love it, but unfortunately God give most everyone the power to speak and once you learn the language even idiots can speak up. Things people hate in the city, in no particular order... Traffic, Parking, Pedestrians, Bicycles, Public Transit, Private Transit, The BART,  Bums, Hobo's, Vagrants, Techies, Hippies, Streets, Parking Meters, Parking Garages, Rent, Rent Control, Land Lords, Tenants, The Internet, The interwebs, Elevators, Stairs, Weather, Dogs, Urine, Dating, Restaurants, The East Bay, The South Bay, The North Bay, The Silicon Valley, Homeless, Meter Maids, White People, Black People, Indian People, People from India, Hispanics, Canadians, Europeans, Asians, (Yes I know India is in Asia), Straight People, Gay People, Transsexual People, Gender Neutral, Cosplayers, The Bay Bridge, The Golden Gate Bride, Any Bridge, Wine Snobs, Food Snobs, Snob Snobs, Hollywood, Bollywood, Work, Not Working, Jobs, Lack of Jobs, Volunteering, People that don't Volunteer, I could go one but I am getting tired of debating on whether I should use "The" more and more or just leave it out, but as you see the list is long and it actually never stops growing, there is nothing in the city or the region or the area or whatever you want to call it that anyone will agree with, it's a cultural melting pot of the smartest stupid people and the stupidest smart people that never stops being tinkered with, too many cooks spoil the stew, but a city full of cooks, and well you have a pretty messed up stew, or a chowder, I do love a chowder. But with all that being said the people that live here are hell bent on changing the world, with free international phone calls, being able to send pictures of what you are eating, drinking, wearing, to everyone that doesn't care, snappy apps that allow you to find a place to sleep, find a sucker to give you a ride, find someone to spend the night with, play random games with or directions to that out of the way leather bar that has a "There not chaps unless they are assless" sign posted on the door. (For the record, I think all chaps are assless because if they weren't wouldn't they just be leather pants? ) But all the brain power is dedicated to making the world a better place, you know for the important stuff.  So this is my take on the City in which I live, hopefully you will find it entertaining, because as you know, once I post it, it's all true.