Time to Bag It or Maybe Not

Hillsdale shopping center in the rain

The rain fell steadily all day, but we were lucky. The places we frequent aren't flooded, but many nearby areas were.

The City of San Mateo announced that free sandbags were available:

SAN MATEO PD: Update - Sandbag materials are at the Corp Yard located at 1949 Pacific Blvd. City of San Mateo residents only.

A few hours later the offer was withdrawn due to flooding at the pickup site:

SAN MATEO PD: DO NOT DRIVE TO THE CORP YARD FOR SANDBAGS. THERE IS FLOODING AND THE AREA IS NOT SAFE FOR DRIVING.

We confess that we had a quiet chuckle.

Tonight we're staying home and will lift a glass to the passage of the old year. We still share the optimism that our own lives and the general condition of mankind will get better.

Happy New Year!

Solar Canals: A Great Idea with a Health Caveat

"Solar canals" in India

The benefits sound compelling. Putting solar panels over California's aqueducts will reduce evaporation and generate green energy.

The California Department of Water Resources is funding the $20 million pilot program with the intention of learning where solar panels might be viable along the state’s 4,000 miles of canals and aqueducts...

The [UC Merced / UC Santa Cruz] study detailed other benefits, too. Vast tracts of pricey new land wouldn’t be needed to generate solar energy, minimizing debate over the conversion of farmland or pristine desert for throngs of arrays. The solar panels on the canals also would operate more efficiently because the water would keep them cool.

A caveat from history: to help the environment California tends to go all-in on solutions that are not only costly but end up creating environmental damage worse than the original problem.

Case in point: MTBE. California imposed stricter requirements for oxygenated gasoline than set forth in the 1990 Federal Clean Air Act. Refiners added MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether) to gasoline, which was found to be highly toxic when it leaked from tanks into the water supply. IMHO, most people would rather take their chances with smog than drink water that may have been poisoned.

Now back to the subject at hand. Solar panels contain toxic materials, e.g., lead and cadmium, that make them difficult to dispose of properly. If California covers its 4,000 miles of canals with solar arrays, surely there will be some leakage, if not breakage that could jeopardize the water supply.

I just hope that California tests the concept thoroughly before it goes big.

Wet Weather: Dampening the Scoldings

December snow in Tahoe, which is under flood watch

We're ending the year with a series of storms.

Headline: Entire Bay Area under flood watch this weekend as more storms roll in

A flood watch will be in effect for the Bay Area from Friday evening to Saturday evening as more rain arrives in the region, according to the National Weather Service.

Moderate to heavy rain is expected during that time frame, and it could be more than already saturated soils can absorb.

Rapid rises of rivers, streams and creeks are expected, the National Weather Service said, and urban areas and roadways with poor drainage may see flooding...

A brief reprieve is expected on New Year’s Day before more rain moves in, the National Weather Service said.

I'm sure the nattering nabobs of global warmism will insist one rainy season doesn't make up for years of dryness and that we should continue to conserve water, but I'm taking this year by year.

Let's be thankful that there won't be mandated cutbacks and usage penalties next summer and even more thankful that the drought/climate alarmists will dampen, somewhat, the volume of their scoldings.

I Predict This Business Will Wane

Fortune-cookie fortunes fall into two general categories: predictions ("you will get good news at work") or self-improvement ("eat more protein").

Your humble blogger has noticed a recent annoying tendency to insert fortunes with political messages.

There's no sanctuary from people who, ironically, like to create safe spaces and sanctuaries for various groups, just not consumers of fortune cookies.

In America This Will Be Off-Menu

And my dish: pic.twitter.com/mljWNV8fbe

— China in Pictures (@tongbingxue) December 28, 2022

The Day After Christmas

Left: during the week before Christmas the mall wasn't particularly busy. We did our shopping at the Apple Store and exited to the plaza. There was no one within 50 feet of the Christmas tree.

Right: On the day after Christmas the parking lots were filled. This time people milled around the Christmas tree taking selfies. The Apple Store required everyone to make an appointment.

We stopped by to make an exchange. The recipient of an iPad wanted more memory (he paid for the upgrade), and fortunately one was in inventory.

We went to restaurant row and bought a cheesecake. The Christmas task list was finally complete.

Christmas Eve Service

The Episcopal Church welcomes everyone: male or female, old or young, black or white, straight or gay, believers or non-believers, masked or unmasked, sinners or non- ...actually, everyone sins.

The Episcopal and Catholic churches have a name for everything. The thurifer is the acolyte who holds the censer, which holds the incense. For those of us with allergies (cough), I'm glad the church doesn't burn incense as much as it used to.

The priest read the passage from Luke:

Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see-- I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

"Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!"

Bah, humbug! We go overboard with inclusive language. Much better:

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Merry Christmas!

Songs of the Season

(Reprised):

In the late 1990's my former employer could draw on a talent pool of more than 200 financial professionals to put together a decent holiday choir. The grainy video (VHS tape) and monaural audio won't attract any hits today, but Christmas is a time of nostalgic sentimentality...



Note: here are parts Two, and Three.

Part Four is below:



Through the years we all will be together
If the fates allow...

But the fates do not allow. As this year has reminded us, Our time together is fleeting, gone in the wink of an eye. Like the ghostly watchers in Grover's Corners, we have an eternity to mull the regrets of moments unappreciated until too late.

Free the Tree

"Stanford hates fun" passes for controversy in 2022

Each of the two institutions of higher learning that I attended in the 1970's had a marching band that annoyed alumni greatly. Their halftime shows were filled with iconoclasm, not to mention scatological and sexual humor.

The more that our elders' generation was horrified the better. Halftime shows were a rollicking time, often better than the football game.

50 years later the people who want to clamp down on politically incorrect humor come from within the band, the student body, and faculty. Stanford University is a leader in this role reversal, and its mascot, the Tree, has become the center of a cultural contretemps. During halftime at a game between Stanford and ASU, "the Tree unfurled a 40-foot banner that said 'Stanford Hates Fun.'” [bold added]

The students on the band’s executive committee said in a statement to the Stanford Daily that they suspended the Tree because he used his platform to spread a message without going through the required channels.

"Required channels"? These brilliant students, many of them not old enough to drink, are going to be our future leaders and are already inured in bureaucratic pettifoggery. But it gets worse.

Administrators this year published a 13-page index of words to be avoided on the school’s websites. It suggested “ballsy” be replaced by “risk taker,” “you guys” by “everyone” and “Karen” by “a demanding or entitled White woman.”

The language policing is far more extensive than anything the blue noses attempted to do back in my day. With its multi-billion dollar endowment Stanford asks for but doesn't need my money. And I don't intend to give a another cent, at least until the Tree is free.

San Francisco Has Peaked

(photo from the Real Deal)

There are numerous reasons to leave San Francisco--and post-office and IRS data show that people are leaving--but one reason stands above all: [bold added]

The desire for a larger home was the top reason people say they moved to and within the San Francisco metro area, which includes Oakland and Hayward, according to a recently released federal housing survey conducted in 2021.

Among the survey respondents who said they moved in the S.F. metro area — either from elsewhere or within the area, nearly half cited wanting a larger or better quality home as the reason for relocating, the American Housing Survey data shows...

San Francisco saw a steep population loss and an exodus of wealthy residents during the pandemic. Likely as a result of wealthier people moving out, the surrounding Bay Area saw the largest drop in household income in the country.

The housing survey data suggests the exodus is expected to continue, as San Franciscans are more likely to consider moving out of the city in the next year than any other major metro.

San Francisco's homelessness, crime, drug, public education, and transportation problems capture the headlines, but the main reason people move away is pedestrian; residential real estate is too expensive. Increasing the housing stock will take years, if not decades, to effect because of red tape and NIMBY homeowners' resistance.

COVID-19 may have been the catalyst, but now the widening gyre is nearly impossible to reverse. San Francisco has peaked.

Sounding Off

Swedish offshore wind farm (tos)

Two weeks ago we noted that environmentalists claim that lobster fishing is killing North Atlantic right whales (it's speculative because no whale carcasses have been found entangled in lobster-fishing lines.)

But environmentalists have ignored the danger that cacophonous offshore wind farms pose to the whale population.

The harmful effect of noise on whales is well documented:

Anthropogenic noise can change a whale's behaviour, such as causing the marine mammals to feed less or to produce fewer calls. Shipping noise also cause whales to become stressed, with the build-up of stress related chemicals linked to growth suppression, lower fertility and poor immune system function.

To environmentalists wind farms are more important than whales, which are more important than the lobster industry.

Your humble blogger likes both whales and lobsters and hopes technology will provide a solution to whale entanglement, if indeed it's proven to be a problem.

As for offshore wind power, not only does it kill whales, it's not keeping anyone warm on freezing, breezeless nights. I'll take always-on natural-gas or nuclear power plants. And so will our friends, the whales.

Spirit of Christmas

Presents for the kids, gift cards for the adults

There are still Christmas cards to mail and presents to shop for, but again we took a scheduled break to help out strangers (your humble blogger did so grumpily at the start of the morning and is not a good role-model).

After wrapping and boxing the gifts for the families assigned by Samaritan House, I called to schedule the drop-offs in San Mateo. The mothers and I (the mothers are always the contact persons) played telephone tag, made worse by the fact that their English is barely better than my Spanish. (My sour mood was also due to my Spanish-speaking friend begging off at the last minute.)

At the first appointment the lady of the house could not hide her joy at the sight of presents for her children. The delivery man's spirits improved, another confirmation of the truism that the giver receives greater rewards than the giftee.

When I delivered the next box, the lady asked me to wait. Her six-year-old son ran to their upstairs apartment and came back holding a small bag of hand-made items. Thank you. "You're welcome," he said.

I'm keeping the bag where I drink coffee every morning as a reminder not to let the busy-ness of life get in the way of the spirit of Christmas, a spirit that is alive and well in a little boy in San Mateo.

Accountants Get Their Due

(Rasmussen image)

Accountants are in demand:

A deepening shortage of accountants is driving a growing number of companies to raise salaries or seek temporary help to strengthen their finance teams amid a slowing economy...

But, the problem for companies isn’t just the tight labor market. The profession is also attracting fewer job entrants, with the number of U.S. students who completed accounting degrees falling by 2.8% for bachelor’s and 8.4% for master’s in the 2019 to 2020 academic year compared with the prior year.

As it was 45 years ago when your humble blogger was a new CPA, accounting still is seen--rightly, IMHO--as an unglamourous profession. Many accountants labor in the back room, re-checking reams of data and summarizing them in bite-size chunks so that executives can understand them.

What accountants do is unnoticed when things are running smoothly. but like when something goes wrong with the out-of-sight electrical or plumbing systems, the problem often must be fixed immediately. (When payroll or cash collections or vendor payments stop, it soon becomes a crisis.)

In an age of self-aggrandizement, it isn't surprising that diligent detail work in the backroom doesn't appeal to young people. Fortunately, we live in a market economy where prices (wages) rise so that supply meets demand.

It's nice to see accountants get their due.

A New Mission

This week we took a break from shopping for friends and relatives and shopped for strangers.

Our Foster City congregation filled 50 boxes of food for clients of the Episcopal Church's Bayview Mission, which ministers to the residents of Bayview-Hunters Point. There was also room in the Outreach budget to replace the mission's freezer and place a Safeway gift card in each box.

Our new priest became familiar with and volunteered for Bayview Mission when he attended the Berkeley seminary 14 years ago. Not only has he brought fresh ideas and perspectives, he also has stimulated our suburban church into forming new relationships.

We expect to have a monetary and personal stake in Bayview Mission next year.

San Francisco: Where Bureaucracy Reigns Supreme

Tesla's Powerwall battery.

When we visited the Tesla dealership in 2017, I saw our path to going green.

During the day rooftop solar panels would produce excess power. The power would not be sold to PG&E (and repurchased that evening) but would be stored in batteries in our garage, where our Tesla EV would be charging at night time. An added benefit is that we would be independent of unreliable brown-out prone PG&E.

The dream would wait, as solar and battery technologies were improving rapidly. Besides we had a fairly new natural-gas water heater and furnace that were reliable and inexpensive to operate. Their useful lives would expire in the mid-2020's, which would be a good time to execute the solar panel==>battery==>EV vision.

But if we lived in San Francisco, one of the greenest cities in America, the dream would be impossible. [bold added]

San Francisco needs power when the fog comes out and after the sun sets. Meeting that demand without fossil fuels will be impossible if we don’t start storing our solar energy for off-hours use.

And yet for the past three years in San Francisco, it has been illegal to install a battery storage system over 20-kilowatt hours on a one- or two-family home. For context, that’s not even enough to power a 2013 Nissan Leaf, one of the smallest electric cars on the market.

San Francisco's fire-safety concerns over battery storage are "unproven" and not subscribed to by any other Bay Area city. They're emblematic of a City bureaucracy that prevents its own citizens from doing the very things that City leadership advocates.

Meanwhile, San Francisco faces a budget deficit of $200 million in the next fiscal year and is looking for places to cut.