Mod: Depending on who you are talking to California is either the planet's 5th largest economy and therefore a wonder of the world, or going to hell in a hand basket. Or perhaps a little of both. Here are the stories that are rocking the Golden State.
California is full of psychopaths, ranks 2nd in nation, study finds (KCRAlink): Ever feel like there's something sinister lurking behind the crunchy granola, yoga-loving, avocado-eating facade of your fellow Californians? Now there's research to back you up.
California is among the two U.S. states with the highest concentration of psychopaths, according to a working study from Southern Methodist University released on the Social Science Research network this week. The study looks at trends in personality traits across areas (the study hasn't yet gone through the full peer review process, so take the findings with a grain of salt).
The only places with more psychopaths? Connecticut (thanks, hedge funds!) and, shocker, the District of Columbia. Other highly psychopathic states include New Jersey, New York and Wyoming, while West Virginia, Vermont and Tennessee are among the least psychopathic states.
"The presence of psychopaths in District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture found in Murphy (2016) that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere," the author writes.
The author, Ryan Murphy, combined the findings of two past papers, one that mapped distribution of the "big five" personality traits (neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and openness to experience) across states and one that tracked which of those five personality traits most closely corresponded with psychopathy, to get the results.
Murphy found that the greater the share of a state's population that lives in dense urban areas, the higher the rate of psychopathy. Other findings were more intuitive. Two things that correlate with a state with lots of psychopaths? High concentrations of journalists and lawyers.
Venture investor Tim Draper is back with a pointless plan to split California three ways (Los Angeles Timeslink): The late Robin Williams used to have a great line about how “cocaine is God’s way of telling you you’re making too much money.” But it’s a new day and a different world now. Here in California, it may be more accurate to say that God’s way of saying you have too much money is to have you spend millions of dollars on a chuckleheaded and self-interested ballot initiative. Case in point: Tim Draper.
Draper is the Silicon Valley financier whose ballot initiative to break up California into three states was certified this month for the November ballot. That achievement resulted from his submitting more than 365,880 valid petition signatures to the state attorney general’s office.
Given the lack of evident clamor statewide for breaking up the state and the manifest fiscal imbalance that would result, Draper’s initiative looks more like an investment by a Silicon Valley fat cat to keep more of his money in the long run while telling the rest of California to go to hell.
The three-state plan is widely thought to have no chance of passage in November; political experts have so far treated the initiative as a silly stunt, with the attitude that there’s no downside to letting Draper have his fun.
But that’s not so. This is a dangerous and dishonest proposal, with consequences that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. As long as it’s on the ballot, anything can happen — unexpected election outcomes occur all the time. So it’s proper to examine the measure’s ostensible rationale and its implications seriously.
Jerry Brown will decide whether Californians vote on daylight saving time in November (Sacramento Beelink): The fate of daylight saving time in California now rests in Gov. Jerry Brown’s hands.
The Assembly on Thursday sent Brown a measure that would ask voters to repeal a 70-year-old initiative enshrining the biannual changing of clocks into state law. If signed by Brown, that question could appear on the ballot as soon as November.
"While I would love to enLIGHTen you on this, our office typically doesn't chime in on pending legislation,"Brown spokesman Brian Ferguson wrote in an email. "Please don't be alarmed, we will be sure to circle back when the time comes."
Assemblyman Kansen Chu, the San Jose Democrat who introduced the bill, has been trying for several years to eliminate the practice of springing forward and falling back, which he considers “outdated” and a detriment to public health.
Is sleeping on the streets a crime? Los Angeles Timeslink): Eleven years ago, Los Angeles officials agreed to stop arresting people who bed down for the night on streets and sidewalks until the city built more homeless housing.
The deal ended a legal battle with skid row residents and their advocates, who argued that the law trampled on the rights of homeless people who had nowhere else to go.
Now Mayor Eric Garcetti says enough housing has been built to meet the settlement requirements, clearing the way to enforce the law again. But if L.A. starts ticketing people under the contested code, it is likely to kick off a new battle with homeless advocates.
“There is a snowball’s chance in hell that a court will let them enforce that,” said Carol Sobel, one of the attorneys who represented skid row residents in Jones vs. City of Los Angeles. “The city will lose in court again.”
Garcetti, who is weighing a presidential run, has faced growing pressure to address the tent cities that sprawl across L.A. sidewalks. This spring, he launched plans to spend at least $20 million on new shelters and vowed to boost police patrols and cleanups to prevent encampments near those sites.
California net neutrality bill gutted as lawmakers cave to AT&T lobbyists (Ars Technicalink): A California net neutrality bill that could have been the strictest such law in the country was dramatically scaled back yesterday after state lawmakers caved to demands from AT&T and cable lobbyists.
While the California Senate approved the bill with all of its core parts intact last month, a State Assembly committee's Democratic leadership yesterday removed key provisions. "What happened today was outrageous,"Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), the bill author, said. "These hostile amendments eviscerate the bill and leave us with a net neutrality bill in name only."
AT&T and the lobby group that represents Comcast, Charter, Cox, and other cable have been lobbying against the bill and seeking changes.
"AT&T and other large Internet service providers are engaging in a massive and expensive campaign to lobby members of the committee to kill or water down the bills,"Wiener's office said in a press release before yesterday's hearing. "Specifically, they are pushing to remove key protections such as the ban on charging website owners 'access fees' so that their websites are available to an ISP's subscribers and the ban on circumventing net neutrality protections at the point of interconnection."
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California Billboard Credits ICE With Making ‘Kids Disappear’ (Huffington Postlink): Activists in California altered a billboard on a busy highway to remind citizens what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s priorities are all about.
“We make kids disappear’ - I.C.E.” the billboard, changed Wednesday night, reads on Emeryville’s Shellmound St, referring to the U.S. law enforcement agency by its acronym. It previously read “We Make Junk Disappear” for an ad for trash removal, CBS San Fransisco reported.
Activist group Indecline created the new piece as a response to the separation of children from their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border. It also refers to the migrant child detention centers springing up across the country.
Spokesman Heran Medhin said the billboard is an attempt to publicly condemn President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies. He also cited the president’s “willingness to inflict immense trauma on young children and their families under his banner of xenophobia” in a statement to the Washington Post.
See the 100 highest pensions in the CalPERS and CalSTRS systems (Modesto Beelink): How much does it take to make it into the 100 top-earning CalPERS or CalSTRS retirees? A pension of more than $219,000.
CalPERS is the retirement system for most state employees. CalSTRS is the retirement system for most certificated school district employees. Both systems have faced scrutiny for years due to large unfunded liabilities — they don't have enough money at the moment to pay all the benefits they have promised. In response, both systems have increased the required contributions for local governments that are part of the system.
Most CalPERS and CalSTRS retirees will never make anywhere near the pensions earned by the top-earning 100 retirees. The 100 top-earning CalPERS employees, for instance, make up about one-hundreth of 1 percent of CalPERS beneficiaries. The pensions paid to them in 2016 were equivalent to about one-tenth of 1 percent of all benefits paid to CalPERS beneficiaries.
sierramadretattler.blogspot.com
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California is among the two U.S. states with the highest concentration of psychopaths, according to a working study from Southern Methodist University released on the Social Science Research network this week. The study looks at trends in personality traits across areas (the study hasn't yet gone through the full peer review process, so take the findings with a grain of salt).
The only places with more psychopaths? Connecticut (thanks, hedge funds!) and, shocker, the District of Columbia. Other highly psychopathic states include New Jersey, New York and Wyoming, while West Virginia, Vermont and Tennessee are among the least psychopathic states.
"The presence of psychopaths in District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture found in Murphy (2016) that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere," the author writes.
The author, Ryan Murphy, combined the findings of two past papers, one that mapped distribution of the "big five" personality traits (neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and openness to experience) across states and one that tracked which of those five personality traits most closely corresponded with psychopathy, to get the results.
Murphy found that the greater the share of a state's population that lives in dense urban areas, the higher the rate of psychopathy. Other findings were more intuitive. Two things that correlate with a state with lots of psychopaths? High concentrations of journalists and lawyers.
 |
Draper is the Silicon Valley financier whose ballot initiative to break up California into three states was certified this month for the November ballot. That achievement resulted from his submitting more than 365,880 valid petition signatures to the state attorney general’s office.
Given the lack of evident clamor statewide for breaking up the state and the manifest fiscal imbalance that would result, Draper’s initiative looks more like an investment by a Silicon Valley fat cat to keep more of his money in the long run while telling the rest of California to go to hell.
The three-state plan is widely thought to have no chance of passage in November; political experts have so far treated the initiative as a silly stunt, with the attitude that there’s no downside to letting Draper have his fun.
But that’s not so. This is a dangerous and dishonest proposal, with consequences that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. As long as it’s on the ballot, anything can happen — unexpected election outcomes occur all the time. So it’s proper to examine the measure’s ostensible rationale and its implications seriously.
 |
The Assembly on Thursday sent Brown a measure that would ask voters to repeal a 70-year-old initiative enshrining the biannual changing of clocks into state law. If signed by Brown, that question could appear on the ballot as soon as November.
"While I would love to enLIGHTen you on this, our office typically doesn't chime in on pending legislation,"Brown spokesman Brian Ferguson wrote in an email. "Please don't be alarmed, we will be sure to circle back when the time comes."
Assemblyman Kansen Chu, the San Jose Democrat who introduced the bill, has been trying for several years to eliminate the practice of springing forward and falling back, which he considers “outdated” and a detriment to public health.
 |
The deal ended a legal battle with skid row residents and their advocates, who argued that the law trampled on the rights of homeless people who had nowhere else to go.
Now Mayor Eric Garcetti says enough housing has been built to meet the settlement requirements, clearing the way to enforce the law again. But if L.A. starts ticketing people under the contested code, it is likely to kick off a new battle with homeless advocates.
“There is a snowball’s chance in hell that a court will let them enforce that,” said Carol Sobel, one of the attorneys who represented skid row residents in Jones vs. City of Los Angeles. “The city will lose in court again.”
Garcetti, who is weighing a presidential run, has faced growing pressure to address the tent cities that sprawl across L.A. sidewalks. This spring, he launched plans to spend at least $20 million on new shelters and vowed to boost police patrols and cleanups to prevent encampments near those sites.
 |
While the California Senate approved the bill with all of its core parts intact last month, a State Assembly committee's Democratic leadership yesterday removed key provisions. "What happened today was outrageous,"Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), the bill author, said. "These hostile amendments eviscerate the bill and leave us with a net neutrality bill in name only."
AT&T and the lobby group that represents Comcast, Charter, Cox, and other cable have been lobbying against the bill and seeking changes.
"AT&T and other large Internet service providers are engaging in a massive and expensive campaign to lobby members of the committee to kill or water down the bills,"Wiener's office said in a press release before yesterday's hearing. "Specifically, they are pushing to remove key protections such as the ban on charging website owners 'access fees' so that their websites are available to an ISP's subscribers and the ban on circumventing net neutrality protections at the point of interconnection."
“We make kids disappear’ - I.C.E.” the billboard, changed Wednesday night, reads on Emeryville’s Shellmound St, referring to the U.S. law enforcement agency by its acronym. It previously read “We Make Junk Disappear” for an ad for trash removal, CBS San Fransisco reported.
Activist group Indecline created the new piece as a response to the separation of children from their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border. It also refers to the migrant child detention centers springing up across the country.
Spokesman Heran Medhin said the billboard is an attempt to publicly condemn President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies. He also cited the president’s “willingness to inflict immense trauma on young children and their families under his banner of xenophobia” in a statement to the Washington Post.
 |
CalPERS is the retirement system for most state employees. CalSTRS is the retirement system for most certificated school district employees. Both systems have faced scrutiny for years due to large unfunded liabilities — they don't have enough money at the moment to pay all the benefits they have promised. In response, both systems have increased the required contributions for local governments that are part of the system.
Most CalPERS and CalSTRS retirees will never make anywhere near the pensions earned by the top-earning 100 retirees. The 100 top-earning CalPERS employees, for instance, make up about one-hundreth of 1 percent of CalPERS beneficiaries. The pensions paid to them in 2016 were equivalent to about one-tenth of 1 percent of all benefits paid to CalPERS beneficiaries.
sierramadretattler.blogspot.com