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Posts Tagged ‘california’

California’s housing bubble is spilling over into poor and exurban neighborhoods, creating waves of crises

California has such a huge undersupply of housing -- and oversupply of housing speculators -- that affluent homebuyers have effectively rendered the state's major cities unaffordable for all but the very wealthy, even pushing into neighborhoods that were historically undesirable due to poverty, poor housing stock and crime.

As a result, everyday working people are being ...

Tiki bar pulls thousands of dollars from ceiling and walls, donates it

It started innocently enough. A single dollar bill was pinned to the ceiling of a tiki bar in California — with a tiny paper umbrella, no less. That lone bill soon inspired many more.

For over 10 years now, patrons of Forbidden Island, a popular tiki lounge in the island city of Alameda, have been ...

Bob Ross couple’s costume and other Halloween night surprises in my neighborhood

This Bob Ross "painted" happy little trees onto their partner's face all evening.

I've lived in Alameda, California going on 10 years now and I'm always surprised by what I see on Halloween night — it's a real circus! Each year, thousands of revelers head to my neighborhood in the Fernside district to trick or treat. ...

Burbankers! Help put an eviction-protection measure on the 2020 ballot!

The passage of AB1482, which limits annual California rent-increases to 8%, is an important step to solving California's urgent housing crisis, but thanks to lobbyists for the massive private-equity landlord industry, the bill contains a huge loophole: if landlords evict their tenants before January 1, they can effectively escape the bill's strictures.

In most ...

Burbank! Come to an emergency City Hall meeting on 10/29 to deal with the city’s eviction crisis!

On Jan 1, 2020, AB1482 comes into effect, capping rents at their rates as of March 15, 2019 plus an above-inflation; in response, the state's greediest landlords are evicting their tenants, either by raising their rents to levels they can't afford to pay between now and Jan 1, forcing them out, or by staging ...

Berkeley city council unanimously votes to ban ****** recognition technology

Berkeley has joined the swelling ranks of cities (pioneered by nearby Oakland) that have passed ordinances banning the government's use of ****** recognition technology, after a unanimous city council vote.

California has passed a statewide, three-year moratorium on the use of ****** recognition in conjunction with police bodycams.

Massachusetts in considering a similar measure, ...

A San Diego Republican operator ran a massive, multimillion-dollar Facebook scam that targeted boomers

Asher Burke died in March after a helicopter he'd chartered to visit the Kenyan ranch he'd invested in as an "entrepreneur playground" crashed in high winds; his stateside obits called the 27-year-old deputy political director of the Republican Party of San Diego as an entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Ads, Inc, "on a mission ...

The first-ever mandatory California drug price report reveals Big Pharma’s farcical price-gouging

In 2017, California passed a state law mandating disclosure of wholesale drug prices, something the Big Pharma companies fought tooth and nail. Now, the first of those disclosures has taken place, and it reveals spectacular levels of price-gouging from the pharmaceutical industry's greediest monopolists: an overall rise of 25.8% in the median drug price ...

LA is going to get cheap nighttime power from a massive solar and battery array in the Mojave

LA's next source of energy: a massive solar panel and lithium battery array in the Mojave, operated by 8minute Solar Energy, and capable of supplying 6-7% of the city's energy budget, with four hours of nighttime use. It will cost an eye-poppingly low $0.03.3/kWh, cheaper than natural gas.

The otherwise unambiguously good news has one sore-spot: ...