The ignorant idiot that recommended the tincture, as well as the people who marketed and sold it, not only got away with no consequences for the criminal act, but thanks to America’s long tradition of snake oil and romanticization of alternative and “natural” cures, there were no civil damages for me to collect as well. Powerful natural medication lobby aside, there are loads of true believers in Congress as to the benefits of natural cures. Lawyers won't bother to put in the time to sue a small time publisher or vendor.

Three recently died from taking the “gas station heroin” known as Kratom, and more have gotten addicted.

I know from dealing with doctors and emergency rooms, that the basic formula involving the US National Womens Gymnastics Team and Larry Nasser is accurate: Low status Americans just get ignored when they contact law enforcement regarding high status ones.

Put bluntly, there is no broken windows or three strikes for white collar crime.

I say this because, we are now undergoing a debate and small civil war over the issue of blue-collar crime in American cities. San Francisco so far has avoided having the National Guard sent, because it began to take some basic safety measures beginning with the replacement of the so-called Justice DA Chesa Boudin. Los Angeles also replaced the controversial George Gascon, but right now is caught up in a separate standoff involving illegals and ICE. Following the murder of Iryna Zarutska, the North Carolina legislature along with Governor Josh Stein instituted several criminal justice reforms, including doing away with cash free bail in certain circumstances. Portland and Chicago are involved in a similar tug-of-war involving crime reduction versus the price paid by suspension of civil liberties.

I personally think it's a stupid idea to downplay the existence of violent crime in mostly blue cities as I recently experienced the menace of a schizophrenic homeless person, and observed my elderly female Uber driver dealing with one coming right to her car window.

But today I read another article about some 13 year-old girl who was a lively student with an entire future ahead of her that went down some ugly rabbit hole on some social media platform, and wound up, following encouragement, killing herself. It seems like there's one of these kids a month, that we know of. Each story just breaks your heart. There may be others in other countries that make the number higher.

The fact that social media companies valued at $200 billion can't hire customer service representatives to remove the sites that are preying on American children - after receiving specific notification from parents - is another example of this ugly white vs blue collar double standard as we approach the 250th anniversary of the country.

As I continue to say, you can be a good libertarian and let the market decide, you can be a good Judeo-Christian, but you can't be both.

(The number 3.5 is deliberately minuscule to show you how cheap the CEOs of these companies are.) The most consequential decision of the 21st-century - aside from the waging of wars and immigration policies - was the grand -and penny pinching - conclusion that since social media companies did not sell hardware, they were not in need of customer service. In another post, I will list dozens of instances that arise on a daily basis where human employees being in on policy decisions is crucial. Safety is certainly one. For decades now, your power and Wi-Fi company can be alerted to and act on an outage within minutes, but a multi-billion dollar company like TikTok is slow in removing things like the Blackout Challenge, which has led to the death of over a hundred kids. And some pranksters that are dangerous to others and themselves need to be removed.

One other is that many of us did not and still do not know the ABCs of how to use these services. (Tech bros tend to assume that others possess a similar starting point bed-of-knowledge when it comes to all technology. We don’t.)

Customer service has always been a huge employer of college graduates, artists, and people with liberal arts degrees. It has traditionally been a huge employer for people of color and allow them to get a foothold in the company with a decent salary and stock benefits. It makes it a lot easier for these companies to promote from within, because entry-level positions like customer service show who has initiative, for example, in learning a second language. And these companies clearly lack people of color. Facebook had their Latina cafeteria and janitorial employees walk out twice demanding better wages. We all had to listen to Google, Twitter and Facebook put out stock bullshit responses when they were caught with so few managers of color. They wound up hastily hiring people with academic backgrounds who clashed with them over the issue of racism and wound up being let go. But had they had their own black and Latino employees from the beginning, they would've known exactly whom to promote. Not to mention the fact that if you can afford to give $90 million to BLM, millions to Ibram X. Kendi, offer $1 billion for a promising AI specialist, you can afford to hire customer service people to answer the phone, explain how the product works and humanize the experience. But they didn't. Because this what the moral philosophy let “the market decide” means in real life.

Millions of liberal arts majors are graduating college each year with the worst prospects ever. Economic libertarians enjoying mocking every tenet of socialism, but this raw display of Tech CEO greed is a primary cause for people being drawn to it. Again: There is no intellectual or moral logic that unlike a clothing retailer, a social media company does not need to employ humans who help to troubleshoot. My suspicion is that this precedent was set when early companies like MySpace and Friendster decided not to have anyone answering the phone. Then the larger companies that exist today followed suit.

There is also the matter of the “brown M&Ms.” Many business books use Van Halen's famed concert contract rider, came up with by David Lee Roth, that seemingly trivially asked for for a bowl of M&Ms to be prepared before every concert with the brown ones removed. This actually served a purpose, which was to see whether the other requests pertaining to the safety of the ropes that Roth would descend from were gone over. Yet none of the venture capitalists seem to ask social media CEOs questions such as “Who's your Urdu translator,” or “What is your plan for when things go South?” And now the CEOs of these companies are moving in the opposite direction and trying to replace their bare-bones Trust and Safety department with AI. This after a riot broke in Myanmar during the early days of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg instructed all his employees to respond with the stock “We didn't know!” regarding the potential dangers that a poorly trained and staffed Social Media company could lead to. Yah right.

Basic rules and company policies need to be posted and equally enforced.

What an irony that while endless brow-beating takes place regarding the deep state, private social media companies are among the least transparent.

We still don't know the basis for being de-platformed, (sometimes due to the maneuvers of people who have gamed the system against us,) and still have no reason method for appealing the decision. This is pure cost-cutting greed. The end result is countless books and public intellectuals pontificating as to how we are Bowling Alone and all the Ted-Lasso-esque attention being paid to “taking care of our mental health” while we live with endless anxiety and uncertainty in terms of what is transpiring with our social media accounts.

Suspend or expel those who make death, assault and rape threats online.

People get arrested for this, particularly after President Trump and Charlie Kirk. Besides, there is no genuine free speech if people who make threats in the middle of a political debate are allowed to remain. This is another arena where having a contact person by phone and email, and not just the farce of AI would lead to greater meaningful employment for people with liberal arts degrees, (regardless of their background or political leanings.) And would lead to a more satisfying experience for those who remain online. I say remain because we don't know how many millions have quit out of the disgust of having to endure these threats. A big deal was made out of the 2000 journalist that were canceled roughly from 2017 to 2023. But nothing about the kids who made trip up the algorithm and find ourselves being kicked off of some social media company a week before their birthday or some special occasion. It is a farce that people were $200 billion can't employ Americans and people all over the world to engage on the phone. The way things work now, only people with connections, such as influencer, Benny Johnson, get a response. The rest of use marvel at the lack of one. Consistently enforced rules will also end the fact that only those with no variety or connections such as Megan Murphy a friend of Joe Rogan are allowed back on platforms such as X. It is also laughable remembering however there is an outcry of someone with name recognition such as a journalist gets deplatformed off of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg quickly reinstate and claims that a mistake was made. Meanwhile, those of us who are anonymous just have to resign that we are the platform with no explanation or basis for appeal or live with the uncertainty that we may be on any given day.

Charge any of these venture capitalist or tech CEOs 50% of their assets if they move to another country after studying here and starting a company.

We all know the forest of rising tide not lifting any boats in this day and age. Now the crap about the rich paying the bulk of America's taxes has been lied by the fact that more and more are beginning to relocate to places such as Singapore, India, or New Zealand.

I am slowly working towards a social media customer service bill of rights to get us out of this tech-libertarian created dystopian mess. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. The Florida and Texas state Attorney General actually came up with one - that of course, was struck down by the Supre…

Read more

“High Rise To The Danger Zone…”

Let's just get it over with. Let's just build a series of high-rise condo complexes and highways beginning from the Haight in San Francisco through Golden Gate Park and the Japanese Tea Garden, all the way to the beautiful neighborhoods in Austin such as Hyde Park and Cherrywood.

I say this because I recently listened to an interview conducted by Bari Weiss with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on their new book “Abundance.”

In case you don't remember Ezra Klein, he’s the pundit who proclaimed the VA healthcare system to be the best one in the country just before the story broke that the 14 day maximum waiting period was complete bullshit, and that in fact at least 40 veterans had died waiting to get healthcare, which actually took up to two years. (This was followed by the usual cover-up scandal.) That Ezra Klein.

“Abundance,” as one Reddit user put it, is at the end of the day just warmed over Bill Clinton “New Democrat.” I refer to the author as “Red Red Klein” because in the end it in the end the recycling of libertarian zealot John the Stosselist’s proclamation; “Single home zoning laws bad, mass housing construction on every block good,” which is a smaller version of big - read, any - government as the root of all evil and the impediment to progress.

This idiotic oversimplification, that should really be treated as a trade-off, with hidden costs and unintended consequences considered, has already been adopted by Austin city council members, Scott Weiner in San Francisco, and Peter Thiel himself; the theory being that the shift in supply and demand will lower the cost of housing in trendy cities.

Construction in San Francisco, for the past few decades has already created high-rises that block the view of the Bay by the Wharf and downtown for the rest of us and soon will block the view of the ocean in the outer Sunset District. Prices have not gone down. They’ve skyrocketed.

I'm not totally surprised by Bari’s lack of pushback during the interview, because her wife Nellie Bowles, is an open YIMBY advocate, and in fairness to them, so is half of the country. ( And her interview with Sarah Wynn-Williams about her time at Facebook was fantastic.)

The problem is the lack of respect for the other half. In Austin, an initial rezoning plan named Code Next failed to pass in a city-wide initiative, and a later meeting on a new council-initiated rezoning plan called HOME — short for Home Options for Mobility and Equity - was contentiously debated by those who showed up long past midnight. (The council wound up ignoring 50% of the city’s population who objected and passed HOME with a 9 to 2 vote.)

I contend that if the local media in all cities actually did their job, they would show an AI simulation of what a city block would look like after eight single houses are replaced by eight fourplexes, complete with the traffic, parking and sewage problems created. Maybe then, far fewer people would support it, or at least have second thoughts.

I also have my suspicions that the same real estate companies that are tripling the rent and driving mom and pops to close up shop are going to charge as much as they can get for each condo, which will still be a lot.

The New Right and billionaire class keep repeating ad nauseam that the left consists of elites which somehow always know what's best for the rest of us. So why are so many lower class folks such as myself not buying into their scheme?

We are just constantly demonized as NIMBY. I myself, don't feel that I was born with a God-given right to be able to afford a home in Honolulu or Manhattan, and would certainly hate to spoil the former with mass development projects that would end what's left of the natural beauty

“I Came In Like A Wrecking Ball…”

Meanwhile back in the Bay Area, Scott Weiner is trying to strip the power of the California Coastal Commission to build supposed low-cost housing along the coast. (If Trump did this it would be first page news, but Weiner is quite the autocrat himself.)

I still predict this is going to be a major disaster with the eventual density destroying the character of both cities in order to save it. As it is already.

Liberals in the 60’s were the ones who bulldozed neighborhoods in the 60’s and replaced them with a grand idea of public housing projects. One example was the Fillmore in San Francisco. Because some people were low-income and some were doing heroin, public housing was the answer. And destroying the beautiful Penn Station to make away for another form of progress. Decades later, these monstrosities that were eventually torn down themselves.

“You will see it come to its fruition…”

I don't find fault with anyone who sincerely embraces YIMBY because they're short on money and long on the desire to own a home. I just can't stand the public intellectuals and politicians who don't present the trade-off, which is the decimation of two of our finest cities.

As Dr. Thomas Sowell reminds us, the simpletons who sold us on this libertarian, free-market utopia will be long be out of office by the time it comes to fruition.

Subscribe now

The answer is because these cities, like Santa Fe and Sedona, are large blue cities, with huge pension and retirement obligations for municipal unions, that demand a never sending source of income into to avoid, or fend off, going broke. But making a deal with the devil - as all literature teaches - comes with a price. In this case, destroying the entire look, vibe, and cultural identity these cities have cultivated for decades as an escape from the rat race, and not the epitome of it.

My name is Ted Queso, tq for short, and I became severely and permanently disabled by and unregulated supplement in the 90’s, before there was an internet, and any possibility to check out the claims made by the quack of an author were true. We lived, and in my case nearly died, by the words of the author who published the mass market paperbacks back then, and by the assurance of doctors who had awful bedside manners and were dismissive of the concept of explaining things to the patient to the point of understanding.

Cities like Austin and San Francisco were my laid-back refuge. No longer subscribing to any political party or doctrine and just viewing all as trade-offs with huge pros and cons, I could hang out in these cities because they were inexpensive, laid-back bohemias. While I leaned libertarian at the time while most denizens of these cities leaned left, the majority of people I interacted with were friendly and tolerant.

Now, arguably our two best large cities in the country, have been taken over by a cool — at least in their perception — New Right group of Venture Capitalists and Tech Bro True Believers who profess to believe in a trade-off themselves but actually adhere to detached, pure business-like libertarian dogma.

I have nothing against religious Christians and consider myself to be both religious and a realignment Republican myself. You remember the realignment don’t you? The supposed movement chronicled in thousands of articles where Maga would come in and led by their supposed affection for actual trust-busters like Lina Khan, would bring back the day where the GOP would return to their Teddy Roosevelt Square Deal roots.

As we know now, that turned out to be a joke. Lina Khan is gone and there is now a role-played “civil war” between the shrieking Steve Bannon and more thoughtful Batya Ungar-Sargon and the VC’s and Social Media moguls on the other side. I say role play because we all know which side has won.

Meanwhile, the press is not chronicling the extent of the 180 degree transformation these VC’s and tech moguls are doing to the community traditions that reigned for so long in places like SF and Austin.

It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.