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California relies on snowpack in the Sierras for 30% of its total fresh water.

https://www.sfgate.com/weather...

It's kind of hard to give India much of a reprimand over some of that, when we're not much better. Someone from San Francisco made a poop map where people could report all of the human shit on the streets. India at least has some people who seem to care about fixing those problems whereas we in the U.S. seem content with letting the problems we have get worse or fighting against people trying to help solve them.

San Francisco along with the rest of CA is heavily invested in their citizens smoking. Back in 2003 CA used future payments from cigarette sales to issue bonds.

Vaping products are not covered under the MSA, so these bonds are floundering due to drops in smoking rates. SF needs people to keep smoking.

They knew this was a bad idea back in 2000: https://www.sfgate.com/busines...

https://www.treasurer.ca.gov/c...

Facebook itself pointed out they could adopt a subscription businessmodel:

“We certainly thought about lots of other forms of monetization including subscriptions, and we’ll always continue to consider everything,” - Sheryl Sandberg
https://www.sfgate.com/busines...

What your (troll) comment shows is that Silicon Valley is so used to the current businessmodel that they can't envision something else.

If you ask me, we need HTML6 to have a built-in micro payments system, where I can top-up my browser's credit and pay for search/content/etc the old fashioned way. The only way I would use Google is if I could pay-per-search, and would be assured my queries would then not be stored.

How would operating this as a non-profit or government change anything?

The corporation certainly wouldn't have diverted safety funds into bonuses and stock dividends, because there would be no stockholders.

I mean yes, ostensibly a nonprofit could still divert safety funds into bonuses, but it would likely cost them their nonprofit status.

Basically, PG&E is what happens when governments try to allow a regulated monopoly to provide critical utilities instead of a municipal electric company or a regional nonprofit. Every dollar that went to PG&E's sharedholders is a dollar that should have been used for routine maintenance and upgrades. If that money had been used that way, close to a hundred people would likely still be alive today, just from those two incidents alone. The problem is, the primary goal of any for-profit corporation, no matter how highly regulated, is and always will be profit, and their concern for public safety will always be limited to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid getting sued out of existence.

If there's no profit in providing electrical services then why would anyone bother to invest in it?

Because they need electricity for themselves. 56% of the United States by land area gets its power from electrical co-ops. In principle, there's no reason that number couldn't be 100%.

There's nothing inherently wrong with people making money on this

Except when the desire to make a profit causes you to divert safety money into bonuses and stock dividends. To date, no one has been criminally charged in that incident, in part because the corporate veil in this country is way too strong.

These people need to make money providing electricity or they will be forced to make their money doing something else. There must be a profit or the lights go out. You believe a non-profit could do better? Why?

Because the largest power provider in the United States is a little non-profit called TVA, with almost 5x the generating capacity of PG&E. And their customers (direct or indirect) average 8 to 12 cents per kWh while more than two-thirds of my PG&E residential usage is billed at over 28 cents per kWh. Profit in electrical utility companies is, indeed, a very bad thing.

So in statement 1 you say most of the rest of the country power is provided by for-profit companies,

No, you made that part up. I certainly did not say it.

Yes, there's a few small municipal power companies, but for the most part power is provided by very large, for profit companies.

That's not even remotely true. Some real facts:

• Nearly all the high-power parts of the U.S. power grid are owned by non-profit independent system operators (ISOs).
• As of last year, electrical co-ops provided power to 56% of the United States by area.
• At last check, the single largest power generation company in North America is a government-owned non-profit corporation called TVA. With about five times the generating capacity of PG&E, its service territory covers nearly the entire state of Tennessee, plus parts of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
• Municipal power companies provide electricity for the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Nashville, Memphis, etc. None of these are small towns or small companies by any stretch of the imagination.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure that a large percentage of generating capacity is provided by large, for-profit companies, but that's a rather different point.

Given the evidence of statement 1, I heavily disagree there's something wrong with the regulated, for-profit model of utilities. I'd offer further evidence of hypothesis 2 that California had freaking rolling blackouts due to crazily miss-managed de-regulation and Enron ass-hattery in the 2000s. So my guess is that hypothesis 3 is the correct one.

Hypotheses 3 is definitely the correct one. I'm not saying that the CPUC isn't a disaster, nor that their failure to regulate properly hasn't compounded the problem, but PG&E itself IS the problem; they really shouldn't have needed that much babysitting to do their jobs in the first place. Get rid of that, and whatever hundred or so companies take its place will be much easier to regulate, because they won't be too big to fail.

That said, the fact remains that PG&E has a history of asking the CPUC for permission to increase rates to provide funds to improve safety and then deliberately diverting those funds into bonuses and dividends for its shareholders — something that a nonprofit corporation would be incapable of doing. So if PG&E were a non-profit, clearly their service would be safer than it is today. This is pretty much an incontrovertible fact.

And that's why we need to turn PG&E into a nonprofit. It is so big that the only effective way to regulate it — the only way to ensure that it cannot possibly abuse its power to turn a profit for shareholders — is to eliminate the shareholders entirely. And if you break it up, it is just going to re-form again, and in a few decades, you'll be right back where you started. Better to just fix the problem once and for all.

much less that it would file for bankruptcy with a possibility of going out of business

Yeah it's absurd to think this would happen twice right? https://www.sfgate.com/news/ar...

One factor in the bankruptcy is that the PUC and the courts have said that they can't pass along costs of lawsuits to their customers by raising rates.

Passing management mistakes on to customers doesn't solve this problem. Ideally bankruptcy should mean that the idiots who got the company into the mess (maintenance? what's maintenance? the process of keeping something in good condition? Why would we do that?) should be expelled without the customers of a regulated monopoly being impacted.

PG&E Files for Bankruptcy / $9 billion in debt, firm abandons bailout talks with state (2001)

They are cyclical and are related to milkweed availability. But given that milkweed is considered a noxious weed and often targeted for eradication, it damages the Monarch food cycle. Too bad that milkweed is on the weed management area list.

Yours is the kind of narrow argument that makes me groan inside.

Given the enormous asset base (5.7 million articles in English alone, plus all of the discussion and history behind that process), and the public visibility and reach, it's pretty easy to slap a valuation on Wikipedia well north of $5B, were it commercialized in any way similar to its closest comparables.

When you're playing on such a big stage, even if you aren't commercialized to the full potential of your underlying asset, you are actually on the radar of other enterprises worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You don't necessarily need to throw your weight around (you don't have a revenue model to protect), but you also don't want to be discouraged from operating in your natural domain because you can't even afford the coffee, on the way to the limo, on the way to the fancy conference hall.

As a ratio to a putative (but defensible) capital asset base, the management cost of Wikipedia is on the order of 1.5% annually.

Oh, profligate waste! thy name is the WikiMedia Foundation.

As a net value to society, I would say the $5B valuation greatly underestimates the present state of affairs: permanently free leads to the virtuous circle of ubiquity, where the asset is repurposed in so many ways that barely anyone knows about, because each additional marginal use is too cheap to meter (the Foundation sees only the marginal bandwidth costs).

Perhaps its a paradox too great for your axe-contracted mind to absorb, but even a socialist utopia of altruistic knowledge workers requires an interface with the capitalist world where you don't get pushed around in every possible way. The price of that interface is not tied to internal models of the cost of production, it's tied to the external model of how you sit eye-to-eye at those tables with the power brokers like Google and Amazon.

Forbes Power Women 2012: #70 Sue Gardner

Wikipedia pre- and post-Sue Gardner are two completely different organizations.

When she arrived at Wikimedia, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, in 2007, the organization had under 10 employees and was raising less than $3 million dollars annually. In 2011, Wikimedia's number of donors had increased ten times over, raising $23 million.

Gardner is focused on expanding Wikipedia's scope for readers and contributors, especially in the global South. In 2012, she partnered with Orange and Telenor, two European telecommunications companies, in a move that will provide Wikipedia free of data charges to millions of users across Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.

Also in 2012, Gardner led the full-day Wikipedia blackout in protest against SOPA, one of the only major websites to do so.

Gardner's roots are in journalism, graduating from Ryerson University with a journalism degree and acting as head of Canada's national public broadcaster, CBC.CA, prior to joining the Wikimedia Foundation.

There are many corporations which pay $70 million to a single executive to drive those kinds of agendas forward in the world, and they justify this by looking at their bottom line, a line which Wikipedia does not have. But if you imagine a bottom line based on their assets and clout, you'd not be hopelessly out of the ballpark of multi-million dollar executive compensation packages.

News site to investigate Big Tech, aided by Craigslist founder — 23 September 2018

Now, with a $20 million gift from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting the Markup, a news site dedicated to investigating technology and its effect on society. Sue Gardner, former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, will be the Markup's executive dir

People who like to winge about California often have never spent much time in the various parts of California.

I lived in California for all my life. I'm somewhat familiar with the Great Nanny State of California. For example, Los Angeles tried to ban IDE cables because the terms Master and Slave were used. Or San Francisco wanting to ban the Blue Angels from flying during Fleet Week for terrorizing families in neighborhoods. And don't get me started on "ban paper bags, use plastic bags instead" in the 1990's to "ban plastic bags, use paper bags and pay per bag instead" in the 2010's.

The Space Force is more an attempt to separate out programs from the Air Force that have been killing their budget the past decade or more. Whether it is wise or not is debatable, but to automatically declare sinister motives is silly.

There's no good reason to move that stuff out of the Air Force at this time, because it is a small amount of activity compared to the whole. The only reason you might want to move that stuff into its own force is so that you can handicap it. Trump works for Putin, who would very much like to see our ability to manage military interests in space impaired...

By that "logic", does Dianne Feinstein work for Beijing?

Hell, the LA Times was publishing stories on that twenty years ago, probably about the same time Feinstein hired a Chinese spy:

Feinstein, Husband Hold Strong China Connections

WASHINGTON — On Capitol Hill, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has emerged as one of the staunchest proponents of closer U.S. relations with China, fighting for permanent most-favored-nation trading status for Beijing.

At the same time, far from the spotlight, Feinstein's husband, Richard C. Blum, has expanded his private business interests in China--to the point that his firm is now a prominent investor inside the communist nation.

...

And the SF Examiner:

Husband invested in China as Feinstein pushed trade

An investment fund backed by the husband of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinste in pumped millions of dollars into firms doing business in China while Feinstein was boosting expanded trade between China and the United States, The Examiner has learned.

...

So, for two fucking decades, the Democrat leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee has a Chinese spy working for her, she's pushing for closer relations and trade with China, and her fucking husband is literally making millions of dollars in China, but you go around spouting unsubstantiated bullshit about Trump?!?!

Trump Derangement Syndrome much?

-1 huh? Must be a few San Francisco people in this thread...

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea...

You do realise your city is known for scenic beauty, trolleys, needles, and faeces?

Why stop there, indeed?

The Examiner quotes Supervisor Peskin saying

“People will have to go out and eat lunch with the rest of us”

Given that San Francisco is famous for the amount of human faces on the streets I'd say they should also ban restrooms in office buildings so people will have to go out and poop on the streets "with the rest of us"

When you couldn't even get Google in 2014 to roll out it fiber network in your city, despite SF being the techno capital of the US, and instead choosing cities like Chattanooga, TN, then you know that the municipal gov is too much of a pain to deal with.
https://pando.com/2014/02/25/having-being-burned-once-before-google-wont-bring-fiber-to-san-francisco/

The fact that four South Bay cities are among the 34 announced on Wednesday suggests that there’s something about San Francisco specifically, not California generally, that’s keeping Fiber away. And there is: Google knows San Francisco too well -- and it’s been burned here before.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-stalling-Wi-Fi-plans-Google-executive-2551901.php

In an interview with The Chronicle, Chris Sacca, who leads Google's special projects, voiced frustration with what he called the city's slow negotiating style. Sacca said that talks to come up with a final contract have advanced little since they started and that officials have made unreasonable demands, including a request for free computers and a share in revenues. "Every meeting is like the first," he said. >

Per my other post....I've yet to see in the US, a non-cash business in meatspace.

Yes you have but I think you mean retailers. Most (though not all) retailers accept cash but many other businesses do not as a general practice and the number is increasing. Heck my company pretty much never deals in cash. We could in principle but it would be wildly inconvenient and cost a lot more because we aren't a retailer.

It may take over..but I don't see it going fully that way in my lifetime.

I would agree with that though I do think you will see increasing numbers of businesses that find cash to not be worth the bother. It really comes down to whether the increased revenue and profits offsets the added cost of handling the cash. For most businesses it does but not all. But if companies could do away with checkout counters and their costs in exchange for not handling cash anymore I think some of them will take the plunge.

I tend to think this move, so far, is mostly outside the US, I mean, we still write and take checks here.....you know? While that isn't exactly cash, it is cash equivalent and doesn't require a network connection to accept and deposit.

Writing checks sort of speaks to how backwards our system is here in the US. And yes checks do require a network connection at some point albeit not necessarily at the point of sale. Many retailers will not accept them unless they can verify them electronically. Frankly checks are hugely annoying and expensive to the retailer. Younger people tend to use a lot less of them. I can't remember the last time I saw someone under the age of 50 using a check at the grocery store.

You can't (normally) evict someone that isn't party to a lease agreement.

What? Who told you that? And why did you believe them, after all the other nonsense they almost certainly have told you? Are you just soaking it all up and regurgitating it? You should carefully check over everything that person has ever told you, I assure you that more of it is wrong.

Reading law doesn't require tons of intelligence. It does requires hard work and a particular knack for dealing with stuffy dusty lawbooks

Obama worked on just 30 cases in four years. He was absolutely terrible as a lawyer, this indicates he had no knack for it at all.

You do have to put in a lot of work memorising stuff, though. So a smidgen extra intelligence

Memory has nothing at all to do with intelligence.

is what gets you "magna cum laude" from harvard law school.

That just means he graduated along with 90% of his class.

Again, he is credentialed, not intelligence. The fact he was given what amounts to a participation trophy is not impressive.

For better or worse, that readiness to devastate the attacker has never been tested. Worse, the very concept is being chipped away by movies and other art, which mocks it, and glorifies dissenters, leakers, and outright traitors, who either refuse to follow orders, or subtly sabotage them out of concern for collateral damage.

If/when push comes to shove one day, some officers may decide to not push the button. Something like this for example: "Our firing back now will not protect those already doomed to die in Guam. Why kill millions of innocent on their side?" See? It is so convincing...

Especially, if the base is not tightly run, and/or he has a cute Chinese wife/girlfriend and is well-versed in the rich and enlightening Chinese culture.

And you are a criminal defense lawyer?

Even if what you say is true, that will not prevent me from being stalked by police, arrested, being falsely accused (with all the legal expenses and notoriety that entails), and my blood taken by force.

Like happened IN THIS CASE.

https://www.sfgate.com/busines...

And mainstream America doesn't even want to tell Californians how to live,

False. You know who claims to represent "mainstream America" ? A certain authoritarian President who is on record as demanding the California, the despised and despicable state of the nebulous, "non-mainstream America"
is the enemy that must be cozened into doing the right thing for its own good. Even a claim they had millions of illegal voters because oh wait, that dope lost big in California.

It's "mainstream America" that keeps insisting on putting their anti-environmental(see Scott Pruitt's EPA), welfare reform(POWA), coercive criminal justice(1994 Crime Bill, anti-Marijuana legalization), and anti-immigration agenda(see Jeff Sessions), anti-same sex rights (DOMA) as the one and only true righteous path, and if you don't remember, try reading.

Sorry, but believe it or not, when you have endorsed a guy shouting on a podium how he's going to boss everybody around, both within the nation and outside it, you have a problem with people not believing you when you try to claim otherwise.

Remember, some of us know about P. T. Barnum. You can only fool people for so long before they smell a rat.

And boy do you reek.

Tesla bought its factory super cheap: $42 million. That price is so cheap that essentially Toyota was investing in Tesla. That factory is in California, not Michigan.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Tesla-paid-only-42-million-for-Nummi-plant-3187254.php

Tesla's big cars have been extremely successful (they simply took market share away from other luxury car makers). The Model 3 is selling as many as they can make, and they are selling only the most expensive options for it right now. A year from now I expect there will be almost 200 thousand Model 3 cars out on the road. So overall I'd say that things are working out pretty well for Tesla.

dockless is like Mountain View where there are little yellow bikes laying around everywhere. You can even find them in the local creek

Quote: African governments are notorious for interfering with citizens' internet access, particularly around election time or during periods of unrest.

Yea. You may want to take a look closer to home, subs. Western governments have been in on this for some time.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/ar...

Oh, this is how it ended. More juice goodness :)

http://www.sfgate.com/news/art...

Just like this.

This, http://homeguides.sfgate.com/t..., claims that Maples like a pH of 5.5-7.3 whereas peat usually measures more like 4.4 according to http://thegardenofoz.org/peat..... Your article doesn't actually say what the ideal pH for Japanese Maples is though they do compare them to blueberries and various members of the Rhodo family so it sounds like they do like quite acidic soil, which is likely rare for an Acer. Someone else mentioned problems with the invasive Japanese Lilac in Sugar Maple forests. Lilacs hate acidic soil so I assume they're flourishing in closer to neutral soil.
They also like light fluffy well drained soil in general and like so many plants, need oxygen for the roots, not really bog plants. Add enough sand, at least equal to the peat and add perhaps 25% compost, cultivate, and it might work. Not really efficient for large plantations of Maples.

And thus Japanese Maple which while it has a lower output of sap than sugar maple or bigleaf, still can be tapped for syrup, and LOVES acidic, organic fill soil.

This mafia-like behavior from Yelp has already been through the courts, and they've won so far (circuit court level): http://www.sfgate.com/news/art...

Like a decade ago, Yelp was accused of taking bribes-for-reviews and vigorously denied it, and it seems more likely some Yelp salesmen said it when it wasn't true. Whether you believe that or not, Yelp made their invisible reviews visible and of course if salesmen start openly claiming buying ads will help their reviews then customers would distrust Yelp. Somebody would be sure to record the interaction as well. It would kill Yelp's credibility and I really don't think they would do this except perhaps with a very large account where they could concievably keep it all secret.

The 9th circuit did say it would be legal for Yelp to do so, and as a company that seems reasonable to me. Yelp says that they do not do that, and I think there is at least some burden of proof on the accuser.

Censoring positive reviews while showing negative reviews is plain extortion when you act as an honest authority. Possibly even defamation, since they're manipulating the facts.

However, they have been sued unsuccessfully before over this and the court seemed to think it was fine.

Give back to the people who worked for the corporations you drove out of business with illegally anticompetitive business practices, Bill. Give back to the people who had to clean up after your deliberate attempts to sabotage Linux. Give life back to the people that your investments have killed. Give back the tax revenues you've avoided paying even though you're one of the biggest beneficiaries of the system. Let us have back control of education. Please, Bill. Give Back.

It's the far right Christians who keep the war on drugs going.

Wait... Obama was a far right Christian?

You'd think given his eagerness to use a pen and a phone when he couldn't get his addenda passed legislatively, he would have done more to reduce the number of DEA raids of medical marijuana dispensaries in states where it was legal.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
http://www.sacbee.com/news/sta...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
https://www.politico.com/story...
http://www.sfgate.com/politics...

Take off your hate goggles for a bit and look around a bit more.

There were never wildfires before climate change was discovered.

The is real problem is that we're been putting out the wildfires for over a hundred years when burning is part of the natural cycle of life for the ecosystem. As a result there are many millions of dead and dry trees just waiting for a spark. However, climate change is exacerbating the issue by causing more extreme weather (longer droughts and more extreme downpours) which ultimately kill more plants and turn them into fuel for the fire. Climate change definitely isn't the cause of these giant wildfires but it is making it worse.

Turkey is the best, most flavorful, most nutritious meat available, if it's done correctly.

Bison is a bit more nutritious than turkey, both in the good stuff it contains more of and the bad stuff it contains less of (this source is a bit more neutral in their comparison). If you like beef, bison tastes really good, and is much healthier than beef as well.

Sir,

    You are factually inaccurate. It is not acid which cleaves sucrose into fructose and glucose. Instead, an enzyme in the small intestine called sucralase does this, and splits a water in order to do it. It doesn't take significant energy.

Reference:
http://healthyeating.sfgate.co...

I agree that a gas furnace's efficiency isn't 100 percent. But its efficiency is still greater than that of the generation and transmission of electric power. In much of the United States, an 80 percent efficient gas furnace costs half as much to run as a 100 percent efficient electric heater because of all the losses upstream of the heater.

Same thing happened with the Oakland-SF Bay Bridge. Steel was not tested as should have been required and turned out to be vulnerable to sea water.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...

Valid Point, There is this ;)

America does have one of the Worlds Best Health Care Systems."Money Can Buy" ;) ATM

FYI
Canadians Increasingly Come to U.S. For Health Care
Canadian Politician Comes to U.S. for Heart Surgery
Why Canadian premier seeks health care in U.S. - SFGate

That's the demographic that is seeing the movie; From this link is an exact quote;

But the audience poll mostly consists of older male audiences who likely saw the original film in theaters. Opening night demographics were 71 percent male and 63 percent above the age of 35

Truly a movie for the "patriarchy."

Yelp tried to extort them a few times, so this restaurant gives 50% off on pizza if you give them a 1-star review:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/botto...

http://www.bottobistro.com/REW...

http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.co...

http://time.com/money/3398188/...

Nope you have it backwards.

Nope. It's the way of things. Whether you Admit it or not.

It's the Progressives who only respect a right when it benefits them.

Nope. The way it works is that Conservatives make claims about Progressives, expect us to ignore what they've said and done, and then mysteriously, expect us not to notice the rank hypocrisy that they possess themselves as they do what they want to do anyway.

It is part of their false virtues. When it comes down to it, I'd respect somebody who admitted what they were doing, rather than try to cloak it in sanctimony like Conservatives do.

Privacy is enshrined in the 4th Amendment as any US Conservative will tell you.

The 4th amendment, according to Conservatives only limits the government in its searches, providing no other protection, but you know this since...

We may admit that it's not as all encompassing a protected right as some would like.

Oh good, you admit your principles, if not as earnestly as you might have.

But it is there in our "Precious" Bill of Rights and it most certainly does exist.

Not according to Conservative thought. It isn't there at all. They wouldn't have a problem with this kind of ID, though fortunately, their own abusive acts keep losing in court.

I think both of you missed the point. The fact that the Constitution does not address privacy as a specific right does not mean privacy is not a right. From the 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Nope you have it backwards.

Nope. It's the way of things. Whether you Admit it or not.

It's the Progressives who only respect a right when it benefits them.

Nope. The way it works is that Conservatives make claims about Progressives, expect us to ignore what they've said and done, and then mysteriously, expect us not to notice the rank hypocrisy that they possess themselves as they do what they want to do anyway.

It is part of their false virtues. When it comes down to it, I'd respect somebody who admitted what they were doing, rather than try to cloak it in sanctimony like Conservatives do.

Privacy is enshrined in the 4th Amendment as any US Conservative will tell you.

The 4th amendment, according to Conservatives only limits the government in its searches, providing no other protection, but you know this since...

We may admit that it's not as all encompassing a protected right as some would like.

Oh good, you admit your principles, if not as earnestly as you might have.

But it is there in our "Precious" Bill of Rights and it most certainly does exist.

Not according to Conservative thought. It isn't there at all. They wouldn't have a problem with this kind of ID, though fortunately, their own abusive acts keep losing in court.

Obama wouldn't try to stifle the free press.

Wrong. On the same day that US governement announced World Press Freedom Day,

https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/12/152465.htm

Julian Assange was arrested.

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/08/131892110/wikileaks-dodges-obstacles-to-stay-online

On that same day, the famous journalist Daniel Ellsberg defended Assange, pointing out that "EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."

http://blog.sfgate.com/opinionshop/2010/12/07/daniel-ellsberg-praises-wikileaks/

Then why is it so hard to understand the issue? To use one of your conservative tropes, if you don't want to play by the rules, then you don't get to play.

I'm not a conservative, dingbat. In fact I don't conform with your stupid one dimensional understanding of politics.

If there is any argument against this very rational and LEGAL position, might I remind you that it sounds like you'd like to be a special snowflake in a safe space. We know that couldn't be true, right?

The problem with ADA is that even if you fully comply with the laws, people will still sue you, even for really minor things like having a handicap sign a half of an inch too low (literally, this has happened.) In literally thousands of cases, businesses get sued by somebody who they can prove never even went there, but they settle anyways because it would cost more to fight it.

http://www.recordonline.com/ne...

Politicians and business leaders across America counter that ADA compliance cases are about extortion rather than equal access, because lawyers like Weitz often recruit serial litigants and seek reimbursements for $400-an-hour legal fees for boilerplate filings.

Clint Eastwood fought such a lawsuit and won, but it cost him more than he would have had to pay out otherwise:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...

Note this tidbit:

After only four hours deliberation, the eight-member jury agreed with Eastwood's attorney that Diane zum Brunnen, 51, had not actually tried to use the Mission Ranch resort's facilities in 1996 -- so she wasn't denied access.

However, jurors did find that the inn should provide a ramp to the registration office, a second disabled-access guest room and signs about access accommodations -- improvements Eastwood said were already in the works.

Anyways, it's not as if would be airbnb customers are SOL, they could always go to an actual motel.

Actually, that cover is a rip-off of a Mad Magazine cover from a few months ago:
http://www.sfgate.com/national/article/Mad-magazine-says-Time-ripped-off-cover-idea-11159783.php

Given that it's Mad Magazine, it's possible they intentionally mixed up the Cathedral and the Kremlin, though it's also likely they just made the same mistake everyone else does.

[...] enter the code that authorizes the machine to make the sale [...]

Not in the Great Nanny State of California. Also, alcohol sales are prohibited between 2AM to 6AM. Whenever I walk into 7-11 to pick up a bottle of water and a cheese stick at 6AM during the week, the manager is unlocking the doors for the cold cases and the homeless are lining up to get their booze.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Alcohol-can-t-be-sold-at-self-checkout-lines-4831117.php

Dude, 150 grams/day is NOT a low-carb diet.

Low-carb diets are between 50 to 150 grams of carbs per day. The average person eats 225 to 325 grams of carbs per day.

http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/150-carbs-per-day-still-considered-low-carb-7754.html

Your mileage may vary, but if you're on Slashdot I'm guessing you're not dong manual labor all day. ;)

Pushing a trackball all day is hard work. ;).

http://www.sfgate.com/news/art...