He didn't fundamentally change us after all.

Two days ago, if I would have had eff you money - I would not have bet for Trump to win. Those odds were just too crazy. When the government becomes that corrupt - the house always wins. Always. 

Most of the time you couldn't figure out where the government stopped and the media began. And that is the creepiest effing thing about the Obama Administration. I'd never seen anything like it before. The complete adoration of government. So effing creepy. The whole thing couldn't have been more 1984.

On Friday the floor fell out for me. I started preparing for a Hillary Presidency. I'd been so strong up until that point. I just couldn't do it any longer. Californians can stay crazy, longer than you can stay sane. For the past year I haven't been asking anyone about the election because all my opinions about Trump were formed before he announced he was running. I used to hang out with a ton of construction guys. A lot of them admired him. But once he announced, people just changed. I didn't think I would get any honest opinions about him, so I just stopped asking. 

The thing about the Obama administration was you expect leaders to fuck things up. But you never really expect them to hate their citizens so deeply. Honestly every day it felt like he was trying to crush you. Trying to make your life harder. The Obama administration was more like the short movie 2081.  He was absolutely the handicapper General. If you have 26 minutes - watch it. It's in the vein of 1984. 

It's hard to feel optimistic when half of our own party is hoping Trump doesn't win.

Spotted - Newest Acura NSX.

Nothing says recession like.....

There are three rentals in my city that have been on the market for 100+ days. One has been on for 119 days! That is almost four months without income for the owner. Just one year ago you could rent a place in two weeks flat. Nothing, and I mean nothing sat for more than 30 days. There are a bunch of houses in the 90/70ish day range on the market too. But when houses get into the 100 day range something is seriously sideways.

Also, there is starting to be a lot of news articles like this: Twenty one percent of SF rentals cut prices. So far it looks like the overpriced rentals.... but we will see how things go. Even during the Great Recession rents only fluctuated about 5%. But as always - we are uncharted territory.

Now I understand why I'm starting to see a bunch of articles about what a sucker you are to own a house again. The funny thing about those articles is they name all the reasons not to buy a house, but they never list what the typical rental increase is every year.

I'm gonna lose my mind soon.

Two conferences today...... zero interesting things to blog about. Normally I would chalk this up to being the end of the year - but this really has been going on for about six months. It all seems like such a waste of time and it's frustrating. The only place things seem to be happening with is cars and what cars need. Maps are not interesting. Lidar is barely even interesting at this point. Some people are trying to make cheaper lidar which is great - but it's not that interesting.

I don't even remember it being this bad during the depths of the recession. It's like the Valley is liquidity starved because nothing new is making it to the table. It's feels like we are running on fumes. At the same time the world seems oddly normal if you don't think about things too hard. Lots of construction and so forth.

I did manage to make it into Levi stadium today which was mildly interesting. I've never been in there. I see the outside pretty much all the time. And it was nice I didn't have to wait in lines or put up with the crazy fans.

This is how Silicon Valley used to be.

"I’m convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar." Steve Jobs.

"It’s a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime—and I feel I have to spend it. If you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it away or using it to express your concerns or values." Also Steve Jobs.

Source.

When I look at Silicon Valley right now, all I think is - Jobs would have never put up with all this bullshit.

It's going to be interesting to see how Silicon Valley reacts to a Trump win. It's a cesspool of crony capitalism right now.

A less corrupt government would subpoena Yahoo so quick it would make your head spin.

I know things drop off the news cycle pretty quick these days, but I find it frustratingly ironic that so many government officials had Yahoo accounts. Remember just on Oct 4, this was revealed about Yahoo.

"Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time."  Source.

Yahoo would sell out their customers in a nanosecond. Thank goodness Yahoo in in the tank for this Admin. Losers.

Victory is mine!

If you only knew how hard it is to get rabbits to cooperate. I think she might be contemplating if she should have tried to get adopted by another family.

Evil Clown Pumpkin.

The whole weekend has been tied up trying to get my pumpkin together. First you go to the pumpkin patch where you find that every pumpkin has been picked to look perfect, but finally you are able to find just the right misfit pumpkin. And you take that little baby home.





We decided to make the teeth with fake nails.



They are easy to cut down so they look sharp.











Previous years - Evil Pumpkin Snowman. I think that's the one that started all this craziness.

South Park Pumpkins.  OMG They Killed Kenny.  Pacman Pumpkins.  Packman Pumpkins lit up. Zombie-ish pumpkins.

Wow. Did Hillary say she was qualified to be President because she can stand for four hours?! (shakes head)

It's a good thing California built all that extra rain storage....

Oh wait - that never happened.

Most of the Bay Area is several hundred percent above average for rain. I'd give you more specifics, but you can't believe how unhelpful all the weather sites are when trying to find this info. I mean, if they made it easy to find then people might start getting super shitty about still having to pay a drought surcharge next year. For example, my city was at about 500ish% of normal before the storm we are getting now.

San Jose is the only place that is still about 60% of average.

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for these fake companies.

Twitter is shutting down Vine.

I hope Dorsey takes it in the butt for buying this company. After I read the headline it was shutting down I was curious how much Twitter paid for it, but got distracted about all the glorifying of how popular it was. Which was IMO was complete bullshit.

One website giddily crowed that "more than 100 million people view Vine videos across the Web each month."

Yeah, the number is probably true, but we did so BY FORCE. So who knows what the real number is. People who used Vine, so overused it _ I bet that company pissed off more people than it made money from.

For a little while some sites were almost unreadable because they'd embedded so many auto play Vines. Lots of times I'd see a post with upwards of 6 Vine videos and they were all playing at once. You couldn't even play the Youtube video people would link to because your CPU was caved playing all those Vines.  All those Vines and adds were really over the top. Nothing made me want to punch people in the neck more. It's like Twitter said - are these ads annoying the crap out of you? I know, lets add some short auto play vids to make things better. Said in the most sarcastic way.

If each site was using six Vines per article you can see the actual amount of people using the site was probably vastly over reported. I'm betting the only reason they are shutting it down is because it made so many people mad and people stopped going to certain sites with Vine abuse. I'd forgotten Vine even existed because it's been a while since I'd seen any site link to a vid. And it was glorious.

Tiny arcade.

This actually worked and you could play tiny space invaders. I tried to get them to give me one... but no luck.

It never gets old.

I just still love that they make server racks pretty these days. This is one of the companies that I used to work for. They didn't make them that pretty back then.

It's a little bit early.

We don't have lush sprawling trees that change color in the fall en masse. We have vineyards. I normally wouldn't start taking pictures this early, but we are suppose to get a good storm tomorrow. Depending how windy it's going to be these might be patchy after it's over.

It's just nice to have anything with color this time of year. After months of brown, brown, brown.

This market is so stupid.

It's been trading in a 600 point range since April. This is how you know how badly wall street is in the tank for Hillary. A market that looks like this is so range bound, that I doubt it can go higher, but the hedgies won't let it go lower like they normally would. Why upset the election? Most traders would short the hell out of this market. But the Fed has their finger on the trigger. Who wants to risk it?

Since everyone has a big stick up their butts about scary clowns right now - I'm making that my pumpkin theme.

Porsche's never make it here.

By this time of year the car shows are only half full. So I didn't really want to go to one today. But, I thought - those guys have really fast cars. Some of them have to have gotten the "big" ticket.

One guy with a lambo told me he had a Canadian drivers licence and he didn't get tickets. I didn't quite understand it, but he said our police have to call in some other police to give him a ticket. What's that about Canada?

Two of them said they'd been caught doing like 140 but the cops probably didn't want to take them to jail and they got ticketed for like 80-90mph.

WTF? I was only going 1 over. Now I'm sad I wasn't going faster. ONE MILE OVER.

I don't know - when the US announces it's going to start a cyber war Russia and ISIS, maybe it invites a bunch a people to show what a tard country you are and how weak you've become.

Frankly, Russians have always been amazing hackers since the beginning of my career. However I give a very small chance they are actually hacking us. The US is just a giant tard right now regarding cyber security. The US is probably just leaving the door open.

Remember how I've been saying the dollar would get stronger not weaker?

The dollar is the highest it's been since February of this year at 98.64. This means pressure will resume on oil, commodities, exporters and emerging markets. Here. It's about 2-2/5 cents below the high set in Jan when the FeD was insisting they were going to raise rates. When they didn't - it started a downward trend. I think they will raise in December because..... no fucks given then.

It's been a little tense trying to figure out how much stronger it would go. I thought it was possible it was tapped out. But world events keep making it go higher. However, as I said not too long ago - around the year 2000, the dollar was way up into the 120.00 range. Here. I think it could potentially go that high. And that would put immense deflationary pressure on everything. We've been rolling in a 7 cent range the whole year. If the dollar were to go up more than 20 cents - that is a really huge move.

Just to give you an idea -  the dollar went up about 20 cents from summer-ish 2014 to the end of 2015 you saw what happened to oil, commodities and earnings.

Before you Libertarians get too smug.

Your candidates suck too.

Jill Stein said she would be okay nationalizing the banks. She is like Bernie Sanders but with less math skills. Here.

And Johnson said we should just shut up and take our fair share of refugees. Here.

I don't know how either of these things are Libertarian views.

If you want more diversity, Black culture needs to change.

Oh yes, I'm stepping on the third rail today. You see, every time I read an article about how Silicon Valley cares deeply about diversity, but they are totally confused as to why they don't have more of it I just get a little pissed off.

You see - the fact that tech companies have so few black workers has always stood out to everyone who thinks about it for a minute. When Mr S. moved to California he was shocked at how many Black people worked in tech (almost none). We've had many discussions about it.

I don't find the whole thing that perplexing. As I've said many times before - I grew up poor. I never thought about going into tech. I wanted to be a veterinarian. Tech was never on my radar. Until I realized I probably wouldn't be able to be a vet. It takes a really long time. And kids from poor families don't have that kind of time.

After landing a job as a receptionist at a tech company I realized I would have to change my goals. So I started learning sysamin stuff and eventually got a job in a field which was 99.99% men at the time.

How does my situation apply to Black people? Well, as a poor kid  - you do look at Oakland and wonder endlessly why poor Black kids weren't trying at all to get into tech companies any way they could. Like I did. Start on the bottom. Work your way up.

When I grew up we were suppose to be color blind. I think if they would have actually tried they could have gotten in just like I did. But working in tech simply wasn't cool. Being a nerd wasn't cool. And working for whitey would make you an Uncle Tom. After all, poor black kids used get beat up for being smart. Or too white. IMO these are the biggest factors in why there hasn't been more Black people in tech. That's all. Just the cool factor and peer pressure. Seriously!

Likely tech companies don't really have to do much to influence diversity. If it's cool enough to your peers, they will come. You can't make them come if they don't want to. It isn't rocket science.

I'm a little in the dog house.

For the past couple of days Mr S. and I have been having a few discussions about my ticket. Obvi!

I think he feels like I'm not taking it seriously enough. Which I completely am! But every time I talk about it, it makes me giggle and that makes him not happy. It's not funny... technically, but it's such a tard thing to do it makes me laugh. Everyone laughs when you tell them you got nipped doing over 100. Because no one is that stupid. You don't even know the extent of how hard I've tried to stay out of trouble because I came from a troubled place.

But honestly I just feel lucky this is the first time I've been caught. I knew this day would always come. I just didn't know when. I mean when I first started dating Mr S. I told him I made it from Mountain View to the San Fransisco airport in 15 minutes. IN TRAFFIC! So this whole speeding problem was fully in the open the whole time we've been dating.

I don't actually feel any remorse - only bummed I got caught. So a lot of our conversations have revolved around me trying to do my best to not get another ticket. And I think he still wanted me to more remorseful. I couldn't even say that I would never do it again, because that would be a lie. After a couple of days of me saying I couldn't guarantee that I would be more remorseful, but I could agree to be more careful.  I think we agreed on a settlement.

I did get a little arrogant because highway 5 has so many truckers! They watch out for each other. I thought it was pretty impossible to have a cop on that road and not get a Waze notification. But obviously I was wrong. Maybe he was well hidden.

I'm just a little butt hurt. That's all.

Soooooo. I had to start retaining legal council after my trip.  Turns out those tickets of driving over 100mph are pretty much as bad as drunk driving. No foolies. And I don't think I'm reformed because it sounds like if you were going 1 mile over 100 is the same as going 17 miles over 100. Makes me wish a little I'd done the second if it really doesn't make a difference.

That's not a good sign right?

I can't tell if I'm sadder about the fines or never being able to drive that fast again. I think I can make more money eventually. But never being able to drive that fast again sucks.

Nope definitely not reformed.

Rain gives you an excuse to be lazy.

We are having a first good storm and it's the best thing ever. I'm laying around playing DOOM 2016. I got though like 5 levels yesterday!

Around this time of the year the ground and the sky become one brownish color. The hills because they just don't get water, but the sky because no matter where a fire is the smoke seems to get trapped where I am. A fire in So Cal? The smoke hangs out up here. A fire in Napa or anywhere North, why the smoke goes south and gets trapped in my area too. So it's nice to finally have some rain to knock down all the dirt and stuff. Brown really becomes such a tiresome color. Seriously.

San Diego.

This was the closest I ever got to a beach. Even though it seems like no matter where you went - the beach was just two blocks away from where ever you turned. But.... I can see the beach any time, I'm not sure I want to drive 6 hours to hit a beach. It has to be a really special beach like glass beach or something.

Kite surfing on the other hand. That is something I don't get to see that often. We have it here too. But it's by the San Mateo bridge or at the ocean. This little lagoon made it so they were super up close. And some of the guys were using a hydrofoil which I'd only seen on the internet.





I mainly wanted to do things I couldn't do anywhere else. And having a California burrito was about at the top of that list. It's a burrito with french fries instead of rice. Mr S kinda thought this was bullshit and just went along with the ride. I figured it was just one of those things I would cross off the list, but they are actually pretty good. The fries add less flavor than you would think, but a little more texture. If we would have found a good place on the way out, we'd have hit that again.

Next? Fresh churros. Seriously! Here in northern California you only get churro's from under the heat lamp. I had them once fresh and Mr S. has never heard the end of it. He thought I was making the whole thing up. How different can they be? But since San Diego is the closest to churro central I figured it was my best chance. Fresh churros are the BEST.

With food out of the way, San Diego was a bit of a challenge to find things to do. It's so completely normal there. They even have a section called Normal Heights. I guess 25% of the people down there are tied to the military so people have to keep their crap clean. I get it. Even if you don't work for a government company in Silicon Valley, there is a chance your company will get a government contract and all of a sudden you are under the umbrella of government rules. You try to stay squeaky clean.

I wanted to do the chalk show, but that bunny show messed that up. So we started asking people what fun things there were to do down there. Besides the beach and the water. They all suggested to the Zoo. Which I was pretty cool with at first. It seemed big. When we got there though, I was really glad I'd picked a Tuesday because the place is filled with screaming kids who's parents are constantly yelling at them. Now I'm not so sure I'm in love with the Zoo. Usually the animals are sleeping and you really have to walk a long way for not that big of a payoff.  And I'm hardly one to complain about walking. But I did that day.



As I said in a previous post, I'm afraid of heights. So why not take a gondola? I hate these things more than anything else, But I did get a good shot of the skyline.

Raphael Orlove of Jalopnik is now biggest douche in the universe.

Mercedes Decides Who An Autonomous Car Should Save And The Answer Is Worrying.

I talked about this subject a while back when everyone was freaking out about who died in a self driving car crash. There were all these articles saying your car would be programmed to kill you. Which I thought was the most absurd thing. This is what I said about the hysteria at the time.

"Mr S. and I have been talking about this a lot since that conference. Gizmodo is falling victim to not understanding stated preference vs. revealed preference. Quite simply - People are big fat liars. And if you ask them questions they will tell you all sorts of things, but what they actually do is very different than what they say.

People might say if it's between 10 people dying and me dying - just take me out. But they would be lying. Until this happens everyone is altruistic. But I'm buying a car for MY safety. First and foremost, and anyone who says differently is pretty much lying. No one is buying a car to make sure pedestrians don't die. It's a nice perk, but pretty much I want the car company to make sure I don't die." Here.

People buy the cars they feel will protect them the best. It's always how we've bought cars. It will always be how we buy cars. But it doesn't stop people like Raphael Orlove from being a complete douche bag by turning this into an argument about how evil rich people are.

"My dude. Holy shit. You know what you’re saying there, right? You’re saying that a Mercedes S-Class or whatever, driving down the road, will happily if not gleefully run over a child if it guaranteed saving the caviar-guzzling millionaire inside. Not just a child. An orphan. A group of orphans. A group of sick, orphans with leprosy.

Pictured: a child begging a Mercedes for its life."

I don't know if this idiot has ever bought a car. I'm often glad these people are always on the edge of ruin because they really are pretty stupid. I guess he might be okay with it if it was just a minimum wage earning reporter and not a super rich dude with a Telsa. Because this is exactly the choices we make right this minute when we buy cars. Cars don't have airbags on the outside! That is not going to change because the car drives itself.

If the car was programmed to kill you over pedestrians - PEOPLE WOULD NEVER BUY THAT CAR. I don't care what anyone says.