A recent SFgate article on the mass exodus of middle and low income earners from SF. . .

From 2002 to 2006, the number of households [in San Francisco] making up to $49,000 per year dropped by 7.4 percent, those earning between $50,000 and $99,999 declined by 4.4 percent, and those bringing home between $100,000 and $149,999 fell by 3.9 percent, according to Census Bureau estimates. In polar opposition, the number of households making between $150,000 and $199,999 surged 52.2 percent and those earning more than $200,000 climbed 40.1 percent.

“A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies,” said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California.

Funnily enough, I was speaking with someone this weekend about the fact that I may soon be moving to the East Bay. A big fan of pro-and-con lists, my friend cited the former as being: real seasons and hot summers and comparitively cheaper rent. High and bold on the con list? It is the East Bay. Crime, for starters, and a dearth of any real gay nightlife.

If I end up going to school ‘over there’, it will seal the deal. Not a shock for my friend from across the bridge. “I’d just assumed that is what the guy, which I thought was you, was doing in your dixie exile header. . .staring across the water to the east bay, through all that damn SF fog.”

Kind of an awesome ad and a great response to Bush’s bullshit Rose Garden ruse on climate change.

Have you tried mint.com?

I read about it, was intrigued at having my money and expenses effortlessly catalogued, etc for me, and the set up was silly easy. However, when I pie charted my expenses, 80% was ‘health care’, which, while i do have high costs and medical debt, it ain’t 80%.

Also, I just got this auto email from Mint

Hi there,

Your eTrade (Checking & Savings only) – Bills & Debt has reached your low balance threshold of $363.80. Proceed with caution!

Cheers,
The Mint Team

The Mint team should have a better idea that that is actually a nice, high balance for any of my accounts.  But I suppose they compare my balance against general averages, and in that case, yes, I iz po’.

Getting loads o’ shite from the husband for sharing (see if I ever try that again) a dirty little secret of mine.

I have never voted. Not once, for anything or anyone. Ever.

And, as I suspected, economists have shown that it is a complete waste of time. I knew it. Although their very valid reasons for not voting are not my own (I’m terrified of being called for jury duty and forced to sit in a box for extended periods of time with trash that the stupid state considers ‘my peers’. Fuck that. This is also why I do not have a driver’s license), it is nice to have math on my side. At least in this matter.
Here are the highlights:

Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost – in time, effort, lost productivity – with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your “civic duty.” As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, “A rational individual should abstain from voting.”

The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote.

But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters’ hands – most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts.

Still, people do continue to vote, in the millions. Why? Here are three possibilities:

1. Perhaps we are just not very bright and therefore wrongly believe that our votes will affect the outcome.

2. Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets. After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it’s fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you’d spend the winnings – much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

3. Perhaps we have been socialized into the voting-as-civic-duty idea, believing that it’s a good thing for society if people vote, even if it’s not particularly good for the individual. And thus we feel guilty for not voting.

The forum from whence I filched the thread discussing this little video gem is full of people in total disbelief and shock that Photoshop can do so much.  Clearly they’ve never been stuck in the grocery store check out line and wondered why everyone on the magazine covers looks like an anime character or an oil painting.

Like almost anyone else, I can get a little disheartened seeing how many homeless there are in San Francisco. Not as disheartened as I get, however, when I hear how my fellow house-having homos interpret the situation.

I like this rather clarifying take on the situation, pictured below, from here, which is slightly clipped on the right, but still readable, at least on my browser.

I’ve received a bizillion suggestions to put the South Carolina (yah homestate!) pageant contestant’s bumbling performance up, but it literally hits too close to home. Instead. . .

God I can’t count the times I’ve wasted in an airport playing that stupid bathroom stall game, foot going tappy tap tap. Actually I can count the times. Never mind.  Criticial diff being, I suppose, a) i never got caught b) i’m not married to a woman and c) i am not in the Republican party.

Lozers.
The GOP’s Bathroom Problem

The Nation
Mon Aug 27, 8:13 PM ET

The Nation — What’s up with Republican politicos getting arrested by undercover cops for soliciting sex in public restrooms? First, Florida state representative Bob Allen, formerly John McCain’s state campaign co-chair, was arrested in July after he offered a police officer $20 for the privilege of performing oral sex. And today, news broke that back in June, Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), long the subject of gay rumors, was arrested in a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes cop investigating lewd conduct in the men’s bathroom. Both men are married–to women. (See Max Blumenthal at Campaign Matters for more details.)

The moment is so thick with irony, I scarcely know where to begin. But let’s start with their incredibly lame attempts at damage control. Upon arrest, both Allen and Craig attempted to use their positions of power to escape charges (Craig handed over his US Senate business card to the officer and asked, “What do you think about that?).

Post-arrest, Allen, appealing at once to homophobia and racism, mounted a “black (gay) panic” defense. You see he wasn’t really interested in giving head, he was just trying to save his neck. Apparently, the cop was “a pretty stocky black guy” and “there were nothing but other black guys around in the park.” Fearing he was “about to become a statistic,” Allen did what any other, rational, straight (straight!), white man would do if he just so happened to find himself cruising a public restroom full of black men: fork over a Jackson and drop to your knees.

Less hysterical, but equally flimsy, is Craig’s story. Through his spokesman, Craig said that the whole incident was just a “he said/he said misunderstanding.” Last year, when gay blogger Mike Rogers alleged that Craig had engaged in same-sex relations, Craig called the story “absolutely ridiculous, almost laughable.” I wonder if Craig was laughing on August 8–when he plead guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges in a Minnesota County Court.

Of course, both Republicans have a long history of support for anti-gay legislation–in Craig’s case votes for the Federal Marriage Amendment and in Allen’s a court brief against gay adoption and authorship of a failed bill to ratchet up penalties for “unnatural and lascivious acts.”

I’m sure as the press digests the Craig scandal, you’ll hear a lot about “hypocrisy,” “repressed homosexuality” and “internalized homophobia.” Good enough, I suppose, for making a somewhat cheap political point and sweeping these undeniably creepy, tragic guys back into the Brokeback Mountain days from whence they apparently came. But I wonder if the GOP’s burgeoning “bathroom problem” isn’t reflective of something larger than just a bunch of conservative dudes who couldn’t come out of the closet. There’s something palpably sad to me about what happened to Allen and Craig too, something oddly touching about their misplaced faith in the fading world of secret, anonymous gay sex. That world–once found in bathrooms, parks, piers and adult bookstores; the furtive refuges of adventuresome queers, married men, the curious–has been swept away by so many police raids, privatization schemes, quality of life campaigns and internet dating services. But mostly, it’s fallen away as gays have become increasingly integrated into the mainstream, and also, paradoxically, more marked than ever. “You’re either gay or you’re not” seems to be the equation.

Until someone like Craig, Allen, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard or Jim McGreevey shows up to ripple momentarily the waters of public discourse on sex. These guys have problems, no doubt. But we might also pause to wonder if there’s some cultural knot that gay liberation–despite its original and best intentions–has left in place. At the very least the link between public power and domestic heterosexuality–with all the fetishistic displays of family life that entails–has yet to be completely severed. Just ask Rudy Guiliani, or Hillary Clinton! Moreover, that knot, perhaps best described as sexual propriety, is what fuels the moral campaigns against homosexuality that have become one of the Republican Party’s identifying causes–loyally supported by the likes of Craig, Haggard, Foley, et. al. It’s also what leads Bob Allen to the stunning and revealing calculation that it would be better to be seen in the public eye as an avowed racist than as someone who likes to have sex with men sometimes.