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Electric Charging Stations In San Francisco

I went to my local Walgreen’s today and got a surprise. They had a charging station for electric cars. This was a first for me as I didn’t know that we had any set up yet, but had heard of talk about them being installed. All of these are owned by a company called Chargepoint.net and they charge $3 per hour to charge your electric car. While this is a cool idea, I think that when you charge your car at home and have to pay somewhere around 25¢ per KWh the price is a bit steep.

I’m not sure how many KWh hours a typical car needs to be fully charged, but I’m sure it’s less than the $65 I currently pay to fill my car up every month [we rarely need to drive outside the Sunset District, so most of our trips are short.] I also can’t exactly see why if I’m mostly driving in the Sunset District that I would need to fill up my battery on a trip to Walgreen’s less than a mile from my house when on average electric cars get about 100 miles on a charge [quoting the Nissan Leaf].

I could see if you were driving from SF to someplace outside the city that was at least a 50 mile drive and needed to be there for a couple of hours that a system like this would work well. Say we take the family out in our electric car for a drive down to San Jose for a couple of hours then it would make sense to charge up the car before we drove home, but the way we drive we would be able to do it much cheaper at home.

As you can see from the photo the charging station doesn’t have a solar panel which would make it even more green. The electric car brigade is still in its infancy and needs some fine tuning still. They’ll need to work the bugs out over the next few years, but at least it’s a good start. While people who live in the Sunset know that sun and this part of the city do not go hand in hand solar panels would still be a good addition.

I like the idea that there is a push in this city towards being more green since after watching a show last night on Hong Kong that the breathing the air there is similar to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day that I like our air quality here and if there’s people trying to make it better I’m all for that.

We still have the problem that not all electric cars have the same hook up so just because there’s a charging station there doesn’t mean you can hook your car up to it. Nissan has teamed up with chargepoint.net so that’s great if you buy a Leaf, but not so good if you’ve bought a car that hasn’t teamed up with them.  There are still some kinks to be worked out, but I think this is a good start.

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The Election!

Yesterday was election day and now due to ranked choice voting [RCV] we still have no idea who the new Mayor is. Ed Lee taking 31% has started to hint at a victory, but he doesn’t realize that RCV favors the far left more than the conservative democrats in this city. If you look at the list the bottom is pulled and the second and third choice are added to the ballot. Most of the bottom rung candidates are what San Francisco likes to call, Progressives.

In some cases I think anarchists might even be better. There are eight write in candidates and I haven’t heard of even one of their names. My biggest shock was that Terry Joan Baum actually got more votes in the first round than Mr. Reset San Francisco Phil Ting. I guess we like things just the way they are. As the far left is weeded out we’ll eventually start to see the far left moving a little more to the right and my prediction is that Supervisor John Avalos’ name will start to pop up.

I believe this to be especially true when the second and third choice votes for Cesar Ascarrunz are divided up. I was surprised to see that Cesar was running again after all the years he’s consistently run and lost. He has pulled a bit of the latin vote in SF over the years and the fact that our number two in the first round has a last name of Avalos and is a latino will probably help him out. Avalos came in second in the first round with only 18% of the votes. This was surprising to me even though I offered my endorsement to him since I did not receive one piece of political junk mail from him which makes him very green so I’ll assume that several of Terry Joan Baum’s second and third choice voters will go to him.

Dennis Hererra sent out an email yesterday that almost read like a concession speech. As I mentioned in my last post that initially I liked Dennis until the smear campaign started. Again, I don’t like smear campaigns because they don’t focus on the candidate, but more on what the other candidates are doing wrong. John Avalos took the high road. Ed Lee has acted like a rockstar without a band. He took a Ted Nugent attitude and just assumed because he was the mayor he would get the spot. Senator Leland Yee who was all over the place talking about how wonderful he was until he found it better to stop talking about himself and start focusing on how Ed Lee was a traitor to the cause came in the first round with very disappointing 8.93%. I guess I won’t be seeing him at the Tennesse Grill anytime soon.

I do not like ranked choice voting because of the fact that it is now the day after the election and we still have people counting votes in overtime. We still don’t know who the mayor is as well as the sheriff or district attorney. We may not know for up to a week as people work overtime to count and recount the ballots and then when it is announced we’ll have people crying foul! which could carry this on for over a month. If we had the standard voting method with a run off it would take a couple of days for the decision. Granted, there would be time in between, but then people would be able to get on with their lives. San Francisco needs a fix and we need it fast. So now I unofficially ask you to vote in a run off. Ed Lee or John Avalos. Who would you choose. Any other comments will be deleted.

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Baghdad By The Bay Meetup in the works

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile and I finally broached the topic on Twitter yesterday and was surprised by the response. I’m getting a large amount of people in San Francisco and beyond who read this website and I’ve finally decided to get out of the house and meet up with some of my “foreign corespondents” in San Francisco. That is the other bloggers, citizens, fans, readers and even the haters of this website.

Since I’m a Sunset redneck, it only made sense that I have the meet up in a suitable Sunset establishment. Also since I want to give some of the people from out of town a chance to prepare I’m going to not try a flash mob type of thing with a meet up tonight @ Uncle Fucker’s Chuckle Hut! but actually give you a few months warning. I like to plan ahead and I want to find a place that can handle the people who will come. Judging from last night’s twitter replies of over thirty people I suspect I will get a good amount of people to show up so I’ll actually have to approach a place and tell them what I’m doing. First stop will be the Blackthorn Tavern @ 9th and Irving because not only do they serve Boddington’s beer, Magner’s Cider, and have a DJ, but on Sunday’s they also have a BBQ going.

I’m thinking sometime during the San Francisco summer which falls right after the rest of the world’s summer meaning September. We should have good weather then and that’s the month of my birthday so what better excuse to stage a party. So I’ll be visiting the venerable Blackthorn Tavern in the next few days to discuss with them having a meet up there and see what they say. I want to see all the local blogger’s, politicians, scoutmobbers, miscreants and hipsters from all over the city to come to this event so make sure to mark your calendars for sometime in September for this get together.

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Work is Coming Back to San Francisco!

I have to say that the past couple of years have been rough. Jobs have been disappearing left and right and it’s hard for me to name a time when I can remember working a 40 hour week. Most of the jobs I’ve had in the last 4 years have been 40 hours a week when I started, but quickly moved down to 20-30 sometimes 15 hours a week.

The bosses at those jobs used to use the trick of telling me I sucked at what I was doing in order to fire me so they wouldn’t have to pay into unemployment, but I won out every time and those companies have all gone out of business.

In the last couple of years I would search for jobs daily and if I was lucky I would find three, maybe four jobs a week. Over the last month though I am beginning to find 30-40 jobs a week and I’m actually getting calls for interviews. I’ve got three interviews scheduled this week plus freelance work that’s come out of nowhere to add more change in my pocket.

I even had an interview today and they actually said that if I was hired they would include health benefits. Now how weird is that for a company in San Francisco? This wasn’t a health insurance plan that was a company of five doctors that you got to choose from, but an actually real big overpriced health insurance company that my prospective employers actually pays part of the premium like they’re supposed to, not tell the government they are, but charge it all to the employee like many have done to me in the past.

Now that fact that I’ve sent out my resume to 120-160 jobs in the last month and I’m still not employed may seem like something wrong with me, but there are lots of people who don’t have jobs and as my wife said to me today, Well, if you don’t get it, that at least means there will be less people in the pool for other jobs you find. I hadn’t thought about that, but I think she’s right.

There are lots of people who have been down and out in San Francisco over the lack of jobs, but now that our new Mayor Ed Lee is extending local tax breaks to businesses [which there are hardly any cities that charge a payroll tax on businesses] it looks like things are turning up for us. San Francisco is a damn expensive place to live in not just with housing, but also with the fact that a trip to the store revealed Oscar Mayer bacon is selling for $8.99 a pound. I don’t want to sound like an old curmudgeon, but I remember 15 years ago when that was $1.99 a pound. Of course back then I was eating rib eye steaks and filet mignon for around $4.99 and I didn’t have to go to Costco to get it.

Good times are ahead for us and don’t let them get you down.