A Series of Tubes

Since California is in serious budget crisis mode, the UC system is bracing itself for a huge cut in funds ($1 Billion cut to UC/CSU over 3 years). Every once in a while I get an email from Mark Yudolf and the UC Office of the President. In one of those emails, the following was said:

“Salaries for senior managers have been frozen, and the highest-level leaders, including myself, are taking a 5 percent pay cut.”

Mark Yudof and Arnold Shwartzenagger

One would think that Yudof is trying to share the pain of the UC by taking this pay cut. Of course one needs to understand that when Yudof was hired last year, his total compensation package was double that of his predecessor. By my calculations, Yudof’s salary is down from $591,084 to $561,529.8. This means that his salary is still up from his previous job at the University of Texas ($528,860). Of course he is only taking a 5% PAY cut, not a 5% reduction in compensation…so his total compensation package will go down by a percentage less than 5%. Yudof’s total compensation includes: Read more

Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting ready to gut the government of California.  The state has a budget deficit of $24 billion, and the list of Arnold’s proposed budget cuts is about $20 billion.  In a speech made today, Arnold made the following mental disconnect: He didn’t want the state to be in the real estate business and that California would be selling off land (essentially, getting into the real estate business).  It’s like he didn’t listen to himself about 10 seconds ago.  I guess this land sale will generate the other $4 Billion or so.  Of course there is not a single tax increase in Arnold’s plan.  For some reason Arnold thinks that the propositions that failed in the last election means that voters hate taxes.  The thing is that the propositions in the last election were not a round of tax increases.  Prop 1A had tax increases, but also set up a rainy day fund in a year when we can’t afford to be setting one up.  Apparently Arnold thinks that the failure of prop 1A was a referendum on the taxes in the proposition but not the rainy day fund portion because he still wants a rainy day fund.  Arnold is coming to the conclusions that he likes instead of the ones that match the facts.

The video below shows Arnold coming to the wrong conclusions about the election and proposing to gut the state government (along with proposing not to get into the real estate business followed by his proposal for the state to enter land into the real estate business): Read more

Recently I went to the Griffith Observatory.  First off, the Griffith observatory is named after Griffith J Griffith.  No I did not write that wrong, the guy’s first and last name is the same frign name (hilarious).  I of course found this out in a video narrated by spock Loenard Nimoy.  The Wikipedia page on Griffith J Griffith is quite entertaining (attempted murder, failed and successful lies about military accomplishment).  After the city of Los Angeles accepted the controversial money from Griffith J Griffith, seriously read that Wikipedia article, they constructed the observatory as a public institution.  This is the observatory in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean.

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Well I had a previous post with the back and forth with Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of yelp.  It was incredibly frustrating to have to ask him the same questions over and over since he kept answering the questions he wished I had asked instead of the questions I did ask.  His final response to me is as follows:

We have many thousands of advertisers on Yelp these days, I suggest a much simpler and faster solution… pick up the phone and call a handful of advertisers (they are easy to find on our site) and ask about their experiences with Yelp.

The East Bay Express did that and buried their findings at the end of their 4k word piece…

Interviews with more than a dozen local business owners suggest that Yelp sales reps may be wording their sales pitches more carefully these days. Owners who were approached by Yelp in recent months said they were told they could choose one positive review that would appear at the top of their page, which would clearly be denoted as a “sponsored review.”

And plenty of Yelp advertisers still have negative reviews on their pages. “You pretty much have to fight tooth or nail to get a bad review moved or removed,” said one East Bay restaurant advertiser, who wished to remain anonymous. Peter Snyderman, the owner of Elite Cafe, said his sales rep never mentioned moving negative reviews.

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Meth will mess you up:

I clicked through all the photos from the drugfree.org site with a sort of morbid fascination.  I managed to click to the website off of the Matt Taibbi blog post about religious apologist Terry Eagleton.  It was sort of a non-sequitur from religion to drugs (and now I’m going to do the same but in reverse order).  Fun quote from the blog post:

“This is the kind of stuff that permeates Eagleton’s work: a lot of masturbatory semantics and naked goalpost-moving buried in great gnarled masses of old-world sneering and unnecessary syllables.”

Matt mixes serious arguments, which help prove his point, with ad hominem attacks, which make it fun to read.  Of course Matt might be mad at my use of ad hominem considering his dislike of A priori:

“First of all, why is that no professor alive can make it ten feet from his front door without sticking an a priori into a sentence? Is there some kind of subterranean lair where academics are beaten with whips and clubs until they learn to write alliterative book titles (”Pus, Primates, and Pessimism: Jane Goodall’s Descent into Septic Shock”) and lard up perfectly good sentences with epistemological catch-phrases?”

There is a student protest at UCSC today (it’s probably still going on.  I’ll post some pictures later on).  In order to launch the protest a blog was started.  I guess the organizers don’t want to continue to use their old sites (2).  As usual with the protesters, planning was not their forte.  The events section of their website stated for the event that is taking place right now:

April 29 – Escalation of Budget Fight Back

More details will be available soon.

Through collaboration with other organizations on campus we will be holding another rally and march similar in nature to our April 22 action. Our goal for this action will be to turn out more people in preparation for May Day and to demand that Community Studies and LALS professors not be cut! Planning for future actions are still in their preliminary stages, so take part and help shape the movement!

It’s the day of your protest.  I think the time to post your more details has passed.  Also, I’m not sure how signs against the corporatization of the UC campus will get more funds for the community studies and LALS professors.  I’d be more sympathetic to the cause if these actions were more thought out.  This action comes in the shadow of two horribly managed and implemented protests (tent University and the tree sit).  Both protests failed to set a single unified goal and thus the protest ballooned out to encompass animal rights protests, justice in Palestine, anti-corporitization, greater student involvement in the budget and planning of the UC, anti science, anti-growth, and more.  Talking to the UC officials was perceived as selling out and betraying the core values of the movement and thus negotiation was immediately thrown out and step one of Tent University, the tree sit, and the current thing is a student protest. Read more

This video has been making the rounds.  I enjoyed it:

You can check out similar ones here.

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Here are some images from my cell phone.  I’m cleaning it out:

I like to walk.  Just to get where I’m going, that is probably my preferred mode of transportation.  For this reason I hate LA:

Where did my sidewalk go?

Yes there is an apartment complex in LA called Crapi apartments:

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I previously posted that the eastbay express article along with a follow up article ran about Yelp.  They articles claimed that business owners were extorted by Yelp.  The CEO of yelp responded on his Blog (twice), but did not respond to the second article which did not have anonymous sources.  I posted a 1 star review of yelp on yelp.com.  Within yelp itself, the CEO of yelp, Jeremy Stoppleman, responded to my 1 star review and to the allegations made in the east bay express stories and we have been going back and forth a bit today.  I figured I would post the exchange below since it is interesting.  I will always remember this day as the day my career as a hard hitting interviewer took off.

Update: this post keeps getting updated so I’ll just post the date of the last change: (4/13/09)

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