Posted on 01/30/2015 5:09:21 PM PST by artichokegrower
Author, founder of Salon.com, and Bernal Heights resident David Talbot recently made a speech at Stanford which was then published in 48HillsOnline.com decrying Stanford douchebags, gentrification, and Mayor Ed Lee. Talbots strong words for Stanford students have struck a chord up north in San Francisco, and his speech is rapidly going viral.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.sfgate.com ...
Please! No enema!
If you gave the place an enema the overflow would infect the rest of us.
You must be from Baltimore.
Any one associated with salon would definitely be familiar with the details and nuances of douchbag usage.
Elway on 1/25/13: "The bottom line is, I think that President Obama did a tremendous job, he's a tremendous campaigner ... the people they had on the ground did a tremendous job of getting the votes, getting people to the polls, and did a tremendous job there.
No one can ruin that human sewer, it’s already at the bottom and has been ever since the first time I was there in the early 1950s.
Average, not median, because a relatively few true palaces drive the average much higher. You still can buy a 2br/1ba house for under 500k if you compromise on the neighborhood.
True, mostly, but you have to agree that -
The bank robbers are mainly in New York
The top train robber works out of Omaha NE
The ass-kickers are mostly Texans
Compromising on the neighborhood — not a good survival strategy.
Ps: in today’s San Francisco realty listings there are exactly four little shanties available on the market meeting your criteria (500,000$$ 2 beds one bath -—— this in a city of 800,000 people). Almost anything halfway desirable comes in at over a million, at least in areas where there aren’t so many anti- burglar bars on the windows. FYI.
Does David Talbot realize how many native americans were displaced so he could have his property in Bernal Heights?
You realize FR is based in California? California has some of the most conservative people in the nation; as well as its share of wackos.
But anyone who has been around much; knows wackos are everywhere.
“California is a state full of douchebags... What it needs is an enema.”
Aw, wassa matter? You came to California to be an actor and it didn’t work out? The lines were too long at Disneyland?
Here’s an interesting statistic: More FReepers live in California than any other state. Including its founder.
Oh, you stand by your brilliant, not-at-all-rude post? It’s just your opinion? Okay, then please explain how such a collection of losers manages to pay more federal income tax than any other state. (Including you, Texas, so shut it.) You’re welcome.
And yet we still manage to support our enormous welfare rolls, with are dominated not by illegal aliens, not by native Californians, but by American lifelong losers who transplant here from other failed states, yours included. You’re welcome.
Whatever state you live in, California’s economy eats yours alive.
Still disagree with math? Then I’m sure you and the rest of the California haters won’t mind if we turn off the tap.
Yeah. I didn’t think so...
(P.S. Before anyone posts their totally original riposte about the need to wall off California and let Mexico have it, try to remember that only rubes say “Cali.”)
Dang, havent checked lately. I’m much richer than I thought. We could sell out and buy a palace somewhere.
My wife would kill me though.
What’s wrong with that statement? Seems accurate to me.
Also a California resident here.
A lot of the banter about CA is unkind, but so be it.
What is true about CA is that it is an unkind place, no longer as much the land of opportunity as most of the rest of the US, and certainly not the place someone without specialized education and skills should consider. Its cost of living consumes its median income to the degree that the ordinary person is better off in South Carolina.
There are some industries that do well here, but most don’t and many have been deliberately driven out. There used to be a great deal of precision machining done here, for instance, and Los Angeles and the South Bay were something of an incubator for German style “Mittelstand” tech companies, but no more.
Yup you could have a palace most anywhere. Excepting only three or four cities Maybe take the wife on a little liw- key vacation tour?
Yours is one of the few responses about SF that knows what they're talking about. Too many posters here at FR knock SF (and California) as being beyond hope and infested with gays. Nothing could be farther from the truth. SF is beginning to return to normalcy. For 2/3rds of the 20th century it was a conservative place, as was most of California. Hippie liberals started arriving from elsewhere in the mid-1960s and began to ruin things; then gays migrated in. They've been leaving over the last couple decades. They're a minority, and their numbers are declining.
As you stated, the hill of SF used to be covered with rich people's homes. Now they're returning, in the guise of techies and professionals. And as you say, the same wealth that built Stanford University also built SF long ago. I'm in the midst of remodeling my mother-in-law's home in SF. Prices are going up 10 percent each year, as rich people move in and gentrify the neighborhood. A home half a block up was remodeled and sold over $2 million. It's crazy. Everywhere in SF there is gentrification and "ghettos" no longer really exist. The tech boom of Silicon Valley has moved north into SF, and the bums are being edged out. Too bad, but the city is better off without the freeloaders.
“A lot of the banter about CA is unkind, but so be it.”
I don’t take the “so be it” attitude. That nasty post was just dripping with bile. I think it’s important to remind people that they are hating on OTHER AMERICANS.
No other state engenders the kind of vitriol on Free Republic that California does. And why? California is bankrolling the entire country. The biggest economy. The best farmland. Silicon Valley, where, as I said in another post, the future of the entire planet is literally being invented right now.
I despise the politics of the Northeast. And my experience there is while you meet plenty of decent people, the number of abject racists is shocking. Way worse than the South. But do I hate them? Do I wish them out of the Union? Hell, no. They’re Americans.
And if California is responsible for its own slow-motion Mexican conquest and colonization, then New York is responsible for its attack on 9/11. And that’s simply crazy talk. Nobody thinks that. So what’s the difference between the two Ground Zeros? Why is New York the victim, while California is the one who asked for it, perpetrated it, and had it coming?
And to your point — all states have lost their heavy industry, to China and Mexico. Nobody here is making anything anymore. So why is that on California?
And why no bile directed at Hawaii, New York, and Washington, D.C. for how expensive it is to live in any of those places? Way more expensive than California.
I just don’t get it.
I’m not defending the bile, just putting it in its place, as the sort of thing that passes between fans of football teams. Not the sort of thing one should take seriously.
While many industries have moved abroad, the ones I mentioned have moved out of state. I was in the suburbs of Austin TX visiting one last summer.
As for inventing the future, that’s not a California thing from my POV. Real cutting edge stuff that changes material existence is not happening here to the degree it used to, at all. What’s growing is new forms of entertainment.
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