True love stories never have endings.
Richard Bach
 |
| Courtesy of mocii.com |
Any regular reader of this blog knows that I do not like California. I'm a former resident, having moved there in late 1999 and staying for about 18 months before returning to the Chicago suburbs. Perhaps you may recall the story of how my boss had charmed me into moving to California. I had started a temp gig with the American subsidiary of a Japanese computer chip testing technology company; the corporate DBA had given 2 weeks notice in a tight-labor market, and a staffing company reached out to me in the Chicago suburbs, agreeing to cover expenses and pay a reasonable but unremarkable rate. The IT manager position was vacant, so I was hired by the comptroller, whom served as interim IT manager. The contract was initially for 5 weeks while the company attempted to recruit a perm Oracle Apps DBA locally. The new IT manager was finally hired about 3 weeks later and almost immediately started trying to recruit me. I politely sidestepped the issue because I knew my subcontract had a no-compete clause and I had no interest in moving to California anyway. At the end of the 5 weeks, he extended me based on the fact another colleague had gone on vacation to India for a month. In the interim, they rehired the former DBA whose new consulting position didn't work out, but he gave notice a week later when a prior employer offered him stock options.
I was used to the road warrior lifestyle (no wife or kids), flying back and forth from Chicago to SFO during the prior year's 6-month gig for the City of Oakland while with Oracle Consulting. (San Jose also has an airport, but it was easier to schedule out of SFO.) So the gig stretched past 3 months, and I was fine with the arrangement. Then as I was preparing to leave for the airport one Friday afternoon, the client manager abruptly diverted me for a short private meeting. I was told that this was my last day unless I immediately agreed to a full-time offer. Oh, he liked me and would hire me as a project DBA when it came to upgrading Oracle's ERP suite (which they ended doing a few years later), but if I wanted to continue work on an ongoing basis, it would be as a perm employee. I argued I had no-compete clause, but he said he had leverage over the agency and guaranteed to take on any legal fees. (The agency sales guy quit after getting paid a bonus for placing me there, and the agency had made mistakes in invoicing the company.) I had not anticipated this event or tested the job market, so I reluctantly agreed (in hindsight a huge mistake). The agency did not take it well ('Benedict Arnold' was the most printable thing I was called by the agency's top management, even though I was not an employee), but in fact they had no follow-up assignments for me, and I had never done a thing to encourage or solicit an offer from the client. What I did do was stretch a 5-week gig to over 3 months for them.
Among other things, I had decided the prior year to convert my traditional IRA to a Roth IRA under an arrangement which split the income over 4 years. California decided it had the right to tax that prorated portion of non-California income during my tenure of residency at the top tax rate. It felt it was entitled to do so because it wasn't chasing after former California residents whom had converted their IRA knowing California's tax policy (which was in the minority nationwide). (They also disallowed my deduction for excess contributions for mandated disability insurance, because they had "lost" my W-2's--I had paid the capped contribution for the tax year with my first employer.) It's not so much the amount of money stolen from me legally (well over $1000); it was more a question of principle and ethics. [I've mentioned this in one or 2 past posts.]
The People's Republic of California has decreed a number of liberty-sapping laws in effect starting today. As usual, morally self-superior, condescending progressives are obsessed with
- SB 782 prohibits landlords from evicting tenants whom are purported victims of certain abusive behavior (stalking, sexual abuse or domestic violence). Now we have to separate the question of crime victims and legal rights of tenants. What is salient for landlords is whether tenants faithfully pay their rent and maintain the property; there should equal protection under the law--not permutations of special-interest restrictions over property rights. Moreover, why is the state handling this versus more local government?
- AB 715 requires all new California buildings to be energy-efficient. I have nothing against energy-efficient homes. I prefer to rent/own more energy-efficient appliances and/or facilities based on long-term cost savings, but I think that that is a factor which should be left to the free market. The point is that raising the costs of residences (to cover the premium costs of relevant technology) makes it more difficult for lower-income people to rent or own. (It may also be that future energy-efficient technology products will be much less costly to retrofit newer, lower-cost residences.) Where do you draw the line? You can argue that aggregate energy demands are scalable, but energy use is correlated with cost, and lower-income people have a natural intrinsic incentive to limit energy use. Regulations like these are de facto tax hike/subsidies.
- AB 97 bans the use of trans-fats in food facilities. I also write a nutrition blog (although I haven't posted there in a while) and have studied various types of fats extensively. Some trans fats occur naturally in the food we eat, but most prevalently it's used in partially hydrogenated oil used by food manufacturers to help extend shelf lives of food products (primarily found in snack foods, baked goods, and/or solid margarine). (It can also be generated in the process of heating/deep frying many conventional vegetable oils.) The bottom line is one should limit one's consumption of trans oil (it raises bad cholesterol and lowers good cholesterol), but one could make a case that many Americans aren't eating properly (eating too much of one thing, not enough of others): where do we draw the line? What's next--a rule a restaurant can't sell a customer dessert if he still has vegetables on his plate? Let's leave these decisions to the heads of the family. The bottom line is that there are economic side-effects to these efforts; for example, if food companies don't have feasible alternatives to extend shelf-life of baked or packaged food products, shorter shelf life translates into higher prices.
Pope Benedict XVI Speaks Out Against Anti-Christian Repression and Violence
The United States extends its deepest condolences to the families of those killed and to the wounded in both of these attacks, and we stand with the Nigerian and Egyptian people at this difficult time. - President Barack Obama[Minor criticism here: notice how Obama fails to note the nature of the attacks and the victims? These were unprovoked attacks by Muslim militants against innocent Christian civilians attending church services.]
The Holy Father used today's homily to speak out against state-sponsored repression against Christian minorities (e.g., China) and escalating violence by religious fanatics against Christian minorities, especially in the Middle East. Today's bombing outside a Coptic Church in Alexandria killed at least 21 and injured several dozen other parishioners. The Church of Alexandria, founded by St. Mark, is the largest church in Africa and one of 4 Apostolic Sees, and roughly 10 to 20% of the Egyptian population is Coptic/Christian. (Perhaps the reader remembers former UN Secretary-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Eyptian Copt.) Religious tensions in Egypt flare over discriminatory actions against the Christian minority (e.g., they face certain bureaucratic roadblocks, including any Muslims whom convert to Christianity); in response, the Copt community resents how easy Egypt makes it for Christians to convert to Muslims and hence have sought to impose community restrictions of their own. Current Al Qaeda factions have encouraged fellow Muslim attacks against Copts, reportedly in response to the detention of 2 prospective Christian female converts to Islam.
This follows a string of recent unprovoked violent attacks against Christians: e.g., a Christmas Day bombing at a Philippine church wounding 11, Christmas Eve attacks killing at least 38 in Nigeria, and the ghastly Halloween massacre at a Baghdad church, which I discussed in an earlier post. In particular, the continuing post-invasion exodus of persecuted Iraqi Christians is especially troubling.
I'm sure that prominent antitheists like Christopher Hitchens must be smirking at the contradiction of people whom allegedly believe in an almighty God but feel that He cannot smite down infidels on His own. No doubt the majority of peace-loving Muslims must feel frustrated that they have borne the brunt of attacks by Muslim militants and feel that attacks against Christians unfairly get more press in the West. But to be honest, there is no comparable concept in Christianity of deliberately killing oneself or others to win a way to heaven; in the Christian scriptures, Jesus deliberately avoids a political message, rejecting those whom would have made Him king, not objecting to Roman taxes, and preaching an innovative message of forgiving one's enemies and not judging other people. (Does that mean that Christians over the centuries haven't contradicted those principles? We only need to look at the abuses of the Inquisition and past sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, just to provide two examples.)
But the libertarian in me wants to remind others than our promotion of democracy abroad has not sufficiently emphasized individual/minority rights. In Iraq, for instance, where America has had significant influence, Sunnis initially found themselves excluded from any significant power and discriminated against in government employment; Christians ironically found their religious and minority rights better protected under Saddam Hussein's secular government. This should not be taken as any nostalgia for the bloody regime of the war criminal, but it would have been better for America to promote its secular republican ideals, including respect for minority rights.
Political Humor
A few originals:
- Drug-related violence just across the border; DHS Secretary Napolitano personally arrives on the scene to get a first-hand grasp of the border-protection situation. El Paso, Texas (across from Juarez)? No, the mountainous east Afghanistan border to Pakistan.
- Failed GOP Alaska US Senate candidate Joe Miller went to court to try to block the counting of votes with incidental misspellings of write-in candidate incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski's name. Just imagine how Washington state citizens must feel about staffers working for Senator Maria Cantwell. Not only did the parents of a fallen Afghanistan veteran get a form letter: "May your memories of [insert given name here] and the...", but the staffers wrote 'Bryn' instead of (Sgt.) 'Sean' Collins.
Musical Interlude: Holiday Tunes. I will resume my one-hit wonders/instrumental series with my next post.
Kenny G, "Silver Bells"
