Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

The thing about republics is they tend to die from suicide.

The thing about a republic made up of smaller republics is that before the large one dies the smaller one die before it.

Case in point:

Consider the unfathomable irony of progressive Democrats forcing Elon Musk to give up on California. Musk came to this state as an immigrant and proceeded to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) and its subsidiary, solar panel manufacturer SolarCity Corp., than all the “progressive” politicians in the state combined. Musk didn’t talk about it. He simply brought products to market that benefited the consumer, the environment and his shareholders. He should have been the poster boy for the green agenda, but instead they turned on him because he committed the ultimate sins: He made money and he questioned their authority.

This year, Musk is likely paying billions in state tax. Next year, he will be a resident of another state.

One of the problem with living in liberal unreality is that you don’t understand that actions have consequences, and those consequences can get amplified if the actions you take piss off someone with with the power to get even.

The damage goes much deeper than the tax revenue of one person. Musk didn’t just leave the state. He turned on the state. It is now his mission to get other innovators to leave as well. According to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, he is on the phone with Musk once a week, strategizing about how to get other California companies to relocate to Texas. In the last few weeks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (NYSE: HPE) and Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) have both announced they are moving their headquarters to Texas, with other potential moves in the pipeline.

The fun part is it was just virtue signaling going after Must but the real life consequences of him deciding to take all his friends out to play is going to be interesting.

The only question is this. Will these people having exited California hell decide they want to bring it with them to Texas by voting for the same clowns that destroyed the golden state?

Let’s hope not

via Insty.

The worst thing about a Biden Administration isn’t, of course, Joe Biden himself, bad as he is. It takes a special something to be “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue” for forty-some years, as President Obama’s own defense secretary, Robert Gates, put it in his memoir.

Even so, the worst thing about a Biden Administration is not Biden, but all the little Bidens – and worse – he scatters throughout the government. The Democratic Party is led by people who, in case the reader has not been paying attention, have completely lost their marbles – yes, the Democrat-run House proposes to ban “gendered” terms such as father, mother, son, and daughter in the rules of the House of Representatives, and replace them with neutral words such as parent and sibling. Like I said, marbles have seriously gone missing. A Democratic Party led by such people is bad enough, but it then sets a fairly low bar for anyone else in the Party. If you’re just destructive and foolish, well, that’s not so bad, comparatively.

A recent exhibit is Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Education, Miguel Cardona. Cardona, in his recent position as Connecticut education commissioner, required all high schools to offer courses on black, Puerto Rican, and Latino studies, to help “[a]nalyze how race, power and privilege” affect “access” to citizenship, civil rights, and that favorite leftist goal, power. Wonderful – more navel-gazing at race and ethnicity. That’s what our kids need. Can they truly not see how focusing on our superficial differences divides us, whereas focusing on our common humanity unites?

It’s funny how the left claims to revere Martin Luther King, Jr. as a moral leader and even a prophet (I had a Jesuit, of all people, make the claim in a religion course once). Yet they can’t run fast enough away from King’s famous dream: that we should be judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin. All the left does is judge people by the color of their skin.

And now the Department of Education is going to be filled with all these race-obsessed psychos, mandating this and implementing that, demanding everyone focus on our navels instead of on math, science, history, and the sort of knowledge that will actually help our civilization advance.

Happy New Year!

…is at Ace’s site:

As best I can tell, AT&T has not communicated a single word to its affected customers. They could have texted or emailed me with updates, but they never did. So, I visited some online forums to try to figure out what was going on. A website that tracks outages had a lively forum going on, and one sad post exposed how destructive it can be to require internet access to operate most everything in your house.

“My whole house runs on Alexa, so no heat, lights or internet is what I am dealing with.”

It’s bad enough when people can’t live without their cell phones (I’ve been without one for 3 years and find I like life better without it) but it’s idiocy to make your so many things in your life dependent on the net. Forgetting the privacy concerns (anything connected to the net that can hear you when it want it to can hear you when you don’t) one net outage will literally leave you with no way to live your life.

One should always have redundancy to back up a possible net problem and/or even manual redundancy to back up a power outage. Having devices that function without the net and/or power and being prepared to live without them these days is called “disaster prep”

There was a time not long ago when it was called “life”