Provo doesn’t know where its fiber is, Google makes city spend $500,000 to find it.

[Ars Tech­nica]

One part of this story in par­tic­u­lar grabbed my atten­tion because of Google’s recently announced plans to bring fiber to Austin:

As we reported pre­vi­ously, Provo tax­pay­ers are still on the hook to pay off the city’s $39 mil­lion bond that was used to fund the network’s construction—the city still col­lec­tively owes $3.3 mil­lion in pay­ments in the next 12 years.

If Google wants to be an hon­est busi­ness and make an invest­ment in fiber infra­struc­ture here in Austin, fol­lowed by charg­ing peo­ple money to use it, great! But if they’re expect­ing the city gov­ern­ment to steal money to pay them to do busi­ness here, then thanks but no thanks.

It’s offi­cial: Google Fiber is com­ing to Austin “by mid-2014”.

[Ars Tech­nica]

There’s no men­tion of where, exactly, they’re going to be installing it. If it comes to my neigh­bor­hood I’ll cer­tainly pay for the $70 package.

Your Dreams of Own­ing a Dire Wolf Can Finally Come True (Sort Of). You?ve been read­ing or watch­ing Game of Thrones. You?ve lov­ingly lin­gered over the descrip­tions of Gray Wind run­ning into bat­tle with Rob, Sum­mer sleep­ing on Bran?s bed. You cried for Lady and light a can­dle every night for Nymeria. And lately, you?ve caught your­self look­ing back over your lease agree­ment and won­der­ing if “dire wolf” qual­i­fies as an exotic pet. [Wired News]

I’m more of a cat per­son. I’m hold­ing out for a saber­tooth tiger.

Here’s a rather unusual story: Cal­i­for­nia teen girls charged with drug­ging par­ents to evade Inter­net cur­few. Mil­lions of young Amer­i­cans are rou­tinely drugged into sub­mis­sion by their par­ents, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it going the other way around.

God Damn You, Amer­ica, and Your White, Priv­i­leged Grief [Once Upon a Time…]

An excel­lent (if typ­i­cally long-winded) arti­cle on the rather dis­gust­ing dis­plays of hypocrisy and nar­cis­sism in response to the recent mur­ders in Con­necti­cut. Let’s not for­get that the very same peo­ple who today are claim­ing to be oh-so-upset about a cou­ple dozen mur­ders were, just over a month ago, actively and enthu­si­as­ti­cally endors­ing the mass slaugh­ter of many hun­dreds of times as many peo­ple by the vile, mon­strous tyrant who rules in Mor­dor on the Potomac (and this includes the peo­ple who voted for his phony “oppo­nent,” who made it clear that he would do the same things).

From the BBC News RSS feed:

A man from Kent is found guilty of traf­fick­ing three teenage girls from Nige­ria into main­land Europe using African ‘juju’ witchcraft.

I can’t tell from this sum­mary whether some­one did a really poor job of sum­ma­riz­ing the case and it was really some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent from what this sen­tence describes, or if it’s actu­ally as appalling a mis­car­riage of jus­tice as that sen­tence makes it appear to be. The link in the feed is bro­ken, so I can’t find any more details.

If this really is what it sounds like, well, the British used to have a much bet­ter per­spec­tive on witches.

‘Plain Jane Ban­dit’ Con­tin­ues to Rob Banks Despite Unkind Nick­name. The woman who has been some­what unkindly nick­named the “Plain Jane Ban­dit” by the press isn’t let­ting her new­found moniker deter her from her cho­sen line of work: She was recently spot­ted rob­bing a Chase bank in Cer­ri­tos, her eighth SoCal rob­bery in about a month. [LAist]

From the story:

ABC 7 reports that she used the same method in the Cer­ri­tos rob­bery that she always uses, whereby she sim­ply walks in, shows a teller a note ask­ing for money, and leaves. She report­edly has never been armed or shown a teller a weapon, but she does some­times say that she has an accom­plice wait­ing for her outside.

How exactly does this con­sti­tute “rob­bery?” It sounds more like unusu­ally suc­cess­ful pan­han­dling to me. If banks want to put a stop to this woman’s “crime” spree, I sug­gest the fol­low­ing approach: on being handed a note ask­ing for money, deter­mine whether the woman has an account with that bank with suf­fi­cient funds. If not, tell her “no” and call for the next customer.

The Week­end Inter­view with Joel Kotkin: The Great Cal­i­for­nia Exo­dus. And things will only get worse in the com­ing years as Demo­c­ra­tic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre imple­ment their “smart growth” plans to cram the pro­le­tariat into high-density hous­ing. “What I find rep­re­hen­si­ble beyond belief is that the peo­ple push­ing [high-density hous­ing] them­selves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want every­one else to live like my grand­mother did in Brownsville in Brook­lyn in the 1920s,” Mr. Kotkin declares.

“The new régime”—his name for pro­gres­sive appa­ratchiks who run California’s government—“wants to destroy the essen­tial rea­son why peo­ple move to Cal­i­for­nia in order to pro­tect their own lifestyles.”

Hous­ing is merely one front of what he calls the “pro­gres­sive war on the mid­dle class.” Another is the cap-and-trade law AB32, which will raise the cost of energy and drive out man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs with­out mak­ing even a dent in global car­bon emis­sions. Then there are the renew­able port­fo­lio stan­dards, which man­date that a third of the state’s energy come from renew­able sources like wind and the sun by 2020. California’s elec­tric­ity prices are already 50% higher than the national average.

Oh, and don’t for­get the $100 bil­lion bul­let train. Mr. Kotkin calls the runaway-cost train “clas­sic Cal­i­for­nia.” “Where [Brown] with the state going bank­rupt is even think­ing about an expen­di­ture like this is beyond com­pre­hen­sion. When the schools are falling apart, when the roads are falling apart, the bridges are unsafe, the state econ­omy is in free fall. We’re still doing much worse than the rest of the coun­try, we’ve got this grow­ing per­ma­nent wel­fare class, and high-speed rail is going to solve this?”

[…]

Accord­ing to Mr. Kotkin, these upwardly mobile fam­i­lies are flee­ing in droves. As a result, Cal­i­for­nia is turn­ing into a two-and-a-half-class soci­ety. On top are the “entrenched incum­bents” who inher­ited their wealth or came to Cal­i­for­nia early and made their money. Then there’s a shrunken mid­dle class of pub­lic employ­ees and, miles below, a per­ma­nent wel­fare class. As it stands today, about 40% of Cal­i­for­ni­ans don’t pay any income tax and a quar­ter are on Med­ic­aid. [The Wall Street Jour­nal]

A good arti­cle from a few months ago on the exo­dus of the pro­duc­tive class from Cal­i­for­nia, and why it’s hap­pen­ing. I’m look­ing at leav­ing myself in the not-too-distant future.

Offi­cer Regina Tasca Goes “Rogue” [Pro Lib­er­tate]

Every so often I run across a story about a good cop. These sto­ries inevitably include a men­tion that the good cop isn’t a cop any­more because he or she was fired for being good. This par­tic­u­lar arti­cle includes an unusu­ally clear exam­ple of why it is that cops all seem to be vicious psychopaths–in Regina Tasca’s case, she stopped other cops from beat­ing a defense­less man for no rea­son, and was then fired for being “psy­cho­log­i­cally unfit” to be a cop. Or in other words, cops tend to be vicious psy­chopaths because that’s a require­ment of the job.

The Shadow Super­power. Sys­tem D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe par­tic­u­larly effec­tive and moti­vated peo­ple. They call them débrouil­lards. To say a man is a débrouil­lard is to tell peo­ple how resource­ful and inge­nious he is. The for­mer French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and eco­nomic real­ity. They say that inven­tive, self-starting, entre­pre­neur­ial mer­chants who are doing busi­ness on their own, with­out reg­is­ter­ing or being reg­u­lated by the bureau­cracy and, for the most part, with­out pay­ing taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouil­lardise.” Or, sweet­ened for street use, “Sys­teme D.” This essen­tially trans­lates as the inge­nu­ity econ­omy, the econ­omy of impro­vi­sa­tion and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy.

[…]

Today, Sys­tem D is the econ­omy of aspi­ra­tion. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organ­i­sa­tion for Eco­nomic Co-operation and Devel­op­ment (OECD), a think tank spon­sored by the gov­ern­ments of 30 of the most pow­er­ful cap­i­tal­ist coun­tries and ded­i­cated to pro­mot­ing free-market insti­tu­tions, con­cluded that half the work­ers of the world — close to 1.8 bil­lion peo­ple — were work­ing in Sys­tem D: off the books, in jobs that were nei­ther reg­is­tered nor reg­u­lated, get­ting paid in cash, and, most often, avoid­ing income taxes.

[…]

The total value of Sys­tem D as a global phe­nom­e­non is close to $10 tril­lion. Which makes for another aston­ish­ing rev­e­la­tion. If Sys­tem D were an inde­pen­dent nation, united in a sin­gle polit­i­cal struc­ture — call it the United Street Sell­ers Repub­lic (USSR) or, per­haps, Bazaaris­tan — it would be an eco­nomic super­power, the second-largest econ­omy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 tril­lion, is número uno). The gap is nar­row­ing, though, and if the United States doesn’t snap out of its cur­rent funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could con­ceiv­ably catch it some­time this cen­tury. [For­eign Pol­icy]

This arti­cle, pub­lished just six months ago, is gen­er­ally cred­ited with the wide­spread adop­tion of the term “Sys­tem D” in place of older terms such as “under­ground econ­omy” and “grey mar­ket” among English-speakers with an inter­est in the sub­ject. I expect it will become more promi­nent in the future, as the US becomes more oppres­sive and its “offi­cial” econ­omy heads down the drain.