Sunday, November 23, 2014

San Francisco: Welcome to the Turd World

So You've Decided to Map Sidewalk Poop in San Francisco...

San Francisco is a weird magnet for poop. Travel around the city in the grimmest of Easter Egg hunts, and you'll find turds basking on sidewalks, chilling in flower gardens, gumming up subway escalators—hell, you'll even find them littering the roof of a three-story building with no roof access.

I assumed upon moving here this was the marking of irresponsible dog owners. I wish I could still believe that. But Jennifer Wong has torn the brown veil asunder with "(Human) Wasteland," a revolting map of all the anthropogenic excrement around San Francisco.

Wong's venture into crappy cartography began with her needing a hack-week project for her company, HotPads. So the San Francisco native scoured the web for "cool" data sets, and found that the Department of Public Works, for whatever reason, keeps records of sidewalk cleanings for reason of "human waste or urine."

"Honestly, the data inspired me," she emails.''

Click through for some sample maps. As for Ms. Wong, I know some stables that are inspirational too.

If you actually liked your Obamacare plan, you can't keep that either

Latest Obamacare ‘Tweak’ a Doozy

Americans are inveterate tinkerers — a trait commented on by observers from de Tocqueville to Winston Churchill.

That’s why it’s not surprising that the bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would want to keep tweaking Obamacare. Mind you, it’s not so much because they think they can perfect the law. Rather, they keep tweaking the law in order to keep the American people from brandishing pitchforks and coming to Washington to tar and feather them and ride them out of town on a rail.

Self-preservation can be a marvelous motivating factor.

The geniuses who brought us the dysfunctional website healthcare.gov are in a panic because just about every Obamacare policy is going up in price. So rather than having American citizens deal with such unpleasantness, our intrepid bureaucrats have hit upon a brilliant scheme: why not change the auto-renewal rules of Obamacare premiums by automatically shifting a consumer from a policy that went up in price over to a cheaper policy? Of course, the cheaper policy will have fewer benefits and a larger deductible. And some people may actually like the policy they have now.

But what does that matter to the jamokes at HHS? They know what’s best for you. Just ask them.

Not to mention that your doctor may not be covered under the new plan.

The inevitable result, of course, is that after a couple years of years of this all Obamacare recipients will have spiraled down to one cheap plan. Meet your new Obamacare doctor:


Don't worry, he'll look scary but will be very popular.


Meanwhile back at the White Hut, there will be a lot of laughs among the privileged elite..