So many people are moving out of New York City, L.A., San Francisco, and Chicago. But will they take their politics with them?

Rod Dreher writes in The American Mind,

The writer James Altucher, a native New Yorker who owns a business in New York, believes that New York is over –– and explains at length why. Here’s the key factor:

In 2008, average bandwidth speeds were 3 megabits per second. That’s not enough for a Zoom meeting with reliable video quality. Now, it’s over 20 megabits per second. That’s more than enough for high quality video.

There’s a before and after. BEFORE: no remote work. AFTER: everyone can remote work.

The difference: bandwidth got faster. And that’s basically it. People have left New York City and have moved completely into virtual worlds. The Time Life building doesn’t need to fill up again. Wall Street can now stretch across every street instead of just being one building in Manhattan.

We are officially AB: “After Bandwidth”. And for the entire history of NYC (the world) until now we were BB: Before Bandwidth.

Remote learning, remote meetings, remote offices, remote performance, remote everything.

That’s what is different.

Everyone has spent the past five months adapting to a new lifestyle. Nobody wants to fly across the country for a two hour meeting when you can do it just as well on Zoom. I can go see “live comedy” on Zoom. I can take classes from the best teachers in the world for almost free online as opposed to paying $70,000 a year for a limited number of teachers who may or may not be good.

Everyone has choices now. You can live in the music capital of Nashville, you can live in the “next Silicon Valley” of Austin. You can live in your hometown in the middle of wherever. And you can be just as productive, make the same salary, have higher quality of life with a cheaper cost to live.

G) And what would make you come back?

There won’t be business opportunities for years. Businesses move on. People move on. It will be cheaper for businesses to function more remotely and bandwidth is only getting faster.

Read it all.

Resting raccoon

This raccoon is just resting. https://t.co/d6yseNYAAa

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) March 8, 2020

Results of San Francisco's no arrest policy

San Francisco’s no arrest policy has anarchic results. pic.twitter.com/3FqauPHUaM

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 3, 2020

Tribute to San Francisco

🎥BROUGHT TO YOU BY....@SpeakerPelosi & @GavinNewsom pic.twitter.com/9HzLRR1irm

— Dan Scavino (@DanScavino) December 28, 2019

"Pelosi's Paradise"

Pelosi's paradise is America's #shithole sanctuary for thieves, vandals, drug addicts, illegal alien criminals, and outdoor defecators. https://t.co/BKpEx8S3KS

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 26, 2019

"They want you playing hopscotch with human dung."

Unlike Tony Bennett, Kurt Schlichter left his shoes in San Francisco! He writes in Town Hall,

...The elite indulges its weird notions of virtue by making us tolerate weirdos, losers and mutations. We Normals get to do the hard work, pay the taxes, fight the wars, and now we also get to dodge piles of street scat.

But do you think some hobo would get away with doing the squat n’ scoot outside of a Pacific Heights mansion where our betters like Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi live?

Yeah, sure. And I can sell you the Golden Gate Bridge cheap.

The fact is that this is the liberal elite’s blueprint for the future. It’s a future where crime goes unpunished, and pathological deviance is allowed to flourish. But not where the elite live and work. Just like none of their kids ever attend any of the pathology factories that are the urban public schools, their kids instead get to go to secure private schools, safe from the chaos their liberal mommies and daddies tolerate for the little minority kids across the freeway.

...They want you playing hopscotch with human dung. They want you living in fear; you’re more pliable that way. All this shows you who’s boss.

Read more here.

San Francisco: a growing homeless population and longstanding HIV and Hepatitis C epidemics.

Zero Hedge has an article here about San Francisco's homeless problem.

The city, which hands out up to 4.8 million syringes each year, has struggled to figure out how to keep streets clean and safe for residents, while accommodating a growing homeless population and longstanding HIV and Hepatitis C epidemics. There are roughly 16,000 residents in San Francisco with HIV, and 13,000 with Hep C.

City Health Director Barbara Garcia estimated in 2016 that there were 22,000 intravenous drug users in San Francisco - around one for every 38.9 residents, while the city hands out roughly 400,000 needles per month.

Of the 400,000 needles distributed monthly, San Francisco receives around 246,000 back - meaning that there are roughly 150,000 discarded needles floating around each month - or nearly 2 million per year, according to Curbed. ...Most of the needles littering streets in downtown neighborhoods came by way of the city itself, as part of the Department of Public Health’s 25-year-old needle exchange program.

Protecting criminals

Bookworm writes about a crime epidemic in San Francisco and Oakland. There is an epidemic of car break-ins. Also,

The Bay Area had the nation’s highest rate of car theft last year — and the problem is getting worse in San Francisco, statistics show.

...Have you all heard the expression that “the fish rots from the head”? I’m guessing that some of you young’uns haven’t. It means that in an organization, if the head of that organization is corrupt, that corruption will inevitably trickle down, eventually permeating the entire organization.

Since 1989, San Francisco has been a “sanctuary city.” What this means is that it aggressively encourages lawlessness within its borders. Illegal aliens who find themselves in San Francisco are pretty much immune to any serious consequences, not just for being in the country illegally, but for any other crimes they might have committed along the way. Putting an illegal alien in the criminal justice cross hairs runs the risk that federal immigration authorities might nab that criminal and return him to his country of origin.

This is a rotten system, one that creates a protected class of criminals. Just read about Katie Steinle — her murder and the criminal “justice” travesty that followed — to understand how corrupt this system is.

The same rot is in Oakland, a city directly across the Bay from San Francisco, and a city (as one of the above articles noted) that place a close second to San Francisco when it comes to car-related crimes. It was in Oakland, just a couple of weeks ago, that the mayor broadcast an imminent ICE raid, allowing hundreds of dangerous felons to avoid being removed from Oakland’s streets.

...The entire state of California has declared itself a sanctuary state, willing to do whatever it can to prevent federal law enforcement from rounding up dangerous criminals who are in this country unlawfully. The state of California is also making best efforts to circumvent the new tax law. As written, the law no longer allows high tax states to subsidize themselves as the expense of low tax states. That’s been morally rotten for years, and California wants to violate federal law to keep the rot alive.

Read more here.

When is enough enough?

Anna Marie Erwert reports at SF Gate that median rents in San Francisco are now a ridiculous $4,225 per month!

Another memory

In 1976 I took my daughters on a train ride to California, where we enjoyed a spectacular fireworks show in San Francisco on the 200th anniversary of our great country.



Thanks to Ann Voskamp