KWBaker

Today’s must-reads from around the Internet.

A spectacular bounty of rare autos discovered in a French barn, the puffer vest goes high fashion, a primer on rum and…»
 

Those instant hand warmers that heat up after a simple chemical reaction can be a lifesaver when you find yourself stuck outside in the cold for extended periods. But even the single-use disposable ones can cost $3 to $5 each. Instructables user junits15 posted a way to make your own in minutes with materials you probably already have at home.

The DIY instant hand warmer starts off with a large zipper plastic bag filled with a small amount of calcium chloride pellets. These are also known as ice melter pellets and can be found in most hardware stores in the colder months. Then fill a snack-size plastic zipper bag with water and put it inside the larger bag.

When the larger bag is sealed, you drop the whole assembly into a pocket or bag and wait for your hands to freeze. Then just pull it out and squeeze until the water comes out of the smaller bag and comes into contact with the calcium chloride pellets. The resulting chemical reaction warms up the bag and keeps it warm for 20 minutes to an hour. Get the full instructions here on Instructables.

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Keep Going - Check out this Great Related Gajitz Article:

Twist + Shout: DIY Phone Charger From Household Items

Bucket-Mounted Washing Machine Cleans Clothes in 5 Mins

Zip it: Innovative Magnetic Zipper Needs Only One Hand

Squish to Activate: Knitted Sensors Power Household Items

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Even when you turn your gadgets off, if they’re plugged in they are drawing power. Since a lot of power outlets are located behind or under furniture or in otherwise inconvenient locations, we aren’t likely to unplug the devices we aren’t using. They keep draining electricity even though they aren’t serving a purpose.

The Clack Plug from designers Goeun Choi, Jeongsoo Heo and Younghun Lim solves the “vampire power” problem by combining power outlets with the functionality of light switches. When you are finished using a plugged-in gadget, you can just flip the cord down to shut off power to the outlet. To use it again, flip the cord up just like you’re turning on a light switch.

The design makes it simple to cut down on energy waste without stretching and contorting yourself into uncomfortable places to reach the plug. All you need is to get close enough to toggle the plug into an up or down position. The Clack Plug is just a concept, but it’s an exceptionally clever idea that could save a single household hundreds of dollars in electricity costs.

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Rotating Sockets Power All of Your Gadgets From Any Angle

How to Kill a Leech: Clever Outlet Spits Out Gadget Plugs

Power, Redesigned: Innovative Folding Power Plug Design

Sony’s Smart Outlet Will Recognize You + Your Appliances

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Remembering to water your houseplants can be tricky. If you want to keep them alive you’ve got to either stick to a watering schedule or figure out a way to get the plants to water themselves.

Designers JiaChen Du, YangHan Wang, WenZai Ye and DanDan Liao of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts designed a self-watering flowerpot that requires far less attention than most others.

The Water Recycling Flowerpot is a double-wall glass structure that allows water to evaporate, collect on the glass and then drop back into the soil. It’s a natural type of irrigation that prevents both over-watering and under-watering.

An added benefit of the flowerpot’s glass walls is that you can see the roots of your plant growing and snaking through the soil.

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Keep Going - Check out this Great Related Gajitz Article:

Smart Flower Pot Feeds + Waters Your Plants Automagically

Clearing the Air Naturally: Plants + Technology Scrub Toxins

Wireless Bluetooth Gadget Lets You Know What Plants Need

Eco-friendly Air Purifier Want to Plant Itself in Your Home

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Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., gave his farewell speech to the Senate Thursday, remarking on the solemn duty, not always solemnly carried out, of Senators to defend the Constitution.

As opposed, for example, to looking out for their own parochial state interests. Coburn is a famous pork-buster.

I wonder what Coburn thinks today of his old friend Barack Obama, the former professor of Constitutional law who seems to have actually studied some other country’s Constitution.

Coburn, who was known as one of the few senators Obama had any relationship with at all when his was in that body, told me soon after Obama was first elected president that everything Obama says is sincere. Such naiveté.

Coburn is a good man, and I assume he returns to Oklahoma a wiser one.

Once you have been offered a new job, you might assume the process is at an end. But is it really? Not all jobs are created equal, and the goal in getting a new job is (typically) to improve your situation. So job offers must be evaluated carefully to ensure that your goals, personal finance and otherwise, are being served.

Read more...

"Americans should be ashamed!" "The Democrats are endangering our servicemen and our allies!" Such is the extreme spread of opinion and reaction to the release yesterday of a 522-page report from the Democrat-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Standard narratives oscillate between condemning any use by America of tactics such as waterboarding, to those who see the release as a potential trigger for attacks against US interests around the world. 

But what are the facts? In my career, I have trained US federal law enforcement agents in the principals of how to effectively interview Jihadist suspects. Before, that I was involved in the training of British special forces (SAS), in helping them resist interrogation by the enemy. Here is what I know:

• Professionals do not use violence when interrogating "bad guys." Even the most heinous terrorists. Why? Because most humans do not like pain and you never know if your prisoner actually has the information you need. As a result, when they "break," you have no idea if they are inventing information just to make you stop hurting them. Subsequently, you may take that fabricated information and plan future operations around them, thus endangering the lives of your own people because the information was false.
• Torturing people, or even "just" waterboarding them-- a procedure which makes the subject feel as if they are drowning-- may break a subject, but it will most often engender even greater hatred. That hatred cannot be controlled, especially if you are in an extra-judicial situation, or in a battlefield environment, which may lead at some point to the release of your prisoner. As a result, you may take a lowly foot-soldier who was just fighting you to feed his family and turn them into a person totally committed to the destruction of the United States. Remember the head of ISIS/The Islamic State, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, was once our prisoner.
• The "ticking time-bomb" scenario is a powerful argument, but by its nature should not be used as a justification for standing policies.  The idea that the interrogator can "step over the line" when the threat is dire and imminent is sympathetic to many reasonable people. However, there is no way to codify dire and imminent in an operationally useful fashion. A nuclear bomb timed to explode in New York tomorrow? Sure. But what about a car bomb in a "major" US city by April? Can I torture then? (One approach has been suggested by a kidnap case in Europe in which the victim was expected to die imminently and the perpetrator was in custody. The officer in charge, using the ticking time bomb analogy, decided to use violence. But first he told all his colleagues to leave the room and formally accepted all the legal ramifications of hurting the prisoner. And he was in fact prosecuted for his actions although he made the suspect talk. Note: his  actions were never used as an argument for a permanent change in policy. The individual knew that what he was doing was wrong and he was prepared for the consequences).
• The argument that we did "bad" things as a nation for the greater good in the past is not sound either. Yes, we interned Japanese Americans, and our allies, the British, tortured SS officers. So what? Do we really think that American citizens should have been treated differently because of their skin color or where they grandparents came from? And yes, the Nazis were incarnate evil, and the SS the worst of all, but does that really mean ALL options are open? Can I parade the prisoner's children into the cell and proceed to threaten their lives, or physically hurt them to get him to talk? Surely, if the war against Global Jihadism has any meaning, it is because we posit ourselves as morally good and the enemy as evil. Does that distinction end when the door to the cell is slammed shut?

I’ve had my Flip-Pac six or eight years. The pictures on their web site will pretty much show you what it is and how it works. It is very convenient, extremely comfortable, sets up and folds downs quickly and easily.

It allows us to quickly and easily camp out anywhere we can find a reasonably level spot to park our 4WD truck. We sleep off the ground on a comfortable built-in mattress (about Queen size) with plenty of screened windows for ventilation and stargazing if the weather is nice, and – with the rain fly – absolutely dry under the wettest conditions. A couple small interior lights run off the truck battery.

When we are not camping: we still have full use of the carrying capacity of the truck bed same as we would if we had a conventional camper shell. The mattress and tent live under a headliner and take up only about six inches of space under the roof of the shell.

Compared to other pop-up campers: it is light weight (less than 300lbs, important if you have a small truck), cheaper, sturdy enough to carry stuff on the roof [I had a friend make racks for kayaks and boating gear]. I can use all the camping equipment I already had – stove, coolers, folding chairs and table. etc – without the cost or inconvenience of built-ins, which would compromise the usefulness of the truck for hauling stuff around. In pleasant weather we’d sit, cook, and eat outside; in foul weather, this can be done inside, but in a small truck bed it’s not what one would call “roomy.”

It’s very hard to find these used, people who have them will find another truck they can be used on when the first truck wears out.

Possible negatives: they are made to order in Riverside, Ca. (only). When I got mine – years ago – I had to put 50% down, wait maybe a month and a half, then arrange a date when I showed up at the shop where they make them and had mine installed. Back then, they installed one in the morning and another in the afternoon: so they are a small shop and not a big assembly-line operation. I’m sure today the price is higher and the wait longer…

I could have had it delivered to a dealer in Phoenix, who would have installed it, but then I would have had to pay AZ sales tax; I elected to drive to Riverside instead, about the same cost – and no sales tax!

While this has never been a problem for me… some people complain (on the Internet) that it is inconvenient (or impossible) to put up the rainfly without folding up the Flip-Pac; in other words, you need to install the rain fly when you first set it up, you can’t easily change your mind in the middle of the night. Where we camp – the desert SouthWest – this is no problem; but it seems that in the Pacific NorthWest it is.

The tent is made of a vinyl type fabric that resists a light rain or sprinkle well, but for a real rain you want the rain fly [an option available at additional cost.] But with the rainfly installed, there is no way you can get wet or have any water get inside, it is very well designed and functions perfectly – although it eliminates the views out the windows. In the morning after a downpour, you and all your gear are dry – even if the truck is in the middle of a large puddle.

For cold weather camping, we use a small “Mr. Heater” propane heater to keep it warm inside before we crawl in bed, or when we get up in the morning. It sleeps two adults comfortably on the bed [over the cab and hood of the truck] and can also sleep a small adult [or child] on a shelf over the truck bed. Or the shelf can be used to store gear…or folded out of the way altogether. When the Flip-Pac is erected, there is plenty of room for a tall person to stand up in the truck bed.

-- Drifter Smith

[People love their Flip-Pacs. Check out this forum with plenty of photos.]

Flip-Pac
$6,000 and up

Manufactured by Flip-Pac

Isil militants have published a horrific document outlining how sex slaves can be treated, including with beatings and daily rapes. The pamphlet, which is dated Muharram 1436 (October/November 2014) and was printed by ISIS's publishing house, Al-Himma Library, is titled Su'al wa-Jawab fi al-Sabi wa-Riqab ("Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves").

The document was obtained by the US-based Middle East Media Research Institute who published full details of it on a website.

It was written by Isil's "Department for Prisoners and Women's Affairs", presumably, says the MEMRI, in response to the uproar caused by the many reports this summer that ISIS had taken Yazidi girls and women as sex slaves.

It explains in sickening detail when a female can be raped by her captors, some of whom pay as little as £27 for each of their victims.

Question 18: May a man use the al-'azl [technique] with his female slave?

A: A man is allowed [to use] al-'azl during intercourse with his female slave with or without her consent.

Question 19: Is it permissible to beat a female slave?

It is permissible to beat the female slave as a [form of] darb ta'deeb [disciplinary beating], [but] it is forbidden to [use] darb al-takseer [literally, breaking beating], [darb] al-tashaffi [beating for the purpose of achieving gratification], or [darb] al-ta'dheeb [torture beating]. Further, it is forbidden to hit the face.

The vast majority of their victims are women and children from the Yazidi region who were kidnapped during the Mount Sinjar massacre in August of this year. Up to 5,000 are being held in the de facto capital, Raqqa.

It lays out the "rules" for how to deal with captives in a simple Question and Answer format so even stupid militants can understand.

Questions include "It is permissible to have intercourse with a female captive immediately after taking her possession?" and "If the female captive was impregnated by her owner, can he then sell her?"

Question 13: Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who has not reached puberty?

It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however if she is not fit for intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse.

It says that slave women, known as al-Sabi, can be taken from any group of people with whom Isil militants consider themselves at war and makes a detailed case for why Christians and Jews are permissible as slaves but ex-Muslims are not allowed to be captured.

The rape of a female captive, the document explains, is perfectly acceptable even for married men and in one paragraph the document even says that virgins can be raped immediately after their ‘owners’ purchase then.

For those who are not virgins, their uterus must be "purified" first and it even says that it is legal to have sex with a child, providing she is "fit for intercourse".

THE PRICE OF HUMAN MISERY - THE FULL ISIS PRICE LIST FOR SLAVES A woman aged 40 to 50 - 50,000 dinars (£27) A woman aged 30 to 40 - 75,000 dinars (£40) A woman aged 20 to 30 - 100,000 dinars (£53) A girl, aged 10 to 20 - 150,000 dinars (£80) A child under nine - 200,000 dinars (£106)

Yesterday Breitbart London reported on the anti-fracking group Frack Free Balcombe Residents Association (FFBRA), who had gone to the High Court in an attempt to overturn planning permission for exploratory drilling in Balcombe, Sussex. The case was thrown out and the group ordered to pay £10,000 in costs.

Now it has emerged that those costs have been covered by none other than Dale Vince, the vegan developer who has made millions from wind farm subsidies.

The High Court ruling was originally brought to light by blogger Bishop Hill. Now one of his commenters has uncovered a newsletter circulated by the FFBRA, which details how the legal costs incurred would mostly not be borne by the group itself.

Under the heading "Update on Funding for the Balcombe Relief Fund", the newsletter reads:

"Great news – we now have all the money we need for our judicial review. Last week we explained how we needed to have £10,000 available in the event of our losing the judicial review and having to pay WSCC’s costs. Ecotricity has kindly stepped forward and sent us £10,000. FFBRA will hold this in our bank account ring fenced to either return in the event we win our judicial review or to use to pay any costs awarded against us if we lose. This is tremendous news.

"Who are Ecotricity? Ecotricity, founded in 1995 as the world’s first green energy company, are the only energy company that has pledged to be shale gas ‘frack-free,’ now and forever. The company thinks fracking is an unnecessary risk and are actively supporting the anti-fracking movement in Britain. Ecotricity have a unique not-for-dividend model, so instead of paying any shareholders they are free to reinvest the money from customer bills into building new sources of green energy – what they call turning ‘bills into windmills’. They now power around 120,000 homes and business from their growing fleet of wind and sun parks, and are developing a Green Gas alternative to fracking in Britain."

Ecotricity is chaired by Dale Vince, Britain’s wealthiest wind farm developer. Vince is worth an estimated £100 million; a fortune he made by erecting 60 wind turbines in 17 sites across the UK. Last month, Breitbart London reported that Vince had announced he was no longer able to construct wind turbines, thanks to the subsidies no longer being economically favourable.

Questioning the ethics of a wind farm developer funding protests against alternative forms of energy, Bishop Hill has said: "There are some interesting business ethics being demonstrated here by Ecotricity's chairman Dale Vince. I'm not sure that paying green activists to disrupt your competitors would generally be seen as a legitimate tactic. But if it is, perhaps it's time for big oil to start funding windfarm protestors."

Despite being run by anti-capitalists, the group goes on to advocate using the markets to register protest:

"People can conscientiously object to fracking using the power of their energy bills – households can boycott companies involved in shale gas fracking," the newsletter reads, continuing: "And if you do want to switch to Ecotricity, when your old supplier rings and ask why you changed, savour the moment, and say because “I don’t want Fracked Gas”. It is very enjoyable!"

The newsletter also reveals that the group’s barrister David Wolfe QC and solicitors Leigh Day have waived their £75,000 costs, meaning that the total cost that the FFBRA are now liable for is just £1,000 in fees.

New York Rangers defenseman Kevin Klein offered the definite proof that hockey players are indeed the toughest athletes. He lost part of his ear during Monday night’s game only to have it sewn back on and return to score the game winning goal.

Pittsburgh Penguins forward Zach Sill high-sticked Klein in the ear in the first period. He lost a lot of blood, but walked into the locker room to receive stitches. The team doctor used thirteen stitches.

Rangers defenseman loses part of ear, gets it reattached and scores OT gamewinner http://t.co/OYxwYLNnhD pic.twitter.com/xog9vvYVto #HockeyTough

— Tommy Thornton (@tommy_thorntonn) December 10, 2014

“That’s a first for me,” he said. “Haven’t been hit in the ear like that. Pain’s only temporary.”

& 13 stitches in his ear! "Hockey players are tough SOBs"-AV RT @NYRangers: #NYR @Realkevinklein8 gets Broadway Hat! pic.twitter.com/FFUoTy9rTv

— Jim Cerny (@JimCerny) December 9, 2014

Klein received the Broadway Hat, which is given to the top player of the night. However, he passed it on to Chris Falzone, 15, who was signed to a one-day contract with the Rangers. The team awarded the young cancer survivor a contract through the Garden of Dreams Foundation and the Make-A-Wish Foundation of New jersey.

Watch @Realkevinklein8 give the #NYR Broadway Hat to Chris Falzone! @gardenofdreams #GDFWeek2014 https://t.co/JnGRG2Evkw

— New York Rangers (@NYRangers) December 9, 2014

A salvaged barrel home at Playa Santana, Nicaragua.

Contributed by Ian Provo

Shepherd’s hut in Thar Desert south of Khuhri, Rajasthan, India.

From contributor Joe NIemczura:

Yes, that’s a solar panel, but it was not attached to anything. My guide shared a tobacco pipe with the shepherd. Birds flew through and curious lambs were shooed away. They made tea over an open wood fire inside, though it was bone dry and highly flammable. There was a well 300m away.

Photographer Ryann Ford is systematically documenting the last of America’s highway rest stops.

Learn more & support her efforts via Kickstarter here.

The longest road in California is El Camino Real, a six-hundred-mile route that once connected twenty-one Spanish missions from San Diego to Sonoma. While the state began to pave over the road in the nineteen tens, portions of it still run throughout California, including every city on the San Francisco Peninsula. In Palo Alto, El Camino begins at Stanford University, where it winds past the Stanford Shopping Center, a regal, open-air mall with an Ermenegildo Zegna but no Foot Locker, restaurants but no food court. As the road continues southward, it passes a series of newly finished luxury apartments, then half-completed luxury apartments still wrapped in scaffolding and tarp, followed by a showroom for Tesla, and one for McLaren. Then, finally, it reaches the city limits at the border of Mountain View, about two-and-a-half miles from Google.

A few blocks before the car dealerships, tucked behind a strip mall with a health spa, a Baja Fresh and a Jamba Juice, is Buena Vista Mobile Home Park, a four-and-a-half-acre plot of land roughly in the shape of Utah. The park’s five small streets are not flanked by sidewalks, and the territory of each trailer seems to bleed into the next. Unlike the recent vintage mini-mansions and luxury condos constructed in tightly uniform patterns of stucco and beige, Buena Vista’s hundred and eight mobile homes are a patchwork of styles: Some are an inoffensive industrial brown, one is evergreen, one is baby blue, one has a roof lined with Christmas ornaments that appear to have been hung in the mid-nineties and never taken down. The park houses about three-hundred-seventy-five residents, who are mostly low-income and predominantly Hispanic. It is the last mobile home park left in the city limits.

Buena Vista, which started out in the nineteen twenties as a road-stop with a gas station, general store, and lodging for passersby in the then orchard-rich Santa Clara Valley, was bought by Toufic Jisser and his wife Eva in 1986, along with investment partners, whom the Jissers bought out in 1999. In October 2012, the Jissers’ son and park manager, Joe, sent a letter to residents to inform them that the family was “working with a local real estate firm to explore possible redevelopment options.” That firm was Prometheus, the largest private apartment developer in the Bay Area, which had signed an agreement more than a decade earlier, in 2000, to purchase the land “upon the occurrence of certain events.” The agreement remains confidential, but one of the assumed prerequisites was that Palo Alto allowed the Jissers to remove the park’s residents; a city law required the Jissers to create a plan to pay to move the residents to a “comparable mobile home park” if Buena Vista was sold.

After receiving the letter, a number of Buena Vista’s residents decided to speak out against the impending sale during the public comment portion of a city council meeting scheduled for that month. The normally half-empty council chambers were so packed that the council took the unusual step of limiting each speaker to just two minutes. Erika Escalante, now president of the Buena Vista Residents’ Association, began the procession of comments with a brief statement of purpose. “We wanted to come here today to see if we can get some concrete and reliable information” about the the specifics of the sale, which were not detailed in Joe’s letter. She was followed by nineteen-year-old Miguel Sanchez. “We are worried about our education,” he said. “For students who are currently going to Palo Alto Unified School District…they really can’t be compared to other schools around the area.” Next, a woman asked where the people with disabilities and limited income will go; another woman said she had a disability and could not afford rent anywhere else; a seven-year-old said, “I am scared because my mom cannot afford so much money for another home,” and walked off; four more children testified after her; and finally, Winter Dellenbach, a retired civil rights attorney, said the city was abandoning its most significant remaining source of affordable housing. The commenters were thanked for their time and council began the rest of its meeting.

A few weeks later, in December, the residents hosted a Posada—a Mexican Christmas party—and invited the entire city of Palo Alto. “Because [Buena Vista] is kind of an odd placement,” Escalanate, who has lived in the park for fourteen years, told me, “a lot of people did not know where Buena Vista was. So it was kind of like to say, ‘Hey, we’re here, come meet us and get to know our community.’” A few hundred people showed up, including the mayor, members of the fire and police departments, and several council members. “We told them that if we’re still here by next year, we’ll do another one,” Escalante said.

In mid-May of this year, Craig Labadie, a hearing officer appointed by the city, held three days’ worth of hearings to determine if the Jissers could remove Buena Vista’s residents and sell the park. The Jissers were represented by their lawyer, Margaret Nanda, who argued that nearby parks in cities like Redwood City and Sunnyvale were sufficient replacements for Buena Vista, and that the Jissers’ relocation plan was more than fair, as they had offered to pay: the residents’ moving costs; first and last month’s rent and a security deposit at a nearby mobile home park; lodging costs in a motel for the move; a twelve-month rent subsidy to make up for the difference between the six-hundred-eighty-five-dollar rent at Buena Vista and the rent at the new park; and the cost of deconstructing and moving the mobile home if it was still possible to move it. The Jissers also offered to buy mobile homes for their appraised value if they could no longer be moved. Besides, Nanda said, the Jissers had a fundamental right to sell the property.

The park’s residents argued that the prices offered for their homes came out to about half of their original values, turning their investments into losses in a town that has otherwise seen real estate prices explode. When Escalante’s parents moved down the street to a different trailer, she bought their trailer for twenty-three thousand dollars and spent another twenty thousand on renovations, which included a new hot pink paint job, dark, handsome hardwood floors, and a refurbished kitchen. The Jissers offered Escalante eighteen thousand dollars. Another resident, Blanca Conseca, a thirty-nine-year-old Mexican immigrant who has lived in the park for nearly half her life, testified at the hearing, “My husband and I looked around two weeks ago over Sunnyvale and Redwood City, four hours driving in the car looking for mobile homes on sale. Most are in the seventy-thousand-dollar price range and up, which, with the twenty-three thousand dollars from our appraisal from the owner, we can’t buy half the homes in the area.” (She later told me, “The cheapest home I could find was unlivable. It didn’t have windows; it didn’t have doors.”)

Residents also argued that the Jissers shouldn’t have even bothered drawing up plans to move them, since a “comparable mobile home park” doesn’t exist—Buena Vista is in Palo Alto, the birthplace and command center of Silicon Valley and the densest concentration of venture capital in the United States. It has one of the best public school systems in the nation, its city services border on luxuriant, and it is impeccably safe. A consolidated community of mostly poor Hispanics in a wealthy, mostly white city is a community that is by definition ghettoized, but Buena Vista’s residents argued that it is without rival, especially when compared to East Palo Alto, the city across Highway 101, which in 1992 had the highest murder rate in the country.

One day during the nineties dot-com boom, a couple of startup employees went to what is now the Palo Alto Creamery, a diner with an eighty-five-year history of delicious milkshakes. The employees, who were there to celebrate an IPO—the company’s name has been lost to legend, according to the manager—ordered a round of Bubbly Burgers, listed on the menu as “one of our delicious burgers and a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon,” for a hundred and ninety-five dollars. The item had been added to the menu a few years earlier as a joke by the owner of the Creamery; with that order, it passed from gag to IPO rite of passage. Startup founders “would have stock options and no money, so once they hit a home run, they could come in and buy a Bubbly Burger,” the manager told me recently. “When PayPal went public, they had sixteen guys come in here and order eight Bubbly Burgers.” He couldn’t remember how many they sold throughout the boom—just that it was “a lot.”

It’s difficult to call what has happened in Palo Alto over the last forty years “gentrification” in the same way that the term is used in many larger cities, but what has happened in the Valley is perhaps an even more remarkable form of post-industrialization. When I grew up there in the early nineties, Palo Alto still allowed an aesthetic lawlessness on par with any other American town, with luxury homes sitting next to ramshackle ones, and beat-up Volkswagens planted in driveways stocked with collections of junk piled onto tarps. I often went my grandmother’s home, in the Midtown neighborhood, where she had moved in the nineteen thirties. She lived down the street from what was then a grocery co-op and a small pharmacy that sold bad toys; Steve Jobs lived a mile away, his front yard a wild field of grass. Across the street, my father’s friend and coworker at a biotech company in the East Bay lived in an Airstream trailer in the driveway of his own father’s house, where I often played with his grandson. By then, Stanford had already become one of the foremost engineering centers in the world, but native Palo Altans would have still vividly remembered Joan Baez’s first protest after leaving a Paly high school classroom during an air raid drill in 1958 and the beginning of her music career on University Avenue, or the Grateful Dead playing early shows in the town’s coffee shops.

There’s no firmly agreed-upon point when it all changed, but residents generally peg it to the late nineties. The nineteen sixties “was the beginning of the wealth, but it wasn’t off-the-charts wealth,” Steve Staiger, a historian at the Palo Alto Historical Association, told me. “It was just people could buy nicer cars than most people in America, but they weren’t buying Ferraris and Lamborghinis like they are now.”

In the fifties, when Stanford began to turn itself into an engineering mecca, it lured William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, to the area. He created Shockley Semiconductor in 1956, and a year later, eight employees dissatisfied with Shockley’s often tyrannical management style defected, forming Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild was a kind of early Y Combinator, a breeding ground for pivotal companies that would form the basis of Silicon Valley, like Intel, AMD and Kleiner Perkins. People migrated to work for burgeoning technology industry, both as engineers at newly established companies and as workers in the local factories that put together all those transistors and machines. After the formation of Intel and the development of the microprocessor in the late seventies, the city attracted a new generation of engineering talent, and city employees who rented or didn’t already own their homes slowly became unable to afford to live in the city they worked for. “Prior to that, there was the expectation that a police officer or commander would live in the community or the next town over,” Staiger said. “Now they live in the Central Valley; they live a hundred miles away or more. Employees live in the East Bay or South San Jose or farther south. Or they’re still in college and live with their parents.”

According to the New York Times, venture funding rose from seven hundred and seventy-five million dollars in 1995 to nearly five billion dollars just three years later. Venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins—whose co-founder, Eugene Kleiner, was one of Shockley’s original employees—began bankrolling the new e-world. Tech companies launched IPOs on Wall Street; Wall Street money came back to the Bay Area; and Stanford and Sand Hill Road were suddenly dual centers of a new universe. The IPO bubble burst in 2000, but in time, venture capital rose again.

Today, Sand Hill Road commands the highest office real-estate prices in North America—rents average a hundred and fourteen dollars per square foot—and El Camino is congested with BMWs. The average home price in Palo Alto has skyrocketed from six hundred and forty thousand dollars in 2000 to two million dollars in 2014, as humble World War II era houses are replaced with small palaces on streets beautified to a Singaporean spotlessness. In the ten years since I’ve left, nearly all the venues I frequented most as a teenager for licit activities, including a community center that hosted all-ages music shows and a twenty-four-hour Denny’s, have closed.

In late October, Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, responded to a question about the homogeneity of the tech industry in an interview with New York Magazine:

There are two fundamental problems that are resulting in what a lot of people believe is discrimination, and these are the problems that I think need to be solved. One is inequality of education. If you come up through a path that’s sort of a stereotypical upper-middle-class American path and you go to Stanford and you get a really great technical education and your professors really care about you, then you come to Silicon Valley and you’ve got the skills and you’re golden.

But, of course, most people in the world—including most people outside the U.S. but also people in the U.S., like where I grew up in rural Wisconsin, or people in the inner city—never have access to that kind of education.

On an afternoon in early June, I met with Amado Padilla, a professor of education at Stanford, at Printers Café on California Avenue, one of Palo Alto’s two walkable commercial strips. California Avenue housed Facebook’s second headquarters after it moved from a rented floor in a multi-unit building on the other, larger strip, University Avenue, and before it moved to neighboring Menlo Park in its present massive campus. A block away from the café, Cho’s, a dingy Chinese restaurant whose cheap potstickers were something of a town staple, had been evicted by its landlord after thirty-five years in business just one week earlier.

Padilla had read online about Buena Vista’s possible closure in 2012 and got in touch with its residents. “I started going out with them, just to meet people, talk to people, talk to kids, just to kind of become familiar with it,” he said. Padilla organized pizza parties for the teenagers to talk about how they felt about a potential eviction, recruited a local psychotherapist and organized counseling sessions for the residents and spent time querying them for his studies. In January 2013, Padilla conducted a formal study and found that, in contrast to a twenty-nine percent dropout rate among Hispanics elsewhere in Silicon Valley, Buena Vista’s dropout rate among its thirty-one high school students was zero. “These benefits stand in stark contrast to low-income Hispanic children living in less affluent communities than Palo Alto,” the conclusion of the study read.

Padilla later testified in the May hearings that many of the students had gone on to community college or four-year schools. Erika Escalante went to Palo Alto’s Gunn High School in 2004 and now works as a program manager at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a health-care provider. During my visit to her home, her seven-year-old son, Andre, who attends Barron Park Elementary School, frittered around on a tablet—in a few years, he can upgrade to an iPad, which is standard issue to every Barron Park fifth grader.

Just after the Buena Vista hearings concluded, Padilla published another hearing—a survey of residents of the nearby neighborhood of Barron Park, about their support for keeping Buena Vista’s residents in Palo Alto and their children in the city’s schools. About seventy-five percent of respondents thought that the city should work out a solution that would allow the residents to stay in Palo Alto, and more than eighty percent said the city should find a way to keep the children in Palo Alto schools. The latter would be easy enough: Students from East Palo Alto are often bussed to Palo Alto High School, and students who live in the Gunn catchment are routinely allowed to attend Paly.

Some wrote comments in the margins of their responses: “The mobile home park has been here for at least 50 years with NO problems. We do not need more high rise development in Palo Alto with high price tags,” wrote one respondent. Another read, “The city should not let the mobile home park be sold. Make everything as difficult as possible to the owners.”

But a quarter of respondents were against assistance for Buena Vista, and some of the comments were rather vitriolic. One person wrote that the park has been a haven of “gang activity.” (It hasn’t.) Another called the study “amateuerish” [sic]. But the prevailing opposition concerned the right of the Jissers to sell the land. “This is private property. Why this survey?” It’s the property owner’s property! She has the right to do what she wants w/it.” “I’m tired of a socialist coercive agenda and don’t support forcing the owners to sell or develop his property because the land users have co-opted his rights.”

Since the formation of the Buena Vista Residents Association in 2012, the Jissers have engaged in an ongoing campaign of passive aggressiveness, according to every park resident person I spoke with. They alleged that the laundry room wasn’t maintained and was full of roaches; that Jisser has increased water bills by thirty or forty dollars per month; and that the response to maintenance complaints is that if they don’t like it, they can leave. (The Jissers did not respond to requests for comment. Nanda, in an interview said, “If it’s going to be a story about the poor Buena Vista residents, frankly, I’ve seen enough articles about that.” She maintained the Jissers’ right to sell the land, adding, “I have a lot of perspective and empathy. I have been through foreclosures, more than any attorney in Northern California, possibly for the state. I have a great amount of respect for those tenants.”) Toufic, they said, has his assistant wash what has been variously described to me as a black Rolls Royce or Mercedes in front of the office. “We call it the little car wash,” Conseca, told me.

In 2013, the residents’ association hired Melissa Morris, a lawyer from the Silicon Valley Law Foundation, who thought that there might be an amicable way to keep residents in the park. Morris contacted a financial consultant who specialized in helping mobile home park residents buy their parks. Through a patchwork of loans and grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, state agencies, and philanthropic groups, Morris and the consultant came up with a plan that would allow Buena Vista’s residents to buy the park from the Jissers at what they believed to be the land’s appraised value, with the residents paying off the loans at about the same rate they had paid for monthly rent.

But when the Jissers had the park appraised, they were given two numbers: Kept as a mobile home park, Buena Vista was worth fourteen-and-a-half million dollars. But if the land were up-zoned to allow higher-density housing—a necessary step if Prometheus planned on building apartments—the land was worth thirty million dollars. When Morris presented the plan in August with the lower offer, Nanda, the Jissers’ lawyer, wrote back, “Thank you for the offer but it is respectfully declined.” A few months later, the residents’ association presented the offer once more to see if the Jissers, perhaps exhausted by the protracted procedure, had had a change of heart. They didn’t. Instead, the Jissers continued working out the plan’s kinks, revising it five more times over eight months before the city planning department determined it was complete enough to present in front of the Labadie at the hearings this past May.

Earlier this year, Morris told me, “I’ve been hearing from all different cities about mobile home parks at risk of closure and what’s happening to the Silicon Valley economy, this idea that landowners could cash in, even in cities with mobile home park conversion ordinances—that there’s enough money to be made in selling the land, displacing the people, demolishing the homes, I see this as being the beginning, not as an isolated incident. My sense is that people are watching Buena Vista to see what happens.”

On October 2nd, Labadie, the city’s administrative judge, approved the Jissers’ relocation plan. In his decision, Labadie wrote that the measures offered by the Jissers to relocate the residents were sufficient to meet the 2001 city law. “Although I am mindful of the impact this decision will have on the lives of park residents, my factual and legal conclusions must be based on evidence and reasoned analysis, not emotion or sympathy,” he wrote. Palo Alto’s schools “are among the best in California and are highly valued by park residents,” but Labadie deemed that irrelevant for the purposes of the law, as education was not explicitly stated in the law as a factor when determining a comparable mobile home park. Instead, the factors to be considered are restricted to the law’s plain language: “shopping, medical services, recreational facilities and transportation.”

While Prometheus, the developer with the original option contract to purchase Buena Vista, relinquished its right to do so—no one at Prometheus could be reached to explain why—the city’s approval of the Jisssers’ relocation plan still allows them to sell it at any time to another buyer. The park remains in prime territory; a seven-hundred square-foot apartment in the complex across the street from Buena Vista rents for twenty-eight hundred dollars a month.

A few weeks after Labadie’s decision, I received a text message from Melodie Cheney, a resident of Buena Vista, telling me that the residents were waiting until the New Year to file an appeal. She asked me for my email address, and after I gave it to her, she sent me an invitation to this year’s posada.

At the inaugural Beer Mile World Championships in Austin, Texas, this week, Elizabeth Herndon set a world record with a time of six minutes, 17.76 seconds.

Herndon, a 29-year-old Kent State geology professor, beat many of the male entrants in the race, too, especially since not all of them could complete the challenge. According to the website BeerMile.com, Herndon, with a time of under six minutes, 28 seconds, put herself at the top of the women's competition list.

Canadian beer miler Corey Gallagher won the men's title with a time of five minutes, twenty-three seconds. But the world record holder is still James "The Beast" Nielsen with a time of four minutes, 57 seconds.

Gallagher was displeased that he didn't break the men's world record. "I had aspired to be the undisputed world-record holder. Now people will always wonder," he said.

Despite that, Gallagher chose to drink Budweiser Platinum for his beer challenge. Platinum has a higher alcohol content than regular beers and he still ran a mile in just over five minutes--something most men can't do sober!

Beer-mile competitors are tasked with downing a can of beer, then running a lap on the racetrack, and repeating that for each 1/4-mile leg of the race. Only seven of the 10 men who entered the contest were able to finish in an upright position.

The first annual beer mile championship was not without controversy. It was originally scheduled to be held on the running track at Austin's Yellow Jacket Stadium, but at the last minute local officials shied away from having their track associated with a drinking event. So event organizer Flotrack quickly moved the race to the Circuit of the Americas track just outside the Austin city limits.

Despite the last minute change of venue, more than 1,000 people came out to watch the first ever beer-mile run.

As reported by The New York Times, Gallagher earned $2,500 for his first place finish and Herndon earned $5,000 for hers.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com

President Obama declared that "the typical family isn’t bringing home more than they did 15 years ago. And that still has to change" while touting "good news" on the economy in his Weekly Address on Saturday.

Transcript as Follows:

"Hi, everybody.  Just in time for the holiday season, we now have another piece of good news about the pace of our economic recovery.

Last month, our businesses created 314,000 new jobs.  And that’s not a fluke – it keeps up the solid pace of job creation we’ve seen all year long.  November was the tenth month in a row we’ve added more than 200,000 jobs.  So far this year, our economy has created 2.65 million new jobs.  That’s the most of any year since the 1990s – even with a full month to go.  All told, our businesses have created 10.9 million new jobs over the past 57 months.  And that’s the longest streak of private-sector job creation on record.

We also know that the upswing in job growth this year has come in industries with higher wages.  Overall wages are on the rise.  And that’s some very welcome news for millions of hardworking Americans.  Because even though corporate profits and the stock market have hit all-time highs, the typical family isn’t bringing home more than they did 15 years ago.  And that still has to change.  And a vibrant jobs market gives us the opportunity to keep up this progress, and begin to undo that decades-long middle-class squeeze. 

But first, we need the outgoing Congress to pass a budget and keep our government open.  A Christmas shutdown is not a good idea.  Then, when the new Congress convenes in January, we need to work together to invest in the things that support faster growth in higher-paying jobs.

Building new roads and bridges creates jobs.  Growing our exports creates jobs.  Reforming our outdated tax system and our broken immigration system creates jobs. Raising the minimum wage would benefit nearly 28 million American workers, giving them more money to spend at local businesses – and that helps those businesses create jobs. 

America, we still have a lot of work to do together.  But we do have real, tangible evidence of our progress.  10.9 million new jobs.  10 million more Americans with health insurance.  Manufacturing has grown.  Our deficits have shrunk.  Our dependence on foreign oil is down.  Clean energy is up.  More young Americans are graduating from high school and earning college degrees than ever before.  Over the last four years, this country has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and every advanced economy combined. 

The United States of America continues to outperform much of the world.  And we are going to keep it up until every American feels the gains of a growing economy where it matters most – in your own lives. 

Thanks, and have a great weekend."

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett