Sweet Reason with a dose of Common Sense
I WANTED TO WRITE something lighthearted about the New Year in my first post of 2025, but it’s hard to be lighthearted if you live in Southern California, as I do. So much for a Happy New Year. You’ve surely seen or heard about the fires that have decimated several SoCal communities, and the hardest
FOR ALL THE CLATTER about how well the American economy is doing, there sure do seem to be a lot of layoffs going on. The latest — and some out here in SoCal would say the noisiest — was the recent layoff of more than 20% of the Los Angeles Times newsroom staff. Los Angeles
HOUSING IS A BIG PROBLEM here in the People’s Republic of California. There are many reasons why, but as the website CalMatters explains, “it’s complicated.” Years and years of regulations and restrictions have made building new housing a lot more expensive. The result? As Cal Matters reports, “the median price of an existing single family
BACK WHEN I TAUGHT college part-time, I told my opinion writing students about the struggle I had with movie and television reviews. I was usually disappointed when I watched something after reading a positive review because it seemed whatever the critic praised was never quite as good as they said it was. Bad reviews just
I’M NOT SURE ABOUT the rest of the world, but here in the U.S. there has been an ongoing battle over just what an independent contractor is. It’s become a bigger issue over the last few years because of businesses like ride-sharing giant Uber, a company built on the premise that its drivers are simply
WE CONNECT WITH MANY people in our journey through life, but the few we truly cherish are the ones who, as the famous quotation noted, understand our past, believe in our future, and accept us just the way we are. There have been a few people like that in my life, but I don’t think
I SUPPOSE I SHOULD offer up a big “thank you” to the United States Supreme Court. That’s because one of their decisions impacts me directly — to the tune of $8.37 per month. In the final decision of their 2017-2018 term, the court ruled “that teachers, police officers and other public employees cannot be forced to
LOTS OF NEW IDEAS come out of California, and although some are revolutionary and game-changing, a lot of them are just stupid and dumb. This idea easily qualifies as one of the latter. Here it is, as reported by the Los Angeles Times: California’s 168-year run as a single entity, hugging the continent’s edge for
THE GENERAL CONSENSUS has been that it’s hard to find highly skilled job candidates. But what if a number of the best and the brightest decide they just want to stop being the best and brightest and retire while still in their 30s? This is the latest big idea coming out of California’s Silicon Valley, a
IT TOOK A WHILE, but I finally have some faith in some of our elected officials. I’ve been pretty blunt in my criticism of them, particularly the State Legislature. We send them to Sacramento to solve the many problems the less-than-Golden State is facing, only to find that once they get there they waste time
