Comment Archives: stories: News: Feature
Re: “California Gets Fracked”
Let's mutilate mother earth for another decade of easy motoring.
Re: “California Gets Fracked”
It sounds like our soil, air and water are for sale (for profit). What happens when they're contaminated? Who pays then?
We don't even know what chemicals are being pumped into the ground and contaminating the millions of gallons of water needed to do hydrolic fracturing. What you don't know *can* hurt you. People get sick, have to move off their land, have to buy bottled water to drink.
Why the rush to do it in California? Why don't we take a hard look at what's happening in other states, including the long-term consequences before we say "this is a good thing for California".
Re: “California Gets Fracked”
Half Of The Great State Of California Problems Come From The "Freebie Crowd Of Tree-Huggers" Who Are Against Everything Except "Welfare & EBT Cards" So Lets Get Back To Safety 60 Years Should Be Enough, However When The DC Coyotes With George Soros Pulling Strings Of Pres Barry SoetoroAKA Barack Obama Beware We Need The 10,000 Jobs. God Bless America And Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Re: “California Gets Fracked”
People need to actively monitor NG collection tanks at the drill sites initial gathering. Some 600,000 plus are now in operation without flare offs or recondensers. The NG gas plumes at this stage of collection makes NG just as harmful to the atmosphere as before NG became the next energy major promise.
While there is little doubt that by avoiding restrictions in Clean Air and Clean Water regulations, the NG industry as a whole is the future, by way of its low costs.
Those in close proximity to those locations where the first tanks allow atnospheric exchausting to help with H2O removal absolutely need to be aware. The rest of us can survive the circulation of methane to higher atmosphers where it does 20x the damage as Co2, those on the ground next to the farms may not do so well.
Re: “California Gets Fracked”
Can't be worse than MTBE which was foisted upon us by our own Environmental watchdog, the ARCB!
Re: “Race-Baiting in Richmond”
Well, maybe the Black and Latino people in Richmond felt that they didn't think that affluent white liberals should be taxing them "for their own good."
Re: “The House That AC Transit Bought”
Well now, at the Jan. 23,2013 A. C. Board meeting the Board voted to sell the house on Seminary. The vote was to sell the house even at a loss. This seems quite foolish because housing prices are going up. If they would rent or lease it for a year or two they could at least break even and maybe even make a profit. Rick Fernandez has stopped paying A. C. the money he was loaned on the house.
Why does A. C. have Mary King on the payroll as a consultant? She works for BART.
Re: “Race-Baiting in Richmond”
Gee, you don't think paternalism and the inability to see the value of grassroots organizing BEFORE this was put on the ballot had anything to do with it?
Laudable goal, but wrong approach.
Re: “The High Costs of Outsourcing Police”
This comment was removed because it violates our policy against anonymous comments. It will be reposted if the commenter chooses to use his or her real name.
Re: “Dianne Feinstein's War”
Save our land and oceans is what I say. We need to support the decision to not re-new the lease. After watching THE DBOC ship in people to fill the court room on Friday I am reminded how false his cries are. The environmentalists were stuck out in the cold. Because Kevin Lunny hired bus loads of people to fill the court room so that the green community would not be represented in the court room. It was a sad media show with the slick lawyers form his team hoarding the cameras. They handed press releases to all media sources like they were checks. They had about 10 lawyers on their pro-bono side to sue the government & waste millions of tax $'s. It's just sad when the environment can't stand for it's self. Many people have fought for decades to save our coasts. I stand with them to preserve the waters & the wild lands of Marin.
Re: “Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0”
I have dealt with the extortionist tactics of Yelp first hand. As a marketing director for a small business, Yelp has been my only obstacle.
Yelp has a diabolical practice of burying the legitimate, favorable reviews of small businesses who refuse to submit to their exorbitant advertising program.
I work for a small business in New York City. We have a devoted, appreciative clientele, many of whom have submitted favorable reviews, only to have them relegated to Yelp purgatory - the "filtered" review section.
Yelp may claim that they've found a way to detect which reviews are legitimate and which are not via their secretive "algorhythm", however, that is not the case. In perusing the filtered reviews for my own small business, I recognize several of my clients in these reviews. These are honest, legitimate reviews. Over the past few years, we've received dozens of positive reviews. Because we refused to advertise with Yelp, these five-star reviews will never see the light of day, yet a mediocre anonymous review from 2008 has always remained on our Yelp page.
Yelp's overly aggressive sales pitch, and the vindictive consequences if you refuse them, make it clear that it is money, and not accuracy or objectivity, that is their primary concern.
Specifics:
Yelp calls businesses that have not had many reviews filtered. If the business declines the $300+ a month "advertising package" many positive legitimate reviews move the filtered section causing the business to lower in rank (usually from a 4-5star to a 2-3 star average). Any local competing businesses in the area paying the for Yelp's advertising gets to control their reviews and keep themselves at 4-5 stars while businesses not paying Yelp are tossed into appearing to have flaws due to only mediocre reviews being left on the company's Yelp page.
There is no course of action for business owners that are against Yelp trashing their companies in this way. Yelp promotes "honest reviews from real people" but a federal investigation into Yelp would prove that the company is committing extortion and racketeering.
Re: “Methadone: Not Just for Junkies Anymore”
This comment was removed because it violates our policy against anonymous comments. It will be reposted if the commenter chooses to use his or her real name.
Re: “Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0”
I am a webmaster and I know what Yelp.com is doing. It is TOTALLY unethical and imoral. See: http://www.propertymanagementreview.com/bo… for some more Yelp.com comments from angry people.
Re: “Race-Baiting in Richmond”
Excellent article! Big Soda was not messing around when they came to town. But Ritterman is right, this is just the beginning. So far in 2013, Hawaii, Oregon, and Nebraska have already proposed soda tax bills. More will follow and Big Soda won't be able to outspend their opponents so ridiculously.
Re: “Race-Baiting in Richmond”
NAACP for sale,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/201…
Re: “Race-Baiting in Richmond”
Dear Wendi,
Thank you for your great research. As a Richmond resident, I can attest that you tell it like it is. Both the No on N campaign and Chevron teamed with BMWL, and in vicious flyers, attacked both the obesity tax and the progressive candidates together. For them both, the poor and black communities are pawns.
After a judge ruled that Chevron had been stiffing the city for years and had to pay back utility taxes, we tried to end Chevron's flat fee sweetheart deal and make them pay what everyone else does - 10%. Chevron launched a paid petition drive to reduce everyone's tax to 5% - except its own. The petition was targeted at poor and black families. If passed, it might have bankrupted the city, but not a chance because it was just a cynical ploy. Chevron used the bludgeon of their petition to negotiate a settlement and dumped the poor community.
Would it surprise you to learn that the night before the election a crowd of paid anti-soda tax young workers invaded the “Yes on N” headquarters and hurled abuse and bottles at the volunteers, one of who was an 81-year-old woman? Through their racist and incendiary campaign, BMWL elicited this thuggery.
Anyone reading Gammon’s Joe Fisher article will immediately recognize that Richmond is a plantation, Chevron the master on the hill, and we are treated, like every third world nation where it extract its wealth, like slaves. Of course, there are always those of us that get to work in the big house.
Wendi, if you are ever interested in a Pulitzer, just come to Richmond and write a book called “Richmond: Corruption in a Company Town”.
P.S. It was not just BMWL, but the progressives that helped elect Booze to the council by talking folks out of their long held (and accurate) assessment of him as an incorrigible bully. That he has jettisoned all his former allies is ample proof of his opportunism. The view from Chevron hill must look grand.
Re: “Race-Baiting in Richmond”
What is progressive about a group of middle class liberals deciding what is in the best interest of working class people? None of these progressive activists did their homework. The biggest health hazard to working class people is stress. Stress is what working class people live with from birth to the grave and the worst examples of that stress is found in the minority communities of Richmond. The liberals, by their own admission, did little or nothing to engage the black community, the target of the regressive sugar drink tax, in partnering with them on the issue of regressive taxation. Blame the beverage companies all you want for dividing the Richmond community but the truth is Richmond defeated the tax by a two thirds vote. Please, don’t suggest that the people who voted against the tax were fooled, they were not. The only people in Richmond who were fooled were the liberals who thought they could succeed in passing a regressive tax on a working class community. A regressive tax is a class issue.
Re: “Race-Baiting in Richmond”
My goodness! To assert that it was big business that turned this issue into a racial one e is something one sided and not exactly accurate.
I recall when the issue was being discussed by the City Council to decide whether it was to be put on the ballot when, after a representative of the bottlers had finished speaking and had left the room, one female member of the Council rebutted him and asserted that if you did not support their measure then you were guilty of wanting to kill little black and brown babies. And the Express thinks that it was the bottlers that were playing the race card?
This article also skews the idea of where the tax was to go. The ballot measure never directed where the money was to go and I think you all know this. There was an advisory vote but there was nothing that directed where the money was to go. And this was one of the arguments that sank the measure by a vote of more than two to one.
This article comes across almost as if it were written right out of the RPA offices. And since the RPA is pushing so hard right now to reclaim it’s dominance over the Council with the appointment of one of their key people--Eduardo Martinez--this is that wedge issue they talk about all of the time that can split the people. [The soda tax and Chevron--a pair of litmus tests where your views will decide whether you should be allowed to continue to live in Richmond or whether you should be subjugated by those running the City.] This time they want to split the white progressives living in the border parts of Richmond from those living in the heart of Richmond who amy not appreciate what the RPA has done for/to them recently.
If you look back at the fight for and against Measure N, few people argued about the science. What they argued about was who this tax would apply to (certainly not most of the people living in the Annex, the Marina, the Point, Carriage Hills and North Richmond who most likely do their grocery shopping outside of the soda tax zone) and who elected these people to come into our homes to tell us what we will be allowed to eat and drink.
If you want to write about racism in Richmond, there’s plenty to write about but this was a poor excuse of an article that really just glossed over the issues of substance. It has that same “fair and balanced” feel to it that we see from Fox News except this seems to be coming from the other side of the spectrum.
Re: “Race-Baiting in Richmond”
This is good reporting. It was sickening to see the money that the Beverage Industry and Chevron pumped into the Richmond election. It is a shame that the Soda Tax lost, and a shame that Corkey Booze decided that his ticket to fame was being a constant irritant to all his colleagues but Nat Bates, who is obviously bought and paid for by our neighbors at Chevron.
Re: “Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0”
You might want to try this new online review website called RateDiary. This site helps businesses get reviews from paying customers only and enables them to manage their online reputation. No more reviews from non-paying customers, competitors or anonymous people. This is how it works. The business creates RateDollar vouchers in any denomination they like. Then the business simply hands there customers a RateDollar voucher after a sale or purchase. This RateDollar voucher gives the customer 7 days to leave a review before it expires. Once the customer leaves a review they get rewarded with the RateDollars that is listed on the voucher. Customers then can redeem RateDollars in the form of a VISA/Mastercard gift card they can use anywhere but ATM's. Also consumers can get rewarded 20 RateDollars for referring a business that's signs up to RateDiary. Now there's finally a way to get the satisfied customers to leave reviews. The RateDiary.com mobile app for Android and iphone should be out in a few weeks. Check it out!!!