Liquidspace
Liquid Space is like an AirBnB for coworking space and real estate: blog.
Big in San Francisco, California and NY.
January 15, 2012
January 3, 2012
Kim Chi, artisanal ?
The first offerings of artisan kimchi comprise the most popular recipes: napa cabbage and daikon (the long, white East Asian radish).
Open the mason jar just a tad and the pungent aroma of kimchi wafts out.
Napa Cabbage Kimchi. Leaves of cabbage marinated in a sauce of red chiles, onion, scallion, chives, salt, sugar, garlic, ginger, anchovy sauce, oysters, salted shrimp, beef stock, sesame seeds and rice flour.
Daikon Kimchi. Crunchy cubes of daikon are easier to eat without dripping the sauce, made of red chiles, onion, scallion, chives, garlic, salted shrimp and beef stock. All flavors combine on the palate: chile flavor (and heat), garlic and approximation of citrus, which isn't an ingredient.
Lauryn Chun, a former wine consultant and founder of Mother In Law's Kimchi, spent nine years ferrying kimchi from her mother's restaurant--Jang Mo Gip in Garden Grove, a city in Orange County, California--to her home in New York City. Her friends couldn't get enough of it. Then the light bulb went on--BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY!--and she began to produce artisan kimchi locally, using her mother's recipe plus napa cabbage and daikon grown by a Korean farmer in New York's Mid-Hudson Region.
May 21, 2011
Gov. Jerry Brown, fit at 73
Brown's stamina and fitness are noted by adversaries and allies alike. "I hope I'm in that good health when I'm 72," Dutton, the 60-year-old Senate Republican leader, said a few weeks before Brown turned 73. Still, Brown acknowledges he has lost a beat. He is bald, which has the effect of sharpening his already hawklike visage, with bushy white eyebrows and a slight stoop that sometimes makes him look like just another state bureaucrat as he wanders the halls of the Capitol. He has a huskiness of voice and a slight stiffness as he gets in and out of a car. "Oh, yeah, I feel the effects of age," he told me as we sat in his office in March. "You're not as acute as you were when you were younger. There's an aging process that I certainly have experienced. I'm in pretty good shape. And I do know more; there's an accumulation. But there's a big difference between 56 and 72. You do age. There are limits to our lives. They come to an end."
He is compulsive about daily workouts: a three-mile jog along the Sacramento River with Anne or lifting weights in a gym. In an otherwise loosely structured existence, exercise is the one constant on his daily schedule. When the governor ran into Anne at the lunch he attended with Beatty in Oakland, the couple could be overheard engaged in this bit of bantering:
"You look great," Brown said to his wife.
"You look great," Anne responded. "Did you work out today?"
"Yes, I did," Brown said. "Did you work out today?"
"Yes I did," Anne said. At that point, Beatty, who is 74, turned in astonishment to Brown. "You did?" he said. "For how long?"
Brown does push-ups, and he has a chin-up bar in his suite of offices. "I am the one who got him to do pull-ups," Anne said. He lost a belly of weight before his most recent campaign, and Anne is always on him to watch his diet. When a waitress asked Brown during our dinner if he wanted more wine, Anne intervened. "He'll have some water first," she said. Brown, who was picking at bread and French fries, was not on the program. "No, I'll have more wine," he said.
March 15, 2011
Startups better suited to San Francisco Bay than New York City
And that's precisely what's wrong with New York: it's filled with hyper-stressed, aggressive, social climbers who are actually kind of effete and helpless at the end of the day, and probably need to outsource their software development, because they're not, like, technical and all that. Except there's one problem....there aren't that many hackers in New York, and the few there are (I know because I used to be one of them) won't leave their $300,000 jobs on Wall Street to work on your hopelessly risky idea.
-- Antonio
Counterpoint: UK expat Paul Carr. bring the meh
July 27, 2010
Supporters of Arizona's immigration law say the Obama administration should be going after local jurisdictions that have proclaimed themselves relatively safe places for illegal immigrants.
Critics of the Obama administration's decision to sue Arizona over its new law to control illegal immigration accuse the government of overlooking a more obvious target: the dozens of cities that called themselves a "sanctuary" for immigrants.
"Everyone has noticed the hypocrisy of the government going after Arizona and ignoring the sanctuary cities," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "They have it exactly backwards. Arizona is applying federal law, and sanctuary cities are violating it."
Kris Kobach, the Kansas law professor who drafted the Arizona law, said he particularly objected to cities that have a policy of freeing criminals who are illegal immigrants without notifying federal immigration officials. "It's pretty clear they are breaking the law. And they are doing it with impunity," he said.
He pointed to a provision Congress added to the immigration laws in 1996. It says state and local agencies and their officials "may not prohibit or in any way restrict" their employees from "sending" information about a person's immigration status to the agency then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
But Congress did not set a penalty for violations. And since then, neither Republican or Democratic administrations have taken legal action to enforce it, according to government officials and immigration lawyers.
-- David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau
July 25, 2010
June 18, 2010
Middle class under $7 million
The estate tax is one of those hyper-combustible issues where emotion, and shrewd lobbying, can loose an outsize uproar. That point was made last week with news that the multibillion-dollar fortune of a Texas oil tycoon, who died this year, would pass to his children and grandchildren free of the federal estate tax.
But before railing against the wealthy -- or encouraging your rich relatives to take up cliff diving -- it might be wise to look at what the real-world effects might be next year, when the estate tax of up to 55 percent might be levied on any estate worth more than $1 million.
At first blush, that policy sounds destined to take big chunks out of estates across a broad swath of the population. While supporters say the estate tax affects only the richest members of society and helps counteract the concentration of wealth, that million-dollar limit would seem to ensnare many people who consider themselves decidedly middle class -- especially in the Northeast and California where home values are high.
What is the dividing line between wealthy and upper middle class? Or between someone who owns an estate and someone lucky enough to have bought a home decades ago and watched its value grow to seven figures?
According to the Tax Policy Center, a research group, unless Congress revises the law by Jan. 1, the number of estates affected in 2011 would increase to 44,200 next year from 5,500 in 2009.
Even so, that figure represents less than 2 percent of the 2.5 million Americans expected to die next year, and is far below historical levels. In 1976, 139,000 estates representing 7.6 percent of all deaths were taxed when the exemption was set at $60,000 (nearly $230,000 in buying power today).
And these figures also don't take into account the world of estate planning, where numbers can be fungible. With a bit of planning, tax lawyers say, most families can legally shelter significant portions of their estates. In addition, the law contains provisions that allow owners of small businesses and farms to take additional exemptions.
Such caveats offer little comfort to those who call the tax the "death tax" and have fought for repeal, saying it is a form of double taxation.
"The proper exemption should be everything," said Dick Patten of the American Family Business Institute, a lobbying group that says the estate tax stifles job creation. "These people have already paid a lifetime of taxes to build the businesses they own." (Estate tax supporters say the levy helps the government capture a portion of capital gains that have never been taxed at all.)
March 21, 2010
California coast over inland
What is Southern California holding its breath for? To see whether this is all because the economics of housing are simply pushing problems further inland from the coast. From San Diego to El Centro; Orange County to Riverside and San Bernadino; LA to the Antelope Valley and Bakersfield; Santa Barbara to Santa Maria.