Let's say you're expanding your business, and putting in a bathroom, a bar, a kitchen, whatever. Part of this interminable process is that at some point, your plans land on the desk of someone at the PUC, and they take the list of all the gear you're installing -- every toilet, every sink, every floor drain, every refrigerator -- plug those into some mysterious equation, and then they say, "Now you owe us $40,000 please. Or you can't have your construction permit."

The purported reason for this is that your business is placing "additional load" on the water and electrical systems, and so they get to bill you for it.

But, it's funny, because I get a bill every month for the water and electricity that I use that charges me for exactly the additional load that I have placed.

So this is actually a "paying the taxman" tax. You have to pay this bill for the privilege of paying future bills.

Having heard me rail against the anti-business stupidity of our local governmental bureaucracy, you might get the impression that I'm against taxes, or government in general, but that's far from the case. I'm not some Libertarian who thinks that roads are things that just magically happen during the night. What I'm against is stupidity, which we have in abundance. We have a system that is overwhelmingly optimized for the wrong things.

Taxes don't exist just for revenue generation for some nebulous, parasitic entity called "The Government". They exist so that people pay their share of the commons from which we all benefit, directly or indirectly; and also, they are a form of social engineering. You raise taxes on things you want to discourage, and lower them on things you want to encourage.

So what's this discouraging? What's the market pressure they're trying to exert here? Is it conservation? "We'd like you to use less water, so we'll discourage you from installing sinks." Well, no, for two reasons. First, if you want people to use less water, you raise their monthly water bill (or you make the bill progressive, so that the rate is higher when water consumption passes what you consider a "reasonable" level). Who cares whether they have a sink if it's never turned on. But second, it's not like I have any choice about these sinks! I can't say, "Hey, you know what, let's do our part for Mother Earth and just put in one sink instead of two." All of this is mandated by the Health Department: a bar has to have a 3-pot sink, a hand-washing sink, an ice well, a floor drain, etc. If your capacity is X, you must have Y toilets. There's basically zero discretion here.

So what they're actually discouraging by charging an enormous fee for merely owning a sink is not "wasting water", but is instead, "doing business in San Francisco". They're saying, "We'd rather you not expand your business. We'd rather you not increase the number of people you employ, or the number of visitors you bring to town. We think those things are bad, so we'd like to make it less likely for you to be able to afford to stay open."

It's the "We will have to confiscate your ice cream cones" thing all over again. ]]> http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/05/04.html jwz@dnalounge.com (Jamie Zawinski) Sat, 05 May 2012 06:59:00 GMT http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/05/04.html The new bathrooms now have walls, ceilings, capped plumbing fixtures and working electricity. Progress marches on. Or at least moseys. Here are some photos of stuff:

I think Barry just christened the new men's room.

You can really get a sense of the (odd) shape of the room now.

Some day this will be a sink instead of a faucet stub.

After some adjustments, this piece of junk will be the bar in the back room.

Hey look, most of the front room's sound system has arrived.

New, small ice maker. Sufficient? Time will tell.

Also! We have new stickers. The new ones are green-on-black instead of black-on-white and white-on-black like the old batch. Just $1 each, go get 'em!

But most importantly (to me, anyway) these actually have the correct aspect ratio. Whoever printed the old stickers stretched the image to fit the sticker instead of centering it, meaning the circular part of the logo wasn't actually a circle. Most people wouldn't notice this, but it always drove me crazy.

I regret to report that these stickers do not glow in the dark. Our t-shirts glow in the dark, but after literally years of trying, we were unable to find anyone who can print glow-in-the-dark green ink on paper or vinyl products. Shirts, yes; stickers, no. Oh, sure, some of them will say they can print green, but what they mean by that is glowstick yellow, which is a little bit green-ish, but is not in fact the DNA Green. I decided it was better to have a non-glowing logo than a yellow logo, so there you have it. (A few months back I bitched about this at length on my other blog -- part 1 and part 2 -- if you're interested in the details of this fool's errand.) ]]> http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/04/30.html jwz@dnalounge.com (Jamie Zawinski) Tue, 01 May 2012 06:59:00 GMT http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/04/30.html It's that time again -- please vote for DNA Lounge, DNA Pizza and our various alumni in this year's SF Weekly Best of San Francisco poll.

Relevant categories include:

8. Best DJ
16. Best Bartender
19. Best Gay friendly Bar/Club
22. Best Live Music Venue
48. Best Late Night Dining
52. Best Pizza
62. Best Drag Queen
63. Best Event Producers

Be careful as you click through to vote, because they sneakily try to sign you up for mailing lists every two or three pages.

You may notice that this year they have eliminated the categories of "Best Dance Club" and "Best Club Night". Why? Who the fuck knows why. Do they think San Francisco doesn't have those any more? This is particularly irritating since DNA Lounge and/or Bootie have won those categories every year since 2009! Should we take it personally?

Anyway, please vote for us in the remaining categories! Thanks! ]]> http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/04/26.html jwz@dnalounge.com (Jamie Zawinski) Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:59:00 GMT http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/04/26.html You may have noticed that we're closed this Friday. I can't remember the last time that happened. It's been years.

We had an event booked, until extremely recently. About two months ago, these guys Martin and David, who were, like, part of the C-list of Blow Up's promotional helpers, booked the date for a party with Drop the Lime, who played at Blow Up back in February. And then, eight days before the event, Martin calls us and says, "Hey, David is afraid we won't make any money on this show, so he's not going to pay up, so is it cool if we cancel?" In case you were wondering if that's cool, no, that's super-duper not cool. This was after they had already paid us a deposit and bought plane tickets for the DJ. So at least we got to keep their deposit. But it was far too late to do anything with that night but be closed.

I guess this means they've decided not to be promoters ever again. Obviously we won't ever trust them to book anything here, but what they may not realize is that by fucking over the artist like this, The Windish Agency also won't be returning their calls. That's a somewhat larger bridge to have burned.

Look, our new bathrooms have walls, mostly:

First you put up the aluminum studs. Then the plumbers put the pipes inside the space where the walls will go. Then the electricians come through and put in the conduit. Then you schedule a plumbing inspector. Then you schedule an electrical inspector. Then you schedule a framing inspector. Then you can close up the walls. Then you can install the fixtures. Then you schedule a plumbing inspector again. Then you schedule an electrical inspector again. Then you schedule a health inspector. Then you wonder how anything ever gets done at all.

There has been some minor perceptible progress in our permit review. It has made it to eyeballs at both the Building and Fire department, which is... good? But this has resulted in the fun situation of having people from one department interpret the code one way and people from another department interpret the same code in a completely different way. Negotiations are, as they say, ongoing.

In the event that we someday have custom-printed pizza boxes -- and I'm not foolish enough to predict that this will ever actually happen -- they might end up looking something like this prototype:

Every now and then someone will post a Yelp review related to one of our various parties or businesses and we would like to publicly respond to it. Yelp has decided that they won't let you do that unless your business account has a human face as its avatar: no logos allowed. And they apparently employ an army of underpaid outsourced schmucks to enforce this by actually looking at and flagging every uploaded photo.

Of course they don't enforce this on all accounts, oh no. There's a logo instead of a face for Starbuck's, Best Buy, the ballpark... But when we have our staff meeting and six of us sit around and collectively formulate our official response, they insist that our company have the wrong face attached before we can publish it.

After weeks of trying, Barry finally managed to get a Yelp ad rep on the phone to complain about this -- basically saying, "I'm going to buy ads with you as soon as you fix this" -- and her response was to rant at length about how much it sucks to work at Yelp now, and how she can't get anything done.

"So, I want to give you money if you fix this, and you're saying you can't?"

"That's right. I can't fix it. You're not the only person who wants this, and your not the only person whose business I've lost over it. My employer is making it impossible for me to do my job."

Well played, Yelp! Well played.

Honestly, I wish there was a way for us to just opt out of Yelp entirely. It is far more of a pain in the ass than a benefit, in every way. I would even pay them to ensure that when you search for my businesses' names, you got a 404.

Sadly they do not offer that service, either. ]]> http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/04/18.html jwz@dnalounge.com (Jamie Zawinski) Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:59:00 GMT http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/04/18.html

Meanwhile, some photos:

Mortified

The Final Blow Up

Bootie + Hubba Hubba