So California has just raised its minimum wage to be $15/hr in a couple of years.  And already small biz owners are really concerned that the risk they took (and in many cases, HUGE risks, relatively speaking) will be wiped out by Government fiat (as opposed to real competition in the marketplace – after all, who can compete against a taxpayer fueled Leviathan?).  And I do ask (even though I’m almost a century late) “WHY should government, driving by the Statist politicians, unions, and special interests, be interfering with the relationship between an employer and employee?  After all, how is that any different than their mantra that no one should get in between you and your doctor?

Oh right – Obamacare.  Sorry – lost my head there for a moment.  While we are about to see some $15/hr fast food employees that are not economically worth that, we are also going to see a whole lot of those workers learn that the real minimum wage is $0/hr.  And this story shows that even manufacturing jobs are not immune to this Government distortion in California (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Ahead of $15 minimum wage, 1 company leaves California for Texas

California’s $15 minimum wage does not go into effect until 2022, but one Santa Fe Springs-based manufacturing company has already decided to leave the state this year to take advantage of cheaper wages in Texas. “This is the last thing I want to do, but I don’t see that I have a choice,” said Fred Donnelly, president of California Composites, which makes parts for commercial airplanes. Donnelly, who has lived in California for almost seven decades, said he is moving his company out of California because of its “dysfunctional” worker’s compensation system, excessive state and local regulations and the forthcoming $15 minimum wage.

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Yeah, I’m betting that the NIMBY and BANANA enviros that hate all energy other than solar are going to watch each other’s heads explode:

CO2 Increasing Food Production And Plant Water Efficiency:

Two new papers in the journal “Nature Climate Change” are pointing out the positive benefits of increased Co2 . The first claims that increased CO2 concentrations account for 70% of the increased greening of the earth and increased plant growing seasons

“We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning). Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend,”

— Nature Climate Change

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Bonita Kitson of Concord collected social security benefits from 2008-2010. When she married in 2010 neither her or her husband–who was also collecting government goodies, reported the marriage. In 2014, when Kitson tried to collect a lump sum Social Security death benefit after that husband died, the geniuses in the government said, “husband?”

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I keep seeing my electric bill going up and up and up – and I generally use less electricity than the year before (yes, I do look at that chart that Eversource provides giving a year’s lookback at actual KW used).  So can I blame the environmentalists that just don’t want to see conservation but want NOTHING new?

New England should be benefiting a lot more from the U.S. shale boom than it currently is. The Marcellus shale is one of the most productive formations in the country, and fracking has unleashed massive new quantities of natural gas from the basin, situated in Pennsylvania and southern New York. Despite its proximity to this new gusher of gas, New England electricity is expensive, in large part the result of a dearth of necessary pipeline infrastructure.

One company especially keen on constructing a new pipeline spur through Massachusetts and New Hampshire just scrapped the $3 billion project this week, bowing to stiff Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) and environmental opposition…

[The pipeline], driven by Governor Charlie Baker’s administration and top officials in other states, is aimed at curbing New England’s relatively high electricity rates by bringing in cheaper natural gas to fuel power plants. Their theory: The cost of pipeline construction would be more than offset by savings in electric rates because more cheap gas could flow from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. Roughly half of New England’s electricity comes from natural gas power plants.

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University of New Hampshire Media Relations Director Erica Mantz told the New Hampshire Union Leader that the $17,570.00 table purchased for the Holloway Commons, “…was a mistake, and it won’t happen again.”

You think?

“We believe the concept of what they wanted to do with the table was great, but we believe that it could have been done a lot less expensively,” Mantz said.

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Well then,

Weddings are back on at Stephen Forster’s Christmas tree farm on Mount Hunger Road after the Henniker planning board voted, 6-1, to approve his site plan.

The board decided Forster’s plan was within the zoning regulations, including the town’s definition of agritourism, approved by voters in March.

“It meant something or we wouldn’t have done it,” said planning board member Rick Patenaude of the decision by voters to redefine agritourism to include weddings and other functions.

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Concord Monitor had this bit about the new rest stops on I-93 here in NH just south of the Hooksett tolls.  Rusty McLear is lamenting that no one is using the electric car chargers put in by Tesla for free (and therefore, not buying his food or trinkets where his profits come from) AND that no other electric car charger company will put theirs in, that would operate almost universally with other EV cars, meaning many MORE people buying his food and trinkets, for free. Here’s the part that caught my eye (full article after the post, reformatted, emphasis mine):

Why aren’t the Tesla chargers at the Hooksett tolls used more? And why are they alone?

If you want a hint about the obstacles facing the transition to electric vehicles, stop texting the next time you drive through the Hooksett tolls and glance over at the Tesla Superchargers.  All 12 are empty, I bet.  This is not a very risky bet: According to the vague numbers provided by Tesla, bumped up by some generous assumptions, each charger in the new hospitality centers on Interstate 93 is used an average of just one hour per day. (Details on that calculation in a moment.)

This isn’t due to lack of trying, said Rusty McLear, co-owner of Granite State Hospitality, which operates the Hooksett rest stops. “We have been trying to arrange with a more universal charger company to come in and basically do the same kind of thing as Tesla,” said McLear, who makes his profit when drivers are strolling through the center, buying food or gifts. “I’d rather see 20 Leafs than one Tesla parked out there.”

Well, of COURSE he would!  His main deal is boots through the stores – not being in the electricity industry.

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It is a strange election cycle when Republicans go to war with each other with a ferocity rarely manifest when they are confronting Democrats and their progressive agendas.

It is especially puzzling because a general consensus has formed on the right that the Democratic Party is moving so far left that its agendas threaten the very foundations of America’s social contract. These include a frontal assault on the system of individual rights that the Founders set in place. The left envisions a fundamentally transformed America where individual rights are secondary to the collective rights of races, ethnicities, genders and classes. That is why the particular circumstances of individual acts, such as the ones that led to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, for example, don’t matter to progressive mobs. It’s the races of the actors that do.

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Tuesday c/o AP and Politico.

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This is an interesting story given the recent events at PhilliSEXeter Academy. USA Today dug deep into the issue of how well states perform background checks on teachers to look for disciplinary issues, including sexual misconduct. They gave New Hampshire an ‘F.’

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