Car Parking 105: Fill & Download for Free

One of the coolest things, was something I did just yesterday. I went to my car in a parking lot, and found that a car had parked next to me on the drivers side, so close that it would be a challenge for me to open the door and squeeze in. As I was in a private lot, and not on a public road, I simply used the “summon” feature to have my car back itself out of the parking lot, where I then easily got in and drove away. I could see a gentleman down the lane stop and just stare as my car backed itself out.Another feature I frequently use is the remote starting of the air conditioning system.“When temperatures outside range from 80 degrees to 100 degrees, the temperature inside a car parked in direct sunlight can quickly climb to between 130 to 172.”– Centers for Disease Control and PreventionI live in the southeast US, and it tends to be quite hot and humid in the summer. So 10 minutes or so before I go to my car, I use the Tesla app on my phone to turn on the A/C. I can also use “Dog Mode” to leave the air conditioning on full time, if I was to have my dog with me and have to run into a store for something. I could leave the cabin at a comfy 70 degrees. I guess you could do this in a gasoline powered car, but you would have to leave the engine running, resulting in a V-8 powered air conditioner, and hope it did not overheat due to lack of airflow. I don’t think many people do that. With Tesla, Ii simply runs off the battery. It uses a little of the battery to do so, but that has never been an issue I had to worry about. Also, the Tesla will keep the temp in the car at a maximum of 105 even without me doing anything.

Meet Mukesh Ambani.Looks like a jolly old man doesn’t he?He’s an Indian billionaire who is the chairman, managing director, and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Ltd. India’s most valuable company by market value. He’s also Asia’s richest man.(Remember him. He’s important.)Now lets travel down the spectrum. Let’s look at the average Indian.Let’s call him Ashvin.Ashvin is just an ordinary guy.Lives in an ordinary house.A 494 sqf house.(Remember that number too. I promise this is going somewhere.)Now let’s take a little trip to Mumbai.Antilia.A 27 storey, 48782 sqf skyscraper in South Mumbai.It just happens to be owned by our good friend Mukesh Ambani.What is this building used for?Offices?Apartments?Nope.It’s Mukesh’s house.Oh I hear you.But Vic, that’s impossible! How could one family live in a 27-storey building!Well, they do.The property has (*deep breath*) three helipads, a 168 car garage, a ballroom, an 80-seat theater, terrace gardens, a spa and a temple.At a market value of $2 billion USD market value, our good friend Mukesh owns the second most expensive residential property in the world. After only Buckingham Palace. (Which would also make Antilia the most expensive private residential property in the world.)Remember that number from earlier? The size of an average Indian’s house?494 sqf.Alright. Let’s do some math. (It’s big brain time)48782 (Antilia) / 494 (Ashwin the average Indian)= 98.7489879So, in terms of sqf, 98 families could live in the same amount of space that Mukesh’s family does.Now lets look at price.The cost of an average Indian’s house:$1,292USD/sqf (cost to buy a house in a city centre in india) x 494= $638248 USD to buy a house in IndiaNow for one more math equation (It’s the last one I promise)$2000000000 (Antilia) / $638248 (average house)= 3133.578 housesSo the amount of money used to build Antilia could have been used to build 3133 houses for Indians.The amount of space being utilized by Mukesh and his family is enough to house 98 families.Questionable decisions Mukesh. Very questionable.The “housescraper” (see what I did there?) has been at the centre of controversy.It was bought in 2005 by Muffin-Antilla Commercial Private Limited, a commercial entity controlled by our friend Mukesh Ambani. Before this, the land used to house a 105 year-old orphanage with 60 residents.The Indian Navy claim that they do not permit the construction of helipads on Mumbai buildings. The Environment Ministry claimed that the helipads also violated local noise laws. There have also been multiple issues regarding the construction of Antilia’s car park.This just shows the contrast between the rich and the poor in India.Ratan Tata, another Indian billionaire says it best:The person who lives in there should be concerned about what he sees around him and asking can he make a difference. If he is not, then it's sad because this country needs people to allocate some of their enormous wealth to finding ways of mitigating the hardship that people have. It makes me wonder why someone would do that. That's what revolutions are made of.Our good friend Mukesh Ambani is our good friend no more.

It depends on what your goal is.If you want a culturally diverse, politically extreme *for the US* population of people earning 150k plus a year concentrated in high money areas dictating life to the remainder of the state such that those who don’t live in these selective areas wish to leave, California is your state.If you want a state where you can mountain bike around Tahoe, then drive four hours and go to the beach for the afternoon and polish it off with a glass of wine in Napa, California is your state.If you want a state with some of the best public universities in the world, affordable higher education for all, and a job for the same state afterwards because your degree wasn’t actually good for anything, California is your state. (Alright, this one was a little unfair, but we really do have a fantastic higher education program.)If you’re looking for a state with a massive water crisis that is enabled by people who have already “got theirs” and destroyed an area more beautiful than Yosemite to ensure they don’t run out of water, but who also desire make it illegal to spray a registered pesticide within a quarter mile of a public roadway, then California is your state.If you want a state that has the highest functional poverty rate in the nation (that is comparing poverty levels in each state, by state, as opposed to setting them to a national standard) but that also has more billionaires than any other state in the country, then California is your state.If you want a state to do business in that’s 33rd best in the country with the worst cost of doing business, then California is your state.If you want a state that won’t sell ammunition to it’s own police officers because their systems are so faulty, then California is your state.If you want a state that you can walk to your job in, then some cities in California is the place to be. You probably need to be making 250k a year to afford a house there, but that’s the cost of doing business. San Francisco is the second most walk-able large city in the country, and there’s some neighborhoods in LA that do even better (West Hollywood for example)If you want a state that enables you to spend twice the national average in traffic (both SF and Los Angeles), to the tune of 120 hours a year, (and 105 for SF), then California is your state.If you want to graduate with an engineering degree, make your 82 thousand dollars a year, have two kids and a wife, drive a newer car parked on the street and have a two car garage filling up with crap without worrying about your car windows being busted out, California isn’t your state. That’s why I’m leaving.I can’t take another year of more “feel good” measures that make things like raping an unconscious woman a “non” violent felony for which you’re eligible for early release. I can’t deal with watching people drugged out of their minds walking down the street, cussing at kids and flipping cops off while whipping their dick out and getting “indecent exposure” cited and moved along due to jail overcrowding because this state is more concerned with making sure we have bike lanes than building prisons or mental health facilities.I can’t deal with driving down the freeway to our equipment yard, coming off the overpass, looking at the gate to see if someone has broken in that night or not (only happened 7 times last year), because the local police won’t do anything about it, nor will the state let them if it’s under $950. Then the one time you manage to catch someone who stole a 7k dollar trailer, a Judge appointed by our lovely governor gives the guy drug court and 6 months probation. For felony theft and a half pound of meth.I’m tired of dealing with life as a non-chosen Californian. I’m tired of offering tweakers pipe cutters so that when they want to steal sprinklers, they’ll cut the pipes instead of kicking them and breaking them off below the ground such that I have to dig it out, because God knows if I tell them to leave the orchard they’ll just come back and steal more shit at night.I’m tired of walking to the aforementioned excellent public university and having to step over sleeping bums with hypodermic needles littering the ground around them.California is a tale of two states. If you can afford to live in the “nice” part of California, it’s certainly not declining. If that isn’t for you, you better have enough money to buy everything around you and put private security on it, because you’ll need it.