Open Mic for the week of 6/12/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Well, The Times is reporting some stuff about stuff that happened.
Why are we still talking about this? Ron DeSantis appears poised to be even worse than Trump!Report
We are still talking about this because China is a secretive nation who are all too easy to blame as a bad actor. Plus they are the “new” enemy. Since we need to have enemies.Report
Ah, for the innocent days of “Bat Soup”.Report
Animal crossover is still the most statistically likely scenario. China’s refusal to allow proper investigations will keep the lab leak evergreen however.
If we really want to see something good come out of this for America – how bout we look at what the Administration in power got right and wrong. That part we control afterall.Report
The worst part is that even if new evidence comes to light, nothing matters.Report
This. We should be expending our energies on:
1. Newer and better vaccines against this
2. Ways to protect the medically vulnerable from the next wave
3. Preventing the next one (Bird flu, if it figures out how to do human-to-human transmission, will make SARS CoV2 look like a walk in the park. It has a 50% fatality rate. 50%.
But because folks LOOOOOVE conspiracy theories they’re gonna keep beating the drum about “oh someone created/enhanced it in a lab” even though if we knew that for sure, it would literally change nothing and we could do nothing about it? I mean, what would we do? Nuke Wuhan as retribution? Of course not.Report
This makes too much sense. That said, I’m not sure why it’s the “worst part” if new evidence comes to light and it doesn’t change what should have done or need to do — which is a very different thing from “nothing matters.”Report
Trump was in charge when Covid broke. He is responsible for much of the domestic response.Report
I agree… What’s strange to me, however, is that even if we assume that the most likely scenario ought to be zoonotic, the actions of China seem to be creating three camps. Personally, I think 1 & 3 are over-represented and ‘wrong’. Sensible people should be in #2, even if the origin is Zoonotic.
1. Fodder to Flog China for people who have an aggressive anti-China agenda… usually tips into Bio-Weapon / Military spheres
2. Are we confident that this bio-tech outsourcing to China meets our safety and accountability standards?
3. Any questioning of origins is racist and/or will upset existing power / influence / money / professional structures and that would be bad. Clearly represented by people who have money / professional / and reputational issues at stake.Report
Being sensible myself, I agree number 2 is the right way to look at this, especially since we probably never will know the real answer absent something like the fall of the USSR plus subsequent access to archives we got in the 1990s, which may never happen with China.
Where I would say the lessons learned efforts really should be is questions like how do we make what happened in operation warp speed even easier, invest in the technology that made it possible, and fix regulatory hurdles (cough FDA cough cough) that could stand in the way in a future pandemic? Normally the success of something like operation warp speed plus our semi subsidized commercial distribution process is the kind of victory that has 1,000 fathers, yet here we are a few short years later and it’s an orphan.Report
I have said several times that Trump got Warp speed right. And had he run on that and kept his mouth shut, we’d be in a different America right now.Report
Yea, it’s definitely a testament to the… unfortunate state of the GOP that objectively the best thing Trump did has to be brushed under the table while a bunch of conservatives decide that maybe Jenny McCarthy was right all along about not giving children MMR vaccines.Report
I think it’s commonly accepted that China worsened the impact of covid by failing to share information earlier. I think so, at least. It’s not something I kept track of, but I think it’s widely acknowledged that China’s response to covid is at least indirectly responsible for millions of deaths. So this is more like identifying Ted Bundy as an enemy and then possibly exaggerating his kill count.Report
China’s secrecy in all areas impacted how far, wide and fast Covid spread. That’s no the same thing, however as China intentionally releasing a bio-weapon, or even have a lab leak. And I suspect China will never allow anything like a full investigation, even if they didn’t “do” anything.
Which means the lab leak theory won’t ever die.
That’s different however from direct or indirect responsibility. The Trump Administration bears direct reasonability – as do a number of governors – for deaths in the US that were likely avoidable. We as nation can analyze that response and learn from it. Or we can keep throwing shade at China. One of those approaches brings real benefit to the US. The other keeps pundits and politicians employed.Report
I’m addressing your “need to have enemies” comment. It seems entirely reasonable to consider China an enemy for the way they handled covid without entertaining speculation about its origin.Report
What do you believe we as a nation gain from calling them an enemy over this? Especially if it was animal crossover?Report
I don’t think it’s useful to call China an ‘enemy’ over Covid.
I think it’s useful to recognize that maybe we outsource to China things that we don’t want done in the US… and that’s a rational policy that we don’t like to talk about on *several* different levels.
We should talk about that, and make new rational policy choices.Report
I consider it factual. What I consider useless or worse is implying that the only reason a person would be critical of China is that we need enemies. That’s what I’m trying to get at here.Report
China was an “enemy” years before this. But a lot of conservative pundits and politicians ignored them until COVID, because it created a convenient story line to fit the “Chinese bad, Americans good” narrative.
My point is that spending so much time and energy even now trying to get the “truth” of a lab leak in a country with no cultural or historical reason to do so is a waste of time and intellectual energy. Doing so in no way honors our dead here at home. And it does nothing to prepare us for the next incident.
We as a nation gain nothing pursuing China over this.Report
“And it does nothing to prepare us for the next incident.”
This is where I think your rhetoric takes you way past where you need to go, and is wrong — preparing for the next incident does mean taking safety and accountability seriously. That’s a key part of ‘why do we care’. We care because while we can’t at this point say exactly what happened, it really *is* possible that there was some sort of bio-security breach at WIV… breaches happen… and we should only fund projects where our standards are met and complied with. There should be a moratorium on all grants/funding to China via US intermediaries until either China complies or we re-route the funding to facilities we can trust. Careers and networks will either influence China, or be ruined.
Speeding past this on the… whelp, we might never know what happened, so why change anything is pretty much take #3 in my taxonomy.
p.s. Also disagree on ‘Enemy’ status… a better term is Geopolitical Rival.Report
We have no control over China. Not its government, not its bioweapons labs, not its wet markets. None.
So continuing to labor over whether China “did this” – whatever that means – does nothing to prepare US agencies, hospitals, pharmacies or the general public for the next time. Trying to hold China accountable is like trying to hold Jello onto a wet noodle with butter.
There’s also the issue that correlation is still not – and never will be – causation. This outbreak originating in Wuhan is ALWAYS going to be correlated with the WIV existing in Wuhan. Always. Very highly. But that isn’t proof, and it does NOTHING to enhance accountability for the Chinese.
We are FAR better off asking what the US did to prepare and how the US responded. That’s a decidedly mixed bag, but its the most important one for us as a nation.Report
We have agency not to fund projects in a state that doesn’t comply with our requirements for safety and accountability.
I agree China may or may not care whether we fund or collaborate with their science programs. If they care, they may change – in which case we’re exerting basic indirect influence. If they don’t care, then we ought not continue to collaborate/fund – which case we’re reducing risk because that’s the point of Safety/Accountability requirements.Report
As I recall, China wasn’t funded directly. A US-led team was funded that included a Chinese component. If I got that right, then we have a fine line to balance here, as the government really has no right to tell US academic researchers who they can work with and who they can’t.
Again, however, you are directing effort against China, and not really looking inward at the US preparedness or response. I think having warehouse of expired respirators ( and inadequate PPE supplies) is a far greater lesson learned then who we fund or don’t fund with research dollars.Report
Sure, we should do all of that… nothing I’ve said suggests that it would take away from any other preparedness program we think would be prudent… plan away, lay-in stores, reform the FDA too while we’re at it.
But this is the deflection I’m talking about in #3 … let’s not talk about these other things within our control.
Of course we can prohibit funding and even collaboration among academics (and calling for-profit researchers ‘Academics’ is also deflection)… we prohibit collaboration, trade and selling of goods among private parties all the time. I have to take compliance courses every year about specific Russians identified by name with whom I can’t do business – and that’s on top of all the import/export controls to various countries.
EcoHealth Alliance was the US intermediary… we all know that. Again, the point isn’t cHinA iS ThE EneMy it’s precisely that ‘preparedness’ isn’t a zero sum game… both/and works for me.
I think the meta-issue I’m noticing is that as the Left becomes more and more Establishmentarian, the old ‘lefty’ muscle of good governance and accountability is withering in favor of: these are our people and we need to protect them. That’s bad… the way it’s bad for cops and the military and all the other ways in which tribalism trumps accountability.Report
I don’t have a need to protect anyone in the US from accountability. And there’s plenty to go around. But one can advocate for accountability at home without advocating for it in places we will never achieve it. And when I speak of “Protection” I’m discussing public health responses, not who needs to loose their jobs and who doesn’t.
Much of the Right seems to be fixated on forcing China to accept blame as if that’s the whole game.Report
Why disagree then? I’m not presenting the ‘right’s’ view on this.
It is 100% a proper public health response to demand that safety/accountability – which I’m sure are in all of the Grant RFP’s – are complied with. As we have evidence that certain countries *refuse* to comply – then we adjust how our grants/funding can by applied.Report
As the left becomes more Establishmentarianism the more the right becomes an insurgent revolutionary faction.Report
Deflection is deflection. See #3 above.Report
Jaybird and I went back and forth on this a while back. If you’re going to lead with China and directly pointing a finger at them for being a bad guy for doing something that may or may not be true, you’re going to be regarded, at least in my book, as someone who isn’t really interested in the public health aspect of this discussion.Report
In what way have I done that?
This is such a bizarre tick that comes from the polarization of issues. It isn’t rational, which is why I keep pointing it out. This is just friend/enemy political thinking. It’s bad when the Right does it, and it’s bad when the Left does it.Report
What we should be asking is not whether we need a big government or small government, but how we can make the government flatter our sensibilities about fleeting meta narratives.Report
Ya know, I almost used one instead of you, and I should have. You didn’t. Apologies for being imprecise.Report
No worries, thanks.Report
It is very difficult to picture them not becoming for real enemies, for many of the same reasons Russia has become a real enemy.
Their previous leadership wanted peaceful growth with the idea that they’d slowly take over the world via natural superiority. Their current leadership values their own control more than peace and their current guy is ruling in the style of Chairman Mao. That can’t end well.
That’s in addition to the whole genocide, warrior wolf diplomacy, intellectual theft, and various other problems.Report
Russia isn’t our enemy. We made Russia into an enemy with unprovoked attacks.Report
Cornel West is one of those weird lefties who talks to the weird righties still. So, I can’t even…
Report
I’d vote for him, sure. Might even call people opposed to him “racist”.
But I don’t think that some of those are very good ideas.Report
I’m not sure what to make of him… seems he was an academic in the 80s, an activist in the 90s, and since the 00s seems mostly to be a guy being Cornel West.
I just did a mini-dive on ‘who is Cornel West’ and it seems the internet is conflicted.Report
Some of his long-form essays are pretty good (but I read him in the 90’s). There are debates where he’s going up against Buckley and those are fun. The Yale Man vs. The Princeton Man and they both know that they both know that they both know about the Ivies and about the people who end up in them.
Listening to Cornell West today, I hear someone who misses arguing against people like Buckley. “I won”, he thinks. “This sucks. I miss my old enemies.”Report
Prime Minister Bonga Bonga has died at 86Report
The jokes write themselves.Report
Good news!
Report
That was her decision to make. I would have made a different one if it were my decision to make, but it isn’t. I support her right to publish or pull back as she chooses. To all appearances, she made an uncoerced choice to listen to complaints people had a right to make. I might not have done it if it were my book, but I don’t set my preferences as the standard for authors deciding what to do with their own work.Report
I have no desire to communicate that I wish that the author of Eat, Pray, Love would release another book.Report
It is frequently difficult to figure out what you “desire to communicate.”Report
In this case? It’s a tidbit of news/information.
The author of Eat, Pray, Love has cancelled her next book because Ukrainians complained that it was set in Russia.
I suppose that my main take for this particular story is “this is really really really absurd. Goofy, even!” or something like that.
“It might be absurd but she has that right!”
“Yeah.”Report
Why do you consider it absurd that an author would reserve the right NOT to publish a book?Report
It’s more that I consider that it’s absurd that she is exercising the right (and for the reasons she claims to be exercising it for).
But, I’ll grant: it sounds dreadful. Here’s from Penguin/Random House:
It sounds like the Ukrainians did all of us a favor.Report
What other rights would you consider absurd for her to exercise?Report
“What other rights would you consider absurd for her to exercise?”
Smashing a coffee machine that she paid for with her own money?Report
The right to scream “THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO THAT!” when someone is doing something dumb and no one has questioned whether the something is something that the person in question has the right to do.Report
Authors are not obligated by any law to publish a book.
I don’t get why this is a problem.Report
(looks around)
Is anybody arguing that there’s a law that covers this and she broke it?
I do not think that a police officer who went to a judge to ask for a warrant to arrest Ms. Gilbert for this action should be granted the warrant.
Judges acting as rubber stamps is a huge problem.Report
You are incredibly upset that she’s NOT publishing this book. You consider it absurd in fact that she’s not publishing this book. As if she’s failed morally or legally somehow.
All I keep asking is why you feel that way because SHE”S NOT OBLIGATED to publish anything. Best I can tell its because the Ukrainians asked her not to, and you consider that deference some sort of immoral sin.Report
Considering something to be absurd is different from being upset by this same something.
I believe that I used the word “goofy”, earlier.
“SHE ISN’T OBLIGATED TO NOT BE GOOFY!”
“I agree?”Report
Don’t fight it, keep it in your arsenal for the future.
“OMG look at this horrible thing Trump just posted on TruthSocial!!”
“Well, I wouldn’t have posted that, but it’s his site and he’s free to post whatever he wants. Are you suggesting he not be allowed to post on his own site??”Report
You will note that 1) we don’t generally point to his Truth Social site and 2) we still don’t understand why its even worthy of notice that an author chose to to publish their work. Just as Trump is free to say what he wants – so long as he’s wiling to accept the consequences – she should be free to NOT say what she wants.Report
She should be free to not say what she wants.
Have you visited the reviewbombs on the Goodreads site?
Do you feel that it is important to point out that the people leaving reviewbomb comments have the *RIGHT* to leave those comments?Report
I feel its only the Luddites who would believe it needs to be pointed out the protestors have the right and she has a right. This is self evident to all but the most head in the sand.
I also think its the Luddites who see some great moral drama play in this minor episode. A former president charged with espionage deserves this much brain work. An author deciding not to publish really doesn’t.Report
Talk it out: describe the moral drama that some people see.
As for the other story, this is why people hate soft reboots. The corrupt president’s wife was unexpected. The corrupt businessman has been done to death.Report
Are you sure you know what a Luddite is?Report
I’m quite sure. It’s supposed to mean a person or group who resists technological advancements or ways of working, taken from an English 19th century anti-Industrial protest group.
But in common parlance – you know the normies we often discuss here as well – it’s come to mean anyone who thinks they don’t need to learn new things or think they don’t need to amend their approach to things. Which is a clos analog to the original definition.Report
Do you think it’s a moral failing to pressure an artist into not presenting what may be a great work? (Note that I’m asking a different question than we’ve been debating, and this isn’t an attempt to derail a conversation.)Report
There’s so many layers to that question. I’m generally in favor of the openness and freedom to protest – which certainly can come off as pressure as in the case of anti-trans activism toward JK Rowling. I’m generally in favor of the freedom to create or not for any reason, as in this case. I do not support the fatwah style threats lodged against Salmon Rushdie or any similar threats of violence.Report
“There’s so many layers to that question.”
lol
“Nuance” is the refuge of the owned.Report
Or the intelligent.
As A general principal I support organized protests that advances social justice. I support protests that advances democracy. And I remind all that protests is not meant to be polite or convenient.Report
I think you could get a pretty interesting Russian-style family epic out of the Lykov family, or other self-exiled Old Believers in the USSR.
Added: It’s very silly not to publish any fiction because of the war.Report
Is there any evidence that Russia has ever had *ANY* decent family epics?
I actually thought that since this was happening in the last days of the USSR that we’d get something like “Solzhenitsyn, but for women (finally!)”.
As it turns out, it’s about modernity improving the indiginous.Report
The Golovlyov Family, but also War and Peace.Report
“Is there any evidence that Russia has ever had *ANY* decent family epics?”
Anna Karenina?Report
I can’t believe philistines like you and Chris going straight to Tolstory, as if you’ve never never heard of a little film called An American Tail.Report
“An American Tail”
Sure, if you’re just going to skip over Peter and the Wolf… I guess.Report
Yes, truly remiss of me.Report
It’s ok, an opportunity for growth.Report
“Is there any evidence that Russia has ever had *ANY* decent family epics?”
I assume you’re being ironic?Report
I was considering accusing anyone who recommended a Russian author as demonstrating wrongthink but I realized that it would come across as too heavyhanded and perhaps even a strawman.
Report
If this is true, it means that illogic is certainly flourishing on Twitter!Report
I don’t think she’s ever done anything that wasn’t absurd.Report
Oh, *I* see what happened! Check out the page for the book on Goodreads.
Sounds like these folks could use someone telling them “she has the right to write a book about Russia!”Report
“The US Is Preparing Evacuation Plans for American Citizens in Taiwan”
I’d kinda think that plans would have already been put in place anywhere there are significant US nationals, but could be wrong.
https://themessenger.com/news/the-u-s-is-preparing-evacuation-plans-for-american-citizens-in-taiwan-exclusiveReport
First… basic prudential planning and all that. But, there are an estimated 80,000 Americans on Taiwan and “All agreed: Any evacuation from Taiwan would pose multiple challenges.” The geography is, ‘tricky’ and that’s not factoring that maybe the west coast is, erm, interdicted.
Add in 300k Indonesians and 150k Philippinos and I’m not entirely sure there’s an evacuation plan that doesn’t require several months (of peace).Report
Oh, yeah. The beer thing.
Here’s your headline from three days ago: Bud Light loses its footing as America’s best-selling beer.
So maybe you’re thinking “Wait, who makes Modelo Especial? Isn’t it ABI?”
And the answer is… I dunno.
I googled it and got this:
So, small picture, maybe this is a hit to Bud Light but, big picture, maybe it’s not a hit to ABI? I have no idea.Report
If I understand this right, Anheuser-Busch brews Bud Light and Grupo Modelo brews Modelo. Both are owned by InBev. Bud Light is brewed in the US, and Modelo in Mexico, and although the Modelo sold in the US is a different formula, it’s also brewed in Mexico.
On a completely different topic, Grupo Modelo distributes both A-B and Modelo products in Mexico. A-B distributes A-B products in the US. Constellation distributes Modelo products in the US.
If a person were to drink Bud Light in the US, InBev gains revenue from production and distribution. If he were to drink Modelo in the US, InBev would receive revenue from production only.Report
Slate had this interesting article on how the fun stuff is getting really expensive. Basically a missing middle for the entertainment/consumer economy:
https://slate.com/business/2023/06/skiing-movie-theaters-casinos-amusement-parks-prices-upscale-leisure-industry.htmlReport
Vox has an explainer on Martin v. Boise. For those that don’t know, Martin v. Boise is a 2018 9th Circuit case that holds that people can’t be punished for sleeping outside if there are no adequate alternatives everywhere. The aftermath of Martin v. Boise is a combination of cities trying to find loopholes to the ruling and a lot of argument about what an adequate alternative to sleeping outside is.
https://www.vox.com/23748522/tent-encampments-martin-boise-homelessness-housing
The activists naturally are arguing for adequate alternative means generous building of affordable housing, although they tend to oppose building housing unless it is affordable, and elected politicians believing sanctioned encampments is enough or are looking for loopholes.
I think my big problem with the activists in the United States is that they seem fundamentally undemocratic at times. They seem to have at least some awareness that what they want is really politically unpopular with voters even in very Democratic voting areas but they want politicians to implement really left leaning radical programs despite the fact that the electorate rejects this in very Democratic area let alone more moderate areas. Politicians are generally not going to implement programs and policies that will result with them getting unelected at the polls. The activist goal seems to be to agitate and sue America into Scandinavian social democracy rather than trying to engage with the electorate and get their policies implement because they have a majority on the city council or state legislature.Report
The single most politically popular policy on homelessness is the status quo, of people just sleeping in tents wherever they can, and the police periodically shooing them off to some other location, then back again, and repeating as necessary.
No one actually LIKES this policy, but it wins by default, almost every time everywhere.Report
This seems to be true for a lot of policies in the United States right now. Nearly every transport and climate change person realizes that a transport policy based on everybody driving everywhere doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. American politicians can’t bring themselves to use policy to shift the scales towards mass transit for a variety of reason. Education, healthcare, and everything else also suffer for the same reason.Report
The demographic collapse we’re seeing in the rest of the world can be summed up to “it’s hard to raise children if you need to rely on mass transit”, and the reason the US has more children that our peers is “we have more cars”.Report
This is just stupid. There are plenty of cars in other developed democracies along with plenty of transit. These aren’t places where driving a car is near absolutely illegal and everybody has to take the bus everywhere. If you go to those countries you see plenty of teens and kids navigate the transit systems without parents and get to places just fine.Report
I grew up in a Southern California exurb in the 70s where transit was nonexistent, and a drivers license and car was a rite of passage.
So when I was later talking to a woman who grew up in a New York City apartment building, I was incredulous how people could live in such a place.
Like, where do your kids play I asked, and how do you go to the market without a station wagon.
Today of course I live that very life where I don’t have a car and walk to the market with a cloth bag, as do the families with children in our neighborhood.
I remember how hard it was to give up our car, after being entirely car-dependent for 40 years or so.Report
Many Americans and would be Americans really do love the idea of car oriented suburbia with single family homes and generous lawns. It has been deeply ingrained as the proper way to raise a family in the United States from even before World War II. After World War II, the cultural teaching increased ten fold.Report
I don’t think the cars are the issue either, more the cost of living and lack of space. I’m in a pretty dense ‘burb that while technically not car dependent would be really inconvenient to live without one. I would happily live somewhere even denser if it was remotely affordable and kid friendly, and the more kid friendly the less affordable it seems to be.Report
“I would happily live somewhere even denser if it was remotely affordable” I would not. I live in a very similar situation as you do. I can walk to the mall, movies, and a concert hall. I’m 30 mins from the airport and 20 from trains. It’s very expensive here as 1) it’s an expensive state, 2) in an area lots of folks want to live. Most folks I know who live here could not afford to buy any form of property now if they had to. The only reason they can live here is they bought 10-20 years ago. I can’t wait to leave here and move to my retirement location.Report
It’s all up to personal preferences and what matters to you in life. Now that my wife and I both work remote we could certainly move to the exurbs and upsize considerably. We know a few people who have done just that. However we like the amenities and our little hole in the wall bars and restaurants. Despite having kids we are still able to have somewhat of a social life here and our families are nearby as a bonus support network.
We still see the folks who moved away once or twice a year but I’ve learned that after kids anything much more than a 20 minute drive might as well be halfway across the country in terms of how often you see each other. So from my perspective that premium I am paying also buys me a guys night at the pub every other week or darts in someone’s basement or garage or meeting up to watch a game without a lot of hullabaloo. Others differ but I think it is well worth it, especially when I hear about how isolated and miserable it can be out there without those things. At the very least a bigger yard and more square footage doesn’t remotely tempt me in exchange for what I’d be trading off.Report
“At the very least a bigger yard and more square footage doesn’t remotely tempt me” Agree on that. I had no desire to mow grass (even a 1/4 acre) after the divorce. Now I life in similar square footage and a small patio. It’s enough, especially given the location. But my house is 50% less then single family houses or more here even if I’d want that.Report
I’m with you on the yard maintenance and have ensured that which I have is minimal. I don’t work 50-60 hour weeks to spend my Saturday cutting grass.Report
The United States has:
1. A lot of land and a climate where most places are habitable.
2. A decentralized economy where there is not one megacity juggernaut that dominates most, if not nearly all, of the economy, government, culture, etc of the country.
I think Lee is correct and that combating climate change requires more than thinking electric vehicles are magical. We need to live closer together and take more public transportation. These are tough sells though.Report
America’s economy is a lot more centralized than it ever was previously. You used to have big regional cities all across the United States in addition to Pre-World War II big three of NYC, Chicago, and Philadelphia. After World War II, you had this big rust belt collapse even though the Sun Belt started to grow. Other changes caused even more economic concentration in a few areas than even after the Post-War II era.Report
I don’t necessarily disagree but IMO we need to be thinking way bigger than just mass transit. No matter how much some aging CEOs want to bring it back the days of huge office buildings filling up with people from all over the place for 5 days a week are over. There are both costs and opportunities and mass transit should be part of the conversation but I don’t see how it could look remotely like it has in the past.Report
People can work from home in dense cities with mass transit. Whether people work in offices or not doesn’t really change the environmental impact of sprawl and having to drive or get everything delivered.Report
Yea but you need it to run it in ways that are consistent with how people are actually living, and are convenient for getting them where they need to go when they want to go there. I know NYC is the exception in the US but in the DC-Baltimore area anyway it is all designed and run around commuter corridors and peak commuter times of the pre-covid world. It isn’t going to work if there aren’t stops nearby or if it is inconveniently slow or unreliable on weekends or after 7 PM when people might want to run errands or go to dinner or whatever.
So the question to me is how are you going to re-design development and infrastructure that both work and make it appealing to live near? And the answer can’t just be build around the metro station that’s been there for 30 years or add another station to the line that already follows some semi obsolete commuter channel and call it a day. At best you end up wasting money on something no one uses, at worst you exacerbate the problems mass transit already has.Report
Transit advocates have been arguing that you need a lot more frequency than American systems currently operate on to get people to ride them. You also need to make driving more at cost than heavily subsidized. You can redo suburbs through zoning to make them walkable.
Alon Levy at Pedestrian Observations would argue that the greatest threat to transit use is job sprawl and that has jobs in a bunch of different locations rather than concentrated.Report
The United States has the issue of the culture war but even in solidly blue states, Democratic politicians don’t want to use policy punishments to make driving harder because they, rightfully, perceive it will be political suicide.Report
Most developed democracies are facing demographic collapse. I.e. they have birth rates that are below replacement.
Germany 1.53
England 1.75
France 1.83
and so on.
If you have enough pop density to support mass transit, then you probably also have small enough space per family that children are an issue.
My youngest is a teen, she’s fine. When I had 4 children under the age of 10, I was very grateful for a large car and a large house and a backyard and dog.Report
It’s dropping faster in the developed world but it’s a worldwide phenomena. I believe the only area where birthrates are still strong is Africa and even that is going into steep decline much faster than predicted.Report
Theories abound, but from what I can see, the main reason people are choosing smaller families is just that they can due to accessible birth control and education.
Because that seems to be the only common variable.
We see declines in all the major nations, ethnic groups, religions, geographic areas, wealth groups.
Wherever people are able to limit the size of their families, generally they take advantage of it.Report
Women’s education and legal equality seem to be the big factor. I’ve heard there are some small exceptions but that’s the general rule. I think our biggest challenge as a species in the next century is going to be to adapt to it. And to be clear, I think these developments for women are good things and have unlocked a lot of productivity and prosperity and happiness but there is a trade off we need to navigate.
Not that we need to go back to families having a bazillion children or some ridiculously traditional society or anything, but children are necessary and good and we should want to produce enough of a regular flow of them to sustain ourselves and our civilization.Report
It varies by culture more than area. (It’s funny how often that’s true about subjects we discuss here.)Report
Israel has the highest birthrate of the developed world at 2.2 women per children. This isn’t due to the Ultra-Orthodox population and Israeli Arabs. The Israeli Arab birthrate is lower than the Jewish birthrate and Secular Jewish women in Israel are reproducing slightly above replacement rate.Report
I consider Israel weird, possible exception territory. What will be interesting is if they can sustain it. It wasn’t long ago that the US was a bit of an outlier too, but no longer.Report
Israel might be facing instincts saying “our tribe is threatened so we should multiple”.
Tribal war was a huge thing for a long time. Supposedly we had periods of time with a 25% lifetime murder rate.Report
I do not want to speculate too much about a place I’ve never been, and have no real insight into, but I would imagine sustaining themselves as a people is in the forefront of their minds in a way that is unlike most other places.Report
That didn’t sound right to me, so I found this:
“The real story here is the high birth rate of traditional and secular Jewish couples in Israel, who make up most of the country. Observant Jews (religious but not ultra-Orthodox) have an average of four children, while secular women have an average of two.”
It may be the same story you said, but it sounds different.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/danielle-kubes-the-truth-behind-israels-curiously-high-fertility-rateReport
The closest thing I can think of is Singapore where they actually do try to limit the number of cars on the road through a combination of high taxes* and mandatory certificates of entitlement.**
*The paradox of this is that you see a lot of luxury cars in Singapore.
**Basically, it allows you to own a car for ten years and the pricing is dynamic based on demand. The more people who want them, the more prices go up. Car dealers tend to handle the negotiations for them. It also means people tend to get new cars every ten years.Report
There are other countries that make car driving more at cost than the United States but nothing close to Singapore. Japan requires you to own a parking space for your car rather than do on street parking for urban residents like New York. There are also more toll roads in other countries compared to the United States.Report
We still haven’t figured out that the way to build low income housing is to get rid of local vetoes. That problem suggests seriously undemocratic solutions, like getting rid of local vetoes.Report
“No one actually LIKES this policy, but it wins by default, almost every time everywhere.”
Not many people consider chocolate ice cream their favorite flavor, but it wins nearly every “best flavor” poll, because every other flavor has something about it that people just ick ick ewewewhate hate HATE hate HATE and refuse to accept.Report
Exclusive: Westfield giving up S.F. mall in wake of Nordstrom closure, plunging sales and foot traffic
I cannot find an example of McMegan tweeting about this.Report
Yep.
Whole lotta store closures going on:
Ohio Braces for Another Wave of Store Closures: Full List of Stores Closing Their Doors
https://original.newsbreak.com/@ash-jurberg-560946/2956149990668-ohio-braces-for-another-wave-of-store-closures-full-list-of-stores-closing-their-doors
They don’t call it the Retail Apocalypse for nothing.Report
Its only news if it happens in San Francisco. Everywhere else its just markets doing market things.Report
The same way that some of the most poverty stricken, crime ridden areas of America are not Chicago or Detroit, but the small rural and suburban areas, but for some strange reason conservatives don’t talk about that much.Report
of course not – because they judge that crime and poverty as a moral failure by whites (and blacks); a failure that government has no business correcting.Report
They just need more funding! Not changes in policy!Report
“The same way that some of the most poverty stricken, crime ridden areas of America are not Chicago or Detroit, but the small rural and suburban areas,”
You mean the nests of racist transphobic Trump-supporters who continually vote against their best interests and deserve what happens to them?Report
Everybody knows that San Francisco has a mystical magical social aura that turns the market into the non-market or even the anti-market.Report
Hey, the economy is going through a rough patch everywhere. It’s not limited to San Francisco!
Also, it has nothing to do with governance at the local or national level.
It’s just bad luck.Report
Keep tilting! Eventually that windmill will strike back.Report
By now, perhaps we’ve learned that when Jaybird drops a random observation with no apparent point, the best thing to do is leave it there.Report
I admit to assuming that people remembered last week when we discussed the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square closing down.
I see this mall closing as being part of the same buncha problems as that.
When pressed last time, I said that my take on the closing of the hotel was something to the effect of:
Of course, if you have no memory of me saying that, it’s probably confusing to see me just post a link to a story.
It’s just a link to a story! Why is someone posting a link to a story in the open thread?, you may wonder.Report
The problem is you expected a lot of very busy, albeit very intelligent, people to naturally draw that conclusion. Without any input or prompting from you. Had you started with “last week we talked about this big hotel in SF closing. Now a Mall developer is walking away. I wonder if these things signal X?” and then posted your tweet you might have been on to something – and we might have had a different conversation. It’s on you to set context for what you post, and when you don’t, it’s laughable to expect anyone else to naturally get it.Report
Yeah, I guess.
I imagine it would all look like a bunch of unrelated stuff without that context.
Hey! The mayor is apparently trying to save San Francisco from a “Doom Loop”.
That seems strange. Is there any evidence of anything happening that isn’t also happening to Harlan County, Kentucky?Report
Also too, if I wanted to persuade people that “This is one of the really big bad things that indicates that worse things are around the corner” I would just provide more than the occasional random factoid.
Because by all metrics, the health of the California economy and the national economy are pretty good and getting better.
As a small example- We have all seen stories of retailers like Walgreens and CVS shutting stores.
What you’re not seeing in these stories, is that the retail consumption of their products hasn’t slowed down at all.
The retail sales are shifting online, and there has been explosive growth of not just the big online companies like Amazon and Walmart, but their associated physical plants.
Like, in all the outlying areas around metropolitan areas are building booms of massive supply centers handling the massive volume of shipping all the retail products that we all buy online.
Data point:
Amazon’s Largest Warehouse Ever Under Construction in Southern California
Twice as big as Downtown L.A.’s tallest skyscraper and bigger than Disney’s California Adventure Park with room to spare, the largest Amazon warehouse in the world is under construction in Southern California’s Inland Empire.
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2022/06/117394-amazons-largest-warehouse-ever-under-construction-southern-california
These development don’t generate viral “poverty porn” videos, but for every sad retailer with boarded up windows on Main Street or abandoned regional mall looking like a set from the Walking Dead, there is a huge warehouse somewhere handling their former customer base.Report
Yeah, you’d think that London Breed would be on board with that. “Look at Amazon!”, she could say. “What’s a doom loop?”Report
That’s nonsense. You made fun of Jaybird for always posting SF stories. You can’t also claim that you didn’t remember them.Report
When reading this, I didn’t connect to the Hotel story. Neither did Jay.Report
I did, but I did it in my head.
Granted, that’s because I remember last week.Report
I remember last week too – and taking an inordinately long time to get you to give us your point regarding that hotel. Now it’s take over a day to get you to set context and make a point on this. We can’t read your mind Jay. Please stop making us try to.Report
Well, to be honest, I am not sure that I *NEED* you guys to read my mind.
If you see a story about a nigh 2000-room hotel closing in the middle of San Francisco for reasons about the city going to heck, it’s usually good enough for me to see people respond with something like “ugh, San Francisco is falling off” or “those investors are stupid… you *BUY* when stuff like this is happening! When stuff turns back around, you’ll make a *MINT*!!!”
Having to wonder whether Jaybird thinks that this is bad or that he thinks that it is good strikes me as being far, far less interesting than what is being said in the article.Report
If it makes you feel any better, Philip and Lee immediately made the connection.Report
Thanks for providing an example to confirm the wisdom of my adviceReport
but Jaybird, if you look at the statistics it shows this was just a seasonal downturn experienced by everywhere else in SF and clearly this is just Westfield worried that the shop workers would unionize!Report
It’s actually a sign of the health of the market, if you think about it.Report
Downtown SF’s appeal is becoming more selective!Report
“I’m going through my refrigerator and I’m starting to ask the question: Was this ketchup bottle woke? Is this mustard? I mean, literally.”Report
Political Branding 101:
When I was a very precocious lad in the early mid 1970s, I read an article in the paper by Wm. Simon, former Treasury Secretary in which he explained that the government was spending money it didn’t have, and growing deeper in debt each year, and we needed to get spending under control.
It was one of my first experiences with politics and it was one of those pivotal moments of forming a political identity, where the conservatives just seemed reasonable and logical and common sense.
Flash forward to 2023:
Girl, 9, accused of being trans at Kelowna track meet
The mothers, who choose not to identify their daughter, say she was competing in a shot-put event when a grandfather of one of the other participants started yelling at her.
“She went to step up to compete for the grade four shot-put final, and right before she went to throw, a grandfather of a student said, ‘Hey, this is supposed to be a girls’ event, and why are you letting boys compete.’ My daughter is cisgender, born female, uses she/her pronouns. She has a pixie haircut,” said mom Heidi Starr.
Starr says the man then carried on to demand certification to prove that her daughter was born female.
“He stopped the entire event. He also pointed at another girl who also had short hair. He then piped in and said, ‘Well, if she is not a boy, then she is obviously trans.'”
Starr said the man’s wife then started calling her “a genital mutilator, a groomer, and a pedophile.”
Now imagine you are another precocious adolescent, just forming your understanding of political brands and identities.
What other impression could a young person have of “conservatives” other than, “JFC man, these people are freaks and weirdos!”Report
I read that article and could not believe anyone tolerated this nitwit for even a second.Report
Don’t get out to many children’s sports events do you? Ya know, like little league games where coaches and umpires are physically attacked because of some minor issue?Report
Least anyone forgets transphobia is just recycled homophobia, it turns out that this man was harassing the girl’s two mothers before this. It’s easy to skim past the ‘two mothers’ in the story, but it’s exactly what that implies.Report
Experts warn against canceling Pride campaigns after extremists threaten Target:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/experts-warn-canceling-pride-campaigns-after-extremists-threaten/story?id=99634728
Does it count as Stockholm Syndrome if you were a sympathizer before you were taken hostage?Report
Hey, I forget, does the side taking hostages get to joke about Stockholm Syndrome?Report
Did you read the article?Report
Yes. In fact, I read it weeks ago and have actively been following the story.
How does this change the ‘Hey, people on my side are issuing bomb threats and holding stores hostage to their demands, I shall joke about Stockholm syndrome.’ thing you just did?Report
It’s the people on your side who are issuing the bomb threats.Report
LOL. Sure. So apparently people are believing the people who make bomb threats now.
So, on one hand, we have people _actually showing up in person_ and berating employees and damaging displays for having LGBTQ stuff, we actually have a lot of video of this stuff. We also have had repeated bomb threats towards children hospitals from nonsense anti-trans stuff.
And on the other hand, we have some bomb threats supposedly made by people angry about them removing their Pride stuff.
We also have bomb threats against Target _for_ LGBTQ stuff. More of those, in fact, sadly for your narrative. So many we stopped paying attention to those a while back.
And the thing about bomb threats is that anyone can make them, and assert they are anyone while making them.
If we want to figure out who is actually making them, we should look at what other physical violence is happening in that area. Because violence escalates, and if LGBTQ activists were at the low end of bomb threats, you’d think _some_ would have escalated, just like the far right wack jobs have shown up to Targets in person.
Or maybe just discard the bomb threats entirely and look at the actual violence(1) that is actually happening, the people who are willing to show up and put their face on video cameras and risking arrest.
And, of course, I guess we’re pretending we’re only talking about Target specifically, somehow, and it’s not the exact same pattern of violence as this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/07/lgbtq-violence-protest-glendale-unified-school-district
We have, at this point in time, pretty clear pattern of anti-LGBTQ violence and threats of violence happening. Real things happening in the real world.
On the other hand, we have…a few bomb threats where the person _asserts_ they are opposed to Target removing displays.
1) Wow, it sure is fun that we can now officially call property damage violence. I used to be opposed to that, preferring to restrict the term to harm to people, but people here convinced me ‘violence’ covered property damage, pretty recently.Report
And I’m asking whether your last comment counts as Stockholm Syndrome or not, given that you already made up your mind to support the terrorists.Report
But regardless of that: Even pretending that the Target bomb threats have been made equally by both sides:
Target caved to _one side’s bomb threats_. And only one side.
Yours.Report
Or to put that in easier to understand terms: Target thinks one side is likely to do actual violence, plant actual bombs, and not the other side.
Probably because one side has been showing up at Target threatening employees, and the other side hasn’t.Report
“Probably because one side has been showing up at Target threatening employees, and the other side hasn’t.”
Do you have some video of this happening?Report
Why, do we have some particular reason to not believe Target, who explicitly said employees were being threatened over Pride displays and that was why they were removing them?
How exactly are there supposed to be videos of _threats_, anyway? Target employees cannot film customers, the Target video cameras do not record audio, so where exactly would these videos come from?
Well, there’s always the few dumbasses who record themselves attacking things, although they obviously are notable restrainedwhen filming themselves: https://youtu.be/FscUyMuf-Fo
But most people are not as stupid as Ethan Schmidt.
But, hey, good news: If we only believe video, instead of people reporting things that happened to them, I guess we don’t believe any bomb threats either, so, hey!Report
“If we only believe video, instead of people reporting things that happened to them…”
lol
remember this one next time you tell us how right-wingers are just making shit up and lying about things that never happened and there’s not one single shred of objective proofReport
“We also have bomb threats against Target _for_ LGBTQ stuff. ”
Are these the same sort of bomb threats that were made against synagogues in 2016?Report
Probably yes, in that they are bomb threats intended to harass people with no intent of following through.
Your mistakes appears to be thinking that I think random bomb threats, without any other threats of violence or any escalation that would logically lead to bombings, are important.
No, they are not. They are bad, and criminal, but they are not an indication of anything at all, as they are incredibly easy to make.
I just pointed out that if bomb threats were an indication of anything, ‘both sides’ had been making them. Except we have no idea who made them. Maybe it is yet another Israeli teen.Report
In actual reality, violence escalates, as it has been happening at Target.
It starts off with harassment, which pretty common at Target at this point, not just of Pride displays, but of queer employees also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Target/search/?q=pride&restrict_sr=1
That’s the employee’s subreddit, and the store itself has directed management to have repeated meetings about harassment due to this.
The next step is threats of violence against employees, which is currently, but rarely, happening.
The next step would presumably be actual violence, people actually making good on those threats.
The thing is, we are _near_ the point of actual violence in this escalation. It hasn’t happened yet (Well, unless you’re counting destruction of property as violence, which I have been assured I should count.), but it is drawing closer and closer…although it almost certainly won’t be bombs, just because bombs are very rare. It will be someone throwing punches at employees.
This is opposed to the ‘other side’, for lack of a better term, which…hasn’t even called for a boycott but…somehow escalated to bombings, I guess.Report
Well, let me modify: We _were_ at the point of actual violence in this escalation, which is exactly why Target caved and took down the displays. So we aren’t anymore, and things will not escalate, probably.
Target is well aware of what is going on and what the actual threats are.
This is why Target didn’t put _back_ the Pride merch after these ‘pro-LGBT bomb threats’, because, again, bomb threats are not actually important, and these specifically are not part of any escalation of violence. Thus they are being treated as a hoax, and not included in Target’s decision-making process.
Unlike the current wave of anti-queer harassment and rare actual outright threats that their employees are receiving, which _have_ caused them to change things.
Aka, the ‘terrorists won’.Report
“Are these the same sort of bomb threats that were made against synagogues in 2016?
Probably yes, in that they are bomb threats intended to harass people with no intent of following through.”
(the bomb threats made against synagogues in 2016 were the work of a teenager in Israel who used a VOIP phone to call in anonymous bomb threats for kicks; prior to the synagogues he was doing high schools.)
“Your mistakes appears to be thinking that I think random bomb threats, without any other threats of violence or any escalation that would logically lead to bombings, are important.”
My point is that people like you thought they were threats of violence that would logically lead to bombings, similar to this thing going on with Target, but we’re supposed to believe that this time it’s definitely real and definitely truly going to go somewhere.Report
I literally said we shouldn’t assume the _bomb threats_ against Target are going anywhere. From ‘either side’, assuming that anyone on either side is even making them and not the exact same random teenager.
I said we should assume the _threats of violence made by customers in person_ are going somewhere. That they are part of an escalation.
You do understand there’s a difference between someone using some phone proxy to make completely anonymous threats that cannot be tracked back to them, and someone showing up in person and making threats, right?
Not just in ability to make good on the threat, but also someone showing up in person thinks their behavior is something they will not get arrested for, that it is a normal part of society, to for them to be allowed to threaten to harm people. (As opposed to the phone calls, who, duh, understand what they are doing is illegal.)Report
“Wow, it sure is fun that we can now officially call property damage violence.”
I’ve heard people claim that the word “sir” is violence! But I’m on the fence about whether property damage should be counted as violence. I think it depends on context. It’s more threatening than words.Report
America has a new greatest living author somewhere. Cormac McCarthy has died.Report
Not the obituary any of us were hoping to read today.Report
No, but I’d certainly be happy with 89.Report
100%
And I’m struggling to think of one contender to fill his shoes.Report
We’ve discussed Criminal Justice before and have touched on particularly bad DAs. DAs who go after the wrong things, DAs who charge certain persons way too much and other persons get a slap on the wrist. Alvin Bragg has showed up in a handful of these criticisms… there was the bodega guy who got charged after an altercation with a customer, there was the garage attendant who got charged after an altercation with a guy breaking into cars, so on and so forth.
Here’s a story where Bragg managed to get a plea deal with a man accused of committing a hate crime.
Victim advocates are going nuts, as if they don’t understand that there are a lot of dynamics going on here.
But if I wanted to undercut both hate crimes and New and Improved Approaches to Crime, I can’t think of a way to do it better than Alvin Bragg is doing it. (Among other prosecutors, of course. Among other prosecutors.)Report
What about this do you see as undercutting either of those things?Report
Well, this is where we disagree about the point of criminal justice.
This part?
He would need to be sequestered until he would no longer do it again.
This isn’t something silly like arson or shoplifting. This is, like, attacking someone.
You know the things that you didn’t like about Daniel Penny? This is like that except instead of being homeless the guy was being Jewish.Report
You know the things that you didn’t like about Daniel Penny? This is like that except instead of being homeless the guy was being Jewish.
If I was trying to undercut conservatives and make them look bad, this is exactly a sentence i would write.Report
Vigilantism, man. It sucks.Report
There is no such sentence as ‘prison until you won’t repeat the thing you did’. And even if there was, that would be something that was checked _later_.
You seem weirdly sure that imprisoning this guy _won’t_ change his mind. You’ve already assumed 18 months have failed, for some reason.
If you think prison doesn’t work at rehabilitating people, then…I don’t know what to tell you, but I don’t think your disagreement is with the people you think it is.
Which is why assault has harsher punishment under the law than shoplifting. (And I have to disagree with arson, which isn’t silly. It’s pretty dangerous, it risks the lives of all sorts of people.)
And also the homeless guy ended up dead. In a fairly non-accidental way. Which I feel is an important distinction in any punishment.
But ignoring that, yes, there are people wandering around who think they can assault other people just because those people annoy them, and by ‘annoy them’ I can indeed mean ‘merely existing in their space while actively Jewish or homeless’.
And those people should probably be imprisoned when they do that.Report
You seem weirdly sure that imprisoning this guy _won’t_ change his mind. You’ve already assumed 18 months have failed, for some reason.
I’m taking the guy at his word.
But, hey. Maybe prison will work. Have there been any studies on recidivism?Report
Still don’t know who you think you’re talking to, Jaybird. I’ve made my position on the prison system in this country pretty clear:
It is nightmarish nonsense that does not actually accomplish anything, and the system itself greatly increases chances of recidivism. While we do need to separate people from society when they do such things, the current system is almost tailor-made to convert someone like this asshat into an lifelong criminal, because, after all, we are locking up a bigot with a bunch of professional car thieves in a vicious environment and setting it up where he will find it hard to get a real job the rest of his life.
I’m sure that’s going to work out _really well_ in the future for us. Good job us, I guess. Heaven forbid we come up with some _other_ way to temporarily separate people from society and punish them in a way that they are unlikely to commit crimes in the future, but _isn’t_ ‘get daily assaulted in prison until you join a gang and make a bunch of criminal friends and then can’t get a job later’.
But what exactly is your argument here, that Bragg, as a ‘progressive DA’, should have overthrown all laws and recreated an entirely different prison system? Because last I checked, the prison system isn’t even under the jurisdiction of the DA.Report
I agree that it is nightmarish nonsense but I disagree that it does not actually accomplish anything.
Going by the assumption that prison is for:
1. Punishment
2. Deterrence
3. Sequestration
4. Rehabilitation
It does 1 and 3, it completely and totally fails at 4, and we can’t really measure 2.
Given that we can’t do 4 and we can’t measure 2, we should figure out the whole appropriate use of 1 and 3.
And whether committing hate crimes and asserting “I’d do it again!” qualifies as requiring a good and long #3.Report
Prisons are actually incredibly bad at 1 also.
Because part of punishment is to punish them in a consistent manner congruent with their sentence.
When in reality prisons allow certain people to amass criminal gangs, harm people, even rape other inmates, which really does not seem the same amount of punishment as other people, perhaps sentenced the exact same amount of time, who are attacked by criminal gangs and even raped.
So what we have left is 3, which prisons… Well, as I pointed out, they don’t technically manage that either because what they actually do is sequestered them with other people, which means they can continue to behaving a criminal manner against those other people. Saying we’re sequestering them away from other people only works if we don’t include other prisoners as people.
So we’re functionally down to zero things that prisons accomplish effectively, and two things that they sort of maybe accomplished if we ignore the crimes committed in prison and the inconsistency in punishment due to that.Report
…why do you think this is undercutting anything? I literally cannot follow your logic.
You understand that people taking plea deals for 18 months for charges that are ‘up to seven years’ is not some weird outlier, right?
And unless you dislike the idea of threatening people with longer sentences to force people to agree to plea deal at all (as I do, I have a problem with a justice system that operates by plea deals, because it skips the entire ‘finding if someone actually committed the crime’.), it’s not really objectionable…when the law says ‘up to seven years’, that’s the max. In reality, it probably would have been three year or something in court…so a 18 months plea deal is, again, completely normal.
If you object to the mechanics of that, you object to something like 99% of all criminal justice. (Again, like I do, cause I object to the absurd overuse of plea deals.)
And none of this sentence is even vaguely out of line for assault. I know the _victim_ doesn’t seem to understand that, but it isn’t. Savagely assaulting someone and getting sentenced to a year and a half in jail is so normal that no one should even blink at it.Report
In a worlds where your biggest beef with the criminal justice system is the need to down list marijuana . . . something something hammer something something nail . . . .Report
“Savagely assaulting someone and getting sentenced to a year and a half in jail is so normal that no one should even blink at it.”
What do you think of the sentences for the other guys Jaybird mentioned?Report
The other guys weren’t sentenced at all. They were both involved in altercations and it took a fairly short time to figure out that they were not the aggressors.
So the sentences were appropriate.Report
In addition to what CJColucci said, the reason I didn’t have an opinion on them is that Jaybird didn’t talk about their sentence!
Instead, he acted like someone getting a 18 month plea bargain for assault is somehow weird and demonstrates how Bragg is horrible, when in reality it’s completely middle-of-the-road. If anything, it’s slightly _long_ for assault, which normally would a year in jail, but, then again, there were hate crime charges on top of that and this assault seems especially unconscionable, so adding another 50% on the plea bargain seems reasonable.
This really feel like a classic example of ‘People who do not understand how the justice system works get outraged when they look into the details of a random case that operated basically like all other cases’.Report
If this sort of thing happened in Wichita, or Cedar Rapids, or Oklahoma City, we wouldn’t be hearing about it. And we can be pretty damn sure that it happened in Wichita, Cedar Rapids, and Oklahoma City without even looking it up, because it’s what happens everywhere.
One could make an honest case against what happens everywhere, but one would have to be honest to make it. And what happens everywhere doesn’t advance the narrative about Jewish Space DA’s or whatever.Report
Savagely assaulting someone and getting sentenced to a year and a half in jail is so normal that no one should even blink at it.
Does the whole “hate crime” thing change anything at all?
It doesn’t have to! I just thought that we wanted to make “hate crimes” especially heinous. Not, just, like an additional category.Report
It probably bumped the average ‘year’ to ‘eighteen months’.
And no, adding hate crime modifiers to a crime aren’t going to magically make it count more than the actual original crime counted. That’s not how laws work. Hate crimes are not ‘crimes’, they are merely modifiers of existing crimes.Report
Well, maybe the guy should lighten up and know that these assaults normally plea down to a year. Hey, it’s not like Muslims have had a particularly easy existence in NYC over the last couple of decades.Report
Jaybird: Argues a thing.
Others: Shows him how wrong he is about the thing.
Jaybird: Pretends he was really arguing the opposite thing all along.Report
That’s not what’s happening here. You realize that, right?Report
Sure seems like it, with a bit of snark thrown in . . . .Report
KQED is San Francisco’s NPR station.
San Francisco to Pay Hotel Whitcomb $19.5 Million in Property Damage
This may provide context to the other hotels closing down shop in the region.Report
Yes.
The context is, despite crime being at near-historic lows, the long term decline in foot traffic to brick and mortar stores, was accelerated by the pandemic, combined with the decline in office occupancy due to work from home is causing downtown retailers to collapse.
https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2023/06/14/brokers-westfield-pullout-no-surprise-as-retail-action-shifts-in-sf/Report
You’d think that London Breed would know that San Francisco is the venue most receptive to that argument. She should make it more vigorously instead of attacking allies like Dean Preston.
Report
Its not an argument.
Its just what’s happening.
Sorry if it disrupts your preferred narrative.Report
I certainly hope that London Breed’s flailing about in service to a false narrative doesn’t impede the progress that is currently taking place!Report
Demand for office and R&D rises 14% in Bay Area
Oakland sees the biggest increase in May followed the Peninsula, according to CBRE
https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2023/06/13/demand-for-office-and-rd-rises-14-in-bay-area/
This is good. This isn’t one of the last good things that happens before things go bad. This is one of the really big good things that indicates that better things are around the corner.Report
Sounds like you should invest in whomever picks up the hotel that closed last week. This is an opportunity to make some money!Report
That’s…exactly what is going on.
S.F. supes cut red tape in effort to fill downtown’s empty buildings
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-supes-cut-red-tape-fill-downtown-s-empty-18150947.php
Developers in SF and everywhere are desperately looking for ways to convert underperforming office and retail space into housing.
I sent a concept sketch back to one of my clients last week for a building here in LA.
Seriously, its a very big topic in our industry right now. It has jack-all to do with politics, its just a natural evolution of the business ecosystem.Report
It has jack-all to do with politics, its just a natural evolution of the business ecosystem.
I doubt this very much. I tend to agree with the owners of the hotel who just walked away from it on their take of how the city will evolve over the next few months/years.
Now I *DO* think that there are glimmers of hope… stuff like the School Recalls and the Chesa Recall and London Breed calling for stuff like vigorous policing. Seriously, if San Francisco turns around, it’ll be because of changes in policy like the ones that they are adopting after abandoning the really stupid ones that had been fashionable enough to get them to the place where they are now.
I just think that it’ll get worse before it gets better and require policies that, two years ago, would have been pilloried by the same people who will soon be embracing them.Report
I know this is your firm conviction, that blue cities like SF are in dismal shape because of liberal politics.
But you don’t really have much other than your gut and feels and the stray anecdote.
The facts just don’t support your conviction.Report
Eh, I also have stuff like the statements made by the corporations leaving San Francisco, stuff like the Teacher Recalls, the Chesa Recall, and the stuff that London Breed is saying in this, the current year.
I’ve even linked to news reports and government websites backing up my statements, believe it or not (you can read one such comment filled with links here!).
As I get new information, I will be happy to change my tentative conclusion. But I’ve seen more bad indicators in the last week and a half than good ones.
And I weigh my tentative conclusion accordingly.Report
you have two indicators in a week, that you have decided are “bad.” Statistically you can’t draw any conclusion form two data points. And those two data points are meaningless sin a city the size of SF. An din the universe of Blue cities generally.
Put this in context – how many other American cities have lost a hotel or mall or both in the last week. Last month. Last year. That analysis is where you will get enough data to draw conclusions that mean something.Report
While I would love to have the “who can say whether anything is good or bad?” debate, I do think that we can look at any given indicator and say “this is a bad indicator” if it comes with something like “management said that they were doing this for the following reasons… a, b, c” and it turns out that a and b and c actually exist.
Then we can pivot to well, those are only *TWO* indicators and then I could point out another bunch of indicators like various recalls around the city as part of a backlash to things being worse than expected and then that can be dismissed as still not being enough.
It’s probably easier to just jump to “is knowledge possible?”Report
No you can’t do this, if you want to be taken seriously.
What you’re doing, instead of logic supported by empirical data, is called divination.
Divination is where someone takes certain signs which appear random, like the way tea leaves settle at the bottom of a cup, but interprets them as omens portending future events.
You’re taking a random event- like the recall of a DA- then interpreting it as an omen portending future events.
Believe it or not, there is an entire branch of science called economics, and they don’t use “Management says” and “hey, a district attorney was recalled” as data sets when discussing economic trends.Report
Do you think that the corporations are operating on empirical data?
Their reasons given for why they are making the decisions they’re making were googleable and had official websites backing up their reasons.
I must not understand what you mean by “empirical data”.Report
For the same reasons that economists don’t assess the health of the economy by calling a bunch of execs and asking, “Hey, how’s things at your stores?”
Again, you’re trying to take isolated factoids (say, an exec asserting a rise in crime)and weave them into a narrative.
But your narrative can’t explain other things we are seeing empirically such as that crime is actually dropping, or that there is a nationwide shift away from brick and mortar stores, or that workers are working from home and thereby not making as many foot trips to downtown stores and restaurants.Report
Well, if the exec asserts something else… something like:
Would it be possible to check the numbers and answer the questions:
Is there record high office vacancy?
Are there concerns over street conditions?
Is there a lower return to office than peer cities?
Is there weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand?
It seems to me that these questions are answerable. Well, the first three are. I couldn’t find an answer to the last one. It strikes me as answerable in theory… I just don’t have the tools to find out the numbers and compare them.
I mean… if there are numbers out there that back up the statement made by the executives as to why they are moving, isn’t that relevant? At all?
As for “crime”, I’ve also made distinctions between stuff like “homicide” and “visible disorder”. “Crime” might be going down after a spike but remain at an intolerable level.
Same for visible disorder.
And stuff like “local dissatisfaction with crime/visible disorder” can be measured, to a small extent, by looking at stuff like “did they boot the DA?” and whether the Mayor is talking about the importance of increasing policing in the town meetings.
Which, of course, is not *PROOF*… but there’s enough there to reach tentative conclusions that can be changed by new information. Perhaps even new empirical data that isn’t a variant of “this isn’t happening besides, it’s happening elsewhere too!”Report
Sure:
So, there’s your SF statistics. They do not appear to match what the CEO’s said in your referenced stories. SO what new tentative conclusions do you now reach?Report
“So, there’s your SF statistics.”
Are they similar to statistics in other urban areas around the country, to the point that “SF isn’t special” is a valid rejoinder to arguments of “SF’s government policies regarding public order are encouraging property-owners to leave”?Report
well the crime stats are below Dallas, Seattle, NYC and Phoenix. As my quote says – its 14th out of 23 cities of 750K population and above. That make SF the median or really close to it. Doesn’t seem out of line at all.Report
I linked to stories in my original comment as well.
Looking at your first story, this jumped out at me:
From the second story:
That seems to me like something that ain’t gonna turn around anytime soon.
You then link to a story talking about crime when my original quotation from the guys who walked away from the hotel didn’t mention crime but mentioned “street conditions”.
But let’s look at your quotation:
So crime is down but violent crime is up?
Okay.
As for the last part, my quotation said “a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand”.
Your numbers didn’t mention the “than expected” part. Is it unfair of me to expect you to give that?
You say: “So, there’s your SF statistics. They do not appear to match what the CEO’s said in your referenced stories. SO what new tentative conclusions do you now reach?”
It seems to me that the statistics either match what the CEO said or talk about other things than what the CEO said.Report
The questions to which I was responding are these:
And the sources I cited were the best statistics available to answer those questions. Unfortunately the data available doesn’t actually match your questions.
Take convention bookings. I found 2022 bookings and projected 2023 booking, which show an increase. I didn’t spend all day on it, but there is not a publicly available source showing bookings out to 2027. My conclusion is that’s just hokum on the CEO’s part. As one other data point – the American Geophysical Union will be in San Francisco in 2026. When they are in San Fran in 2019 they brought over 28,000 people to that meeting. I see no reason that 2026 would be less.
As to “street conditions” there no statistics on that. SO I went with crime statistics, where San Fran is solidly in the middle of cities its size, and its crime trends mirror the rest of the US. Again, since our CEO didn’t cite sources I am left to conclude he’s blowing smoke.
And finally on office rates – I agree with you that the trend isn’t reversing. Its also not based in any way on anything the city politicians ad administration are doing. So while I have some sympathy for CEO’s loosing personal money for underperforming, I am not looking to the city to enact policies to “correct” the situation, because it’s not in their pervue.Report
No, you still aren’t getting it.
A theory is proven only when it can address and rule out any other theories.
And it must explain ALL the data, not just a few variables.
Your theory, that liberal leadership leads to disorder and failing economies, is contradicted by other facts, such as that plenty of other, more conservative jurisdictions also have disorder, and failing retail cores.
And your theory can’t address or rule out competing theories that the failing retail stores and offices are driven by larger trends having nothing to do with disorder or leadership.
For example:
Why is retail grown still healthy in parts of Oakland, right across the bay? Same style of leadership, same crime rate.
According to your theory, this should not be happening. But it is.
There are plenty of rural areas which have the same level of crime as SF. But we are seeing explosive growth of warehouse and retail fulfillment centers.
This should not be happening. But it is.
The state of California has the same leadership as SF; According to your theory, we should see statewide the same problems we see in SF core.
But we aren’t. Statewide, even regionally, the Bay Area has very healthy retail and office sectors job growth and business profits.Report
No, a theory must only do a better job explaining the data than other theories. Theories only rarely address other theories.
A theory can be obviously wrong (The Theory of Gravity is the stand out example) and still be accepted just because it does a better job than others.
When it comes to society, the data is extremely noisy and the margin of error can be large.
It can also be hard to draw the line between “bad leadership” and “bad policy”.Report
“A theory is proven only when it can address and rule out any other theories.”
and since we can’t prove that this is a secret plot by the Jews to depopulate the SF Bay Area, we must consider all other theories unproveable…Report
No. Spend all the time you want on research over in the STEM fields, but there are no rules about when something is a “Theory” and when not. Thermodynamics has Laws. The photoelectric effect, for which Einstein won his Nobel, gets neither Theory nor Law nor capital letters attached to it.
Science is about models. As they say, all models are wrong but some models are useful. Newton’s model of gravity is useful. Einstein’s model of gravity is useful in different situations. Darwin’s model of evolution — another “Theory” — was useful initially, but no one doing research today uses it in its original form.
However, it’s worth noting that “theory” with a little t is often used in conversation, both technical and not, where “hypothesis” is correct.Report
Allow me to re-phrase:
A theory becomes convincing when it can eliminate others, etc.
If there are other theories with equal validity out there, and if the theory in question can’t explain the empirical facts, then it becomes unpersuasive.Report
When management fails to continue a “mandatory vaccination program,” due to probable legal repercussions, economists do pay attention.
Just like they pay attention to the loss of 10+ million Americans from the workforce.
Could these two things be related?
Data sets ought to alarm you when they’re remarkably consistent across the country, from corporations in all walks of life.Report
Oh, boy.Report
This is fantasy. This link points to the official number people in the workforce as a graph (because IDK how to post the picture directly).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191750/civilian-labor-force-in-the-us-since-1990/
Everyone in the nation has either gotten vaccinated or has gotten Covid. The gov has stopped paying for vaccinations. Covid is no longer a scary pandemic, it’s the new normal.Report
What is this “San Francisco”? And if it’s so important, why haven’t you ever mentioned it before?Report
LOL. OT comment of the day.Report
They probably should have done a better job of protecting this particular diplomatic cable. UNLESS IT WAS RELEASED DELIBERATELY!!!
Report
There’s a boatload redacted here. The proverbial blind man touching an elephant.Report
Why yes, the COVID outbreak could have been contained if China admitted to it, regardless of how it started. So what?Report
I think that the “so what?” involves measuring whether avoidable harms were committed and changing how stuff is done in the future if the avoidable harms were above a particular level.Report
Avoidable harms were committed. The only one we can control were committed here in the US, and you seem to prefer focusing on China . . .Report
Well, I think that some of the “avoidable harms” committed on this side of the pond included censorship of discussion of what happened.
I’d also like to open up the topic of “how stuff is done in the future” and whether any of it ought to be changed.Report
Are there any other “avoidable harms” that you can name?Report
There is much in the US that needs to be changed as a result of our Covid experience. Little to any of it has to do with China.
And there was no censorship in the US of discussion of what happened. That discussion has bene lively – even around here – and has been based on as much fact as we can gather.
We can not control China. We can not influence China (A lesson of the last 50 years if ever there was one). SO whatever China did or didn’t do – while important factually, doesn’t merit further discussion in terms of what the US might do next time.Report
Here is an interesting and somewhat depressing though. A lot of ink has been spilled about how the top jobs in the United States always go to the graduates of the top tier universities. These are generally Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford and in the STEM fields, MIT and CalTech. There can be some other universities or graduate schools that may be added depending upon the field like Wharton for business. Now the United States is not the only country where this is true. You also have the domination of Oxbridge and the LSE in the United Kingdom; Tokyo, Waseda, and Keio in Japan; and Seoul, Korea, and Yonsei in South Korea.
In America and the United Kingdom, there are lot of non-academic qualities that can help you get into the top universities like legacy, social status, and being a top athlete in the United States at least. In Japan or South Korea, it is all based on one entrance examination and this creates an internationally infamous pressure cooker education system. What is worse? The system in the Anglophone world which might not be entirely an meritocracy but has a healthier social system for teens or the pressure cooker meritocracy of Asia if we had to choose between the two systems?
One of the things that might prevent creating a more equitable social system these days is that it means tolerating or even encouraging a lot of mediocrity and good enough in the population. You have a lot of people, across the political spectrum and social conditions, that don’t like this and want and need to see everything in make everybody live up to their potential. Well we can’t have that. A more equitable system means just accepting a lot of mediocrity and that not everybody is going to be ultra-competitive striver and that is okay and the non-striving sort should get a good life too. We have a lot of very competitive people that just can’t stand this though.Report
I always wonder about these posters that just appear and then disappear.Report
As always, the question is “What is the goal?”
If you want a guy on your basketball team, what are you hoping for? Let’s say your top three things.
I imagine that “winning basketball games” is probably somewhere in there. You want different things from a Center than you want from a Point Guard, of course. Couldn’t have a team with five Centers. But, at the end of the day, you want someone on the team who will help your team win.
I imagine that someone who hired a guy in order to address historical injustice and provide excellent remuneration to someone who, historically, would have been denied this level of remuneration will feel good about this decision for about as long as it takes until it’s time to hit the court.
Why are we hiring teachers?
Why are we hiring police officers?
Why are we hiring programmers?Report
That assumes there is one goal. Under a more aristocratic/meritocratic system you can argue the goal is that those who are the best should achieve the highest place and reap the most rewards. Everything should be merciless competition tempered at most by luck and those who can not compete must be content with what they get.
The number of people who believe that the above is a good and just way of organizing the world probably aren’t that great no matter if they describe themselves as left or right. Most people would want at least members of their in group to get a decent life regardless of their competency level, although the Further Right would describe their in-group as possessing competence by definition. At the same time, very few people want a world where incompetent jerks who are mean and violent towards everybody while giving nothing get a decent life either. Maybe the Right hates the incompetence more and the Left hates the being a jerk more but incompetent jerks who live a great life infuriate everybody.Report
I am okay with there being more than one goal. I am okay with there being competing goals.
My own, personal, goal in asking the question is *NOT* to say “Your goal should be X!” but to point out that if you say that your goal is X and your goal is actually Y and X and Y aren’t compatible, that will eventually become explicit.
So let’s hammer out what our goals are. Let’s hammer out what our top 3 or top 5 goals are.
Then maybe we could compare what we’re doing to what we’re achieving and notice whether they’re not lining up.
Because, lemme tell ya, if I came out and said “what we are achieving is actually the goal”, I’d sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist.Report
This is because the foundation of conspiracism is the assumption that there is a singular “We”, or “They”.
The goals of the people who run private religious schools is different than public school administrators. The goal of corporations is different than research universities, and so on.Report
Sure! Granted. Different organizations and different groups have different goals. Absolutely.
So when it comes to stuff like what LeeEsq was talking about in the comment that I was responding to, I think that it’s fair to ask why are we hiring various people to do various jobs.
“Who is the ‘we’?” you may ask. “The people hiring”, I’d probably answer.
I’m cool with there being three or five different goals. I’m cool with them being ranked so that if two goals come into conflict, one is considered more important than another.
What are the goals?Report
Speaking of sports, when I was in high school I was on the fencing team. There was a tournament when only a limited bunch of team members were allowed to participate. I was selected to participate. Another team member protested loudly because that person felt he was a better fencer. The coach told him that he might be marginally better but I actually show up to every practice and take things seriously while he does not. So at least for that coach, who lived most of his life in the Soviet Union where they took fencing seriously, thought that rewarding deligeance in practice was important as a goal. Another coach could have said that winning was the goal and picked the teammate despite the fact that he didn’t take seriously because of the marginal difference in skill.Report
“As always, the question is “What is the goal?””
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, man… that’s rich!Report
If it’s a stupid question with an obvious answer, then you should be able to easily own Jaybird like a pet parakeet by providing that answer.Report
It’s not that it is a stupid question with an obvious answer. It’s that in many many conversations we’ve had here about education, I often ask, “Well, what’s the goal?” and Jay’s response is to act as if the question is stupid because the goal is obvious. We shouldn’t even CONSIDER the question of “What is the goal?” because everyone knows the goal. Except they don’t. And when I try to show how complex the creation and pursuit of goals for schools/education is, he handwaves it away because EVERYONE knows the REAL goals so much so we shouldn’t even ask the question.
So for him to suddenly act as if the question is and ought to be and ALWAYS is and ought to be “What is the goal?” is what I find laughable.
It’s a question he wants to ignore often. So asking it here is funny. Stating that it is “always” the question is hilarious.
I don’t have an actual answer to the question here because — as I try to point out when I bring up the question — it is often hard for outsiders/laypeople to understand the internal goals of complex systems.Report
“[W]hen I try to show how complex the creation and pursuit of goals for schools/education is…”
Oh, so there are some goals after all? Cool! What are they?
“[I]t is often hard for outsiders/laypeople to understand the internal goals of complex systems.”
(This is the kind of thing that people say when they can’t actually answer your question.)Report
I tend to think that the goal of education should be something to the effect of:
Proficiency at Math
Proficiency at Reading
If you want me to put finer points on things, I’d say something like:
Students should be able to:
1. Read a book about as tough as Animal Farm and summarize it
2. Pre-Algebra I level stuff. Work with fractions and work with negative numbers. Perhaps even be able to explain why a Quarter Pounder is smaller than a burger that is a third of a pound (pre-cooked weight).
3. Write a five paragraph essay
4. Read a scale, a thermometer, and a measuring flask
Like, maybe a student should be able to do more than that, but I would say that a student who cannot do those things has been failed by his education.
The goal of education is to create a person who can do those things.
And I always get confused when I get told how much more complicated things are than I expect them to be. Like my list of things is reaching for the stars rather than representative of exceptionally low expectations.Report
Thank you, I was going to point that out.
If you’re planning on moving off the bottom rung of the economic ladder, you need a lot more.
Some of that is schools and (unfortunately) some is taught by parents. I say “unfortunately” because that puts it outside of gov mandates.Report
Yeah, but get this:
There are schools where there is not a single student that is proficient in math. Not a single student proficient in reading.
This bar is embarrassingly low. And it still isn’t getting hopped over.
“Raise the funding! Raise the funding!”
“It’s already in the highest quintile of funding.”
“This system is really complicated!”Report
We’re in “how do we shield people from their own bad choices” territory.
The really nasty part of that is the related issues, “how do we shield children from their parents’ bad choices” and “how do we shield children from a bad environment”.Report
Increasingly, it looks like the answer is somewhere between “It’s so complicated!” and “we can’t”.Report
Not biting.
You are on record here saying the question is “always” ‘What’s the goal?’ I’ll remember that next time I ask it and you act as if it is irrelevant to the discussion. Good night.Report
Generally speaking, “equality” isn’t the answer to any of these questions.
Further, when we start pretending that “equality” should be one of the top motivations we have problems. We instantly have a power struggle, and we’re pretty much by definition discriminating against someone, and the motivation is very squishy ergo the metric of success is too.Report
The 101 answer to the teacher question is “to facilitate the education of children”. The police question is something like “law enforcement”. Programmers is probably something like “to write code that compiles and does more or less what we ask it to do, after we figure out what we want”.
I understand that it’s a little more complex than that but any list of goals that we have for hiring a person to do a job involves making sure that the job gets done.
When the focus switches to “we want to provide middle-class employment to people” instead of “we need a task accomplished”, I’m going to suspect that the task isn’t being accomplished and we’ll quickly pivot to something else. “Why don’t you want people making middle-class wages? Afraid that they’ll move into your neighborhood?”Report
Where have you seen this as a primary hiring goal?Report
We have program “X”. Program “X” doesn’t work. We know this.
So do we remove the program or do we continue to provide employment? Or if it’s not “provide employment”, is it “virtue signal that we’re doing something”?
The most explicitly I’ve seen is with some of the inner city anti-drug programs, where having found they don’t work one of the arguments for keeping them was it was injecting money into the community. More commonly we just pretend the programs work.Report
There are lots of reasons we don’t turn off such programs, and I will stipulate that many are “good” however you choose to define them. In the case you present, my informed AWAG is that the anti-drug program in question has received multi-year federal funding for its purpose, funding which can’t actually be repurposed for anything else, even if the on the street program is not effective in the ways hoped. The problem that program, and that city then have is federal laws requiring them to spend that money or forfeit it because repurposing it would be illegal. They aren’t gong to give back revenue because there’s no positive incentive to do so. And so the program limps along.
My “favorite” example e is the federal continuing resolution. When Congress routinely fails to do its most important job, the CR keeps the government operation. But with explicit language that we can neither stop nor start anything. And if we are lucky enough to get an actual appropriation, we have days to weeks to make months long spending decisions. Talk about perverse incentives.Report
Hiring? Only nutpicking would provide you with examples. Maybe some of the nuts are talking about “equity”, though.
*RETAINING*? Oh, my good lord. Any discussion of the importance of Police Unions or Teacher Unions can provide examples of that sort of thing.Report
so this is where your approach to these things really looses me. You started with:
All good questions, even if there’s disagreement amongst us over the answers.
Then you moved to:
Which reads to me as again a Hiring question. So when I asked where you’ve seen this in hiring – which seems to be what we are talking about – I get:
Then you pivot to retaining which is the follow on to hiring. It also appears that you are switching lines of inquiry without closing out the hiring portion of the discussion.
can you open up a little more why what I thought was a hiring discussion isn’t, in fact a hiring discussion?Report
Because, at this point, we’re dealing with stuff like “teachers that already have been hired and are sitting in the chair that they got hired to sit in”.
We could easily change the question to “why did we hire them?” and still be wrestling with the exact same root issue.
Why do we have teachers? What are teachers *FOR*?
What’s the goal?
That’s why it’s a hiring discussion, but it’s also a retention discussion. It’s about having them at all.
Should be easy to discuss why we would want a person sitting in that seat. Why did we hire them?Report
Wait, you see “why are we hiring teachers?” as a question about the hiring process and not being about the “having a teacher after you hire them”?
That may explain a lot of the disconnect.Report
Yes that’s how I see it. Why are we hiring X is about the reasons an organization goes to the work force to acquire a person with Y skills to do Z job. Its independent of what happens after, which we describe with different words.Report
I see acquiring Y skills to do Z job as part of “what happens after”.
Like, if we’re discussing goals? “Is Z job getting done?” is part of the discussion of why we’re hiring X.
I mean, if we don’t care about Z job getting done, I’d like to know what the answer would be to the question.
Can you give me an example or two?Report
“Where have you seen [providing employment to middle-class people] as a primary hiring goal?”
It was a primary goal of the PPACA, for one.Report
We do tolerate a lot of mediocrity and good-enough performance. You’re making it sound like everyone who’s not in the top 5% of performers lives in poverty, and obviously that’s not true. It really doesn’t take that much effort to have a decent middle-class life, or even upper-middle-class.
This is such a strawman that I’m not even sure what it’s standing in for. What, in concrete terms, are you objecting to here?
Obviously there are people who argue that the top spots should go to the top performers, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is condemned to a crappy life. Why would the top spots not go to the top performers? What other criteria would you use? Lottery? Hereditary sinecure?Report
Jay doesn’t do anything in concrete terms. He asks questions and makes observations . . . .Report
Jay’s comments are generally pretty clear to me. It’s not like he’s making allusions to classical Sanskrit poetry. I don’t know why you guys have so much trouble with them. But in this case I was responding to a comment by Lee.Report
Cognitive dissonance, man. It manifests in weird ways.Report
Then bluntly I must not be very bright. Because most of the time I react as you did here, ask a bunch of questions he never really answers and still mostly have no idea what he’s getting it.
Take the thread above on San Francisco. Read through that. Like really read it. And then tell me what point his initially post was making. Because other then “Markets work but in this case I’m needling Team Blue for WHERE this market works” I still have no idea what he’s on about.Report
This is largely why I now recommend that whenever Jaybird drops some random factoid without actually saying anything, or making any discernible point, we not spend the time and energy begging him to tell us what his point is and playing whack-a mole when he refuses to do it.Report
If your framework for understanding Jaybird is that he’s a conservative, you’ll never understand him because he isn’t. Your framework should be that he’s an INTP. Or you should block him.Report
My frame work is he’s a pot stirrer who hates to be pinned to actual statements of his own opinion, while he’s more then happy to nail us to the wall over ours. If he were really displaying introvert thinking when we present him with actual new data and new ideas he’d incorporate them. Yet you will notice that he disengages as soon as his conclusions meet hard resistance in the form of facts and figures. Not very efficient, now is it.
And INTP doesn’t preclude conservative or libertarian, and he has occasionally dipped into expressions of both.Report
If you keep choosing to misunderstand him and keep choosing to talk about it, I’ll keep pointing out where the problem is.Report
You aren’t actually pointing out the problem. See that would mean typing something like “Philip, you misunderstand Jaybird because when he writes XXX he is doing so for YYY reason and responding to him ZZZ is hindering your engagement.”
It might also mean calling out Jaybird for being less then clear as well.
But so much easier to just hint and wink and nudge about how much easier it is for you to see this then for me.
That aside, calling him an INTP thinker tells us nothing about his politics – which is very unusual for a commenter on a politics page. I stand by my assessment that he has libertarian and conservative political views. He simply refuses to state them clearly and openly.Report
The primary framework for understanding me is that I’m a Catholic conservative. The reason that’s the primary framework is because I’m a J. J’s decide on things. The primary framework for understanding Jaybird is that he’s a P, and they mull things over. An INTP will mull things over for decades, and not merely things they agree with or are inclined to agree with. Their satisfaction comes from examining a thing from all sides. If Jaybird can’t find anyone to challenge his ideas, he’ll do it himself. He may take some libertarian or conservative or liberal views on certain topics for now, but he’s not satisfied with them, and he’ll settle on them when he’s finished thinking about them (which will never happen).Report
His examinations would go a lot farther, and get much different input from us, if he was clear about WHAT he’s examining, WHY he’s examining it, and HOW it relates to other things he brings here to examine. He chooses not to start there however. He chooses to throw things out that appear random to the rest of us, spends a lot of time trying to avoid drawing us to any link to anything, feigns confusion when we don’t see the links he sees and then shrugs his shoulders at us. Which why he gets the responses he gets.
Now sure, maybe it satisfies him in some way and allows him to keep up his thinking. Its still poor communication on his part and often results in a lot of unnecessary and avoidable misunderstandings. And when we do manage to see through the fog and get clarity on where he is, and present him things to think about, that’s when the conversation seems to end.
Take his allegedly linked SF stories of these two threads. He asked a series of what read as fact based analytical questions bout SF’s relationship to other cities in a series of categories. Chip and I have presented data in response. I even asked him what new conclusions he’s drawn, trying to figure out the direction and vector of his thoughts.
Silence.
He may pick it back up later, but if he does so it’s most likely to be in a thread on something else, halfway through another interrogatory where we are all still struggling to understand what the heck he’s talking about. In a place where we all claim to want to be debating political ideas and policy outcomes.
Could I block him and be done with it? Sure – the technology exists to do so. He’d be several layers down the list however, and as i have yet to block a single person here, I see no reason to start now.
What I keep inviting him to do – what indeed many of us would like to do – is have him invite us to his mulling in a way that we understand. Jay doesn’t do that, and while a good many folks here think I should just leave that, his lack of clear communication leaves OT frankly less well off intellectually then it could be.Report
Like I said, if you’re choosing to misunderstand him, you can’t really blame it on him.
ETA: Also, he’d be the first to tell you, he’s not that interesting. Maybe second because I just told you. But none of us are interesting; it’s the ideas that we’re here for. If your voluntary approach to him prevents you from understanding his ideas, what are you getting out of it?Report
His style of writing impacts the ability of a great many of us to understand his ideas. That’s my issue. Not his ideas. How he communicates them.
Again lets look at the SF posts. He has finally allowed as to how he is connecting a series of posts over several months that lead him to ask is it policies or something else driving SF’s “condition. And he’s probing to see if/how that relates to other cities (generally Blue cities). Which is an excellent are of debate for OT.
But he chooses repeatedly to NOT state that from the get go. SO those of us who interact with him spend between 1/2 and 3/4ths of our time simply trying to get clear direct statements of what he’s examining, why he’s examining it, and how it relates to other things. That is not effective communication.
I’d add that around here the ideas one communicates an dhow one communicates are PART of what makes people interesting. But who they are is the other part. You and rarely agree on policy – and we both try to note when we do. I still think you are interesting. I think Jay is interesting. His Icelandic travelogue was wonderfully nuanced and fascinating.
It was also clear, direct and easily understandable. His policy writings – not so much.Report
Jaybird often complains that we’re more interested in talking about him than we are in the substance of whatever he says he wants to talk about instead.
But he makes it about him.
The sad fact is that his idiosyncrasies and his style of discourse are far more interesting than any substantive views he may — or may not — have on whatever he says he wants to talk about.
There are ways to get people to engage with whatever ideas one thinks one has. He should try them.Report
“His examinations would go a lot farther, and get much different input from us, if he was clear about WHAT he’s examining”
He’s plenty clear about what he’s examining.
Your problem is that you’re used to discussions that are just people emoting at each other, and you can’t understand what emoting Jaybird is doing, and you can’t understand it because he isn’t doing it.
“He has finally allowed as to how he is connecting a series of posts over several months that lead him to ask is it policies or something else driving SF’s ‘condition’.”
…it really took you this long to figure that out? Really?Report
Chip and I have presented data in response.
Chip hasn’t, not really. He’s mostly made assertions.
The stuff you provided didn’t address my points but argued against different points.
If there is another major closing that strikes me as being the result of Very Bad Policy, I’ll probably give a link to that too.
Then we can pretend that it has nothing to do with other closings, feign surprise that despite violent crime going up, other crime has gone down, and see that the mayor is demanding more policing despite other crime going down.Report
“Then bluntly I must not be very bright.”
(Danny DeVito leans out of the dispatcher cage) “And the LIGHTBULB COMES ON!”Report
I’d say that the top institutional starting jobs go to people from the top-tier universities. There’s no guarantee that they move up, though, or that a startup won’t put their institution out of business.
I just googled “The Top 100 COO’s of 2022” and yeah, it was telling that they had their name, title, and then their college right at the top. Schools are influential. But the list had a mix of schools on it. I recognized most as big names, but not all.
The #1 ranked COO, Ana Corrales of Google, received a master’s from Stanford, but her undergrad was at University of Washington. The #2, UnitedHealth Group’s Jane Brown, attended the University of Connecticut for her BS, then Dartmouth for her MA, then Tulane Law for her JD. Both of those examples point out that the path to an elite school can go through a good one.Report
Ana Corrales is not actually the COO of Google. She is the COO for Google’s Devices & Service. She’s not even on the executive team for the company: https://craft.co/google/executives
I mean, it’s a nice managerial position, and Google (Well, Alphabet) is huge company so even ‘The person in charge of day-to-day operations of manufacturing smart devices and the app store’ is a pretty big position, but it’s not COO of the place.
Her mother, incidentally, was the Minister of Science and Technology in Costa Rica. Also she was Dean of the University of Costa Rica, arguably the prestigious research university in Central America.
So…I mean, I’m not sure anyone was disputing that you can get into Stanford if your mother was one level down from being in the Costa Rican cabinet and also was Dean of a giant important university.
I had intended to also do this with Jane Brown, who incidentally is now the CEO of Aetna, but I can’t find any information on her background at all.Report
I had trouble tracking down Jane Brown too – too many of them. But any complaints about the list should be directed toward C-Suite.Report
You’re bouncing around here a bit. What is “a top job”?
If “a top job” is “Supreme Court Justice” then we are having one discussion.
If “a top job” is “a good life” then median family income is $71k. This implies the “non-striving” already get good lifes.
The US has many millions of engineers, computer people, and various other STEM jobs. The vast bulk of them didn’t come from MIT or other top universities.Report
The canaries in the coal mine are dropping:
Farmers Insurance Group stops writing new property policies in Florida
https://www.wesh.com/article/farmers-insurance-property-policies-florida/44189948#
“Over the past 18 months in Florida, we’ve had 15 companies decide to stop writing new business,” Mark Friedlander, the Insurance Information Institute’s spokesperson, said.
The Insurance Information Institute’s Mark Friedlander says Florida homeowners in search of new coverage have fewer and fewer options, as companies put a pause on new property policies.
This comes on the heels of Allstate and State Farm deciding to no longer write policies in California due to increased wildfire danger.
Climate change isn’t some future hypothetical science fiction. Its fact, and its happening right now.Report
The insurance market for homeowners in Florida is teetering on the brink. Farmers is just the latest to drop out.Report
The Right is in denial about climate change and our side has too many people who believe we can virtue ourselves into doing something climate change rather than apply policy punishments. At least insurance companies are willing to apply policy punishments in this matter. Doing something about climate change is going to require politicians to impose things that will not be popular. We are doomed.Report
Check out the most accurate data before you say we’re doomed (20 years of good data is better than GIGO). Then ask yourself, “who benefits?”
Creating problems in order to have something to solve is a politician’s specialty. “Imposing things that will not be popular”… kinda like mandatory vaccinations, no? Wonder what problem that solves?Report
Shelby Steele’s son has a thread about his card getting broken into and his documentary equipment stolen:
The whole thread is rough. He talks about going to the police with his report and what happens from there.Report
Greenville, Alabama police investigating rash of car burglaries
https://www.waka.com/2023/06/15/greenville-police-investigating-rash-of-car-burglaries/
Greenville police need your help solving a rash of car burglaries.
Police have released a photo and video of an unknown suspect. The break-ins happened Monday, June 5, and Monday, June 12, in the areas of Hillcrest Drive, Westwood Circle, Woodvalley Road, and West Gamble Street.
Investigators say the suspect broke into eight vehicles and stole property that included three guns and money.
They believe the suspect is a tall and thin black male, who was seen wearing a head covering and gloves that have reflective strips on the outside.
If you have information that could help police, call Central Alabama CrimeStoppers at (334) 215-STOP. CrimeStoppers is offering a cash reward to help solve this case. You can remain anonymous.Report
Per 1000 of pop, Greenville Alabama has a violent crime rate which is about 3x San Fran, however their property crime rate is only about two thirds.
Having said that, San Fran’s homeless population is 5x larger than Greenville’s entire population.
Scale is a thing and brings problems of it’s own.
Greenville’s organized crime rate is probably zero, so the local stores don’t have to worry about organized crime rings looting them.
The big summation is your experience can vary.Report
Fun fact: the median value of owner-occupied housing units in Greenville is more than an order of magnitude smaller than San Francisco.Report
No doubt for excellent reasons.Report
I’m in San Francisco five days a week and in the allegedly crime ridden down town section with it’s empty office blocks. I have seen nothing like this.Report
With a car?Report
Without having read the article, is the point of this tweet to document the crime wave or the fact that the cops seem entirely uninterested in doing anything about it?Report
It’s an anecdote with a single story of what happened with a little bit of sonder involving others who claim similar with a pinch of the cops expressing sympathy and communicating that there is nothing that they can do.
If you want something closer to data, you can go here but the story is from November 2021 so who knows whether it’s relevant in June 2023.Report
“We just left police station. The officer was kind and took down all info. She expressed sympathy and said nothing will likely happen: “The police have been defanged.””
WTF does that even mean? The police can’t investigate crimes unless they get to crack a few skulls without repercussion. What utter horsesh*t.Report
The license plate to the vehicle that was caught on camera was stolen from another car.
What can you do?
Keep the windows rolled down and don’t leave so much as a stick of gum where it can be seen.
Also, I understand that a lot of people go downtown all the time and have never seen anything like this.Report
Maybe defund doesn’t ring so hollow now, eh?Report
We have to keep *SOME* cops around to arrest the vigilantes who will eventually show up.Report
Do we?Report
What’s the goal?Report
of keeping the cops? I’d say its continuing to provide protection to the property and persons of a segment of society at the expense of everyone else.
Of eliminating the cops? Taking a repressive, armed, trained paramilitary force out of play and replacing it with other agencies and people with other training who actually address problems impacting citizens.Report
replacing it with other agencies and people with other training who actually address problems impacting citizens.
Will these be the folks arresting the Daniel Pennys and the Jordan Williamses?Report
As the reporting on the two cases appears to show them to be wildly different, I suspect not. We can’t reform modern policing into a friendly detention force.Report
Perhaps “Defund” will have upsides.Report
Yes. If the gov can’t supply order then people will create it themselves. That’s why gated communities is a worrying trend.
At the extreme we’ve seen the gov being unable or unwilling to supply order and local militias or death squads form. That’s mostly been an issue in other countries but it’s a basic human reaction.Report
South American death squads in the 1970’s-1990’s were arms of the government. Ditto militias in a number of African countries in the last two decades. Mostly in places with extant militaries and police which were legally prohibited from doing what the death squads did.
Mexican drug cartel death squads are a somewhat different beast – but they do not exist because of a lack of policing. Heck, the cartel’s have allegedly bribed enough police to make the death squads almost unnecessary.Report
I think “arms of the gov” is over stating it.
I remember an article doing a deep dive on one of their creations and the fourth time in a year the local rich man got kidnaped he decided he’d be better off funding a death squad.
Similarly CHOP saw the police not step in and we had a local militia form and take over within days.
These are “power vacuum” issues.Report
The crazy thing about CHOP is that it was ostensibly a response to an unlawful killing by police but two black kids got killed and THEY COVERED IT UP.
WHICH IS NUTSReport
And by “nuts” you mean “Entirely foreseeable and predicted, indeed to the point of being virtually inevitable to all except morons.”Report
You’d be shocked to hear that so many people supported the CHOP despite that. Like, as it was going on.
It was an enthusiastic farmer’s market, maaaaaan.Report
The people who thought it easily foreseeable are the ones who don’t want to get rid of the police.
Before CHOP (and the negative polling) we had various people who said “yes they’re serious about totally getting rid of the police”.
Their ideology proclaimed that the police were the source of the problems, the source of violence, of repression, so without the police things wouldn’t be perfect but they would be much better.
What happened is the wheels instantly came off. No police results in empowering lunatics, gangs, and criminals (which flocked there because no police).Report
It took 3 days for Raz the Warlord to establish himself as community policing.
It took 3 weeks for a black kid to get killed.
Report
What is the difference between open carry/ stand your ground “The police can’t protect you so you better arm yourself” and CHOP?Report
Carry is because, although it’s very unlikely, you might end up with the cops minutes away when seconds count.
However most situations aren’t like that. Gun ownership carries risks and my risk benefit eval is currently negative. If one of my attractive daughters gets stalked I may change my mind.
CHOP removed the cops so they were then hours away when minutes mattered. A whole bunch of situations that normally they’d handle were now not handled.
Trying to equate them is trying to claim there can never be a situation where the cops aren’t there or drop the ball.Report
No, the cops were always right outside the borders, minutes away, and in did in fact show up a couple times during the existence of CHOP.
It just seems to me that CHOP is the NRA ideal of an armed society being a polite society.Report
Wanna see us discuss this sort of thing in real time?Report
If you read the wiki of CHOP you’d see my “hours away” is a pretty good description.
My favorite example is the Pulse shooting. The people huddled in the bathroom waiting to die while the cops were deciding what they’d do. The people in the bathroom didn’t turn to each other and exclaim how glad they were to be gun free.
Backing it up to how society should work is a mistake. Pulse and CHOP are how things actually do work. Not all the time, but occasionally.
We don’t have the ability to disarm everyone. We have the ability to disarm the law abiding but in a lucky decade (century?) they’re not the source of the problem.
In an unlucky time the gov is the source of the problem.Report
Every time I have experienced someone open carrying, they haven’t shot a black kid.
Every time I have experienced the CHAZ/CHOP, a black kid was murdered and the murder was covered up by the community.Report
They’ll be more motivated to deal with people they actually want to emulate? I doubt it.Report
Here’s some more data:
https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/911-call-volume-and-responseReport
Let’s see… percent of calls answered within 15 seconds:
April 2022: 89%
May 2022: 86%
June 2022: 80%
July 2022: 82%
August 2022: 82%
September 2022: 82%
October 2022: 80%
November 2022: 81%
December 2022: 76%
January 2023: 81%
February 2023: 77%
March 2023: 78%
April 2023: 7700%
May 2023: 8020%
They really turned things around in April and May!
Unless there is an error somewhere and the actual numbers are 77% and 80%.Report
I’m sorry the data doesn’t comport with your priors.Report
I think if they managed to go from being able to answer 78% of calls to being able to answer 7700% of them, then that’s something that the rest of the country should emulate.
That said, 7700% strikes me as an obvious math error and it doesn’t pass the sniff test.Report
Well, yes… it is clearly an error with the decimal point. And you knew that. But here we are.. discussing it anyway because that is what you chose to focus on when provided with a substantial data set that relates to something you are discussing.Report
Here is some additional data which, thank goodness, appears to have no errors with the decimal points:
https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rate-and-property-crime-rate
It only goes through April but doesn’t show this year to be any sort of outlier as regards what they call “Actual Thefts from Vehicles.”Report
Yeah, when you go to the first tab and check “cumulative count of theft from vehicles by month and year”, you see that 2023’s numbers are a hair lower than 2022’s numbers.
And compared to 2017, they’re really good!Report
Well, acknowledging that it is an error with the decimal point gets us to looking at how it moved from the high-mid-80s to the low-80s (dipping into the high 70s).
Which isn’t a vector in the good direction.Report
Yes. That one metric is trending in the wrong direction.
Number of calls is holding fairly steady with historic norms.
Though, I’m having a hard time finding specific info on how SF’s 911 calls are handled. Did you know that, in many areas, 911 does not call the local police station but instead calls a dispatch center that may not actually be a part of any of the local services themselves?
Not sure if that is how SF works but if we want to talk about how 911 responses maybe we should (GULP) know the goals of the 911 system.Report
Well, according to the website that you provided:
Report
Yes. That is indeed a quote from my link. Bravo for accurately copying-and-pasting.Report
Did you see that they set a goal for themselves in the quotation?
Did you see that the goal that they set was exactly the movement in the wrong direction that was discussed earlier in this very thread?Report
Yes, I read the entirety of the link I shared.
You seem to have also.
Do you have something to say about it?Report
To summarize MY argument (because I believe in making and owning an argument):
The original Tweet is unrepresentative of reality on the ground in San Francisco. So much so that the author or that Tweet acknowledged that he may not have been hung up on but rather the call might have been disconnected and his initial characterization may have been a result of his anger. Further, the available data shows that vehicle-related thefts are in line with historic trends. Further, calls to 9-1-1, a loose-ish measure of crime, are also in line with historical trends. Lastly, while SF is not meeting established expectations for 9-1-1 responses, there is no reason to believe that their current 9-1-1 responses are uniquely problematic, as was (admittedly wrongly, by the Tweeter) implied.
So… what YOU got, sir?Report
You mean this tweet?
Yeah, he not only said that he hung up on one, he demonstrated being disconnected in another call.
My criticisms of San Francisco are not that their problems are unique, Kazzy.
It’s that they exist and are getting worse and are even getting worse by their own standards.
And there is no way that this can be blamed on the opposition. These failures are INTRINSIC to local policy.Report
Dude, do you know what words mean? He *clarified* disconnected as *opposed to* hung up on. You then… argued the opposite?
Your criticisms are that problems exist but the data shows those problems don’t exist.
Again, my links show no uptick in theft from autos. So… what’s the problem?Report
Let’s workshop this:
“Here’s the video of the second 911 call after the first call was hung up/disconnected.”
So… first call was either hung up OR disconnected.
“Here we get disconnected again.”
[‘Again’ suggests the same thing happened twice.]
“(Above, I said hung up in heat of moment.)”
[He acknowledges that the claims of a deliberate hang up were motivated by his very understandable emotions in the moment.]
You looked at that and think he meant… what exactly?
His criticisms of the unreliability of the 9-1-1 system stand. The SF Gov’s own data shows they have been failing to meet their own standards for a while now. An admitted issue.
But nothing suggests your initial IMPLICATION (because god forbid you make an argument) that crime is up and 9-1-1 services are down. ALL are within historic norms. If you think historic norms are a problem, so be it. Argue that. A single tweet neither proves nor disproves years of trends.Report
His criticisms of the unreliability of the 9-1-1 system stand.
Oh good! I thought that we were going to say that 911 wasn’t a failure because he was *DISCONNECTED* and not *HUNG UP ON*.
But nothing suggests your initial IMPLICATION (because god forbid you make an argument) that crime is up and 9-1-1 services are down.
My implication is that crime is unreasonably high and they’ve reached a breaking point where, for example, companies are leaving downtown.
Some of the companies have stated their reasons for leaving. They include stuff like crime. Their statements, as far as I can google, check out.
A single tweet neither proves nor disproves years of trends.
True. But they do do a good job of knocking down the whole “that’s not happening” and its cousin “well, that hasn’t ever happened to me”.
Already, London Breed is reversing stuff that was fashionable a short two years ago.
My prediction? We’re going to have two conflicting fashions soon.Report
So we agree! Crime in SF is as it’s has been for a long time, with some people experiencing it but most people not, and businesses are doing what businesses always do and making business decisions based on myriad factors. Cool!Report
Well, I think that a tipping point has been reached.
Are you familiar with the term “doom loop”?
Well, it’s reached the point where pundits are talking about how difficult it will be for London Breed to avoid falling into one.
It’s like saying “high blood pressure isn’t that big of a deal! I know a guy who has had it for years!”
And you know what? For years maybe it’s not that big of a deal. Indeed, plenty of people live with high blood pressure for years.Report
My implication is that crime is unreasonably high and they’ve reached a breaking point where, for example, companies are leaving downtown.
Again, you don’t have any statistics or facts which suggest this. All the actual statistics suggest that SF is just an ordinary city, middle of the pack in terms of crime and disorder and that crime is resuming its long term downward trend.
You know this. We’ve pointed it out to you many times.
But you keep trying to find some new angle of attack, some new anecdote which you hope to divine into being an omen, a harbinger of doom.Report
Again, you don’t have any statistics or facts which suggest this.
I mostly just keep quoting what the companies leaving are saying. I’ll note, they’re not saying “crime”. They’re using talk-arounds. Here, let’s quote this again:
Concerns over street conditions.
Hey, most people haven’t gotten their cars broken into and equipment stolen.
And it’s not like we’ve seen anecdotal evidence of people giving up on reporting stuff to the police!Report
Yes, that’s what I said.
You just keep quoting some anecdote from a guy.
Oh wait:
BH Properties acquires shopping center on SF’s Fisherman’s Wharf
BH Properties is buying a 200,000-square-foot shopping center and parking garage on Fisherman’s Wharf following its $65 million purchase of Holy Names University in Oakland.
…
Despite the vacancies, Fisherman’s Wharf has been described as “crowded” compared to other San Francisco shopping and tourism districts.
Rhonda Diaz, a broker with JLL, said that a client described the Wharf as an “oasis in San Francisco” during a recent tour. It has “more regional visitors than before the pandemic,” she said.
“Many of the restaurants on the wharf are exceeding pre-pandemic levels, in particular projects like Pier 39,” Diaz said. “There is a perception of safety. They have security.”
Holy cow! You hear that? Some person said, and let me quote, “There is a perception of safety. They have security.”
A real estate broker said that. You can’t argue with that!
Proof that SF is thriving, due entirely to the progressive wisdom of its leaders!Report
You see “a guy” and I see “the guy explaining why he walked away from the hotel”.
“That’s just his opinion, man!”
“He’s the official spokesperson for the corporation that walked away.”
Now let’s get to your example.
Yes! There are people willing to make bets on San Francisco! (For example: If you think that the spokesperson was wrong about walking away from the hotel, you should invest with the people who pick it up.)
But let’s look at the quotation that you provided:
That’s one hell of an odd thing to be proud of.
Is there reason to believe that other places might be less investible due to a lack of these things?Report
I just keep coming back to this broker, an expert on real estate investment, saying that things are great, better than before.
It feels like an omen, a portent of something good on the horizon.Report
I’m not seeing where she said that, Chip.
I’m seeing what she did say:
An oasis? An oasis from what? What is the desert that the Wharf is an oasis in?
Safety? Security? Why in the hell is “safety” notable?Report
Hmm.
Food for thought. We have one guy abandoning an investment, and another guy making an investment, in the very same city.
Maybe we should gather statistics about crime and disorder.Report
Perhaps the one guy who abandoned his investment did so in the “desert” part of the city and the person who made their investment did so in the “oasis” part?Report
Truly, whether SF is on the upswing, or in a doom loop is an unknowable mystery.
In the meantime, here is a city that definitely is in a doom loop of crime and disorder- Warsaw, Missouri.
https://www.ky3.com/2023/06/06/benton-county-mo-sheriffs-office-prioritizing-emergency-calls-because-staff-shortages/
Warsaw is in such chaos, that violent crime is nearly double the national average, and police are not able to respond to anything but the most sever life-threatening cases.
Get this- the only grocery store in Warsaw is in danger of closing, due to the poor business climate.
Warsaw is an entirely conservative area so I think we can all agree that this conclusively proves how disastrous conservative policies are.Report
Man, San Francisco is now worth comparing to Warsaw, Missouri?
It’s worse than I thought.
I mean, it’s one thing to compare San Francisco to Portland.
Now we’re comparing it to cities in freakin’ Missouri?Report
I’m not comparing them, not at all.
I’m just saying how many conservative areas are in a doom loop of disorder.Report
See, because it might be useful to compare them.
And compare how we’re comparing San Francisco to them to how we used to compare San Francisco to Portland or New Orleans or Austin.Report
Hmm.
OK, I admit when I’m wrong.
Lets compare SF with other major cities across America to see how it compares.
https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state/Report
Oh, so we shouldn’t compare it to Warsaw, then?
Are the other major cities across America also fighting to keep out of a “Doom Loop”? Or, at least, do they have serious journalists reporting that that’s what their mayors are trying to keep out of?
I mean, what is the comparison that you want us to look at?
The main thing that I keep looking at is the whole “house of cards falling down as a result of local policy” thing. My favorite examples are the stuff that show that local policy is taking a new direction.
That includes stuff like school board recalls, DA recalls, and London Breed getting into snark fights with fellow representatives in meetings after talking about how she’s going to go in a new direction.
Sometimes that entails crime. Sometimes that entails quality of life issues. Sometimes that entails businesses leaving the city. I’d like to thank you for your example from earlier because it also includes businesses investing in certain parts of the city because they part of the city they’re investing in is an “oasis” that has “safety” and comes out and says “They have security.”
And over and over again, people say that the stuff that is happening in San Francisco is happening all over and they give examples like Appalachia and Missouri.
The policies that San Francisco has embraced over the last decade or so has turned it into a place that makes it comparable to MISSOURI, Chip!
MISSOURI!!!Report
So… the goalposts are here, or sometimes over here, or other times way over there.
So like even though we all agree that crime in SF isn’t unusual, and is in fact lower than other cities, lower than rural areas, still, you sense it is in a doom loop because, well, you just have a feeling, a vibe, a gut hunch, y’know, stuff that folks are saying, maybe a bad Yelp review.
That’s fine.
That’s all I wanted to show.Report
No, the argument is about a “house of cards falling down as a result of local policy” thing.
It’s the various demands for evidence that keep changing.
I keep pointing to stuff like the things that have been documented (like the school board recalls, the DA recalls, the statements provided by corporations leaving the city, the statements provided by corporations that choose to invest in the “oasis” that has “safety” and “security”) and people keep jumping and saying “LET’S COMPARE IT TO MISSOURI!” or “NOW LET’S COMPARE IT TO A RECENT LOCAL MAXIMA!”
When I address where their own personal goalposts happen to be, they accuse me of being the one who moved them.Report
So, your metrics to demonstrate a failure of city are:
1. If they recall a school board member;
2. If they recall a DA;
3. Businesses leaving the city;
4. Comments by businesses;
Is that the yardstick we’re going with?
So if we find other cities with recalls and loss of business we could say they are also failing due to bad leadership?
And conversely, if we see other cities without recalls or loss of businesses, we can say they are not failing?
Or do we then pivot to talking about shoplifting, or schools, or car burglaries?Report
You seem to misunderstand.
The School Board Recalls were evidence of even the populace saying “this is nuts, stop!”
Same for the recall of the DA. “These policies are awful!”
When it comes to businesses leaving a city and saying “we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges, both old and new: record high office vacancy; concerns over street conditions; lower return to office than peer cities; and a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand”, taking them at their word unless I have reason not to and cursory googling shows that, yes, these reasons have grounding in reality.
And the comments by businesses that are investing in San Francisco say stuff like “We’re investing in this particular part of town because it’s an oasis and it has safety and it has security”, taking them at their word and asking “what is it an oasis from?” and “why is safety/security notable?”
So if we find other cities with recalls and loss of business we could say they are also failing due to bad leadership?
I suppose we could. There’s a lot of bad leadership out there, after all.
And conversely, if we see other cities without recalls or loss of businesses, we can say they are not failing?
Not necessarily (they may be failing in other ways!) but businesses that are still there deciding to not leave can be a good indicator for the business environment. I mean, if the school districts are failing, pointing to how great the burrito joints around town are doing is to argue against something else than the argument being made.
Or do we then pivot to talking about shoplifting, or schools, or car burglaries?
Or talk about 911! And how the city has a goal for itself that it is getting worse at.Report
You’re demonstrating my point.
You’re taking things that seem minor or random, like the recall of a DA, and assigning Great Importance as omens of something much bigger. But you do this on an arbitrary manner.
By your own words, the metrics for whether a city is failing or not can vary widely- sometimes its crime that is the Portentous Omen, sometimes its 911 service, sometimes its schools, but, oh, sometimes even in failing cities businesses decide to remain and school board recalls aren’t that big of an omen after all.
And this renders your conclusion (that liberal policies produce failure) laughable.
There are plenty of examples of liberal cities which don’t have school board recalls, which aren’t losing businesses, and which have good schools and low crime.
And of course there are plenty of examples of conservative cities which are exactly the opposite.
Your metrics and how important they are, are entirely arbitrary, designed to work backwards from a conclusion rather than towards one.Report
I’m not assigning Great Importance.
I’m saying that the evidence is piling up and there is more and more of it. There’s this small thing here, that small thing there, this other small thing over here…
And even when others provide evidence of things turning around, the evidence they give has little tidbits like the whole “oasis” thing.
And there will be some more evidence later this week, another piece here, another piece there.
“That’s just a small thing!”, you can yell.Report
But your choice of what counts as “evidence” is entirely arbitrary.
One business over here fails, and that is “evidence”.
Meanwhile, two blocks away, another business thrives but that isn’t evidence because, well, reasons.
A guy’s car gets broken into and this is “evidence”. But car burglaries in other cities isn’t evidence because shut up that’s why and anyway crime isn’t the metric.
A district attorney gets recalled and this is “evidence” of voter discontent. Meanwhile the public defender wins re-election unopposed, but this isn’t evidence of voter contentment because, oh hell, who even knows.
You’re just randomly picking and choosing which anecdote, which election return, which business closure is meaningful.
And none of your metrics can be applied to other cities because they are the wrong size, or don’t have a bay, or maybe its trolley cars.Report
What would you see as “evidence”, Chip?
Is there anything?Report
Well, lets start with what normal people consider to be evidence of a city in failure mode.
Things like collapsing property values, high crime rates, high unemployment, political corruption.
Metrics that are measurable, metrics that can be applied to all cities everywhere.
And if you want to go further and reach a conclusion that this is due to bad politics, then you have to match them all up and demonstrate that failing cities have the same politics as other failing cities.Report
Then we will continue to wait.
More stories like this one may pop up for a while… and then we will see.
We’ll just continue to wait.Report
There’s this small thing here, that small thing there, this other small thing over here…
Small.
Perhaps I’m biased by the times and places where I lived, but real problems are like New York City in the mid- and late-1970s. San Francisco general-obligation muni bonds are rated AAA, not on the verge of default. There’s nothing that looks like Bed-Stuy or the South Bronx of that era. SFAIK, the tourist areas aren’t no-go after dark.
Mountains out of molehills comes to mind.Report
That’s a good point. AAA bonds wandering down to AA+ would be a good piece of evidence that stuff is moving in the wrong direction. Not *FAILURE* given that AA+ is still pretty strong.
But it’s movement.
The tourist areas aren’t no-go after dark. Fair enough. That can be another measurement.
We’ll keep an eye out.Report
Lots, and lots of conservative areas are in a doom loop of “disorder” — Pitcher, Treece, Germany. It’s what happens when you run your electric cars on lignite.
Curiously enough, even if we take your numbers, Warsaw has a FIFTH of the violent crime of San Francisco.
What is Warsaw doing RIGHT?!Report
SF seems to have a lot more homeless and a lot less housing than most of it’s peers.Report
I’ve lived in NYC for over 40 years. I take the usual precautions anyone with any sense takes in any major city. In those 40-plus years, my car was broken into once. The police didn’t do anything about it for the very sensible reason that there was nothing they could do, which is usually the case.
These days, I suppose I would be expected to tweet about it.Report
“Leads, yeah, sure. I’ll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they’ve got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts!”Report
That’s probably what it would take to solve the mine-run car break-in, and even then it would be unlikely they’d solve it. Fortunately, the cops prioritize differently.Report
You put cameras on every street to track motion and have a drone that snaps a 360 degree photo once a minute for the entire day.
When a crime happens you look back in time and see who did what. If you also have face recognition then it will go much faster.
This is all stuff various police departments have experimented with, it’s on the shelf.Report
As I understand it, the UK does the camera on every street thing. I have no idea — do they solve many crimes that way?Report
Just judging by all the British cop/detective shows my wife and I watch, the answer is a resounding yes.Report
Well then, let’s raise taxes to expand the power of government to monitor the minute-by-minute actions of its citizens.Report
A few years ago Baltimore was experimenting with drones flying over the city monitoring for crime. Ultimately the 4th circuit held it unconstitutional.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/en-banc-4th-circ-rules-baltimores-air-surveillance-unconstitutional-2021-06-24/
IIRC the issue wasn’t so much the monitoring of suspects but that it was effectively monitoring something like 90% of the city’s population at all times.Report
To be clear, I in no way support that. I was being snarky about a conservative suggesting a massive expansion of the surveillance state and all costs associated with it.Report
Nah I hear you. Just thought it was an interesting tidbit that it has in fact been tried. The police and the government said it was useful, but they would, wouldn’t they. I’m not sure whether they were ever able to substantiate that assertion, and given the constitutional issues I’m not sure how much it would matter if they could.Report
Drones also seem wildly unreliable. But, hey, no fair that the military gets drones and the po-po doesn’t!Report
There was another recent subway vigilante incident.
Jordan Williams and his girlfriend were confronted by an individual on the subway who crudely propositioned the girlfriend when Jordan pushed the individual away. The individual started punching Jordan and Jordan managed to retrieve a folding knife and applied it to the individual ending the altercation. The individual passed as a result of this application.
Jordan’s mother has started a GiveSendGo to help cover legal expenses for Jordan. You can donate to it here.Report
I suspect if that bears out, it will be self defense. Unlike Daniel Perry who has now been indicted for second degree manslaughter.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/14/us/daniel-penny-indicted-jordan-neely-chokehold/index.htmlReport
Based on facts reported so far this one seems a little less ‘it could go either way’ than the Penny incident. I mean if the decedent was in fact punching Williams (and allegedly his girlfriend!) while they were cornered on a subway train I’m not sure what he was supposed to do. Sounds like the judge at arraignment was also skeptical about the charges and Williams was released without bail.Report
You haven’t given us enough information to come up with a response to it. I mean, “Jordan Williams” could easily be a black or white name. And you didn’t identify the color of the other person, or even the gender and current transition status.Report
He is, apparently, Baptist.Report
https://www.yahoo.com/news/brooklyn-subway-stabber-jordan-williams-211300327.htmlReport
“The dead man, who appeared to be drunk, was talking about “white power” before asking the girlfriend if she wanted to have sex, with Williams then shoving the victim as things escalated.”
OK, we know what the answer is; we can reverse-engineer the narrative now.Report
Thank God. Nothing is worse than waiting for our position assignments.Report
I have to share this:
https://youtu.be/JONzK-AUzro
Caution NSFW language, but cannot be enjoyed on mute.Report
Ad is polling well among independents.
Part of me thinks ironic AI campaigning is the future; the other part also thinks it is the future.
Edit: Ad is created by Daily Show … which makes it?Report
I was surprised at the apparent creator too, and had no idea the Daily Show did comedy. But hey funny is funny.Report
Meanwhile Team Kamala is performing forensic analysis to find the connection to Team Buttigieg and is workshopping Alfred E. Neuman as Transportation Secretary AI spoofs.Report
That’s awesome.Report
That’s just because you’ve had your B12 shot already today.Report
Ya gotta do whatcha gotta do.Report
That was great fun.Report
Political branding, episode umpteenth:
Weary parents, young children bused from Texas to L.A. in latest ‘political stunt’
The bus pulled into Union Station in downtown Los Angeles carrying weary parents who had spent more than 20 hours on the road trying to soothe their infants and toddlers.
Carrying a woman whose husband had been separated from her family at the border and who is fighting deportation in Texas. Carrying 42 migrants from Guatemala, Venezuela, Haiti and at least one from China — among other countries.
The group, which arrived Wednesday afternoon, is among more than 21,600 migrants who have been transported across the country from Texas, under a plan hastily instituted by Lone Star State Gov. Greg Abbott last year.
…
Though many of those who arrived in L.A. have connections in the region, some families have immigration hearings set in other states — including New York — creating logistical concerns. Organizers on the ground added that they learned of the impending arrival only the night before and believe it was meant to catch them flat-footed.
“It’s so important to really reiterate that what happened here was meant to be a political stunt. It was meant to shock Los Angeles and meant to have us not be able to welcome these people humanely,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney and executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.
…
As governors in other states began transporting migrants across the country, L.A. officials and organizers began to prepare.
Shortly after Mayor Karen Bass took office, she directed city departments to begin planning in the event that L.A. “was on the receiving end of a despicable stunt that Republican Governors have grown so fond of,” she said in a statement Wednesday.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-15/texas-sends-busload-of-42-migrants-to-los-angeles
What’s remarkable about this is that this is something conservatives are proud of, and boast about. Deliberately using desperate people as pawns in a game designed to leave them stranded and without recourses, intended to cause them pain and suffering.
Meanwhile, the liberals are offering them protection and care.Report
South Boarder has about 2.75 million illegal immigrants per year.
That’s 7.5k a day.
21k immigrants is less that three days worth.
Liberals are patting themselves on the back on (and flipping out over) less than 1% of what they insist the border states handle. That’s why the Conservatives are doing this and why it’s popular.
If LA (by itself) were to handle 21k people every month then they would deserve that “offer them protection and care” title you’re boasting about. If they did 21k a year then they wouldn’t be pulling their weight because LA has more than one percent of the nation’s population.
Instead they handled 42. Once. And them being sent there is described as “pain and suffering” because it’s just unthinkable that LA deal with even that number.Report
You do know California is a southern border state right? A state that between April 2021 and May 2023 (when Title 42 expired), received and provided support to 350,000 migrants that crossed its segment of the border?Report
Yes. So you’d think there would be a lot less pearl clutching over a few dozen immigrants.
Now LA is 150+ miles from the boarder so maybe that’s the issue right there.
Either LA is already set up to deal with tens of thousands of immigrants so 42 isn’t even a rounding error or they’re not.Report
The pearl clutching isn’t over the migrants, its over the way in which they arrived and the disbelief that Texas thinks California isn’t dealing with this issue as well.Report
The way in which they arrived? The expectation should be that whatever chartered bus or airplane was used was much better than sitting in the desert on the border.
This hits the radar as similar to Liberals pearl clutching over the South’s school integration issues… while ignoring that Blue areas are normally worse.Report
I’m just reciting facts which are not in dispute.
1. Republican states are designing transfer programs with the specific purpose of inflicting harm on immigrants, in the hopes of embarrassing liberals.
2. Liberals are responding with care and compassion in resettling the immigrants.
Opinions vary as to whether these are good facts or bad facts , but these facts are proudly boasted of by Republicans.Report
Being sent to a “care and compassion” Blue state is “inflicting harm on immigrants”?Report
Aaaand, this is why we say there is no such thing as a “moderate” Republican.
Because even conservatives who speak in full sentences and use polite words, can always be counted on to throw themselves in front of any criticism of the most rabid reactionaries.Report
I quoting your own words back at you and asking if you’re serious and/or if you’d like to explain them.
Your reply here isn’t explaining what you meant, or what your reasoning was.
My expectation is none of what you said is justifiable. That sending people to Blue states for service isn’t “inflicting harm” on them. And more importantly, the “care and compassion” the liberals are showing isn’t meant to scale to the size of the problem.
That last is what the conservatives are showcasing. That a “sanctuary city that welcomes all” barely is able to deal with a few dozen and is aghast that they need to do even that much.Report
DeSantis and Abbot make it clear, and their supporters chortle, at how these sudden unannounced and secretive transfers will cause chaos and embarrassment to the cities.
And shrug in indifference at the harm this chaos will inflict on the migrants, who are seen by them, and you, as mere pawns, inanimate objects to be used in a sadistic game.
You aren’t even denying it, but trying to obfuscate and bury it under bureaucratic euphemisms.
You don’t have to support this. Repudiating it won’t damage your conservative beliefs.Report
If you were an immigrant fleeing war, would you rather be a Blue City which is offering services and settlement or would you rather be sitting in some tent on the border? This is political grandstanding but it’s not “inflicting harm” on the people involved.
You are talking as though Blue Cities who support immigration are the moral equiv of a Na.zi death camp and/or have the resources of a hick town in Appalachia.
It’s unrealistic, unfair, and shockingly unproductive to expect tiny towns on the border to deal with vast waves of immigration. Some of these places need to process double digit percentages of the local community’s population every month, or at the worst, every day.
That’s a policy which should be expected to “inflict harm” on these human waves. The obvious thing to do is to disperse the immigrants, ideally by sending them to places which will support them.
Ideally this would involve self selection. So an immigrate friendly place, like the Blue Cities which are claiming that they’re friendly to immigrants and want open borders, should get a lot.
What DeSantis has done thus far isn’t even close to “a lot”. If the Blue City flinches from dealing way less than one percent of the population, often just a few dozen people, then they have no business claiming that they’re in favor of open borders and welcome immigration.Report
I never said that being transported to blue cities was the harm.
But you already know this. The choice by DeSantis and Abbot to deliberately do this in secret without warning or coordination in order to cause chaos is embarrassing to you, so you deflect and talk about something else instead.Report
I don’t view it as embarrassing.
I’m amused at how you’re trying to spin what he’s doing to the Blue areas as worse than what illegal immigrants do to Red and themselves.
Oh, so that’s the part that’s totally unacceptable. Having several dozen people show up without warning will obviously cause chaos in a Blue Sanctuary city.
Now when tens of thousands of people show up without warning in a Red border city, that’s different.Report
I’m just reciting the facts.
Abbot and DeSantis used these people as pawns to embarrass (or “showcase” as you call it) liberal cities.
They weren’t trying to help the immigrants.
They weren’t trying to cooperate with the cities to create an orderly flow of asylum seekers.
They went way out of their way to use people as pawns.
This is just the bare bones facts which no one can dispute.
It would really reflect well on you if you did find it embarrassing.Report
Abbot and DeSantis are certainly using them as pawns.
The problem with the rest of your logic is these are desperate people in serious need of help.
If Blue cities are the ethical and practical equiv of a Na.zi death camp or something similar, then your logic makes sense.
If these Blue cities are a serious step up from what’d we normally do to them, then he’s doing them a massive favor.
You seem to be claiming both that these cities are a massive step up AND ALSO that DeSantis is heinous for sending them there.
Blue is flipping out and/or congratulating themselves on dealing with less than one percent of what happens to the border. It seems welcoming all immigrants wasn’t supposed to include welcoming any immigrants.Report
You seem to be claiming both that these cities are a massive step up AND ALSO that DeSantis is heinous for sending them there.
Precisely, because, as you say, “Abbot and DeSantis are certainly using them as pawns.”
Conservatives are content to use people as pawns because they don’t consider them to be people at all.
These migrants are just chattel, un-persons who aren’t worthy of dignity or compassion.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-17/sacramento-migrants-venezuela-texas-desantis-newsom-california
The article details how DeSantis lied and tricked immigrants into being flown at taxpayer expense across the country, then dumped and abandoned.Report
Democrats treat immigrant children as political pawns, pushing them into the arms of their kidnappers and then onto be raped until they are eventually murdered.
I say this as a former Democrat (and current liberal), who supported Obama’s “kids in cages” plan.
When you run on the maltreatment of children, I’m going to rake you over the coals for it. Again and again and again.
Sometimes it sucks knowing law enforcement. This is one of those times. Sounds nice, doesn’t it, getting all the kids out of cages? Problem is, you’re committing to solving crimes committed in wartorn countries. And… that’s really not happening.Report
We often talk about policing, and how it might be best to “reform” it rather then to tear it all down and start over. Up thread we are discussing the police response or lack there of to a car break in in San Francisco, as part of a large discussion of the effectiveness of liberal policies in large cities.
So reading about DoJ’s findings regarding the Minneapolis PD I’m left wondering how you reform this:
Perhaps the most damning part is the discussion in that last paragraph about how cops stopped recording demographic information for traffic stops. One would expect that such a data pull back was done intentionally because the data make them look bad – which it most certainly does.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/06/16/investigation-of-minneapolis-police-garland-remarksReport
“Reform” and “Tear It Down” both suffer from the same flaw, which is that the status quo of militarized/ corrupt/ brutal policing is very popular.Report
Thank goodness for “More Funding!”Report
I’ve had a dozen plus encounters with the cops over the last 40 years. I haven’t observed militarized/corrupt/brutal policing. My experience has been that of professionalism and competence.
If we extend that to everyone I’ve spoken to, that seems to be the same story.
If we extend that to the local newspapers then that still seems to be the case.
The policing is very popular because the activist’s claims aren’t the observed reality.
We had a local riot for Floyd where stuff got broken, but that probably says more about the protesters than the police.Report
I go downtown all the time and my car has never been broken into.
I don’t know what those other people are complaining about.Report
They’re complaining that their cars got broken into, as well they should. Much as they should complain if struck by lightning. And with roughly the same effect.Report
I wonder if _your_ interaction with police, and the interaction of people that you know, might differ in some mysterious way from the people that the police don’t like?Report
We either have, or will shortly, end up with all police encounters recorded on video. We certainly see the occasional problem and abuse of authority, however just being on video seems to reduce those.
We’ll end up with a lot of videos detailing civilians behaving badly (including claiming racism as an obvious power grab) with only the occasional instance of the reverse. Youtube already presents a lot.
Big picture, nothing will change.
Communities that are plagued with violence will continue to be plagued because the cops aren’t the source of the problem. Jobs in those communities will continue to be scarce because big serious job creators won’t put their employees in harms way. Schools with zero percent literacy rates will continue to exist, but we don’t seem to realize they’re a symptom of a problem.Report
I’m not sure if arrestee bad behavior warrants a bad behavior response from the police. The cornerstone of American justice is innocent until proven guilty.Report