Politics is Poison

Three weeks ago your humble blogger commented how he, and millions of others, avoid talking about politics because such discussions often turn vitriolic. And to what end do we engage? Few people change their minds because of a half-hour conversation.

Most companies likewise avoid taking political positions, and their reasons are not emotional: they do not want to risk alienating a sizeable percentage of customers, and they do not want to be diverted from the main goal of building shareholder wealth.

Two of the most politically outspoken CEO's: Mark Cuban
and Elon Musk (Newsweek/Berezovsky and Catuffe)

Researchers have now discovered another risk of corporate political partisanship: Having a Politically Partisan CEO Can Lead to More Company Misconduct, Study Finds [bold added]

Companies with stridently political CEOs are more likely to engage in corporate misconduct, according to new research. And that’s true regardless of whether the leader leans conservative or liberal.

“It boils down to an elevated sense of self-worth and a degree of entitlement,” says Thomas Fewer, an assistant professor of strategic management at Rutgers University and the paper’s lead author.

He says people with strong political convictions tend to have an “us versus them” mentality that discounts the opinions of others, as well as an unwarranted sense of moral superiority. “They grant themselves a moral license,” through which they rationalize bad behavior, he says.

Speech may be free, but talk isn't cheap.

Cutting Off Distractions, Literally

Today's Gospel is from Mark:

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.

And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched."

The priest said:

"When we look at this passage, we need to remember that Jesus, like many of the story tellers of those times, used hyperbole, exaggeration, and word pictures when He wanted to get across the seriousness of the point He was trying to make. So it's pretty vivid.

Here He's warning against the sin of being a stumbling block, of blocking access to the words of Life, of judging unworthy the little ones, the powerless ones, those who are on the margin, and causing them to fall away.

He's saying to His followers, you must make sacrifices. They may cut off and renounce and separate themselves from the attitude that keep people from experiencing the grace, the love, and the welcome of God.

We think that distractions are a modern problem, but it's clear that distractions were a problem in Jesus' time, too. He used the example of body parts (hands, feet, eyes) that cause one to "stumble," while we would likely refer to electronic devices and the plethora of activities that cause us to lose focus. Whatever the example employed, human weakness hasn't changed much over the millennia.

California's Official Slug

Banana slug (Chron photo)

You've got to hand it to Governor Newsom. Amidst all the problems California is facing--crime, homelessness, a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, businesses fleeing the state--he still found the time to name three new state symbols.

The state now recognizes the Dungeness crab as its official crustacean, the banana slug as its official slug, and the black abalone as its official seashell.

“California has some of the most biodiverse environments in the world — with over 5,500 plants, animals, and other life forms,” Newsom said in a statement. “From the majestic California redwood down to the delicate California quail, every organism matters here — and it’s time we celebrated our less cuddly friends before they get too crabby.”

The abalone and the Dungeness crab are more well-known, but your humble blogger finds the banana slug especially appropros to California: [bold added]

Neon yellow banana slugs that are synonymous with UC Santa Cruz make their home in the region’s lush redwood forests. The slugs, which can grow to 7 inches and longer, have both male and female reproductive organs. This gives them unique mating abilities, including the option to reproduce asexually, though extremely rare.

According to ChatGPT California is the second State to have designated an official slug, the first being Tennessee's coneflower slug in 2023. California used to be first in woo-woo stuff like biodiversity, but it's losing its edge, beaten out by a red state no less. Well, California's slug is non-binary, so there.

Proprioception and Rebuttonization

Older induction ranges had no physical, just flatscreen inputs.
Newer ranges have knobs that give users a greater sense of control.

It seemed inevitable that all electronic devices, appliances, etc. were moving toward a button-free world until consumer complaints induced designers to reverse course. [bold added]

The tyranny of touch screens may be coming to an end.

Companies have spent nearly two decades cramming ever more functions onto tappable, swipeable displays. Now buttons, knobs, sliders and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances and personal electronics.

...re-buttonization is occurring in everything from e-readers to induction stoves.

Perhaps the most prominent exponent of this button boom is the company that set us lurching toward touch screens in the first place. Apple added a third button it calls the “action button” to its full slate of new iPhone 16s unveiled this month, after introducing the feature on its upscale Apple Watch Ultra and Pro-model iPhones over the past couple of years. It also added a button-like “camera control” input on the iPhone’s side.

As Apple shows, companies aren’t just rediscovering buttons, they’re reconceiving them. The camera control includes touch features, and the company has also developed the “force sensor” that enables its AirPods to respond when you squeeze their stems.

Engineers and industrial designers—often prodded by user complaints—are tapping into our exquisitely sensitive sense of touch and spatial awareness, known as proprioception. And it’s all in service of making gadgets easier, more fun and, in some cases, safer to use. We want to touch type or operate cruise control without averting our eyes from the road...

Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they aren’t touch-based at all, because they need us to look when using them. Think, for example, of the screen of your smartphone, which requires your undivided gaze when you press on its smooth surface...

The hazards of burying many of a vehicle’s controls inside touch-screen menus that need drivers to look at them have become so obvious that the one European automotive safety body has declared that vehicles must have physical switches and buttons to receive its highest safety rating. Responding to criticism from drivers, Volkswagen has pledged to bring back physical controls for certain oft-used features, such as climate control.

Newer electric vehicles from BMW Mini are bristling with physical controls. To make it so drivers never have to take their eyes off the road, industrial designers at Mini put into their vehicles a user-customizable head-up display that drivers can navigate using buttons and a scroll wheel on the steering wheel, says Patrick McKenna, head of product and marketing at Mini USA. These controls can also be accessed through the vehicle’s round touch screen, and via a voice assistant. The entire point of the vehicle’s interfaces is redundancy, safety and a reduction in distractions, he adds.

It's cliché that technology moves too fast for humans to keep up with. Fortunately, we still live in a capitalist society, where the marketplace continues to force products to adapt to human needs.

Houses--and Justice--Built on Sand

North Shore homes with black tarp (msn photo)

Last year we wrote about Oahu homeowners who are placing sandbag "burritos" to protect their North Shore homes from beach erosion.

State officials are once again trying to crack down on the dozens of sandbag barriers, known as burritos, that have come to litter Hawaii’s beaches...State laws largely forbid private-property owners from erecting shoreline hardening structures, which have caused beach loss throughout the state.

Earlier this week Instagram user kevin_makana_emery filmed the tidal destruction of one North Shore home. SFGate reported:

(Still from Instagram)

A homeowner whose house is falling into the ocean on Oahu’s North Shore is being sued by the state of Hawaii.

Earlier this week, amid a high ocean swell, the home on Ke Nui Road by Sunset Beach could be seen breaking apart and falling into the waves in a video widely shared on social media. In the footage, a resident can be heard warning others, “Be careful where you’re standing. The whole roof is gonna come down right now.”

Glass, metal and wood can be seen strewn across the sand as the waves pull debris into the sea. “The State of Hawaii officials could’ve prevented this! But they did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING,” the resident who shot the video commented.

In a civil lawsuit filed on Tuesday, however, the state of Hawaii is seeking damages against the homeowner. The complaint claims that debris from the collapsing home is now on state land — all beaches in Hawaii are owned by the state, up to the high-tide mark — and it’s on the owner to clean it up.

In Hawaii it's illegal to protect your beachfront home, but if it is destroyed, it is on you to pay for the damages and debris not only on your property but on the beaches all over Hawaii. Aloha!

It's An Honor, Really

P. kamalaharrisae (Balukjian photo)

Researcher Brad Balukjian of the California Academy of Sciences is an admirer of Kamala Harris and has named a bug after her:

Across the tree of life, approximately 18,000 new species are described by taxonomists every year. One of the perks of the work is getting to name them. My colleagues and I can have a lot of fun with it — there’s a genus of spiders named for the band ABBA and a wasp named after Jackie Chan.

Today, one of my naming decisions makes its official debut: a bright green, red, and yellow plant bug will now be known as Pseudoloxops kamalaharrisae.

Yes, I named a bug after our vice-president and yes, it is meant as a massive compliment.

Harris’ six-legged namesake is part of a remarkable radiation of closely related plant bugs endemic to the islands of Tahiti, where I did my Ph.D. research over a decade ago. Plant bugs are a type of true bug; although we colloquially call anything small and scurrying a “bug,” it’s actually a technical term, referring to insects in the suborder Heteroptera, which have mouths like a straw. While some plant bugs are agricultural pests, P. kamalaharrisae and its cousins hang out on brightly colored flowers all day slurping plant slushees and hoping to avoid detection by birds.

Brad Balukjian named the bug after Vice President Harris to honor her support of climate change policies (MAGA - "Making America Green Again").

Now she's even with Donald Trump, who has a blind amphibian bearing his name:

Dermophis donaldtrumpi (Abel Batista / Rainforest Trust)

The Dermophis donaldtrumpi, which was discovered in Panama, was named by the head of a company that had bid $25,000 (£19,800) at auction for the privilege.

The company said it wanted to raise awareness about climate change.

"[Dermophis donaldtrumpi] is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesake's climate policies," said EnviroBuild co-founder Aidan Bell in a statement.

The small, blind, creature is a type of caecilian that primarily lives underground, and Mr Bell drew an unflattering comparison between its behaviour and Mr Trump's.

"Burrowing [his] head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change," he wrote.

Politics infests everything, even the naming of newly discovered species.

They're Different from You and Me

I thought I was fairly knowledgable about communication--both verbal and non-verbal--but a segment of the population does not speak a language with which I'm familiar.

How the Super-Rich Signal Their Wealth to Each Other [bold added]

‘The Asprey,’ a Patek Philippe perpetual calendar
chronograph, pictured before it sold at Sotheby’s
for $3.88 million in 2018. (WSJ/Balibouse photo)

gauche display is out. A subtler set of cues and signifiers is required.

The most straightforward symbols start with watches. One Wall Street macher explained, “You see a gold Rolex Daytona, that’s one thing. You see a Patek Perpetual and you say to yourself, OK, this guy’s playing a different game.”

...Pretending to play down your wealth while emblazoning your net worth in neon requires a lightness of touch. You can’t say it outright, but you want it crystal clear.

It’s extra tricky in Manhattan, where you can’t employ the usual clues of estates and automobiles. Here, people live in apartments many stories up from the sidewalk and out of view. They tend to interact at restaurants and galas, and they never drive.

So everything depends on attitude. You must act like big things in life are, well, no biggie. When you can wrangle people to your abode, serve a tub of Ossetra caviar with Lay’s potato chips. Place it out like guacamole on the coffee table.

Verbal cues confer insider status. High-rollers in the art world now refer to the most rarefied paintings as “pictures.” Thus, for a would-be bidder, a $40-million Abstract Expressionist canvas by Rothko is not a “masterpiece painting” but a “picture.” For most people, a picture is what your 4-year-old paints with a thick brush and primary colors for Mother’s Day.

...Of course, how you travel is essential. As a former Wall Street bank chairman told me, “OK, so you went to St. Barts. So what? That tells me nothing. How’d you get there? That is key.”

To telegraph that you flew private over commercial, those fluent in the language of wealth-speak have created new verbs. People say, “We NetJetted into Aspen. We just had to.” Pause. “Because of the dogs.” Transporting “the dogs” is somehow a constant justification for private travel.

Owning your own jet is a huge notch up on the totem pole. The effort to be blasé about your new Gulfstream G650 can be positively tortured. To signal that your NetJetting days are over, you might drop into conversation with a sigh, “We’ve got to find a new pilot.” This should be said in the same tone as a wearied parent complaining about needing a new babysitter.

Most of the top tenth of 1 percent worked hard to get to where they are. However, they can't clip coupons and relax. They must continue to work hard to signal where they are, discreetly, on the totem pole.

Return of the Wild

St. Mary's Park, San Francisco

Coyotes have taken over some areas in San Francisco. Some residents have taken to outfitting their dogs with spiked vests:

This is how it goes in San Francisco, where over 870,000 people and tens of thousands of dogs are learning to live in harmony with about 100 coyotes on 49 square miles of land. Coyotes in particular are highly visible in the patchwork of green spaces that break up this densely populated concrete expanse. Sightings are common, and confrontations occasionally occur, especially when dogs are involved.

...Beyond dog safety, there’s been concern recently about coyotes and children. In July, a coyote bit a 5-year-old girl who was attending a day camp in the San Francisco Botanical Garden. In response, U.S. Agriculture Department trappers shot and killed three coyotes in the park, and California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials confirmed using DNA testing that one of the animals was the one that nipped the child.

One hundred years ago San Francisco was determined to rid itself of coyotes and did so:

There was a period when coyotes were fully eradicated from San Francisco. “There were coyote killing competitions and bounties and poisoning,” [UC-Davis PhD candidate Tali] Caspi explained, as well as the runoff effects of urbanization destroying habitats. The last coyote spotted and officially recorded in San Francisco in the 20th century was in 1925 in Golden Gate Park.

But thanks to changing attitudes, new laws were passed that banned state and federal agencies from incentivizing animal killings. By the 1970s and ’80s, the coyote population began inching up again in California. In 2002, coyotes began to return naturally to San Francisco, initially in the Presidio, and thrived. After all, while San Francisco may be a big city of concrete and speeding cars, it’s also prime coyote habitat, with pockets of overgrown green spaces and an abundant and novel food supply.

The situation is untenable. It's easy to foresee more attacks on dogs and children and the public outcry that will result.

Posting warning signs will only delay the inevitable.

On Being First or Last

The minister read from the Gospel according to Mark:

He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

(The Matthew phrasing is more well known: "So the last shall be first, and the first last.")

Jesus' advice to humble ourselves seems more out of place than ever in the modern world, where success is measured by clicks, likes, and retweets.

C.S. Lewis in the Great Divorce describes how those individuals who are celebrated in heaven are ignored and likely unknown on earth:

Not at all,” said he. “It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.” “She seems to be...well, a person of particular importance?” “Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” “And who are these gigantic people...look! They're like emeralds...who are dancing and throwing flowers before here?” “Haven't ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.” “And who are all these young men and women on each side?” “They are her sons and daughters.” “She must have had a very large family, Sir.” “Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.” “Isn't that a bit hard on their own parents?” “No. There are those that steal other people's children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”

An honest self-assessment says that I am neither first or last, so I'll continue to live with uncertainty about where I'll end up.

Another Reason the Chicken Crossed the Road

Police Lt. Jonathan Ozol in a SF crosswalk

San Francisco police have a new crime-fighting initiative. They're tagging drivers who don't stop for officers who are dressed as inflatable chickens.

On Monday morning [Sept. 16], San Francisco police Lt. Jonathan Ozol wore a flamboyant, inflatable chicken costume as he attempted to navigate a crosswalk on Alemany Boulevard near the intersection of Rousseau Street. The purpose of the exercise was to issue tickets to drivers who flouted state law by not yielding to a pedestrian like Ozol as he attempted to cross. Quite a few drivers failed that test.

The ostentatious costume, according to police Capt. Amy Hurwitz, serves two purposes. “I don’t want them to get run over,” she told me. “But the costume is so bright, it’s like, how can you miss it?”

...State law requires drivers to stop for pedestrians who are entering a crosswalk. Ozol said that failing to do so can result in a citation that could cost the driver a hefty fine of as much as $400.

...Ozol would attempt to enter the crosswalk, and if a driver didn’t yield and allow him to cross, he would wave at two other officers parked nearby. From there, one of the two officers — one on a motorcycle, and the other in a standard squad car — would follow the flagged driver and pull them over.

The numerous tickets and the irresistible publicity have had the desired effect: drivers are slowing down.

Your humble blogger laughed, too, but I think that those who mock the chicken/Big-Bird costumes as a "stunt" have an anti-SF or anti-police agenda.

Kudos to SFPD for their creativity, and coming up with a strategy that appears to be working.

Microsoft Sees the Light

The Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 single-handedly killed the nuclear power industry in the U.S. After Three Mile Island construction on nuclear power plants halted, and existing plants were decommissioned.

Today nuclear energy is undergoing something of a renaissance. Many green-energy advocates are realizing that ambitious carbon-free energy goals cannot be met by wind and solar power, let alone be "on all the time" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

Many tech companies, including the largest and most well-known, joined the alternative energy marching band, IMHO, because it was easy to, since their fortunes weren't tied to fossil fuels like legacy manufacturing and transportation companies.

After 2020, as the race to acquire electricity for artificial-intelligence data centers accelerated, the virtue signalling dampened down.

Big Tech needed power, and ESG (environmental, social, governance) projects did nothing to help and even inhibited that objective.

Three Mile Island will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center (WSJ)

In a sign that the worm has turned, Three Mile Island, the bête noire of fission haters, is being revived to power Microsoft's data centers.

A deal between Constellation Energy and Microsoft will restart Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the site of the country’s worst nuclear accident, to help power the tech giant’s growing artificial intelligence ambitions.

Under the agreement, Constellation would revive the plant’s undamaged reactor, which was too costly to run and closed in 2019, and sell the power to Microsoft. The plan signals the gargantuan amount of power needed for data centers for AI, along with the tech industry’s thirst for a carbon-free, round-the-clock electricity source needed to meet climate goals.

Constellation expects to spend around $1.6 billion to restart the reactor by early 2028. Microsoft has signed a 20-year power-purchase agreement with Constellation, the companies said Friday. The deal would help Microsoft pair its 24-7 electricity use with a matching source of nearby clean power generation.

It's nice to know that one of our most successful companies is able to discard green-power fantasies when the virtue-signalling impedes basic objectives.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.---1 Cor 13:11

The Chickens are Going Elsewhere to Roost

Intuit HQ in Mountain View (Mercury photo)

Despite economic strength in the rest of the country Bay Area tech layoffs continue. IBM, Cisco, and Advantest announced that a combined 1,000 jobs will be "permanently" eliminated by the end of November.

Added to the 384 positions extinguished at Intuit's Mountain View HQ in July, over 45,000 jobs have been lost in the Bay Area since 2022.

None of the aforementioned companies are in trouble. In fact, all their stocks are trading near the high for the year.

Udemy looks like it was a nice place to work (Chron)

San Francisco-based Udemy is more explicit about the reasons it is cutting Bay Area jobs: [bold added]

Udemy, the world’s largest online learning marketplace, announced plans to lay off 280 employees, representing approximately 20% of its global workforce. The company said it intends to rehire about half of these positions in locations with lower operational costs.

The restructuring is expected to incur costs ranging from $16 million to $19 million, mainly in severance payments, and will span from the third fiscal quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025. Udemy aims to complete the restructuring by March 31.

Udemy is a relatively small company with 1,443 employees at the end of 2023. Earlier this week we posted about how California's inhospitable business environment (taxes, regulatory inefficiencies, anti-business Progressive attitudes) caused Elon Musk to move his multi-billion dollar enterprises to Texas.

California's heavy hand applies to small businesses as well.

Glad They're Not on the Other Side

Downtown Beirut was filled with the wailing of ambulance sirens. (WSJ)

Booby-trapped pagers exploded throughout Lebanon yesterday, injuring and killing members of Hezbollah. (Hezbollah had switched to old-fashioned pagers because of worries that Israelis would hack into their smartphones.)

Within minutes, hundreds of pagers issued to Hezbollah officials in Beirut and around the country exploded, killing 12 people and injuring more than 2,800, Lebanese authorities said. Emergency rooms were flooded with blast victims. Hezbollah’s leaders blamed Israel and pledged to retaliate.

Today a second wave occurred:

Then, on Wednesday, it happened again. This time walkie-talkies and other electronics used by the Shiite militant group began blowing up, sending a second wave of casualties into crowded hospitals and further undermining the Shiite militants’ ability to communicate.

By the end of the day, 20 more people were dead and 450 more injured. The attacks also exposed the identities of thousands of Hezbollah operatives, many of whom worked covertly—a coup for Israeli intelligence and a likely surprise for some Hezbollah members’ relatives and neighbors.

Although some innocents died, this was the least-bad military option to identify and cripple a terrorist organization that had embedded itself with civilians. Israel's strategy was brilliant, and it's a sign of the rot within Western intelligence agencies that no one believes that they could have pulled off a similar operation. I'm glad Mossad is not on the other side.

Twitter Be Gone

After moving Tesla and SpaceX to Texas, Elon Musk has completed his divorce from California by moving X (Twitter) headquarters to Austin:

The light goes out on Market Street

Twitter, now known as X, is expected to close its San Francisco headquarters this month, leaving behind the Mid-Market neighborhood it has called home since 2012. The company is reportedly moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas, but plans to relocate its San Francisco employees to San José and Palo Alto, where it has already listed job openings.

The departure is another blow to a city that has been buffeted by high-profile business departures and that once held up Twitter as a key part of its revival. Downtown San Francisco’s vacancy rates have ballooned as tech companies slashed their real estate expenses and halted office expansion plans as the pandemic has relented.

Confronted with a falloff in foot traffic, major retailers such as Nordstrom and Anthropologie also shut their stores amid heightened concerns about crime, theft, vandalism, drug use and homelessness.

X is the second-largest tenant in the Mid-Market neighborhood, leasing 457,793 square feet, according to CoStar, which tracks real estate trends. Vacancy rates in Mid-Market are at their highest in decades at 62%, according to CBRE.

California is so invested in its Progressive politics that it rather let megabillion employers like Tesla depart than change its ways.

(In an infamous exchange, California Progressive Congresswoman Lorena Gonzalez tweeted “F—k Elon Musk” in 2020 when Musk threatened to move Tesla because of California's COVID lockdown rules.) He responded "exactly" and Tesla departed for Texas.

IMHO, the biggest loss to California is privately held SpaceX, which is the leading American space exploration company. Its current valuation is estimated to be $210 billion, and $1 trillion is well within reach after it goes public.

On the other hand Twitter's valuation has fallen from $44 billion to an estimated $19 billion. (He can't admit this to the bankers and investors, but IMHO Elon Musk's primary objective wasn't to make money from the purchase but to make Twitter a free-speech platform.)

Although the Musk family of companies retains substantial operations in California, the loss of their headquarters is a blow to the tax base. Not only do headquarters support a host of ancillary businesses (hotels, printers, law firms, banks, etc. etc.) repatriated international income and intangible income such as royalties and licenses are attributable to the state of the company's residence.

Progressives rather lose the tax base upon which their carbon-free equality-of-result dreams depend than admit they are wrong. Unfortunately, when the majority of the people of California realize that, it will be too late.

Shige's Saimin Stand

Yelp reviewers say that Shige’s Saimin Stand, a small family-owned restaurant in Wahiawa (pop. 17,400), serves the best cheeseburger in the U.S.

While Shige’s Saimin Stand is best known for its house-made saimin noodles, a popular Hawaii dish, the restaurant’s cheeseburger is among one of the eatery's most-ordered menu items, judging by social media posts highlighting it. The restaurant offers three versions of the classic, all priced under $10: a regular cheeseburger made with a juicy beef patty, ketchup, and mayonnaise; the deluxe served with added onions and tomato; or the double burger that comes with an extra beef patty.

Recently I've been going to the North Shore of Oahu quite often, playing tour guide to Mainlanders.

I bypass Wahiawa because it is off the main road to Haleiwa, the usual destination. It's time to visit Wahiawa again.

I'll check out Shige's the next time I'm in the area. Cheeseburgers and saimin are two of my favorite things in life.

Bad Things Can Come in a Small Package

Earlier this week I agreed with those who avoid discussions about politics:

Count me in the feigning-ignorance crowd. Stress harms one's mental and physical health. Our jobs, finances, and family problems are stressors enough, and voluntarily seeking more in political discussions seems crazy to your humble blogger.

This year is especially off-putting because the negative campaigning seems worse than ever. It's more about how awful the opponent is, rather than what the candidate is for. And political argumentation today involves not only how bad or evil the other person is, but the millions of people who support him or her.

Vilifying others is too easy and appeals to our worst instincts.

(Image from Jared Michael Matthew)

Today's New Testament reading is from James 3: [bold added]

How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue-- a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.

In my youth I had an acerbic tongue, which I now understand partially stemmed from my own insecurities. Just as a recovering alcoholic avoids an environment where he could relapse, so do I stay away from situations where I would be tempted to diss my fellow man. So...no politics.

The Limits of Competition

(Image from Yale Insights)

During my career I worked for a CEO who thought internal competition was the way to get the most out of workers.

The competition was at its fiercest when it came to devising a new line of business. My team worked round the clock, as did the others, to come up with an idea and the strategy to implement it.

No team "won." We ended up adopting a strategy proposed by a well-known consulting firm.

Internal competition often is counter-productive.

Internal competition often stifles innovation.

That is what we found in a study of companies that pushed internal teams to compete with each other—whether for formal financial rewards like bonuses, or for informal ones like greater prestige, access to executives and influence.

Yes, by some indicators, the teams ended up working harder when they were battling each other. But they failed in another crucial respect: The more teams competed, the less innovative they were. Simply put, they were wary of sharing information with other teams, so they weren’t getting unexpected, inspiring ideas from people in other parts of the company.

In fact, the only teams that excelled in the study were ones that did choose to share information with others, whether out of necessity or strategically.

Competition drives innovation, but it appears not to work if the organization competes internally. [bold added]

How, then, can companies leverage the benefits of competition without sacrificing information sharing between teams?

For one thing, choose an outside target: Instead of making internal teams battle each other, have them try to beat external benchmarks, such as how many patents a rival company produces. Companies should also make efforts to ensure groups share information, such as holding regular meetings or creating a shared database that any team could use.

Competition is one of the foundational elements of capitalism, but it is not the only element. The free flow of information is another, as well as the shared value to seek the good of the whole.

Stumbling and Bumbling to Armageddon

Tuchman's history of the miscalculations
that led to World War I heavily influenced
JFK: "We are not going to bungle into war."

The insatiable news cycle currently has placed inflation, interest-rate cuts, Israel-Gaza, border control, Harris vs. Trump, and Haitians eating cats and dogs (!) at the top of the pile.

Ukraine is secondary, but it should be moved to the very top. The U.S. and NATO are making moves that could result in World War III. [bold added]

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Biden on Friday discussed allowing Ukraine to use long-range European-made cruise missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia, according to U.S. and Western officials.

Until now, Western countries supporting Ukraine have balked at allowing Kyiv to use long-range weapons, such as the British-French Storm Shadow, inside Russian territory for fear of escalating the conflict. Officials are concerned in particular that Russian President Vladimir Putin could retaliate by arming the Yemen-based Houthi rebels, who are engaged in a long-running campaign to attack ships in the Red Sea.

Putin has warned the U.S. and its allies that permitting Ukraine to use Western-made long-range missiles against Russia would mean the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s countries were “at war” with Russia.

61 years ago President Kennedy was willing to go to war to prevent Russian missiles from being installed in Cuba. The NATO missiles are already in Ukraine, minutes away from striking the Russian homeland. We seem to be counting on Vladimir Putin to be less prone to war than JFK.

What makes our foreign policy establishment, so rife with miscalculations since the Korean war, so confident that we won't blunder into World War III?

Literally Unsettled Science

"What caused an odd cascade of vibrations to ripple across the globe for nine days?" [bold added]

Using classified seafloor maps from the Danish military, a global network of seismic sensors used to detect earthquakes, drone video of debris washed high up on a remote rock face in eastern Greenland and other evidence, researchers finally pieced together the strange sequence of events.

It started when seismic sensors at monitoring stations around the world detected a signal in September 2023 that looked nothing like the squiggles made by earthquakes. This signal oscillated at 90-second intervals and continued for days. Most seismic events weaken quickly...

[Geologic scientist Kristian] Svennevig assembled an earth-science detective squad of 68 experts who, with seismic recordings, satellite images, field measurements, drone video and computer simulations, reconstructed what happened. The evidence revealed that 33 million cubic yards of rock and ice—the volume of 10,000 Olympic-size swimming pools—had plunged into the Dickson Fjord in eastern Greenland, triggering a tsunami.

The massive wave crested at 650 feet above the water’s surface, throwing debris onto a nearby rock face. It settled down to 25 feet, but over the next nine days, it sloshed from one side of the fjord to the other, striking the sides with enough force to move the walls, creating the seismic signal that propagated around the planet, Svennevig said.

The landslide was caused by a melting glacier below the mountaintop, according to the study, and Svennevig said scientists are reconsidering the kinds of natural disasters that are now possible in a warming Arctic environment.

Before and after photos of the landslide site. Søren Rysgaard; Danish Army/Joint Arctic Command

The continental crust ranges between 22 and 40 miles, and the oceanic crust from 4 to 6 miles. The troposphere, where life resides, is 7 miles above the crust, and the stratosphere is 31 miles above. Despite the advances in environmental science, it took a year to determine that the 9 days of powerful vibrations were caused by a landslide in Greenland. Our knowledge of the 50 miles of crust and atmosphere is demonstrably incomplete. Just imagine how much we don't know about our home planet, which has a diameter of nearly 8,000 miles.

23 Years Later

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I posted the following, now updated with minor edits, using strikethroughs and italics:

============================================================

(Reuters photo)

I saw it on TV, like almost everyone else. I shuffled to the kitchen table with my cup of coffee and pushed the remote. The TV was set to Channel 11, NBC. It was 5:45 a.m. The Today Show was on; strange, normally it doesn't start till 7 a.m. on the West Coast.

The camera was fixed on the World Trade Center. Black smoke was pouring out of one of the towers. There were no jump cuts or commercials to distract the unblinking eye. Katie Couric's voice seemed dispassionate as she described how an airplane had crashed into the building. Surely it was a small plane and a horrible accident.

Then the second jet hit, another struck the Pentagon, and the towers fell. Other images are seared into our memories--the Pennsylvania field that became hallowed ground, the throngs who lustily cheered the deaths of thousands, flames and smoke everywhere, the weeping, the exhausted searching and the death of hope.

The fear gripped us for a long time. Not knowing has that effect. Who did it and why, how powerful were they, what's next, what should we do, what can I do?

Everyone--even those who were in charge of our government--can list major mistakes in the past ten twenty years. All the criticisms have at least some plausibility: we waged war against the wrong people, maybe we shouldn't have gone to war at all, we mistreated prisoners, we had intelligence that was grossly wrong, we sacrificed too many of our civil liberties, we didn't pay the cost of the wars, and we are no farther only a little further along in being energy independent or securing the safety of Israel.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we will remember the worst of our fears:

1) we would be hit again and perhaps lose a major city; this event coupled with our response, could forever change the character of America;

2) if the attack were biological, we could lose much more than one city;

3) oil supplies would be disrupted, maybe cut off for a long time, and usher in a new Dark Ages;

4) Israel, surrounded by powerful enemies, could be destroyed.

5) A state of war would exist between the West and the Islamic world, which has over a billion people.

Ten Twenty-threeyears and trillions of dollars later none of these fears has been realized, yet victory, which we can't even define, seems as distant as it was in 2001.

I'll take it. © 2011 Stephen Yuen

Pain Avoidance

For the record I do think that Kamala Harris won tonight's debate with Donald Trump because she looked "more Presidential" than he did. Regarding the content, I keep up with enough political news to know that each debater made claims about the other that were false, but I wasn't the target audience, which presumably was the low-information undecided voter.

Cheryl Obermiller in Missouri, and Jonathan Chiaramonte in New York.
Both started politics-free Facebook groups. (WSJ photo)

However, one should not demean the latter by assuming they're unintelligent. They could be rationally avoiding politics because they can't stand the vitriol. [bold added]

Some Americans are avoiding [politics] at all costs.

They are canceling subscriptions, deleting apps, silencing notifications and unfollowing rabble-rousers. Many want no part of Tuesday night’s presidential debate or its fallout. Political discourse has infiltrated everything from the Sunday church service to afternoon football, and they have had enough.

Even those with firm political views say they feign ignorance rather than join impassioned discussions. It isn’t, they say, that they are uninterested or uncaring about world events, but they are inundated by the sheer volume of news headlines. Deciding it is bad for their mental health, they are retreating or seeking apolitical havens.

Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group, with 11,600 members, is one. “Not only do I not care who you voted for, in this group you aren’t allowed to tell me,” wrote creator Cheryl Obermiller, 66 years old, welcoming “fellow snowflakes” to post photos of flowers, funny road signs and tasteful jokes.

Obermiller, who founded the group after friends engaged in political flame wars, said, “Things are so contentious right now that people are just starving for a place they can go where someone doesn’t have to know who I am going to vote for.” She helps monitor comments, a time-consuming task for the Kansas City, Mo., construction-services firm owner with eight children and 21 grandchildren.

About 62% of U.S. adults say they are worn out by so much coverage of the campaign and candidates, according to the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 8,709 adults in April...

Politics is a chronic stressor and disengaging is among the most effective coping methods, said Brett Q. Ford, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Ford and a colleague tracked hundreds of Americans in recent years and found political events often triggered negative emotions that left people exhausted...

Jonathan Chiaramonte, a 43-year-old high-school teacher, in 2020 started a politics-free community Facebook group in Sayville, N.Y., where he lives. Chiaramonte, who teaches a peer-education class that promotes community, confidence and eradicating bullying, noticed adults in town behaved worse than his students when it came to political discourse. “It was so upsetting to see my neighbors fighting,” he recalled.

Today, the Sayville Politics-Free Zone has 3,000 members in a town of about 17,000. He said people know they can share or seek information without any spin or political blowback. He once used the forum while redoing his kitchen. “I was looking for a contractor,” he said, “not for a lecture on politics.”

Count me in the feigning-ignorance crowd. Stress harms one's mental and physical health. Our jobs, finances, and family problems are stressors enough, and voluntarily seeking more in political discussions seems crazy to your humble blogger.

I'll do my civic duty, cast my vote in person in November, then move on.

iPhone 16: I've Deferred Gratification Long Enough

It's been six years since I bought my iPhone XS Max. The XS Max has performed well, and I've been patiently watching as successor iPhones have improved the camera, speed, and battery life.

This year I'm going to pull the trigger on a new iPhone 16. The hyped AI (Apple Intelligence) features are just an added bonus, since the XS Max battery health had declined to 81% (80% is Apple's recommended minimum) and I was going to get a new iPhone regardless.

Here's the WSJ's first look at the new iPhone 16 announced today.

Still at the Acorn Stage

Some in Hollywood understand that the woke messaging (the villain is the white guy, the heroine of color is strong and independent and has no weaknesses) that has lost millions (see Disney's Star Wars prequel the Acolyte) requires a change of direction. The success of small-budget religious, specifically Christian-themed, movies has attracted investors' attention:

Faith-based film makers are getting bigger budgets.

[Jon] Erwin, 42, is a Christian filmmaker whose driving purpose is to put out uplifting stories that families can watch together. After nearly two decades of making small-budget movies in the parallel world of faith-based entertainment, he’s part of a loose tribe of filmmakers, producers and independent studios from that realm now storming into the mainstream.

Some key successes turned this corner of the industry into a hotbed. The Chosen, a multiseason TV drama about the life of Jesus and his apostles, became one of the most popular series in the world. Jesus Revolution, a movie by Erwin about a pastor and a hippie evangelist who create a surge of groovy Christians, pulled people into theaters in the shaky movie market of early 2023 and grossed about $54 million. Sound of Freedom, a thriller about child trafficking, had nothing to do with religion on the surface—but it galvanized religious viewers and grossed $250 million worldwide on a $15 million budget, becoming a box-office phenomenon second only to “Barbenheimer” last summer.

While my values are more aligned with Christianity than wokeness, I hope the new family-values film makers don't forget that the story is the key. Their movies will fail like the wokesters' if they forget that audiences want to be entertained, not lectured to.

SF: Another Neighborhood Market Closes

(SF Gate photo)

Despite political leaders' assurances that San Francisco is cracking down on crime, homelessness, and drug use, one local business has given up:

After 35 years in business, a family-owned market in South Beach is closing its doors. Co-owner David Pesusic said high operation costs and mounting neighborhood crime were the driving factors.

Bayside Market, located at 120 Brannan St. near the Embarcadero, will cease operations on Sept. 13. Some of its 12 employees will be transferred to RJ’s Market near Fisherman’s Wharf, the business’s other location, but most will be laid off, Pesusic said.

In addition to inflation-fueled bills and declining foot traffic, the small grocery and deli has suffered from “rampant” crime, including near-daily shoplifting and three break-ins in the last couple years, Pesusic said. He blamed city officials for the increased crime, slamming law enforcement and city leaders for being unresponsive and overly permissive...

Law enforcement has taken hours to respond to petty crimes at Bayside, if they respond at all, Pesusic said. During two of the three break-ins the business faced over the past two years, he said police officers took over eight hours to arrive on the scene. And the market’s employees have stopped reporting shoplifting incidents, which Pesusic said occur at least 5-6 times a week, and sometimes up to five times in one day.

Crime in the city plunged in the first quarter of 2024, the Chronicle reported in April. From January through March, San Francisco saw decreases in every major crime category tracked by the FBI for its Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which includes homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, arson, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft.

But Pesusic said market employees have stopped reporting many crimes.

“We don’t even call 911 anymore because they don’t respond,” Pesusic said. “This isn’t fun, playing security-slash-police officer, trying to hold on to my inventory.”

In the absence of law enforcement, people deal drugs right outside Bayside’s doors and serial shoplifters operate with no consequences, Pesusic said.

“These guys think our store is a pantry where they can take whatever they want,” Pesusic said. “We’ve been spit at, we’ve had knives pulled on us, we’ve been called names.”

For a City that is hostile to automobile traffic, San Francisco doesn't seem to be helping residents shop, dine, and receive services without forcing them into their cars or using problematic public transportation.

Also...after the Federal jobs report was "revised" down by 818,000 from April, 2023 to May, 2024, I've stopped blindly accepting improvements -- such as San Francisco crime decreases--in government statistical measures without corroboration.

SF Zoo: Improvement Requires a Candid Assessment

2011 was the last time we commented about the San Francisco Zoo. The post was about the 2007 incident where an escaped tiger mauled a young man to death and injured two of his friends. Police killed the tiger, and the two injured young men received a $900,000 settlement from the Zoo. Although they taunted the animal into an enraged state, they were not held responsible because the Zoo's tiger enclosure wasn't 100% secure.

The grizzly was caught on video entering the zookeeper's area

Recent investigations into the Zoo's policies and procedures have uncovered incidents that could have resulted in more tragedies but luckily didn't. The most dangerous was one involving a grizzly bear.

One Saturday morning last May, a keeper at the San Francisco Zoo heard footsteps behind him in the grizzly bear grotto. Believing it was a co-worker, he turned, only to see the hulking brown form of Kiona. He thought he’d safely locked her in her den, but the door, which is operated from an adjoining room, had an unusual feature: Its lock could be fastened even without the door being securely closed.

The zookeeper began to run, and with Kiona in pursuit, he circled the grotto, according to people familiar with his account. He then sprinted through the door into the keeper area, according to surveillance video. When Kiona stopped briefly, the keeper escaped through a gate and closed it behind him.

At that point, the almost 500-pound grizzly ambled into the keeper area and was separated from the public by a gate, a regular door and a chain-link barrier, said Travis Shields, then the assistant curator of the zoo’s carnivores department, which includes the bears. Shields was away at the time but was briefed by workers who were involved or listening on the radio.

Zoo employees who came to the keeper’s aid found him in a panic and the grizzly roaming the keeper area, Shields said. The zookeepers managed to coax Kiona into her other outdoor habitat and locked the doors.

It's healthy that the San Francisco Zoo is undergoing an audit. It will need substantial improvements in public safety and animal welfare before the pandas come. From April of this year:

“San Francisco is absolutely thrilled that we will be welcoming giant pandas to our San Francisco Zoo,” Breed said in a statement Thursday from Beijing, where she signed a memorandum of understanding with Chinese wildlife officials regarding the panda plan.

No timeline was given for the pandas’ arrival. The announcement said it depended on the completion of an enclosure for the animals at the zoo. The number of pandas was also not specified, though pandas often have been sent in pairs...

Owned by the city, the zoo is run by the nonprofit San Francisco Zoological Society. In addition to the estimated $1 million annual price tag to rent the pandas, it could cost an estimated $25 million to build housing for them at San Francisco Zoo, Peterson told ABC News in February. That would be on top of the cost of maintenance and upgrades needed for the facility’s aging structures, some of which date to the 1930s.

A Financial Hit That Few Budget For

Christine Salhany spends about $240,000 a year
for 24-hour in-home care for her husband, Jimmy,
who has Alzheimer’s.(WSJ)

Everyone in my boomer circle of friends and relatives has been hit by the cost of caring for a loved one; it could be a parent, a spouse, or even themselves. It's a crushing financial burden: [bold added]

Americans want to grow old in their own homes. But pursuing that dream has gotten harder, and is putting huge financial and emotional strains on families.

In Nebraska, Christine Salhany spends about $240,000 a year for 24-hour in-home care for her husband who has Alzheimer’s. In Illinois, Carolyn Brugioni’s dad exhausted his savings and took out a home-equity line-of-credit to pay for home healthcare.

Traci Lamb closed her business to take care of her mom in Florida. And in California, Cheryl Orr delayed retirement to help pay for care and home modifications for her wife, who has dementia.

Soaring costs of in-home care, medical advances that extend lives but require ongoing help, and the growing ranks of older baby boomers are creating new pressures. Spouses, adult children and siblings are putting their lives on hold to care for relatives, wrestling with sleep deprivation and constant worry. Families are draining savings to hire help, pay for medical care, and modify homes...

The cost of paid in-home care has soared in recent years. The 2023 national median cost of a home health aide, hired through an agency, stood at $33 an hour, up from $20 an hour in 2015, according to Genworth, a long-term-care insurance company. Those needing round-the-clock in-home care can expect a median cost of about $290,000, which is more than double the annual median cost of a private room in a nursing home facility and four times the annual median cost of a private room in assisted living, according to Genworth.

Very few elderly have the nearly $1,000,000 in retirement savings to pay for long-term at-home care for, say, four years. Borrowing against, then selling the family home is an option if the patient is willing to move to assisted living.

I know three families that have tapped the value of their house; they were fortunate to have lived in the Bay Area, where suburban tract homes have appreciated by over a million dollars if held for at least 20 years. They have had to move away but consider themselves lucky to possess such a valuable asset.

If any politician can come up with a credible solution, he or she would win in a landslide.

The Residential Streets of San Francisco

San Francisco, somewhat belatedly, is trying to attack homelessness, crime, and open-air drug use in this election year.

Addressing one subset of crime--prostitution--has been a low priority, especially since sex work has long been regarded as "victimless" (two consenting adults engage in a quid pro quo transaction where supposedly no one gets hurt).

Sex worker Rene, 20: “This is a good street. Quiet. Safe.
Way better than Oakland, where I live. I’ve got two kids to
support, and I can make $1,000 a night here." (Chron photo)

However, street prostitution has spilled over into San Francisco residential areas and has become a severe nuisance: [bold added]

A year after San Francisco officials put up bollards to deter sex work on Capp Street in the Mission District, residents say the activity hasn’t disappeared — it has just migrated a couple of blocks east.

Now, Shotwell Street is the Mission’s epicenter for the illicit sex trade, and all the noise and bumper-to-bumper traffic that comes with it. And frustrated neighbors are suing.

Hiding these problems or pushing them around “is not the solution,” said Ayman Farahat, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed this past week in San Francisco Superior Court. The suit aims to force city officials to eliminate what the plaintiffs describe as a public nuisance.

...at Shotwell’s Saloon on 20th and Shotwell streets, owner David Hall flinched when asked about the nightly activity. “It’s horrible, horrible,” he said — so bad that he now closes the bar at midnight to protect his customers from solicitation or harassment.

Advocates of helping, rather than arresting, sex workers say pushing them off Shotwell might give the locals some relief like Capp Street got, but it won’t solve the larger problem. The area’s reputation as a lucrative sex-trade spot is so widespread it has drawn people from as far away as Seattle — which is where 21-year-old Maryanna was walking the streets until last week.

Customers up north were too edgy, she said, “and then a friend told me ‘There’s this place called Shotwell Street in San Francisco where business is good, you can make good money.’

“She’s right,” Maryanna said the day after she arrived in San Francisco, strolling Shotwell to scope out the night’s work. “I like it here. It’s more intense, but there’s good money. I’ll stick around awhile.”

...Lyon-Martin Community Health Services sends a van to Shotwell two nights a week, offering condoms and other sex-work supplies along with aid references. And though some locals resent that as enabling, Lyon outreach director Celestina Pearl says it is life-saving.

“Nobody is pro-trafficking, and yes we do want better lives for these women,” Pearl said. “But the better solution is not to vilify, stigmatize and criminalize. If people really want to solve the problem I would love to see them advocate for decriminalization of sex work, so these women can move indoors where it’s more dignified and safer and more peaceful for the residents.”

There is a substantial lobby that is (still) in favor of decriminalization, and with so many other problems San Francisco is unlikely to devote substantial resources to ridding the streets of prostitution. Besides, anyone arrested will be released because San Francisco is philosophically opposed to incarceration. The residents of Shotwell Street (a Zillow search values homes at more than $3 million) will have to live with the situation indefinitely or get the politicians to move it to another neighborhood.