In the City dogs eat better than a lot of people (Wilson/WSJ)
The Bay Area is a dog-friendly place, but San Francisco appears to have crossed the line.
Virginia may be for lovers, but San Francisco is for dog lovers. It has sprawling green spaces, treats behind every shop counter and beaches where canines can run and splash in the surf. But dog lovers, dog haters and the dog-neutral are finding themselves in an uncomfortable alliance against a contingent they say is exploiting the city’s tolerance.
Paws are up on the counters of coffee shops and no one flinches. Croissants are being stolen out of the hands of hungry diners by hungrier black labs. The aisles of Target and Trader Joe’s are full of “service animals” that can’t seem to recall much, if any, of their training.
Dog owners ignore posted leash laws, bring their dogs into restaurants and stores, and chuckle when their animals steal food from diners. For a City that prides itself on its civic-mindedness many of its residents don't display the community values that supposedly make it superior to those who live between the coasts.
Fellow patrons can ruin group experiences like movies in theaters and classical music concerts. The obnoxious behavior has even spread to Disneyland. [bold added]
As the lights dim in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, the famous Paul Frees narration begins.
“Welcome, foolish mortals, to the Haunted Mansion,” he intones. “I am your host — your ghost host. Kindly step all the way in please, and make room for everyone. There’s no turning back now.”
If you are lucky, you can listen to Frees’ chilling voice as it was intended. But nine times out of 10, someone talks along, mimicking Frees’ iconic cadence. This isn’t a new phenomenon — but we’re long past the point of calling out Disney guests who selfishly do this.
No one comes to Disneyland with a dream of hearing random strangers recite voice-overs. Just because you’ve been on a ride enough times to memorize the spiel doesn’t mean others have. It’s one thing to laugh, clap or otherwise quietly enjoy an attraction. It’s quite another to become a distraction.
For some, Disneyland could be a once-in-a-lifetime trip, so you may be tainting someone’s first and only opportunity to enjoy the theme park.
Talking on rides doesn’t just extend to mimicking voice-overs. It’s been years since I’ve enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean in silence. There’s always a party in one of the rows chatting about dinner plans or catching up on Sharon’s latest dating drama. First-timers are at the mercy of regulars who apparently view the experience as a moving park bench. If your conversation can’t wait 15 minutes, you shouldn’t be getting on a ride.
On a recent trip, the group behind me — full-grown adults who had met up after work — spent the bayou scene arguing about how loud they should scream on the ride’s upcoming drop. Later, on “it’s a small world,” a dad with his kids began aggressively shifting his weight back and forth to make the boat rock. Another adult in his party laughed along as he proceeded to ruin the ride for everyone else — and model terrible behavior for the next generation of Disney guests sitting beside him.
Look at me because I know the words to "small world" or what comes next on the ride. It only takes a few bad apples to spoil the barrel.
There will be no resurgence of humility and civility, as Pride, which is often regarded as the worst of the seven deadly sins, is not only accepted but celebrated in the month of June.
I dashed off a letter to Mom, then used the Starbucks app to order a blackeye (two shots of espresso added to a regular coffee). I grabbed the car keys, iPhone, wallet, and letter before heading out the door.
The first hitch in the plan for a beautiful Friday was the discovery of a flat tire on the Camry. Changing it would take some time, so as a temporary fix the cigarette-lighter-powered air pump reinflated the tire. The leak could be a one-off occurrence, but 9 times out of 10 the cause is a nail and repair or replacement will be necessary.
Forget esthetics, I want protection
What happened next can only be excused by too many distractions--mailing the letter, picking up the coffee, and worries about the tire--for the aging mind. I had earlier put the iPhone on the car roof and forgot to remove it.
At Starbucks the realization dawned that the phone was missing. Hurrying home, I walked the car's path for the first couple of blocks without success. (Having bought a "military grade drop tested" case, the phone probably survived.)
I returned to the car and drove slowly along the entire route, glancing at the Apple Watch to see if the iPhone was within bluetooth range. Again, no luck, maybe somebody had picked it up.
The "Find My" app on the Mac showed the iPhone to be a half-mile from the house. That was good news, because it meant that the phone was intact.
I'll save you the litany of false steps that were made, dear reader, including getting back in the car for one more search. Suffice it to say that your humble blogger was not aware of all the alert and messaging features of the "Find My" app.
The man who found the iPhone showed up at my door. He was tall, ruddy, masked, and middle-aged, with a baseball cap and walking shorts.
How did you know my address?
"It popped up briefly." [After reading the "Find My" instructions, I still don't see how that happened.]
Here, let me give you something.
"Oh, no," he said, waving his hands.
Thank you sir.
And with that, he was gone, and I don't even know his name.
I do have a picture of his shadow (right), which the camera took while he was looking at the display.
The medical examiner’s office later identified the man as Dustin Walker. He was 37 and homeless. His cause of death is under investigation...
Scores of neighbors responded, several of them saying they’d seen people appearing to be asleep or unconscious on the street many times and had not known what to do.
Amid San Francisco’s triple crisis of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction, it’s common to see people in distress or simply passed out on the sidewalk. It’s such a familiar sight that many of us just walk on by.
It's easy to deplore San Franciscans' lack of compassion, but I don't believe that attribution is justified. There's too much risk of being infected or provoking a violent reaction from attempting to rouse a person lying on a sidewalk (some social workers advise tapping the soles of the subject's shoes).
After running an errand, I stopped by Starbucks at 5:30. I was happy that they were open early on a Sunday morning, though with no other customers but me I wondered about their business savvy.
Two baristas were busily wiping the surfaces and tuning up sundry machines.
My order, a "black eye" (large coffee with two shots of espresso), was ready. "Good morning," I said, "Thank you."
The parking lot was deserted except for my 17-year-old Camry. As I departed, another customer arrived. He seemed to be in a hurry. Golfer? Fisherman? Work? The old reasons for rushing about haven't applied for nearly a year.
When it's quiet, dark, and lonely, being with strangers is better than just ourselves.
The documentaries that I find most fascinating are the ones that tell me something new on topics that (I thought) I was familiar with. Netflix' "/the social dilemma" is such a movie.
It describes how the Internet companies--Google and Facebook, primarily, but also Twitter, pinterest, Tiktok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, et. al.--watch everything that we read, write, upload, download, or view. They know the identities of our friends, families, and business associates and where we are at all times.
The companies use that data to show us ads that are likely to trigger a sale, but marketing efficiency is only a small part of the algorithms' power. The programs predict what we'll do next; a search that begins Climate change is.. will fill in "a hoax" if one is a conservative or "a threat to humanity" if one is a liberal.
The user is steered toward sites and news--even fake news and conspiracy theories--that the algorithm believes will keep the eyeballs fixated. By making it so easy to view materials that one agrees with leads to today's political polarization; it is the rare user who actively seeks alternative points of view.
The movie dives into the ways in which social media hooks the users--for example, continuous notifications about friends and celebrities, or beeping when someone likes their selfie--but is weak when it comes to suggestions about what to do about its pervasive influence. Some speakers call for much greater government regulation--just after a section on the danger of letting tech tools fall into the hands of governments. Parents wage a lonely battle trying to keep their children unplugged when all the other kids stay connected.
Your humble blogger doesn't have any solutions either. I'm just grateful that I grew up when high schools and colleges actively introduced students to different points of view. My education and career beginnings occurred long before the Internet but after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, grossly simplified, said we must judge individuals for what they can do and not who they are. (Obviously there existed a large gap between the law and reality, but everyone knew what the aspiration was.)
15 minutes from the end, the movie runs a clip from Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) at a 2019 Senate Commerce Committee hearing:
I am 62 years old, getting older every minute the more this conversation goes on, but I will tell you that I'm probably gonna be dead and gone, and I'll probably be thankful for it, when all this s*** comes to fruition. Because I think that this scares me to death.
I identify with Senator Tester more than anyone else in the documentary...and I'm sure that Facebook, Google, et. al. already knew that!
Below is the testimony from Tristan Harris, whose ideas are featured prominently in /the social dilemma, at the same hearing.
The ideas included flying cars, giant holes to turn rising sea water into attractive fish ponds, streets paved with mah-jongg tiles, time limits for showers, a system of Tokyo-style capsule hotels and special dormitories made out of compressed dirt. Teachers would be housed in those...
San Francisco Bay would be a lot cleaner, said Vanessa Chavez, 18, if the city would install giant nets on storm drain outfall pipes. The nets would catch junk the way that mesh nets on home dryers catch lint.
Vanessa, a student at Kennedy High School in Richmond, said all the city would need to do is hire about 100 people to go around town during a storm to clean out all the nets.
Too often young scolds propose drastic restrictions on behavior (don't fly, don't eat meat, confiscate guns, etc.) to achieve their visions. The kids at the Youth Policy Summit, for the most part, are trying to invent new ways and products to nudge society in the right direction.
It would be easy for adult curmudgeons to throw cold water on such ideas, but this kind of creativity should be praised, not buried.
Sitting alone in a late-night diner is a common, uniquely American experience. At some point in their lives everyone has made their way to the coffee-stained counters and booths that once reeked of tobacco. Everyone has been a business traveler on a budget, a swing-shifter on the way home, or a lonely single in need of some human contact.
Economist writer Tara Burton sat in one of these American (actually, New York) institutions for a day and chronicled the comings-and-goings of its denizens, most of whom the staff know by name.
Though the diners are slowly winking out of existence ("Ten years ago there were 1,000 diners in New York. Now there are fewer than 400") they meet a deeply felt need for enough people that some will be around for a long time. As Lynn, the producer of classical CD's, reflects, “I spend more time here than with my own family.” .
Redwood Creek is less than a 10-minute walk from the courthouse.
By 9 a.m. the Jury Assembly room was filled to its 165-person capacity. Judging from past experience the odds were in favor of my going home early. Typically 50-60 would be called to go upstairs.
Uh-oh, the clerk flourished a thick sheaf of papers and began reading. There was an initial thrill when 140 names were called, none of them mine. I sobered when the clerk told the "lucky" 23 to come back after lunch. What sort of trial calls 140 candidates, screens them in the morning, and needs more potential jurors in the afternoon?
About 100 newly summoned faces were seated in the Assembly room after the lunch break. Half of them went upstairs, and we lucky 23 joined the uncalled remnant.
After waiting an hour, the clerk told us to come back at 1 p.m. tomorrow. If we didn't, the judge could issue a bench warrant for our arrest. The good news: we all would be paid $15 for showing up.
They couldn't get 12 jurors from the nearly 200 that went to the courtroom today. What was this trial about anyway?
More than 50 years later, this humble blogger is of the opinion that affirmative action has outlived its usefulness. Too many resources are now devoted to claiming membership in "disadvantaged" groups that ironically are granted advantages through force of law. Affirmative action causes individuals to emphasize their differences; it exacerbates, not reduces, conflict. The above statements about human behavior and motivations are disputed in the United States; they are not so in India. [bold added]
Haryana’s Jats are angry. [Blogger's note: the state of Haryana has roughly 25 million people, of which 25%--6 to 7 million--are Jats.] Jealous that weaker, lower-caste groups get government aid, they want to be classified as equally deserving. Protests that started peacefully soon turned violent as rioters looted, pillaged and raped and blocked roads, railways and, most alarmingly, also a canal that supplies about half of Delhi’s water.
Since India’s independence, the government has made provisions to uplift the most downtrodden members of the caste system, known as Dalits, most often by means of state favours known as “reservations”: jobs and slots at universities set aside for the people who had been least likely to enjoy their benefits. None of the riots have been started by Dalits, who were traditionally known as “untouchables”. It is relatively clear who counts as a Dalit: about a quarter of the country’s population qualifies, including remote tribal groups. But since 1990 the national government has allowed other, somewhat less disadvantaged groups to claim similar benefits, if they can establish that they belong to the “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs). There are 11 formal criteria for admission into the ranks of the OBCs, but these are open to interpretation. Dalits and OBCs together may claim as many as 50% of a given state’s reservations. The Jats of Haryana, like the Patidars of Gujarat or the Kapus of Andhra Pradesh, all want to be counted among the OBCs to gain a slice of the social-welfare pie to which lowlier castes are entitled.
Corrective programs do address needs, but they often not only continue but expand with their original purpose transformed, long after the original problems have subsided.
"Nice guys finish last" is a saying attributed to baseball-is-war Dodgers manager Leo Durocher in the 1940's. The saying resonates with experience because everyone knows "winners" who use any means to reach the top. But is "nice guys finish last" mostly true?
the most generous people were overrepresented in both the bottom 25% of their field and the top 25%. As Grant put it, “Good guys and gals have a better chance of finishing last than the rest of us, but also better odds of finishing first. [bold added]”
Professor Grant divides people into three categories: Takers, Givers, and Matchers. The first two are self-explanatory, while Matchers transact interpersonally on a quid pro quo basis. (In real life there's probably no one who behaves all the time as a Taker, Giver, or Matcher.) Though very few Givers behave that way out of cold calculation, generosity can inure to one's benefit in the long run:
being overly generous towards other people can be harmful in the short run, if it outweighs personal goals and needs. But it will pay dividends later with the skills the Givers acquire along the way and the goodwill they engender.
“You actually learn things through helping other people solve their problems,” Grant said. “And there’s a social capital upside… but they don’t happen right away.”
And what about the jerks who finish first? "Takers, on the other hand, tend to rise fast and fall just as quickly."
In related news, Donald Trump, whose most famous catchphrase is "You're fired", saw that his lead has softened significantly over other Republican candidates for President.
This article is about rules of etiquette in the brave new technological world. Examples:
You can’t quit a social network just because your mom joins.
Early Apple Watch owners.....don’t act like you’re better than the rest of us because you can order pizza by talking into your wrist.
All smartwatch owners: No messaging during dinner and pretending you’re just scratching your wrist. Wrists aren’t that itchy.
An insightful quote at the end, IMHO, takes the prize:
When my friends and I go out to dinner, we’ll sometimes go ‘phones down’ as soon as we’re seated. Whoever accidentally picks up the phone first has to pay the tab for everyone. It is really effective at getting people off their phones. — Andy Dunn, CEO of the online men’s fashion retailer Bonobos
When you look at what people are consuming, you don't see the gross material deprivation that really used to characterize being poor, like lack of hot water, regularly having no food in the house, shivering yourself to sleep in the cold, or wearing patched (or worse, unpatched) clothes. Younger poor people quite frequently have things that older non-poor people consider nonessential luxuries, like cable or satellite television, expensive sneakers, and high-end cellular phones.
Every middle-class person knows someone who is technically "poor" as measured by income, but who drives a better car, wears nicer clothes, or has a more exciting night life than one's own. It's tempting to subscribe to the viewpoint that success or failure in life is their own fault:
...poor people are not so much lacking in money, as lacking in the self-discipline to spend their money wisely. This view is reinforced by the fact that a lot of immigrants do arrive here with even less than the native poor, often don't qualify for supplemental benefits that cushion the deprivation of the native poor, and nonetheless after a generation or two end up quite prosperous.
And yet we also know hard-working individuals of character who have fallen on hard times through no "fault" of their own. The catalyst that began the descent could be a divorce, the loss of a job, caring for a sick parent, the death of a breadwinner, or poor health. It seems impossible to craft a wise poverty program that will address each of the "eight million stories in the naked city".
Megan McArdle thinks that people often remain poor because they are trapped in bad neighborhoods:
People with impulse control problems, mental illness, drug and alcohol addictions, are very, very disproportionately likely to end up poor.....So even though these people remain a minority in poor neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods nonetheless have a lot more of them than more affluent communities...
More importantly, poor people have to put up with it, because they have a limited number of other neighborhoods to choose from, most of which have the same constellation of problems. If a gang moves into a middle class neighborhood and starts terrorizing the residents, either the cops take care of it, or the middle class people move. If it happens in a poor neighborhood, well, where are you going to go?
It's hard to see how we will ever have enough resources to make most bad neighborhoods safe, especially given local government budget constraints.
One more thought: poverty is more about the future than the present. When I was going to graduate school, debts exceeded my assets, and I had no income. Yet no one then would have thought to call me poor. Roll that same financial profile forward 40 years however, when productive years are largely in the past, and that would be a snapshot of an impoverished person by anyone's definition.
The facts: Facebook engaged Alice Van Ness to teach yoga to Facebook employees. She asked students to turn off their cellphones during her classes. One student began to text in the middle of a session. Alice gave the student a "stern" look. The employee complained, and Alice was fired. (Technically, her contract was terminated because she is a subcontractor for the fitness contractor that Facebook hired.)
I can understand why the fitness company had to terminate Alice Van Ness; it couldn't afford to jeopardize its contract with a major corporate customer. And all's well that ends well: after the incident was publicized Alice was offered a job at a yoga studio.
I blame Facebook for not coaching its employee: 1) to have respect for the teacher's rules regardless of how important the student or her work may be outside the class, 2) to learn other ways of dealing with humiliation besides getting someone fired, 3) to observe cellphone etiquette---for example, if she simply had to text she could have excused herself temporarily.
...this is Facebook. This is a company that grew from nothing to the biggest thing going in about 15 minutes. This is a company that changes its privacy policy every half-hour. This is a place that is all about the social network, which by the way, has nothing to do with making eye contact with your yoga instructor and everything to do with constant access to a keyboard and screen.
And the sad truth is that when you work at the biggest thing going, you sometimes forget that other people are important, too.]
[Update - 7/14/12, Yoga instructor Alice Van Ness was told in advance that she couldn't forbid cellphones. More from Mike Cassidy:
Van Ness had been warned by her bosses before the class that she could not enforce a cell phone ban while she was teaching yoga. That's what the termination letter that Van Ness shared with The Associated Press says. [snip]
Now whether staring daggers at someone who is disrupting your class constitutes "precluding fitness center users from answering their phones," I'll leave up to the lawyers in the crowd.]
If a class-less society is what we should be striving toward, then nirvana was achieved last night at the Oracle Arena.
The Golden State Warriors honored Chris Mullin by retiring his #17 jersey, but the ceremony was marred by the frequent booing of Warriors owner Joe Lacob. The ostensible reason for the fans' displeasure was a trade in which the Warriors sent away their best player, popular seven-year guard Monta Ellis. Despite pleas by Chris Mullin and Hall-of-Fame great Rick Barry, the boos for Joe Lacob escalated throughout the ceremony.
Those fans who insisted on spoiling the Mullin family's day--yes, that wasn't the fans' main intent and yes, they have laid out a lot of ticket money for decades--were thinking only of themselves and their right to speak.
Class in the "classiness" sense arises not from wealth or social status but from a spirit that chooses not to exercise the rights, privileges, and wealth at one's command, when to do so would injure others or merely glorify oneself. On Monday night in Oakland there was a notable lack of class.
There were 80 of us in the Jury Assembly Room yesterday morning. 55 names, none of them mine, were called; they shuffled upstairs to be interviewed by the judge. We had to wait another hour to see if the remaining 25 were needed for another case. No, we were dismissed before 11 a.m. Yes, I was willing to do my civic duty but didn't need to, reviving a distant memory of the happy feelings from receiving a high draft number.
This week two of the stocks that I own (and recommended on January 7th) reported much better-than-expected earnings. The share prices of both Apple and Netflix have risen, along with my mood.
The Year of the Dragon has gotten off to a good start. I suppose that it could have been even better had the Niners beaten the Giants and made it to the Super Bowl. But let's be honest--San Francisco over-achieved this year and was not as balanced as New York. Incidentally, the Chinese zodiacal magic evened out at the game: both 49er Kyle Williams, who made the critical fumble, and Giant Jacquian Williams, who caused it, were born in the Year of the Dragon.
Someone couldn't spare 10 seconds to put away the cart, center.
I can understand the fascination with end-of-the-world predictions. There's a slim chance that the terrible event will come to pass, but there are some silver linings if the horror indeed occurs: we won't have to pay off those noisome creditors, we won't have to do those urgent-but-unimportant tasks that clutter our to-do lists, and we'll take our last breath comforted by the knowledge that there is a deity after all who was mad as heck and couldn't take our foolishness any more.
Which brings me to the death of civic society. How is it that shoppers can't spend a few seconds walking their carts to the shopping cart corrals after they've loaded their car trunks? The discourteous leave them all over the parking lot, and especially on busy weekends prevent others from using valuable parking spaces.
I have been hit three times in the last 10 years: 1) driver ran stop sign, slammed into my truck, limped off, was run down and detained by me until police arrived; 2) speeding driver hit a mattress in the road (things such as that are rarely tied down by motorists in California), swerved, was hit, did a 180, braked, but still hit me at 45 mph head-on (survived due to the air bags of the Honda Accord); 3) rear-ended as explained above. But this time your wiser author, when the car rear-ended me at 50 mph, was driving a four-wheel-drive Toyota Tundra with huge tow bar in back; the texter was driving a Civic. Nuff said.
But wait, if you think it's bad now, it's only going to get worse.
Tens of thousands of prisoners are scheduled by a U.S. Supreme Court order to be released. But why this inability to house our criminals when we pay among the highest sales, income, and gas taxes in the nation? Too many criminals? Too few new prisons? Too high costs per prisoner? Too many non-violent crimes that warrant incarceration? God help us when they are released. We know what crime is like now; what will it be like if thousands are let go?
Wherever we turn our eyes, things are getting worse.
Our schools rate just below Mississippi in math and science. Tell me why, given our high taxes and highest paid teachers in the nation? Can the governor or legislature explain? Is the culprit the notoriously therapeutic California curriculum? The inability to fire incompetent teachers? The vast number of non-English speaking students? Derelict parents? How odd that not a single state official can offer any explanation other than: “We need more money.” What is the possible cure for the near worst math and science students in the nation? Yes, I see it now: the California Senate just passed a bill mandating the teaching of homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered history, just the sort of strategy to raise those English composition and vocabulary scores among the linguistic and arithmetic illiterate.
Try driving a California “freeway” lately, say the 101 between Gilroy and San Luis Obispo or the 99 between Modesto and Stockton, or an east-west lateral like the 152 between Casa de Fruita and Gilroy, or the 12 between Napa and Stockton [blogger's note: I've driven all those stretches in the past year, and I won't risk driving them at night]. In other words, just try driving across the state. These stretches are all nightmarish death traps (the concrete divider on the two-lane 12 is a sick joke, a sort of kill-contraption), no improvements from 40 years ago when there were 15 million fewer people and far better drivers. But how did this happen when we pay the highest gasoline taxes in the nation; where did the revenue go? Is there some cruel joke I’m missing — a stash of billions in gas tax money buried somewhere and never used? And how can we even begin discussing “high-speed rail” (stage one planned from Fresno to the megalopolis of Corcoran no less!) when millions do not yet have “high-speed roads”? Madness, sheer madness.
His despair is understandable, and I have no prescription to offer our sick state. Fellow Californians, you must hunker down and hope that times get better. Look after yourself and your family, try to do a little something for others in your spare time, and meanwhile put away that shopping cart.
