Aloha to Affirmative Action

Pre-1995 California's explicit consideration of race would
have admitted a non-white, poor applicant but rejected a
white non-poor applicant of similar achievements. (WSJ video)

Gallons of ink have been spilled (sorry, dear reader, I can't come up with a post-newspaper-age metaphor) over the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action earlier today.

In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard Ccllege

The Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions, eliminating the principal tool the nation’s most selective schools have used to diversify their campuses.

Thursday’s 6-3 decision will force a reworking of admissions criteria throughout American higher education, where for decades the pursuit of diversity has been an article of faith.

A few personal comments:

1) Growing up in melting-pot Hawaii, I hadn't heard the term "affirmative action" until I came to the Mainland.

2) I'm so old that Asian-Americans were viewed as an "underprivileged minority" when I went to college in the 1970's. I could be the beneficiary of affirmative-action policies that began in the late 1960's. (In my defense both my grades and board scores were at least as high as my white roommates'.)

3) I always wondered whether the existence of affirmative action tainted the credibility of Asians' or any other minority individuals' accomplishments. I was happy that Asian-Americans stopped being the beneficiaries of affirmative action, if they ever were, and were evaluated on their own merits by the late 1980's in the Bay Area.

4) I am all in favor of giving special consideration to students who grew up in difficult economic, family, and social environments. And one would have to be blind not to see that black and Hispanic students fall disproportionately into that category. Helping everyone in those circumstances regardless of race, IMHO, is the right policy.

"Real Estate is Local" Beats Overall Market Trends

Zillow: these Honolulu fixer-uppers are at least $1 million

The WSJ real estate section declares, Nobody Wants to Buy a Fixer-Upper Right Now [bold added]

Real-estate agents say buyers right now seem in no mood to take on the additional costs and headaches of major renovation projects... It is one reason sellers are receiving an average of three offers now, compared with around six a year ago, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The drop in demand for unrenovated homes is mostly driven by high mortgage rates, buyers and their agents said. Fixer-uppers are always a risky proposition for buyers, but now they are more costly as the rates for home loans and construction loans have both increased, on top of high property prices.

This push higher in rates has widened the gap in sale time between turnkey and non-renovated properties, say agents. For sellers, this means a home in need of repair often sits on the market longer unless they attempt to do more work before listing....

Anything that sits on the market for more than a month is usually either overpriced or in need of significant repairs or updates, said Taylor Marr, Redfin’s deputy chief economist. Homes stay on the market for a median of 27 days, up from 19 days a year ago, according to Redfin.

“Most home buyers right now simply don’t have enough money left over to invest in major repairs or remodeling,” said Marr.

We foresaw the drop in demand when we ran the numbers 12 months ago. The overwhelming majority of home buyers must use a mortgage to finance part of their purchase price, and the main factor behind the drop in home prices is the doubling in mortgage rates.

Repair costs are usually paid from the buyer's cash reserves, because the original mortgagor won't lend on a future uptick in value. If the buyer is fortunate to obtain a home improvement loan, that rate is likely higher than the mortgage rate and in any event the loan must be repaid quickly. That's why, in general, prices are dropping more on old homes in need of repair than on homes in general.

That said, we are personally aware of at least four fixer-uppers in Hawaii. All the homes require repairs to such an extent where two may be torn down. Yet demand remains strong and prices on these old homes seem to be at or above 2021 levels, when interest rates were much lower.

When deciding what to do with a specific property, be aware of what's going on nationally but it's more important to remember that all real estate is local.

No Cruises on the Horizon

During the 1970's we went on our first and only cruise, a trip along the "Mexican Riviera." Starting in Acapulco, the ship made its way north, stopping at port cities until it reached Los Angeles.

I immediately grasped cruising's appeal. Travelers didn't have to pack their suitcases every night to make next morning's bus or train; the floating hotel would move to the next destination while they were sleeping. At one's leisure one could disembark and see the city, or stay onboard if so inclined. Ocean cruises were something we would want to do when we retired.

During the 1990's there were outbreaks of legionnaires' disease on cruise ships. Diseases spread quickly in close quarters.

Now that we're retired we're leafing through the brochures. However, health and safety risks still appear to be as significant as they were three decades ago. Headline:

The Viking Neptune outbreak originated in Iceland

Stomach Virus Spreads Through Cruise Ships at Fastest Pace in Years

So far this year, there have been 13 outbreaks of norovirus on cruise ships, according to reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That marks the largest number of norovirus incidents on these vessels in a single year since 2012—and the year is only halfway over.

The most recent outbreak occurred on a North Atlantic Viking Cruises sailing that docked in New Jersey on June 20. More than 100 passengers fell ill, according to the CDC, accounting for 13% of all vacationers on the ship. Crew members also contracted the gastrointestinal illness.

We'll still travel by ship when it's clearly the best option--for example, Alaska--but for right now there are no cruises on the horizon.

Don't Try to Catch a Falling City

Chronicle illustration of San Francisco's "doom loop"

San Francisco's deterioration as a premiere American city has attracted national attention.

The Chronicle says the persistent negativism has made San Francisco seem worse than it really is.

San Francisco is a dystopian hellscape overrun by armed criminals and fentanyl addicts, its streets teeming with human waste, its buildings crumbling before our eyes.

That’s the situation according to recent stories in major media outlets from CNN to Good Morning America, from the Financial Times to Newsweek, along with legions of posters on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, and perennial S.F. haters like Fox News, the New York Post and, of course, Elon Musk. Presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also chimed in last week.

Of course, people who live in San Francisco don't have their houses or cars broken into every day, nor is there a homeless drug addict camped in front of every house. But it happens to enough residents and businesses that they're packing up and leaving, even at great cost.

Just ask Nordstrom how much it is writing off on leasehold improvements and how many lease payments it is still on the hook for in the heart of San Francisco. Just ask Nordstrom's landlord, Westfield Centre, how many millions of dollars of equity it is abandoning by turning the building over to the lenders.

The Chronicle news department itself, to its credit, doesn't try to put a positive spin on San Francisco's problems. It has run dozens of stories on homelessness, rampant shoplifting, home and car burglaries, open-air drug use, and police inaction and defunding. Last year the Chronicle reported that 8% of San Francisco residents plan to move to a different city in the next twelve months, a higher percentage than any other American city.

Frankly, I think the coverage is about right. There's no indication that San Francisco has hit bottom.

Following His Dreams

My sophomore English teacher was enamored with Simon & Garfunkel's 1965 hit, The Sound of Silence, and spent weeks on it in class. We pored over the lyrics, packed with religious and hallucinatory imagery, trying to make sense of them. The opening lines are straightforward, the later verses less so.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence"

58 years later Paul Simon is still writing songs about life, death, God, and meaning. The source of his inspiration is perhaps unsurprising.

CBS Sunday Morning Interviewer: His latest solo album, Seven Psalms, was recorded in his cabin studio. The title came to him in a dream.

Paul Simon: The dream said that you are working on a piece called "Seven Psalms."

Interviewer: He got up and wrote it down on a legal pad.

Interviewer: When something as vivid as that happens, what do you make of it?

Paul Simon: Since it came to me in a dream with someone or something's telling me to do this, I said it's not my idea anyway so I'll just wait to this clarification on what I'm supposed to do.

Interviewer: Did you get clarification?

Paul Simon: Yeah, it did come as guitar pieces.

Interviewer: The words would come later, again in dreams.

Paul Simon: I would start to wake up two or three times a week between 3:30 and 5 in the morning, and words would come. I would write them down and start putting them together.

Paul Simon goes on to say that his best work, The Sound of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water, came from dreams.

In another time he might have been called a prophet with a pipeline to the divine, except that no prophet had his gift for music.

Don't Burn Yourself

(WSJ illustration)

The word "toast" conjures pleasant images. A slice of buttered toast can be the perfect start to the day, and raising a glass in a toast fills the room with conviviality.

Bill Murray coined a third definition in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters when his character Peter Venkman declared, "This chick is toast" then blasted the demon with his proton pack.

That use of toast seemed to fill a need for a word signifying death and destruction but with a less ominous tone. It immediately caught on:

The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes Murray’s ad-lib as the earliest known occurrence of “toast” with the modern meaning, calling the usage “proleptic.” Prolepsis is a figure of speech in which a future state is represented as already occurring, so “You’re toast” joined other proleptic expressions like “You’re dead” or “You’re history.”

Your humble blogger doesn't use the term because future states sometimes don't materialize. A sage who says "Putin is toast" or "San Francisco is toast" may very well end up looking stupid. Why confirm what people are thinking if you don't have to?.

Careful How You Say That

I appreciate the effort to make legalese comprehensible to non-lawyers, but sometimes colloquial language can go too far.

Yes, risks pretty much suck after events prove them real, but in this case more legalese would have been helpful.

On the other hand, maybe the City attorney should just get a better proofreader.

You Know That You've Been Going to Costco Too Often When

1) You have one item on your shopping list;

2) It's the first day new items are put on sale from June 21 to July 23;

3) You walk around for 45 minutes looking for something to buy;

4) You leave with only that one item.

It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future

Good morning @GretaThunberg! Today is June 21, 2023 and we’re all still here pic.twitter.com/oaIcVl1nWt

— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) June 21, 2023

Swedish then-teenager Greta Thunberg didn't do the anti-fossil-fuel movement any favors when she made the fantastical prediction in 2018 that the world would end in five years.

Most thinking adults, regardless of their position on global warming, knew that her declaration was similar to that of doomsday cultists who regularly make such predictions and demolish their own credibility.

Your humble blogger doesn't mock her for her statements--who doesn't do or say outlandish things as a teenager?--but I do blame adults for exploiting her for their own purposes. WSJ: [bold added]

Thunberg rose to international fame in 2018 when she began her school strikes outside the Swedish Parliament at the age of 15. Thunberg demonstrated every day for three weeks with a small group of students. Then she decided to hold the demonstrations on Fridays, dubbing the event Fridays for Future. She took a year off from school starting in 2019 to focus on her climate activism...

She made a name for herself with her blunt criticism of world leaders, saying they aren’t doing enough to address climate change. Time magazine named Thunberg Person of the Year in 2019, which was criticized by then-U.S. President Donald Trump. She led 25,000 climate protesters in 2021 at the COP26 United Nations climate summit, calling for a more rapid and robust response to curb growing carbon emissions.

Greta Thunberg as a pre-teen "was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), and selective mutism" (Wikipedia). She "struggled with depression for almost four years" and came out of it when she became a climate activist. She took time off from high school and graduated this month at the age of 20, two years behind her peers.

My sense is that she is not regarded positively even by people on her own side. (If she were, wind, solar, and other green-power companies would hire her for ad campaigns.) I hope she finds balance and happiness after the fever passes and people stop returning her calls.

Elemental Thoughts

Last Saturday's water shutdown in our neighborhood caused us to repair to the Hillsdale shopping center.

Unlike the emptying Westfield in San Francisco, Hillsdale is one of the Bay Area suburban malls that is experiencing growth and attracting investment.

The mall is safe enough that parents are comfortable bringing their children. (San Mateo County has a homeless population of about 1,000, and the City and County have improved security recently.) Disney set up a colorful display next to Macy's to advertise the new animated film Elemental.

The film on the whole has garnered moderately favorable reviews (WSJ: "marvelous imagery"; SF Chronicle: "absolutely gorgeous rendering of a half-baked idea").

Good special effects, plus a new, creative world of "elemental" tribes: that's enough to make me want to check it out on the Disney+ streaming service when it arrives, perhaps in September.

Postscript: I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the movie when I was a kid. I liked to keep reality, e.g., real science, separate from fantasy, e.g., cartoons and fairy tales. When I learned that Aristotle, one of the greatest Greek philosophers, declared the basic elements to be fire, air, water, and earth, this fourth grader thought that was pretty dumb. Today I would be kinder--some of the greatest fiction has been spun from premises that are entirely false.

Juneteenth 2023

From the papers of Harlem poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Beinecke Library:

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

Now that Juneteenth is a Federal holiday, let's all of us just celebrate it and forget about the political calculations behind it.

Father's Day, 2023

Napa, 2007: father and son

Mom called me on FaceTime yesterday. We asked each other about how our day is going, what we've had for lunch, and what the weather was like in Hawaii and California. Small talk is normally deplored; however, in our case there was no important information to be conveyed or decision to be made, we mainly wanted to hear each other's voice.

As usual, something reminded us of Dad. I told Mom about the takeout barbecue I had ordered last night, and the conversation turned to how Dad would spend all day smoking a side of beef or pork in the backyard. He became quite expert at wood-smoking for large group gatherings; for years he was in charge of food prep at the Honolulu Shriners' Club.

Dad passed away nearly four years ago, and I think of him every day if only for a moment. On this Father's Day may we cherish the memories of our fathers, living or not, because it all goes so quickly.

This Could be the Giants' Year

The Giants lead the Dodgers 7-5 in the bottom of the 11th inning, make two defensive errors on the same play, and look like they're about to blow another lead as they did in the 9th inning. But as Yogi might have observed, the Fat Lady hasn't sung yet.

Chased Away

At 10 a.m. yesterday the water pressure in the house dropped to zero. I looked out the window. A couple of utility trucks were in the street.

Presumably the interruption was going to be brief, else the workers would have knocked on the affected homes' doors and informed everyone. One could also infer from the absence of signs that the shut-off was unplanned.

After an hour with no water I walked across the street. The homeowner explained that his plumber had damaged the line to the neighborhood, and the City had to close the valve while contractors fixed the leak. Maybe another hour, he said.

Not wishing to wait around, especially if nature called, we left an hour early for the appointment at the Apple Store to fix an Apple Watch.

Any irritation I felt evaporated. I felt sorry for our neighbor, who may be on the hook for the street repair costs, not to mention a plumbing job gone wrong. I felt grateful to live in a City that could respond so quickly to a utilities emergency. And I appreciated living close to safe shopping malls, work-out clubs, and restaurants where we could pass the hours. When we got back in the afternoon the water was back on, and the men were still working in the street.

San Francisco is only 20 miles north, but it seems much farther away.

New Traffic Lights

In March we had lamented how the neighborhood had been greatly inconvenienced by an intersection that had been torn up since the beginning of the year.

This week the work was completed, and the new traffic lights were turned on. It did take nearly six months (cue jokes about public works projects), but I must admit that the new lights are big, bright and technologically advanced.

Last year we only had a stop sign; now three stop lights face each direction, and there are two left turn lights on the main boulevard. Based on a couple days of observations, the intersection feels safer especially for pedestrians, and driving speed doesn't seem to have been sacrificed.

Traffic patterns have already changed. For some routes it's advantageous to avoid the lights, for others efficiency dictates that one should seek out the intersection.

All in all, thumbs up.