California: Marshes and Wildfowl Over the People

For decades environmentalists have regarded the Environmental Protection Agency as their bailiwick. Where the law was ambiguous, sympathetic EPA staffers, especially under Democrats, often gave environmentalists what they wanted through regulations, rulings, and interpretations.

President Trump has reversed some of these regulations and Executive Orders that he believes were not in keeping with the original laws passed by Congress. The latest skirmish is over the Clean Water Act: [bold added]

Andrew Wheeler (NPR photo)

At issue is the reach of the Clean Water Act and, more precisely, what waterways should be regulated. While for years it was unclear whether the nation’s small tributaries warranted protection by the federal government, President Barack Obama sought to remove the ambiguity by ordering the EPA in 2015 to safeguard all bodies of water that feed larger rivers and lakes.

Andrew Wheeler, the current EPA administrator, claimed the law amounted to government overreach that left landowners at the mercy of “distant unelected bureaucrats.”

The new rule maintains federal jurisdiction over navigable waters and their tributaries, Wheeler said, but removes ponds and sloughs unconnected to larger bodies of water from EPA jurisdiction.

The environmental groups, co-represented by the Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy law firm of Burlingame, claim the Trump administration’s decision to repeal the rule opens up thousands of miles of streams and wetlands throughout the country to development, including pipeline construction.

In the Bay Area that specifically re-opens the question of developing the Cargill salt ponds:

Homes on the Cargill site would be only a few
miles from Oracle and Facebook.

The salt ponds have been owned since 1978 by Cargill Inc., which withdrew a proposal to build 12,000 homes on the flats in 2012 in the face of intense community opposition. Environmental groups would like to see wetlands restored there.

“We’re not going to stand by while Cargill uses the Trump administration’s eagerness to gut our environmental laws for its own economic advantage,” said Megan Fluke, executive director of the Committee for Green Foothills. “The salt ponds are part of the bay. Development here would not only destroy restorable natural resources, it would put homes and businesses in the path of sea-level rise, on an earthquake liquefaction site and next to heavy industry.”

What the environmentalists are really thinking, but not saying, is that thousands of homes, including the entire cities of Foster City and Redwood Shores, don't meet their criteria and would never be approved today. If they really prioritized alleviating the housing shortage and eliminating carbon emissions from thousands of cars, they would welcome building where the jobs are. Judging by their actions and not their fine words about "climate change" and "inequality" they really don't.

President Trump may be impulsive, a bully, uncouth, obnoxious, and any number of other bad things. But he has exposed the progressive left as elitists who choose marshes and wildfowl over people. Hey, I don't mind; restricting the supply keeps my house price up.

SF: Can We Sell It Short Yet?

Despite the litany of San Francisco problems--homelessness, crime, needles and human waste on the sidewalks, astronomical real estate prices, astronomical taxes, boulders in the streets, taxpayers leaving, empty storefronts, $billions of transportation over-runs, not to mention picking fights with the Federal Government over immigration and the environment--now activists want San Francisco to set up its own bank.

Advocates for a public bank in San Francisco are rejoicing over Gov. Gavin Newsom signing legislation that will allow them to create a local institution to finance priorities like low-income housing, public infrastructure and small businesses...

Supporters have pushed San Francisco officials for years to consider municipal banks as an alternative to traditional commercial institutions, whose interests prioritize creating value for their shareholders over benefiting the communities where they do business. But setting up a public bank will be a complicated, time-consuming and expensive process — it could take the city 10 to 30 years to break even. But supporters are undeterred by the hurdles.

San Francisco can't even adhere to basic standards of health and citizen safety that are met by towns across the U.S., and it thinks it has the expertise to set up a bank?

If only the City of San Francisco were a stock, I would sell short in a heartbeat.

More Than You Can Give

With all the "big" problems calling for our attention, the story of the sidewalk boulders has commandeered local attention. Chronicle Reporter Heather Knight walked Clinton Park Alley:

Boulders removed, bitterness remains (Chron photo)

The much-discussed boulders of Clinton Park symbolize the anger and frustration simmering over our incredibly wealthy city’s total inability to provide basic services to its swelling homeless population or to enforce laws when street behavior turns dark and violent...

Neighbors reported feeling unsafe as they tried to get past the tents. They described a drug-dealing ring preying on homeless drug addicts. The tent dwellers would sometimes display meth-induced psychosis, cook over open flames, brandish weapons, and scream and party late into the night, neighbors said. They called 911 and 311 hundreds of times, to little avail.

Once word of the boulders got out, activists swarmed the street nightly, pushing the rocks into the road. Some people posted threatening messages regarding the neighbors on social media and, according to some neighbors, even issued death threats.

The city’s Public Works returned daily, placing the boulders back on the sidewalk. This game of move-the-boulders perfectly encapsulated City Hall’s track record on the issue: working hard to get very little accomplished.

The controversy became too much for the neighbors, who asked Public Works to remove the boulders. As of noon Monday, they were gone...

The neighbors I spoke to seemed kind and thoughtful. One man, wearing a stethoscope around his neck, said he has worked with drug-addicted people in the Tenderloin and South of Market for 20 years. Another man said he volunteers regularly feeding homeless people at the nearby St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church.

They don’t understand why not wanting a drug den outside your home makes you anti-homeless. And they don’t understand why super-rich San Francisco can’t provide more shelter beds, supportive housing units, drug treatment, mental health care and mandated treatment for those too ill to know they need it.

The vast majority of San Franciscans--and Bay Area residents--are liberal, loving, and giving people (your humble blogger is one out of three). But the takers always want more than you can give.

Sisyphean Situation

(Chronicle photo)

Residents of Clinton Park Alley in San Francisco have become so frustrated by the homeless encampments and drug dealing on their street that they brought in boulders to make it difficult to conduct those activities on the narrow sidewalk.

For several days there was a back-and-forth battle between activists who pushed the boulders on to the street and City workers who rolled them back on the sidewalk. Finally, the City removed the rocks.

Besides losing the skirmish (and the $2,000 they spent on the boulders) the poor residents may be worse off than when they began: [bold added]

One resident who did not want to be named for fear of retaliation by activists said neighbors were being harassed in person and online by people opposed to the boulders, and the pressure was more than troublesome. Neighbors were getting death threats, being viciously trolled specifically by activists who found their names and addresses, and being shouted at on the street, the resident said.

Conditions are worsening, and there are no signs that the City Government is capable of turning the situation around.

In the Cards

Goldman Sachs is one of the premier investment banks on Wall Street. It's been trying to leverage its prestige by entering the consumer space:

I caved to the marketing hype

Goldman’s new consumer bank, which operates under the brand Marcus, has lost $1.3 billion since launching in 2016. It spent heavily to buy startups and cloud-storage space, hire hundreds of techies, and build call centers in Utah and Texas. Loans have gone bad at a higher rate than that of rivals.

and got an Apple Card

Marcus launched without a collections team to chase down delinquent borrowers, resulting in early loan losses, people familiar with the matter said. A credit card developed with Apple Inc. was a coup, but a costly one: Thousands of engineers across Goldman were diverted to finish it in time for an August debut, delaying other projects.

Apple ads for the card carried the phrase: “Designed by Apple, not a bank”—a line that didn’t appear in a giant banner ad in Goldman’s lobby this fall.

It's easier for an upscale line to go down-market than the reverse. The risk is watering down the brand, and a failure in execution could tarnish Goldman's name. Even if the Apple Card succeeds, the cultural changes wrought from managing millions of retail accounts might prove too much for the venerable investment bank, and it wouldn't be surprising if a spin-off or even a divestiture is in the cards.

Filling a Need

On the Sandwiches on Sunday menu today, like last March, was chicken and rice. Within that description the preparers had broad latitude. Those who were pressed for time picked up rotisserie chicken from Safeway or Costco. Others spent hours in the kitchen. I was in the latter group.

On Thursday I bought 10 pounds of drumsticks--about 30--from Costco for $12.77 and marinated them in soy sauce and garlic.

The water will be absorbed by the rice

On Sunday morning I spread 10 cups of washed rice into a large roasting pan and poured over a mixture of 2 cans of cream of mushroom soup, water, and grilled onions. Next I browned the drumsticks and covered the pan with foil.

Into the oven for two hours at 325 degrees on timer, et voila! Baked chicken and rice. (The dish can sit in the cooling oven for a couple of hours; it won't overcook.)

The cost of all the ingredients was less than $20, under $1 a serving. The 60 people in line finished everything. As long as there's a need--we've been doing this for 16 years--we'll keep coming back.

The Spam Hypothesis

The pantry, like my inbox, overflows with spam. Lately I've been trying to live healthier, which means eating less meat. Spam, which is loaded with preservatives and comes from a can, seems to be the antithesis of healthy food. Consequently I haven't consumed any Spam inventory, and I had to pass up the semi-annual sale at Costco.

In my quiet moments, though, I wonder if we have it all wrong. Products like Spam and Coca Cola have a distant expiration date. Could it be that their preservatives have the same effect on living tissue?

Could it be that a diet of Spam and Coke will extend life? Even if that turns out not to be the case, there's the making of a best seller here...

Global Warming: The Real Fairy Tale

China's CO2 emissions are 2x the U.S. (visual capitalist)

Earlier this week 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg gave an impassioned speech about climate change to the United Nations.

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

A cursory look at the data shows that China's CO2 production, nearly double that of the U.S., is increasing while in the U.S. it’s going down.

India, with half the emissions and 4x the population of the U.S., is on an even steeper trajectory. The math is simple but daunting; if India's carbon emissions rise to 8 tons per person per year (half the U.S. level) India's total annual CO2 will be roughly equal to China's. In India today many millions are without running water and basic sanitation.

With all due respect, Ms. Thunberg, improving the economies of the two Asian giants to a basic health and welfare standard without increasing carbon output is the real fairy tale.

Trash: We Must Redouble Our Efforts

Sometimes a stiff breeze lifts rubbish from a receptacle or blows a paper cup from someone's hand, but I have never seen anyone deliberately litter.

(The collection system isn't perfect; that's why there was the annual California Coastal Cleanup last Saturday. Thankfully, according to local politicians, not a single toxic needle of the unaccounted-for millions gets washed into the Bay.)

2019 Coastal Cleanup (Chronicle photo)

In the fast-food restaurants where plastic is still allowed I always take advantage of this legal exemption, in this instance at Wendy's. The lid, cup, and straw are the perfect drink delivery system: minimized spilling, water resistant, disposable, and cheap.

At home I placed them in the blue recycling container as I have for the past 20 years. Nevertheless, some trash still leaks through.

We, the people, continue to disappoint our leaders. We must redouble our efforts!

ESG: Ripe for Abuse

Exxon Mobil plant (WSJ photo)

If you have not been keeping up with the latest corporate trends, dear reader, you may not know the letters "ESG" (environmental, social, and governance). Proponents say that ESG measures the degree to which companies subscribe to the values of a significant sub-set of the investing public, i.e., those for whom environmental, social, and/or governance issues are important.

Critics argue that this is another attempt to bend corporations to the will of activists who have not achieved their objectives through the political and legal systems.

What are the details of ESG reporting? Investopedia: [bold added]

Environmental criteria may include a company’s energy use, waste, pollution, natural resource conservation, and treatment of animals. The criteria can also be used in evaluating any environmental risks a company might face and how the company is managing those risks. For example, are there issues related to its ownership of contaminated land, its disposal of hazardous waste, its management of toxic emissions, or its compliance with government environmental regulations?

Social criteria look at the company’s business relationships. Does it work with suppliers that hold the same values as it claims to hold? Does the company donate a percentage of its profits to the local community or encourage employees to perform volunteer work there? Do the company’s working conditions show a high regard for its employees’ health and safety? Are other stakeholders’ interests taken into account?

With regard to governance, investors may want to know that a company uses accurate and transparent accounting methods, and that stockholders are given an opportunity to vote on important issues. They may also want assurances that companies avoid conflicts of interest in their choice of board members, don't use political contributions to obtain unduly favorable treatment and, of course, don't engage in illegal practices.

In the opinion of your humble blogger, ESG is ripe for confusion, if not abuse:
1) Who decides what the measurements are, and who measures them?
2) The three categories have only a tangential relationship: dividing the CEO and the Board Chairman into two separate positions (good governance) has little to do with water usage (environmental impact).
3) Once a business starts measuring the data, activists will never be satisfied, because, for example, carbon emissions and plastics usage can not be reduced to zero.
4) In the age of social media, companies will make themselves even more vulnerable to judgment-by-bullhorn. There is enough headline risk already.
5) ESG disclosures will be expensive, because it's unlikely that a business will have in-house expertise on all the topics. Small businesses will be especially affected.

Nevertheless, not paying attention to ESG makes it more likely that a company's stock price will suffer:

while companies that don’t disclose environmental and social data may not always lose investors, they are more often being passed over by new investors, in favor of firms with better disclosure practices, ESG investors say.

pressure on companies for nonfinancial disclosure is growing. A group of 88 investors with nearly $10 trillion in assets, including HSBC Global Asset Management and the Washington State Investment Board, sent standardized environmental disclosure forms—requesting information related to issues such as carbon dioxide emissions, use of fresh water and deforestation—to many of the world’s biggest companies in February and followed up with officials of companies that hadn’t responded by June. Another group, the Workforce Disclosure Initiative, a coalition of investors with more than $13 trillion in assets under management, sent a letter to 750 companies in July asking for more information on how they manage their staff and workers in supply chains; 90 companies have provided the requested information.

I'll believe that the ESG movement is little more than a front for anti-capitalists when the same reporting is demanded of government agencies, some of which affect our lives more than any single company.

Even Hans Brinker Won't Be Enough

Back when heroes didn't have super-powers, a favorite children's story was about the little Dutch boy, Hans Brinker, who saved the town by putting his finger in the dike. Nowadays saving the Netherlands from rising seas involves expert engineering and vast expenditure of resources.

Headline: Dutch reinvent critical dike as seas rise, climate changes

The Afsluitdijk is 20 miles
long. (Wikipedia)

Engineers are strengthening the Afsluitdijk, including laying thousands of custom-made concrete blocks and raising parts of it....Engineers built a scale model of a cross section of the Afsluitdijk in the tank and are pounding it with waves that they say should occur only once every 10,000 years. The goal is to make sure the new design can survive the destructive power of such a storm.

The government has earmarked nearly $20 billion to fund such projects for the period from 2020-2033.

$20 billion is the equivalent of $460 billion to the United States, which has an economy 23 times the size of the Netherlands. The Dutch are devoting a huge portion of their resources to defenses against rising seas; one doesn’t need to buy into all the tenets of climate change to take action when one’s survival is at stake.

San Francisco: the High and the Low

Unfortunately the "high" is nothing to be proud of. Per the San Francisco Chronicle (bold added):

Van window bye-bye (Chronicle)

San Francisco has by far the highest property crime rate in California, with more than twice the number of reported thefts per capita than Los Angeles or Santa Clara counties, according to a new report by the Public Policy Institute of California.

And when it comes to arrests, San Francisco is 50th out of the state’s 58 counties.

Burlingame Apple Store (KTVU)
"Apple workers and security guards
are instructed not to engage"

One likely reason is the passage of Proposition 47, "a voter-approved measure that dropped property crimes of less than $950 in value to a misdemeanor that carries little if any jail time." California released many of its so-called "non-violent" criminals, and the consequences were what any pragmatic person might expect; criminal rings have organized to smash-and-grab cars and retail outlets (Apple Stores, which have desirable products under $1,000, are particularly vulnerable.)

And what do the enlightened progressives who run San Francisco suggest? Here's what the two candidates for San Francisco District 5 Supervisor have to say: [bold added]

[Dean] Preston would take a softer approach: enlisting a “non-police property crimes unit” to patrol the streets, unarmed. And how, we asked, would that stop car break-ins? The patrols would ask the thieves to stop.

[Vallie] Brown noted that many of the break-ins are being conducted by criminal rings. “I wouldn’t have someone say anything to them,” she said.

From one year ago: We keep voting them in, so I guess we're getting the government we deserve.

Poor Little Lambs Who Have Lost Their Way

Natalia Dashan (B.S. 2016) tries to put her finger on The Real Problem At Yale Is Not Free Speech. Excerpts: [bold added]

an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical...

It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more-complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations.

I had to debate with people why it is not racist that my Russian parents actually liked the word “Master.” That they liked that Yale was drawing from a rich, centuries-long tradition. “Master” connotes mastery of a subject. It connotes responsibilities and a cultural aesthetic far beyond what “head of college” connotes.

If words like “Master” are deemed offensive based on questionable linguistic or historical standards, then this means other words and phrases can become offensive at a moment’s notice. Under these rules, only people in the upper ranks who receive constant updates can learn what is acceptable. Everybody else will be left behind.

The people best positioned for this are professors at elite universities. They are ingrained in the culture that makes up these social rules. They get weekly or even daily updates, but even they cannot keep up.

Gutenberg Bible, Beinecke Library, Yale

During the early Middle Ages literacy rates were low, and educated Catholic priests often had a local monopoly on knowledge. The invention of the printing press, iconically represented by the Gutenberg Bible, kick-started literacy among non-clerics. Knowledge was no longer confined to a chosen few.

Whether the phenomenon Ms. Dashan describes is due to the decline in the church, the family, or in general the authoritativeness of the Western canon, today the ramparts of high culture and education have been co-opted by a caste whose scrolls are impenetrable to everyone but themselves.

However, your humble blogger is confident that this phenomenon, too, shall pass. The latter-day printing press, the Internet, is already beginning to expose the new clerics' ideological inconsistencies and individual moral failings.

When Yale and other colleges start to remember what made them elite in the first place, I'll start donating again.

Here's an Exception

White privilege is bad unless it's angry white girl privilege.

Greta Thurnberg's UN Climate Speech (Slate)

SF Demonstration on Climate
Change in March

Berkeley Enforces the Law

Blowing through a stop in Berkeley (Chron)

Your humble blogger only rides a bicycle for weekend recreation, but even that limited experience enables me to understand why serious riders, including those who ride bikes for a living or use them to commute, hate to stop. A bicyclist expends some effort to build a full head of steam, wastes that effort by coming to a stop, and then has to start all over. Also, everyone has grown accustomed to cars' acceleration, and by comparison bicycle acceleration after a stop takes excruciatingly long.

Bicyclists--though not everyone, just to be clear--have long operated under the belief that the rules don't apply to them, for example, that they can ignore stop signs and stop lights if there are no cars, or even if cars are slow--often because of their presence! (Some states now allow bicyclists to yield at stop signs.)

However, the increasing crowdedness of our streets has made it more important that everyone follows the rules that apply to them, for example, pedestrians must use crosswalks and only when the "walk" signal is on, cars must come to a complete stop and proceed with caution when making a right turn on red, etc.

Now the City of Berkeley is strictly enforcing the bicycle laws:

Berkeley has taken a different approach to traffic safety: penalties of more than $200 for cyclists who roll through stop signs.

The enforcement campaign, carried out by police officers who patrol the city’s quiet bicycle boulevards on motorcycles, has caused anger to spill from Twitter into City Hall.

Police say they are trying to prevent collisions and fulfill the requirements of a $250,000 state grant to promote good behavior on roadways.

The progressive nanny-staters who are fond of passing laws--no plastic straws! no free grocery bags! penalties for not sorting trash!--to regulate everyone's behavior don't like it when they have to follow the law.