The Offline Report

Dec 30 Feb. 25 No more ‘Mr.’ Potato Head: Hasbro makes classic toy gender neutral:     washingtonpost.com 5 GOP-led states extend unemployment aid to workers who lose jobs over vaccine mandates Critics says the rule changes in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee are incentivizing people to skip shots, and undermining the White House’s pandemic response.:     washingtonpost.com Opinion: It took witnessing an act of violence for me to get to know my Capitol Hill neighborhood:     washingtonpost.com Opinion: The bad guys on social media are learning new tricks:     washingtonpost.com A doctor struggled with a rare, incurable syndrome. Now she helps others overcome it. Patients with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome are often misdiagnosed or dismissed as hypochondriacs. That’s what happened to Dr. Alissa Zingman.:     washingtonpost.com It Keeps on Raining Too Much Too Fast Even an inch of rain, if it falls too quickly, can overwhelm a place.     theatlantic.com If AI is s

Jony Ive misses Steve Jobs , ten years after his passing: As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he [Jobs] recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient. ... ... I had thought that by now there would be reassuring comfort in the memory of my best friend and creative partner, and of his extraordinary vision. But of course not. Ten years on, he manages to evade a simple place in my memory. My understanding of him refuses to remain cozy or still. It grows and evolves. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

I first discovered the author of the beguiling polemic "Surveillance Capitalism" on BookTV's After Words program . The Verge's Nilay Patel interviewed Shoshanna Zubofin the early days of her book's availability. She was hypnotically compelling, but with time I snapped out of it and categorized her book as a polemic. However I did notice the extroverts in my life who don't care for "privacy" are quite taken with Zuboff's framing, which is very much for privacy. She gets through to some. Friday Zuboff published an update to her stance, articulate as ever, each sentence building on the next. Here she uncovers the tragedy of the uncommons : The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit. The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves

Current Affairs interviewed a local S.F. city supervisor who voted against new housing construction on a heavily-used Nordstrom parking lot: ROBINSON Is that because it would just take such a colossal amount of new housing because a lot of what would be built is just going to be bought up and held as investment property? You know, it’s funny. I live in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which is similar to parts of San Francisco in that it’s a quaint historic district, and I look out my window at night and see no lights in the other windows because so many of the properties are so valuable that they are just held by people as assets. If you built 10% more of them, it would just be 10% more that were being held as assets without ever actually being lived in by the people of New Orleans. Housing is a climate issue. ------------------------------------- Further Reading: "Homeowners, already more than 40 times as wealthy as renters, were more likely to keep their jobs, profit f

Nov. 30 "Residents told CBS News that Boise's housing market has changed the city. Young people squeezed out of buying their first home are moving away, along with older residents who are cashing out."    cbs.com "For years, Mendocino Railway and Fort Bragg have battled over land rights, with fights growing increasingly nasty over time. Last year, Mendocino Railway cut down trees on lands owned by residents and had to apologize to the land owners."    sfgate.com   🐤 Even on U.S. Campuses, China Cracks Down on Students Who Speak Out | Students and scholars from China who criticize the regime in Beijing can face quick retaliation from fellow students and Chinese officials who harass their families back home. U.S. universities rarely intervene:     propublica.org   📧 Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight:     propublica.org   📧 Nov. 27 "'No employees showing up today… we are unable to f

From the Wall Street Journal's article on Robert Woodson : Mr. Woodson has also taken note of a spate of 10 teen suicides, many committed on train tracks, that shook my hometown of Palo Alto between 2009 and 2015. He likens that tragedy to the epidemic of murders in many U.S. cities. “If you devalue your life, you’ll either take your own, or you’ll take someone else’s,” Mr. Woodson says. “But they’re different sides of the same coin.” In both cases, young people “are dying in acts of self-hatred.” Robert Woodson, a self-proclaimed conservative who sounds apolitical to today's reader, is stepping down from his leadership of The Woodson Center. He also worked with Alliance of Concerned Men to diffuse gang violence. He partnered in the 1980s with an enterprising single mother of five named Kimi Gray to bring tenant stakeholders into the public housing management circles, resulting in President Reagan signing public housing reform. ------------------------------------------- Fu

Oct. 27, 2021 "I note with selfish interest that income inequality, a topic that has generated considerable interest of late, was not on the menu at Aspen, just as it wasn’t on the menu at the latest World Economic Forum."    newrepublic.com   🐤 Oct 26, 2021 Amnesty International Exits Hong Kong, Citing National Security Law | Human-rights group says authorities’ crackdown on dissent makes maintaining operations in city unworkable:     wsj.com Google CEO Sundar Pichai says 3 days in the office and 2 at home is a good 'balance' between in-person collaboration and time off from the commute:     businessinsider.com ‘Bernanke,’ high fees and that defense deal with Facebook: 8 takeaways from the new filing in Google lawsuit:     protocol.com Oct. 25, 2021 Google allegedly worked with Facebook to undermine Apple's push for user privacy:     businessinsider.com Oct. 24, 2021 "But others assert that public health’s attempts at being apolitical

This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Sep. 24, 2021 "The New Normal: Doomscrolling Through the Climate Tipping Point Outside Your Window In accordance with all the horrors we’ve witnessed live on Twitter, the inevitable floodwaters arrived in New York on Wednesday night. It was as horrifying as it was uncanny."    vanityfair.com Why everybody’s hiring but nobody’s getting hired | America’s broken hiring system, explained.     vox.com Sep. 20, 2021 Mercenaries and subversives in the gender war:     buttondown.email   🐤 Exclusive Data: An Inside Look at the Spy Tech That Followed Kids Home for Remote Learning — and Now Won’t Leave:     the 74 million   🐤 Sep. 18, 2021 "In the past weeks, The Wall Street Journal published 'The Facebook Files' — well reported pieces that rely on whistle-blowers who are now just tossing incriminating documents over the wall at a furious pace."    nytimes.com "'I think everything we’ve seen over the last two summers surpasses that,' St

From this morning's S.F. Chronicle, a fire story's mention of water : While the snowpack was about 75% below average statewide for the 2020-2021 rain year, it was the lack of runoff that shocked state hydrologists. Water coming off the mountains dropped to about 20% of the forecast, an estimate that already took into account the low amount of snow, according to the California Department of Water Resources. “The water never showed up in the reservoirs,” said David Rizzardo, a top hydrologist with the water department. “It went two places as far as anyone can tell. It soaked into the ground because the ground was so thirsty. Or if you had heavy winds, it wiped it off the surface.” And it wasn’t enough to replenish forests stressed by years of winters with below-average rain. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

"'San Francisco is now less expensive and less crowded, and its tech workers are more productive. Those are good things,' Bloom says." - San Francisco Examiner . If history doesnt repeat itself what will see fill the vaccuum of pandemic flight? According to the City University of New York's Sounds and Scenes of New York City: Hip-Hop | Music of the Oppressed : ...in the 1960s, the vacancy rates were at their highest in the South Bronx because of desegregation policies bussing students of color to different schools to put desegregation policies in action. Most parents soon followed suit and moved closer to the schools. The vacant spots made the perfect destination for block parties from whence the culture of hip-hop came about. That late 1970's and early 1980's culture is still being portrayed in new streaming series. But it was captured in one memorable early film, produced at a time before the music, dance and graffiti trio became widely known as

This summary is from earthweek.com and it appears beneath the last page of the sports section the "Sporting Green" section of our Sunday newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle. Occassionally I'll clip one of the articles and past it to this blog. But this week each of the seven articles seemed equally alarming. On closer inspection, four of the seven articles are alarming as in "climate change is here" right now. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

I wrote a trees vs. fire piece the East Bay Express published two weeks ago . It appears to be affecting others' fire reportage in the region . Here's the S.F. Chronicle today, with more specificity of what burned and what didn't in the Big Basin Fire: More than 90% of the park’s countless redwoods, which can grow 300 feet tall and live for 2,000 years, survived the fire. Their foot-thick bark warded off flames even as most of the giants are now saddled with large black scars on their trunks. The forest’s Douglas fir and tan oak didn’t fare as well. Large swaths of mountainside are filled with crisp, copper-colored trees and scorched brown earth. Roughly 97% of the 18,000-acre park burned. Still, across much of the forest, new shoots of redwoods and other trees have begun to poke through the moonscape, offering a glimpse of the greening that is sure to accelerate. Room for fire reportage improvement remains. Those young green shoots are more vulnerable to fire than the

By just one of our fine local movie critics, in his Sunday column answering reader mail: Hi Eric: Unfortunately, you’re right. The internet is like a wind tunnel for ideas. As soon as an idea barely forms, it gets blown into the public space, and once it’s there, there’s no reason to develop or modify it, because it’s already there. It’s done. Plus, there’s another idea already entering the wind tunnel. -- Mick LaSalle in Datebook I originally titled this post "Radical Statement in Plain Site" but someone mistook my play-on-words for a malapropism. LaSalle was responding to reponses to his earlier column in which he remembered planning to pan a live performance by falling star Andy Gibb, but changed his mind when : Somehow, seeing him up close, close enough to see the sweat on his temple, I suddenly understood that he was an actual person. Of course, I’d known that before, but there’s a difference between knowing something and really knowing it. In that moment, I realized

Inside a vaccination-skeptics twitter thread, a skeptic linked to this article , which was published the first month COVID-19 raged in New York City and long before the Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines were in clinical trials: The correction to this misinformation is found ... wihin the same article, beneath subhead "What are the vaccine options?": This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

From Friday's San Francisco Chronicle. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Note to reader: Editor's posting this LTE from today's San Francisco Chronicle does not imply endorsement. Apply that policy to this from the twitter newsbar: This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Aug 31, 2021 "Selling the open space to become housing that only the very wealthiest city residents could afford “seems tantamount to theft of public funds and an illegal use of property designated for affordable housing,” said the group 1900 Diamond For All, which has asked the City Attorney’s Office to investigate."    sfchronicle.com   📰 "Dozens of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) on Monday demanding an end to the $20.5 billion in annual fossil fuel industry subsidies as part of the latest round of negotiations of President Joe Biden’s mammoth $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act."    hillreporter.com The correct spelling of dum-dum contains one hyphen and zero 'b's.    merriam-webster.com A story with an incendiary headline about Apple, Google and privacy.    inc.com Can investors save the Amazon?     bbc.com Aug 29, 2021 Pinchot was a euge