Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of November 15, 2021
The Lead
Blue States, You’re the Problem
Would you like to bludgeoned by more pro-housing propaganda from me? (This was excellent). [New York Times]
Good journalism/Cool shit
America Has Lost the Plot on COVID
Time for someone else to bang the drum I’ve been going off on.
So if not cases, then what? “We need to come to some sort of agreement as to what it is we're trying to prevent,” says Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease expert at New York University. “Are we trying to prevent hospitalization? Are we trying to prevent death? Are we trying to prevent transmission?” Different goals would require prioritizing different strategies. The booster-shot rollout has been roiled with confusion for this precise reason: The goal kept shifting. First, the Biden administration floated boosters for everyone to combat breakthroughs, then a CDC advisory panel restricted them to the elderly and immunocompromised most at risk for hospitalizations, then the CDC director overruled the panel to include people with jobs that put them at risk of infection.
On the ground, the U.S. is now running an uncontrolled experiment with every strategy all at once. COVID-19 policies differ wildly by state, county, university, workplace, and school district. And because of polarization, they have also settled into the most illogical pattern possible: The least vaccinated communities have some of the laxest restrictions, while highly vaccinated communities—which is to say those most protected from COVID-19—tend to have some of the most aggressive measures aimed at driving down cases. “We’re sleepwalking into policy because we’re not setting goals,” says Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor of public health. We will never get the risk of COVID-19 down to absolute zero, and we need to define a level of risk we can live with. [The Atlantic]
Sports hot takes
On soccer, FC Sheriff, Moldova, and a breakaway unrecognized country.
Health, politics, and academia
Actually, Everyone Is Thinking About You
I think this is really interesting work (please read at least the subheading before you get anxiety). [Vice]
Hate reading
The Demand for Money Behind Many Police Traffic Stops
A different style of hate reading this week: an article that will make you irrationally angry not at the premise, but that this shit still happens. Good reporting from the Times.
Some officers in Oklahoma, insistent that public safety is their goal, no longer cite drunken motorists for driving under the influence, and instead issue less-serious tickets that keep the drivers out of district court and generate more money for the town.
“Because everybody on the road violates traffic laws, that allows the police, who are also in charge of criminal law enforcement, to investigate crime without meeting any of the standards required for criminal investigation,” said Sarah A. Seo, a law professor at Columbia University and the author of a history of traffic enforcement.
As early as the 1910s, Dr. Seo said, departments found that taking on traffic enforcement meant they could hire officers and expand their investigative powers. By 1920, traffic fines helped the Los Angeles police traffic division become “practically self-supporting,” according to an annual report at the time.
“We think that modern police departments and their power came from the need to fight crime,” Dr. Seo said. “Actually, it started with traffic enforcement.” [New York Times]
The communal table is back and it makes me want to shrivel up and die (ed. note: no, really?)
Truly grown to despise the SF Chronicle food writer. People are vaccinated! It’s a fucking table! How does this trigger you?
I think I’ve forgotten how to talk with strangers, at length, during the pandemic; now, there’s an unspoken assumption that things are more normal. Thus, the long-lost communal table, the chilling panopticon of dining arrangements, has tiptoed its way back from the void. Before the pandemic, I was already uninterested in being perceived; now, the thought is simply awful. I’m reminded of people who call this time the post-pandemic, a term that seems more optimistic than based in reality. I just don’t believe most of us are over the intense and drawn-out psychic siege of the past 19 months, but there I was, smiling at strangers with my teeth in-between sips of a mercifully strong martini.
Jesus this is some of the most hyperbolic shit ever… just ignore them? It’s not that hard to have basic social interactions with people! [San Francisco Chronicle]
Who Is Trying to ‘Save Parking Structure 3’ From Becoming Affordable Housing?
I like it when people are just outright disingenuous (this argument is so bad):
His argument goes like this: If the parking is taken away, people won’t come. “It’ll be a wasteland,” Alle said, turning the once-bustling Promenade into “a row of souvenir shops” that will be “really sad.” With all that reduced revenue, both to local businesses and the city through sales taxes, Santa Monica won’t be able to fund its environmental initiatives (which Alle said he supports). “So if we take away the garage, we take away the revenue,” Alle outlined. “And we take away the sales tax revenue and the parking revenue. There’s no way that the city can replace that.” It can try to raise taxes, he said, but then people will move and the city will have a recession. Better, Alle argues, to keep the garage then and not have Santa Monica fall apart.
It’s like they don’t realize that actually getting rid of parking for the most part, makes these places more desirable, walkable, and therefore, people actually want to go there more!
And the solution:
The solution, Preuss and other urban growth experts say, is to embrace local businesses with a more diverse clientele than suburbanites and tourists, creating a place locals want to go to for its own sake rather than a collection of big-name stores people seek out. Key to this conversion, especially for places like the Promenade in a rich downtown area with public transit access, is the construction of mixed-use areas with both housing and stores that serve the needs of the people who live there.
In other words, places like the Promenade need to be less geared towards the out-of-towners driving and parking to shop and build places where people live so they can walk to the shops easily, serving those people not just with restaurants and sunglasses stores but bakeries, grocery stores, coffee shops, and other retail locations people typically want close to their homes.
And some more hilariousness:
He explained that the problem with the Promenade right now is the prevalence of homeless and drug addicts making it an unsafe and unwelcoming place. In a typical example, he said people park in the garages, see or are threatened by a homeless person, then get back in their cars and go home. He thinks none of the mixed-use possibilities for the Promenade’s future can be realized until this problem is addressed.
You’re so close to getting it dude! What causes homelessness? That’s right, NOT ENOUGH HOMES YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT. [Vice]