Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of November 29, 2021
Good journalism/Cool shit
‘You don’t mess with him’: How an S.F. housing advocate wields power by funding ballot measures (ed. note: “housing advocate” lolllll)
absolutely screw this guy
Since 2016, TODCO’s advocacy subsidiary, the Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium, has spent more than $1.35 million to finance ballot measures. In creating a piggy bank for pet ballot measures, TODCO is taking advantage of a law that allows owners of federally funded affordable housing buildings with Section 8 subsidies to “re-syndicate” their debt every 20 years, recapitalizing their portfolios by selling tax credits and tax-exempt bonds. During that process, a market study analyzes current market-rate rents in the neighborhood and what it “costs” an owner to keep a building affordable. If rents skyrocket, as they have in SoMa, it can create a windfall for the property owner. In the case of TODCO, it amounts to “several million dollars” a year, according to Elberling.
agreed on this:
Supervisor Matt Haney, who supported the Stevenson Street development, argues that the low-income housing in the neighborhood is protected by rent control or owned by affordable housing companies, and those who live around Sixth and Market have suffered as shops and restaurants have shuttered and drug dealing and encampments have proliferated. He said the alleys on both sides of the Nordstrom lot have been the scene of constant complaints, with recent beatings and stabbings. A driver recently mowed down a row of tents, sending several people to the hospital.
Preserving a valet parking lot in the name of stopping some abstract fear of gentrification is not helping anyone, he said.
“The narrative that you are somehow protecting the community by keeping things the way they are is flawed,” Haney said. “I’m not sure who they are speaking for.”
of course he’s a hypocrite:
Elberling has also come under fire for choosing to live rent-free in a 400-square-foot resident manager’s unit in a TODCO building on Folsom Street, despite the fact that his salary — about $200,000 a year — is four times the income he would need to qualify for the building. Affordable housing laws allow a live-in building manager who is exempt from income requirements.
While Elberling doesn’t actually manage the building — the John Stewart Co. has a management contract for the property — he makes no apologies for living in the free apartment. He said the unit he lives in was empty before he moved in 1986. He shares the studio with cats named Queen Shorty, Princess Squeaky and Hunk of Burning Love…
Housing Action Coalition Executive Director Todd David scoffed at the explanation.
“For someone who claims to be an advocate for individuals who need affordable housing, it is curious that he would occupy a unit in a deed-restricted building which he obviously doesn’t qualify for,” said David. “One could question the ethics.”
“progressive causes” lmao
While Elberling’s critics portray him as a housing obstructionist and question whether he is using TODCO’s money to reward friends and thwart market-rate development, Elberling makes no apologies and says his critics are jealous. He said he will continue to bankroll progressive causes for as long he is able to continue working.
“They are unhappy because we do a million bucks and they don’t do anything,” he said. “F— ’em. And tell them we are thinking about doing more next year.” [San Francisco Chronicle]
The Deadly Myth That Human Error Causes Most Car Crashes
This is good on what causes traffic accidents in the US and what we can do to fix it.
To understand what the NHTSA was trying to say, imagine the following scenario: It’s a foggy day, and the driver of an SUV is traveling along a road at the posted speed limit of 40 miles per hour. The limit then drops to 25 as the road approaches a town—but the road’s lanes do not narrow (which would naturally compel a driver to apply the brakes), and the lone sign announcing the lower speed limit is partially obstructed. Oblivious to the change, the driver keeps traveling at 40. As he enters the town, a pedestrian crosses the road at an intersection without a stoplight. The driver strikes the pedestrian.
By the federal government’s definition, the “critical reason” for this hypothetical crash—the last event in the causal chain—is the error made by the driver who was speeding at the time of the collision. Almost certainly, the police will hold him responsible. But that overlooks many other factors: The foggy weather obscured the driver’s vision;, flawed traffic engineering failed to compel him to slow down as he approached the intersection; the SUV’s weight made the force of the impact much greater than a sedan’s would have been.
The authors of the 2015 NHTSA report were aware of such contributing factors. But their disclaimer that the “critical reason” for a crash is not the same as the “cause” has been largely ignored. Even a page on the agency’s own website whittles the message down to “94% of serious crashes are due to human error.”
Seeking to find a single cause for a crash is a fundamentally flawed approach to road safety, but it underpins much of American traffic enforcement and crash prevention. After a collision, police file a report, noting who violated traffic laws and generally ignoring factors like road and vehicle design. Insurance companies, too, are structured to hold someone accountable. Drivers aren’t the only ones who face such judgments. Following a crash, a pedestrian might be blamed for crossing a street where there is no crosswalk (even if the nearest one is a quarter mile away), and a cyclist might be cited for not wearing a helmet (although a protected bike lane would have prevented the crash entirely). News stories reinforce these narratives, with stories limited to the driver who was speeding or the pedestrian who crossed against the light…
And if the buck stops with the driver, automakers feel less pressure to make lifesaving safety features standard across their models—which many of them do not. Last year, Consumer Reports found that the average vehicle buyer would have to pay $2,500 for a blind-spot-detection system. Pedestrian-detection technology was standard on 13 of the 15 most popular vehicle models—but unavailable on one and part of a $16,000 optional package on another…
With the infrastructure bill now signed into law, the federal government has a chance to rethink its approach and messaging. Dumping the dangerous 94 percent myth would be a good start; deemphasizing pointless traffic-safety PR campaigns would help too. Encouraging state and local transportation agencies—not just law enforcement—to investigate crashes, which New York City is now doing, would be even better. What we need most is a reexamination of how carmakers, traffic engineers, and community members—as well as the traveling public—together bear responsibility for saving some of the thousands of lives lost annually on American roadways. Blaming human error alone is convenient, but it places all Americans in greater danger. [The Atlantic]
Sports hot takes
Why Giannis Antetokounmpo Chose the Path of Most Resistance
Hilarious profile on Giannis. My favorite passage:
Mariah’s father makes jokes about Giannis. “You know when the birds go in the morning?” Giannis said, quoting the joke. “ ‘Cheep, cheep’—cheap. That’s who I am.” On airplanes, he used to buy coach tickets and would seek out whoever was sitting in the exit row and ask them to switch: “ ‘You’re a Bucks fan?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Want two tickets for the game? When? November?’—I’m a great seller, that’s what you don’t know. I’m a great seller—‘Would you trade my seat with you?’ ”
I said that if Giannis Antetokounmpo approached me to switch seats on a commercial flight, I’d probably be surprised that he wasn’t on a private jet.
“Nobody has money for a private jet, man. Hell no, man.”
Not even to Greece?
“Why would you spend $150,000 to one-way trip there? That’s $300,000. The market makes 6 to 10 percent every year… He’s laughing.”
(I was laughing.)
“So, you can make, for the rest of your life, with that money you just spent, 24- to 30,000 a year, because that’s what the market makes on average. If you take that money and you take it away, that 24- to 30,000 growth every year goes away—correct? So why would I teach my kids that?” [GQ]
Kellen Moore and the Cowboys Are Proving You Don’t Need One System to Win
On the Cowboys’ offense. (ed. note: well this was written before the Cowboys offense did terribly against the Chiefs last week) [The Ringer]
Profile on one of the most infamous men in soccer history. [Bleacher Report]
Health, politics, and academia
I think this is broadly interesting, but perhaps not factually true. [Noahpinion]
Hate reading
The Upside of COVID Hygiene Theater (ed. note: the absolute fuck bro)
Your argument is *checks notes* that hygiene theater is good because it reminds us that Covid exists, as if we can’t tell already? And that your defense of this is fake airport security (which is solemn, can’t forget)? Are you sure you want to run such an absolutely idiotic article? (h/t Stadler for sending me this steaming garbage)
The word theater in these contexts is meant pejoratively, indicating empty gestures with no reasonable justification. Hygiene theater, like security theater, is almost always described as a “waste”: a waste of time and a waste of money. But attempting to quantify these things in those terms is to miss much of their point. Anthropologists are quick to tell you that theater, after all, evolved first out of ritual, and ritual, to take a pretty standard definition from the anthropologist Edmund Leach, is nothing more than “stereotyped behavior which is potent in itself in terms of the cultural conventions of the actors, though not potent in a rational-technical sense.” What we’ve taken to calling “hygiene theater” is indeed a series of conventions whose value is not rational, but that doesn’t mean these actions have no power. Even if we began these practices thinking they had a rational basis in keeping us safe, for some of us they’ve evolved into having a ritual benefit instead.
Ok bud, rituals are only good when they serve a freaking purpose, rituals for ritual sake is absolutely useless.
A number of these gestures are no doubt overkill, and I’ve let a lot of personal practices go myself. But I’m also okay with friends and loved ones who maintain elevated levels of vigilance, and I’m okay with people who continue to do this knowing full well that it’s not informed by the latest science.
The frustration with hygiene theater is really nothing other than misplaced frustration with the pandemic itself, which has been unfazed by premature pronouncements of its demise. As Francis S. Collins of the NIH recently remarked, “We have to keep convincing people that this is not something being imposed upon them by the government. It’s being imposed on them by the virus.” If we are made uncomfortable by mask wearers and restaurant protocols, it’s because they are glaring reminders that we’re still in the middle of something. These behaviors remind us of the bad old days of 2020, the time that we are desperately trying to forget, even as 2021 has turned out to look depressingly the same. (Additionally, heaping derision on people is a terrible way to get them to change their behavior. People adopt irrational beliefs for a host of psychological reasons, and lambasting them for their irrationality backfires spectacularly. This is true of conspiracy-theory belief, religion, and superstition, and it stands to reason that this tactic will also fail against mask wearers.)
You can hardly call me an anti-masker, but with arguments like this, it makes me want to be one!
Rather than see hygiene theater as waste and nonsense, we might see it as the continued and gentle performance of care. When the Kennedy Center announced that it was continuing with temperature checks for its guests, even after health professionals suggested that they’re unreliable, Senior Vice President for Operations Ellery Brown explained that “some of it is psychology … If somebody’s spent a lot of money for a ticket, this helps us notify people that we care about them.” Similarly, the National Restaurant Association’s senior vice president of science and industry, Larry Lynch, suggested that much of the hygiene theater in restaurants “was so customers could see they were doing everything they could … The message was ‘Hey, we care about you.’ It’s not about theater but about wanting customers to feel comfortable about going out.”
Making the argument that these are not just costless, but also a positive externality is… some take.
And rather than denounce personal decisions about masks and other precautions as liberal virtue-signaling, we might look at them as the trauma response of the walking wounded. We might recognize that the pandemic has changed us forever, that we’ll bear these scars all our lives, that things will never be quite the same, and that for some people, once-temporary protective measures will become—for better or worse—a part of their life going forward. If you had grandparents who lived through the Depression, you may have witnessed their attitudes on food waste, and how a scarcity problem from the 1930s imprinted itself—decades later—in how they carried themselves, how they saved, what they spent, what and how they ate. This will be true of COVID-19 as well; decades from now, survivors will still act in specific ways traceable to how these years changed our behavior forever.
Dude what? You want us to mask forever as a… scar of what we’ve lost and a sign of trauma?
As we force ourselves back to “normal,” such rituals may end up being one of the few ways we remember this time and what we’ve lost. After all, it is in the security theater of the modern airport—and not in the anniversary ceremonies—that most of us actually remember September 11. The TSA checkpoint may be uncomfortable and infuriating rather than solemn, to be sure, but like it or not, it’s the one place where travelers are forever reminded of the legacy of those terror attacks, where they’re not only forced to enact out a series of ritualized gestures but reminded of why they’re engaging in such actions. It is grim and unpleasant, to be sure, but why should the memory of a traumatic event be anything but?
COME ON, NO YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY BE MAKING THE POINT THAT TSA SECURITY IS GOOD BECAUSE IT’S A SOLEMN REMINDER OF THE LIVES WE’VE LOST
Here, guest comment from friend (and fellow hater) Michael Stadler, take it home buddy:
Like if you’re the editor how do you let that paragraph out
Don’t you send it back covered in red like “ok man this is insane you undercut your whole argument here” [The Atlantic]
Et cetera
THE LOSS AT THE HEART OF GUY FIERI’S ENTERTAINMENT EMPIRE
I love this show unironically. [The Atlantic]