This blog will continue hiatus through January 1st. Until January 7th. (Might as well make it an even month off.) Have a great holiday, everyone.
Well, this is sad, although not at all surprising.
Regular readers may have noticed a lack of posts recently. I’m busy with other things at the moment, so blogging is taking a backseat. I don’t have time to write more about this now. Hopefully tomorrow.
I appreciate all the responses to my question about billboards. Honestly, I don’t really have strong feelings about billboards one way or the other, but if I had to choose a side, I would have to say that, sadly, I disagree with most of my commenters. I’ll write more about why later, but before I do so, I have another question. Do you guys have a problem with ads on bus shelters and buses and in BART as well?
Sometimes I think I’d be a lot happier if I just stopped reading the newspaper altogether.
I mean, really?:
The committee didn’t look at economic factors it ran out of time, and “the majority (of members) felt they couldn’t trust economists,” Travis said.
I don’t follow Berkeley politics and planning beyond what I see in the newspaper, so I’m crossing my fingers that this is some kind of mistake on the part of the reporter. Something tells me it isn’t, though. But…seriously? A committee charged with creating a plan to revitalize downtown Berkeley didn’t look at economic factors because they felt they couldn’t trust economists? O.M.G. I have no words. That is like, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
Oh, wait. I spoke too soon. This is:
After banning plastic bags from chain grocery stores and bottled water from City Hall, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has set his sights on soda - working up a plan to charge a new city fee to big retailers of sugar drinks.
“The bottom line is that there is a direct nexus between high-fructose corn syrup drinks like colas and Big Gulps and obesity among schoolkids,” Newsom said Friday.
Look, I’m not fan of HFCS and don’t really drink soda myself (I prefer bourbon, admittedly not a health food), but what is the logic here? Sugary sodas cause obesity among children. We want to discourage obesity among children. So to discourage the kids from drinking soda, Newsom wants to tax large retailers who sell soda. So this isn’t an actual tax on individual units of all HFCS drinks (small stores are exempt, bizarely), not that that would matter anyway, since the parents are the ones paying for the damn drinks in the first place, and if Coke raising the price of a bottle 10 cents doesn’t stop them, the City of San Francisco charging an extra 10 cents won’t either. The shrieking of greedy brats beats out cost concerns every time. And I doubt that there is any fee high enough that it would persuade any retailer to stop selling sodas, which are (unfortunately) immensely popular items. So I really can’t see any way that this fee in itself is going to reduce consumption of sodas, particularly among children.
But then I read further, and see that the fee is going to pay for some kind of anti-soda public education campaign. Okay, maybe I could deal with that. I like public education campaigns (although judging from the enormous amount of unsolicited bitching I have to listen to about those Ron Dellums AIDs posters all over town, I think I might be the only one). But then I see this:
The size of the fee (it won’t be billed as a tax) is being worked out, but it may include a sweetener - namely giving the stores some other kind of fee break.
So, SF is going to pay for an anti-soda campaign by assessing a soda fee on soda retailers, but is going to make the whole thing more palatable by giving them a break on fees they’re already paying, which, if they’re so dispensable in the first place, could probably be used on their own to pay for the anti-soda campaign? O.M.G. Does this plan have any purpose at all?
And by the way, the only reason I’m even bringing this up is because I know that it’s going to take like a week after SF passes the damn thing for one of our more useless Councilmembers to introduce a copycat plan for Oakland and I just wanted to get ahead of the game in calling it brain-dead.
So Novometro’s print magazine, Oakbook, is finally out and I’ve got to say it looks totally fabulous. The magazine is free, so when you see it around town, make sure to pick up a copy a copy of the new, hipper alternative to Oakland Magazine, so you don’t miss the very cool fashion spread, the spooky true crime feature, and a great reminder of why the African American Museum and Library is just that awesome. Also, horoscopes! (Apparently, I’m going dancing at Luka’s this week. Who knew?)
Anyway, if you’re planning on going out for First Friday tonight, make sure you stop by the Esteban Sabar Gallery at 480 23rd Street between 7 and 10 to celebrate the launch. If you weren’t planning on going, now you have a reason to. Enjoy music by DJ Fflood and wine from Lost Canyon Winery.
So it’s about time (PDF!) that someone tried to do something about the increasing safety problems in Fruitvale:
Oakland City Council President and District 5 Council Member Ignacio De La Fuente introduced the Fruitvale Safety Project - a three-month focused effort to reduce rising crime and violence in the vibrant Fruitvale Neighborhood through improved coordination and targeting of resources. “We all have to pick priorities and my priority is increasing public safety in the Fruitvale,” said President De La Fuente.
Good for him. (more…)
Why do people hate billboards so much? I feel like I must be missing something, because I just don’t get it. Who cares if there’s a billboard on the Bridge? And what does this have to do with the East Bay Regional Parks? I’m so confused!
So the East Bay Express this week was all about global warming. If you missed it, you can read the stories here, here, here, here, and here. And overall it was interesting. It was nice to see them have some actual content for once, even if it wasn’t unique to that paper. But I have to admit that I’m a little bewildered that a newspaper can devote 4,436 words to a discussion of slowing climate change, and somehow not once mention the single most important factor driving increasing emissions rates - land use. In fact, immediately preceding their special rah-rah environmentalist section, they ran an anti-development story bitching about the kind of high-density housing that, frankly, we’re going to need a lot more of if we want to accommodate anticipated regional growth without making the problems in question even worse than they already are.
Also, I’m not entirely certain that any of the Express articles managed to communicate what a daunting task the emissions reductions they’re calling for is. In October I went to this ABAG/MTC joint event called Bay Area on the Move, where they talked about planning for anticipated housing and transportation needs for 2035. (more…)
So if you ever attend or watch Oakland City Council or Committee meetings, a complaint you’ll hear nearly every week is that the Council is disrespectful to Oakland’s citizenry because they don’t allow sufficient time for public comment at meetings. People get so angry about this! On their list of positions, Oakland’s League of Women Voters includes a section on ensuring “Meaningful Citizen Input.” The first bullet point of this section reads:
Adequate time for input at hearings (one - three minutes is often not enough)
Get real, people. (more…)
So around 10 PM Saturday night, I happened to be sitting in a local bar, enjoying a glass of bourbon and a lovely conversation, when two of Oakland’s finest entered and proceeded to march up and down the room with their flashlights, inspecting all the patrons for cigarettes. They wrote a couple of tickets, issued the bar a warning, and twenty or so minutes later, went on their merry way. Since providing real-time (or even near-time) crime data for its residents is not one of Oakland’s strengths, I couldn’t tell you what else was going on around the city at that time. But historical personal observation and anecdotal evidence have led me to conclude that Saturday night is not exactly a traditionally low-crime time, and I have a hard time believing that there was nothing else those two officers could have been doing to better serve the community at that exact moment. (more…)
Nothing’s inspiring me today, either in the news or at the Council. (Concerned citizens may want to check out the emergency meeting of the Measure Y Oversight Committee tonight, but I’ve already written about that.) Anyway, in lieu of spending time searching for something to complain about, I thought I’d share some stories about other places that I’ve found interesting recently and made me think of Oakland for one reason or another. Happy reading! (more…)
