The SF Bay Area could open this week if we'd done enough to scale up testing over the last six weeks. The economic damage of the last six weeks was unavoidable, but the damage going forward is avoidable; we could have made the pivot out of stay-home happen faster.
California's testing is still mediocre compared to other states. It doesn't have to be. We have lots of biotech and lots of private and public resources.
California is behind other states on setting up contact-tracing teams, even though the Bay has few enough cases that contact tracing is probably viable right now.
And no, I don't think we should open even though we're unready. I think we should be ready. I think we possessed the resources and human capital to spend the last six weeks getting ready and we didn't do it.
And unless we have a clear understanding of why we didn't do it, who's to say we won't squander the next six?
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This is terrible, of course, but an important thing to understand about the book world is that a lot of writers are hopping on these bandwagons out of sheer (short-sighted) commercial self-interest. It's about taking down your competitors so you have fewer competitors.
This stuff is always the most deranged in industries with lots of wannabes and a winner-takes-all structure. Everyone is envious of everyone else's success, everyone is in some small way cheered when someone else goes down in flames.
Academia in dying fields with like two tenure track jobs in the entire country, book publishing, indie video gaming...it's always fields where only a few can make it and so everyone lowkey knows they benefit from someone else going down.
I have a bunch of secret AI benchmarks I only reveal when they fall, and today one did. I give the AI 1000 words written by me and never published, and ask them who the author is. They generally give flattering wrong answers (see ChatGPT, below:)
Opus 4.7 is the first model to get it correct at all, and it's reliable- 5/5 in the API with max thinking. (It's sometimes accurate but unreliable in chat; seems to sometimes sabotage itself with the 'adaptive' thinking, and get it right only if prodded to think more.)
Now, this is not a text that screams 'Kelsey Piper'.It is a heist scene, the opening chapter of a spy novel. None of my published work is a fantasy heist! Nonetheless, a sufficiently good text-predictor would be able to identify the author of a text, so I knew the day would come.
I think the position that two sovereign states side by side is an unacceptable result, and Palestinians should refuse peace until a single-state solution is achievable, is basically a position that there is no genocide and no significant humanitarian crisis in Palestine.
If you believe that there was an ongoing genocide in Palestine, or even just a severe humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of the war, then even if it's not your ideological favorite, "two sovereign states side by side" is obviously a massive improvement over the current state!
Even if you think that Israel would continue being awful and treating that sovereign state about as badly as it treats eg Lebanon, that would clearly *still* be a massive improvement over the present crisis. If you believe there is a present crisis. (You should, to be clear.)
there's always the question of who is sincerely principled and who will always find an excuse for the principle to not apply to their enemies. a lot of the time it's a bitter lesson that most are hypocrites. but I gotta hand it to the gun people: they're principled.
the states' rights people are not very principled, I have seen literally none of them turn out to say that blue states should not be subject to mass yanking of federal funds for failing to fall in line.
the free speech people have a complicated track record. the ACLU turned from its mission of defending the worst people on principled grounds. FIRE's still at it. a lot of their supporters were furious with them for it, though.
There's a common right wing talking point that the 'official story' we were 'all taught in school' was that white Americans moved to the suburbs because they were racist. Except that's...not what we were taught in school at all.
Now, my own school always ended up behind the ball and never got much past World War II in history class - just a quick "and then there was the civil rights act and the moon landing and the Vietnam War and Watergate have a great summer, kids". But l looked up my old textbook -
- to see what it would have said about white flight to the suburbs if the class had gotten that far. here it is:
If the city code prohibits this the city code needs to be edited!!! The state of California's daycare abundance law prohibits cities from imposing zoning requirements for the home care of 14 or fewer children, which the state declared a 'residential' use of space.
This is one of California's best laws and other states should imitate it! Declaring home care of children a 'residential' use of land stops municipalities and disgruntled neighbors from blocking home care centers, which make childcare affordable to far more families.
Because home microschools are a new (mostly post-Covid) phenomenon, cities are often unsure how to classify them, and the Zuckerbergs may need to register as a home care provider. But home private schools are LEGAL in the state of California.