Blame the city not the biker. An person riding an bike will always choose a protected bike lane over having to weave through pedestrians on the sidewalk. If you want to get mad at someone get mad at the city for not putting down a bike lane instead of the biker just trying to not get hit. Pedestrians and cyclist need to have solidarity to take back the road from there dominance by cars. Fighting between each other over the scraps they give us only helps them, we need to demand more.
Was there a protected bike lane next to you when they zipped passed you? It doesn’t matter if there’s a bunch of unused bike lanes in the city if they aren’t where you need to go. There are tons of sidewalks and car lanes that sit unused most of the time but we keep them open because people will eventually use them.
If we treated bikes like we treat cars and pedestrians and give them they’re own lane on every street none of this would happen, cause bikes don’t want to ride on sidewalks just as much as pedestrians don’t want them on the sidewalks. Weaving through pedestrians slows you down and is dangerous. You may be just as scared of bikes as the bikes are of cars but the cars aren’t nearly as afraid of bikes as bikes are of pedestrians. If your in a car and you hit a bike your going to be fine physically cause your surrounded by a metal box meant to protect you. If your on a bike and hit a pedestrian , you may come out better than the pedestrian, but you are way more likely to be physically injured or dead then if you were a driver. There’s a shared stake in avoiding collisions between pedestrians and cyclist that cars don’t have.
The solution has to be more bike lanes and not less e-bikes because e-bikes are better for the environment and people’s health than cars. Even looking at it as just a pedestrian your better with an e-bike riding in a lane next to you then a car, there less dangerous, quieter, and don’t emit a bunch of toxic fumes and brake pad dust that you have to breathe in. The cars are the enemy, not the e-bikes.
We both agree that bikes on the sidewalk are a problem that needs a solution. Making it illegal to ride on the sidewalk isn’t working so the way I see it there are three other solutions:
Increase enforcement so that bikers will get consequences for riding on the sidewalk
Restrict e-bike use
Add more bike lanes
The first one will cost more than the third and could lead to chases that further endanger pedestrians. Theres also no guarantee it will work as long as there’s gaps in the polices views. This also will discourage e-bike use which gets us to two. Restricting e-bikes could stop them from being in the sidewalk but encourages more car use which is bad for the environment and you as a pedestrian. That leaves three which solves the problem and encourages alternative transport which we need to do if we want to stop climate change.
When there’s a problem with a viable solution you have to find out what system is preventing that solution and direct your anger there. Getting mad at the individual only disperses your anger away from the underlying forces that are making that individual do something that will remain. If you report that cyclist and the police actually do catch them and give them a ticket that’s not going to stop them. Even if they confiscated there bike some day another person’s just going to zip past you.
If your boss fires you in favor of an undocumented immigrant who they can pay under minimum wage, getting mad at the immigrant and having them deported isn’t going to help your problem, your boss will just hire a different one and laugh as they watch the poor people fight each other. You need to have solidarity with that immigrant and realize the boss and the immigration system are harming both of you and direct your combined anger towards them.
I do care about pedestrians, I walk way more than I cycle, that’s why I’m proposing a solution that will make both safe. The city would maybe spend a bit more money up front to put down some paint , but long term it would save money because cars wear down the road much more than bikes. Cars are the thing that’s draining the city budget by forcing constant road maintenance.
I don’t understand what you want , if you want bikes to stop being on the sidewalks and for the city to save money along with a bunch of other benefits put down a bike lane, unless you have some better solution. You haven’t suggested any solution though which makes me think you want to just be mad at cyclists and stew in your anger without doing anything, which doesn’t sound like a good way to live.
If you do want to get mad at something get mad at cars which are an exponentially larger threat to you as a pedestrian then a bike. Unless your main means of transport is a car and you can’t get mad at them so you take it out on cyclists instead.
If you don’t want people injecting in the streets then kicking drug addicts out of shelters and taking away their rent subsidies seems pretty counterintuitive.
One of the worst parts of this, and one that will get people killed, is they loosened the restrictions on police chases. Now police can chase cars for crimes where there’s no longer a threat of violence like robbery through the second densest city in the country. People are so indoctrinated by copaganda that they think police chases always end up with the cop catching the bad guy instead of how they usually end, with a fatal crash.
That’s how it was before, for the police to chase their had to be a reasonable suspicion that the criminal was in there way to commit another violent crime. So if a robbery happened and the police arrive and the criminal takes off the reasonable assumption is theyre heading back home, not off to commit another violent crime, so the police would not pursue them. Now they can pursue them and endanger all the people on the road just to protect the property of the store owner.
Cop shows and movies distort our perception of them but the reality is that most police chases end in a crash and serious injury if not death. This chance goes up even higher with dense cities with a lot of pedestrians around like San Francisco. So they should only be used if they’re preventing someone from murdering or seriously injuring someone else. A car at high speeds is just as , if not more dangerous than a gun and should be used as such.
The rest of the propositions you mentioned were pretty liberal but the office space one was lead by the right. It allowed for fast tracking transforming office space from commercial to residential, which sounds good on paper, until you realize that fast track already existed for affordable housing. All the proposition did was fast track developers plans to turn the space into non-affordable housing, which San Francisco already has plenty of, and removes the incentives to build affordable housing out of that space.
You could argue that reducing the red tape for market rate housing would help increase the supply and therefore reduce the cost for everyone, but that’s a standard right wing pro-developer argument. The left would say that SF has been building tons of market rate housing for years with no decrease in rent and that the only way to make housing affordable is to build affordable housing. You can either build it through state funding and building, like the affordable housing proposition A does, or by incentiving developers to build it, because the base incentive of the market is to build the most expensive housing possible to maximize profits.
Of course they’re going to talk about crime, what else are they going to talk about, the weather that never changes?
In all seriousness though I do think it’s the lack of other issues that’s driving this. Most other issues liberals care about have come to a secure consensus in the city, abortion and LGBT rights are as secure as they can get, marijuana and even mushrooms are basically legal, the last gun store has closed, the city has a good recycling and composting system and a green energy option, the parks and schools get decent funding etc. The only thing left is affordable housing and crime. Since the minutia of housing policy is boring that just leaves crime for the media and people to talk about, so even if crime itself is stable or even declining, people’s awareness of it increases.
You can see this during the pandemic where homelesness and crime were just as bad if not worse, but people were focusing on other things.
The lack of other issues also demobilizes the average liberal voter who already has everything they want and doesn’t see a need to vote, so the election becomes dominated by people who care about that one remaining issue.
I know, but there are going to be some people who refuse treatment and are forced out of there living situations and onto the streets, thus exasperating the problem the guy above mentioned.
I’m just saying If your main concern is seeing people doing drugs on the street your main priority should be giving them somewhere else to do them, either a safe injection site or shelter, and anything getting in the way of that is counterproductive. You can try and get them off drugs but coercing people into treatment like this rarely works.
Car break ins did go up during/after the pandemic, just as crime went up across the entire country, but that early 20s crime wave seems to be subsiding. This election took place in a context where car break ins are declining and crime in general is decreasing. If these propositions were truly a reaction to real crime then they would have happened in 2022 when crime was peaking and looked like it was going up.
I’m not saying the problem isn’t real, there is crime. But I don’t think the idea it’s getting worse is true. I’ve only been here for 5 years but my understanding is that SF, like most cities, was far worse in the 80s and 90s . Maybe there was some golden era in the 2000s , early 2010s where it was slightly better but just comparing to what I’ve seen since I’ve been here I haven’t noticed any changes that warrant this recent tough in crime bend that local politics is going.
Hopefully one day they seek treatment, and any system should make that option as open as possible at any point, because treatment can work if the person is truly committed to it. It almost never works when you coerce someone into it though, especially if whatever’s forcing you into it is as alienated from you as the city government. Maybe if the addict truly loved a person or group of people could an ultimatum like it’s me or the drugs work, and even that fails sometimes. But the city government, a government that you may blame for the shitty circumstances your in, telling you that is more likely to turn someone away in spite then awaken some actual desire in a person to seek sobriety.
I’m not saying it sustainable or good, just that these propositions are short sighted and not the way to do it, and most addiction specialists would agree. Fixing this problem doesn’t require more law and order and discipline which we’ve been doing to no effect, but to solve the underlying socioeconomic issues causing addiction. No one is going to quit drugs if it’s the one thing making their life on the streets bearable. To get people to quit, or even not abuse drugs in the first place, they need a stable living situation, a purpose and a regular job and a support structure, these propositions provide none of that. Turning people away from the welfare programs that can provide these will only push them deeper into addiction.
This is absolutely not true. Not anywhere close. SF is drastically behind on housing at all income levels. By tens if not hundreds of thousands of units.
Could you cite something in this, because for nearly the past decade SF has beat it’s market rate housing goals by over 50% . This seems to be going down recently due to the tech recession and people leaving the city though . Even looking on Zillow there’s a thousand results for apartments under $3,000. If you’re medium to high income, based on AMI, and want to live in this city, you can find a place. If there were truly a housing shortage at all income levels and that’s causing high rents then the shortage would be alleviated and rents would be going down with the slow exodus that’s been happening in the city post pandemic and during the tech layoffs, but they haven’t. That’s a big question I have for the market fundamentalists and developers, how does the population go down, the total supply go up and rents stay the same?
Speaking anecdotally I recently moved from one of the newer high rises in mission bay and I’d guess it was half full. They were either fully vacant or as I discovered with my next door neighbor only occasionally occupied during some weekends. The building management probably knew this as they started to encourage residents to Airbnb as they tried to keep or attract more of these pied e terre types of residents. Some of my friends also live in mission bay a few blocks away and they say there building is mostly empty as well.
Here’s an article on some of the flaws of the yimby movement, I hope it’ll give you a different perspective on how to solve the housing problems facing the city.
Nothing in your drafts? If you want to give a more condensed version that’s fine too, rarely get to talk about local politics on here with someone who actually lives here, as opposed to the people outside of the bay area who think it’s a hell hole covered in shit.
Lenin advocated for a mixed system of capitalism under state control as a country transitions to communism called the new economic policy . Stalin abandoned this and went with full centralized state control which had it’s own problems as any Ukrainian can tell you.
A lot of Marxists, and Marx himself, subscribe to to a two stage theory of development and revolution. First there would be a revolution against the feudal system in favor of a capitalist system led by the bourgeoisie. The capitalists and workers would then industrialize and develop the means of production to a point where most necessities are mostly automated. The capitalists would then fire the unnecessary workers and use unemployment as a threat to maximally exploit the remaining workers until they revolt and bring about a communist state where the new abundance made by industrialization is shared by all.
If you believe that communism can only be achieved under the conditions of abundance that industrialization creates then you have to have some way of developing. You can do it through centralized state run planning like Mao or Stalin, which had mixed results to say the least. Or you can do it by allowing capitalism on a tight leash with a powerful state so that once abundance is achieved you can easily disposses the capitalist class like modern day China and Vietnam.
Either way the process of development tends to be a very brutal affair for most of the workers. There’s an argument to be made to let capitalism take the blame for this brutality instead of associating it with socialism as it will sully the name. You can see this in that most people associate communism with the horrors and starvation of Stalin’s 5 year plans.
Xmpp was designed for ease of federation and simplicity in implementation. Most messaging apps these days are designed, or at least say they are designed, with privacy first. There probably are plugins for xmpp to allow for e2e encryption and contact list and metadata privacy from server admins but that depends on the server and will probably not be as secure as signal. Just as signal can be federated but it’s complex and not really worth it.
There’s a tradeoff between privacy/security and federation/decentralization and most people value privacy and security more.
Degrowth is a popular concept among solarpunks. This Jacobin article discusses some of its flaws from a Marxist standpoint. In particular, Jacobin reminds us an interpretation of Marxism which blames the Western working class for exploiting the Global South, and lectures the ever-more-exploited Western worker on the need to...
The author seems to focus a lot on the idea Marx was a degrowther, which yeah probably isn’t true but just starts to sound more like ecclesiastical arguments on what Jesus really meant as opposed to talking about the actual issue at hand.
There rebuttal mostly seems to be a techno-optimist view that a lot of pro-growth Marxists have but doesn’t address the consumerist lifestyle of people in the west. The current growth of the economy powered by western consumers driving their cars to Walmart to buy cheap plastic stuff made by exploited workers from the global south that will end up in a landfill in a year probably shouldn’t be a thing both ecologically and socially.
The truth is if there was true global socialism a lot of the consumerist western lifestyle will probably go away as workers from the global south will refuse to produce that stuff or produce it at such a cost to westerners that they won’t want it. Denying this will only lead to tension post revolution.
We should instead focus on the positives of de-growth, that is less work. Yeah, you may not be able to buy that new pair of shoes every other month, but you’ll only work 10 hours a week.
It’s better now, native Americans in the u.s. are allowed to freely travel and settle in the country and can easily gain citizenship and vote if they want to. If Israel allowed Palestinians to do that instead of keeping them in an open air prison this conflict would be over by now.
In the past though all bets were off though and the u.s. repeatedly committed ethnic cleansing and genocide. Even then though they were still allowed to come and go into the u.s., seek citizenship and even buy their stolen land back if they could afford it, as unfair as that is. That’s because the reason for removing the natives wasn’t “we need to change the demographics of this place so we can have a democratic ethno-state” it was “we want there land so we can, or our slaves can farm on it”.
Your still viewing things from a motor normative lense with statements like I need to drive to get to work and I need to park my car. This sort of thinking naturalizes things that are actually part of a system that can change if we decide to. We can collectively decide to ban cars and humanity could continue to thrive, there’s nothing necessary about cars. They may be personally necessary in the current system, but the system itself isn’t, and this is critiquing the system not individual decisions.
The point of critical theory like this is to look at things we take for granted or think are necessary, show that they actually aren’t natural or necessary, and expose some of the problems we ignore because we think the problem is required to live.
You have to step outside the system and look at it like you don’t come from car centric culture and with the knowledge that it’s a choice and not necessary. From that point of view questions like why is it ok to spew toxic fumes in a populated area? Makes sense since you know the system is a societal choice, not just the way things have to be.
With that knowledge you can try and change the system. That doesn’t mean never driving, because it may be necessary to live, but driving less and taking public transit when you can and advocating and supporting public transit and biking infrastructure over car infrastructure.
They may be personally necessary in the current system, but the system itself isn’t necessary, and this is critiquing the system.
You may need to drive because the system forces you to do so to live. But that system that forces you to drive isn’t necessary and we can work to change it. If you are working to change that than good. If you dismiss problems with the current system by naturalizing it with unqualified statements like “I need to …” Then that’s a problem, you should instead say “I’m forced to…”
Like if the government is restricting your speech statements like “I need to not criticize the government” makes that seem unchangeable and just the way things are, if you say " I’m forced to not criticize the government" or qualify it with “I need to not criticize the government because it’s repressive” then that shows there’s nothing natural about it and that some system is preventing you from doing something, not nature. Then you can recognize the system can change and work towards changing the system, instead of accepting it and moving on.
The idea that they must do x is the normativity they’re testing. You must drive a car isn’t an absolutely true statement, it’s an assumption you make based off your experiences, but many people do fine without a car.
Just like the statement a man must date a woman isn’t true. It may be true for you who are heterosexual and for everyone you know who is dating but it’s not absolutely true. So questions like should a man be able to marry another man may seem wrong to someone who “understands” men can only be romantic with women but that’s a false assumption. That normativity and those assumptions then hurt people who live outside those norms.
This isn’t a few thousand jobs, auto manufacturing in the u.s. employs millions and millions more work in services or industries dependent on it.
Also union auto jobs keep wages high for other unskilled labor as it puts upward pressure on employers as they compete for workers, eg. Amazon may have to increase wages to compete with a unionized auto plant that got a raise with the recent negotiation, otherwise people might choose to work there. If that auto plant goes under though, or moves over to China, then there’s a surplus of workers who need a job so amazon can lower wages cause they know they’re desperate, this is how the middle class collapses.
Globalization encourages a race to the bottom for wages which hurts workers. That’s why free trade deals like NAFTA/USMCA will have minimum wages put on auto manufacturing, and why it’s better for cars to be manufactured in Mexico then in China, where no such minimum wage exists. Chinese cars aren’t cheaper because their manufacturers are more efficient, its because their workers are more exploited.
We do need to transition away from gas cars, ideally to public transit, but absent that we can encourage EV adoption with subsidies and discourage gas car purchases with taxes without destroying the middle class.
Did you read my full comment or just the first sentence, cause I did go on to explain why I think manufacturing in Mexico is better. Ideally cars would be manufactured in the u.s. but I’m not going to let the good be the enemy of the great.
Also along with the minimum wage as part of the USMCA there is also better union provisions for Mexico in it as well which allows the UAW to try and organize Mexican auto workers with independent unions to raise wages.
Pistol Whipped Philosophy (lemmy.world)
Can you imagine how bloodthirsty the pigs would be if we didn’t have all these guns keeping them pacified?
Someone gets killed by a car, so they restrict e-bikes. (www.centraloregondaily.com)
(Title shamelessly stolen from this comment in the crossposted !micromobility thread.)
San Francisco ties welfare to drug-screening, boosts police powers in stunning tough-on-crime shift (www.latimes.com)
Archived at web.archive.org/…/san-francisco-welfare-drug-scre…
Oh no, they're onto him! (lemmy.world)
Telegram founder says the company will become profitable next year | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
Kohei Saito’s “Start From Scratch” Degrowth Communism | if taken seriously, it would lead to political disaster for both the socialist left and the environmental movement | Jacobin (jacobin.com)
Degrowth is a popular concept among solarpunks. This Jacobin article discusses some of its flaws from a Marxist standpoint. In particular, Jacobin reminds us an interpretation of Marxism which blames the Western working class for exploiting the Global South, and lectures the ever-more-exploited Western worker on the need to...
Israel approves plans for 3,400 new homes in West Bank settlements (www.bbc.com)
Cars are rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving (www.theverge.com)
Why is Biden blocking the cheapest, most popular EVs in the world? (www.vox.com)