Anyone familiar with Mexico City universities immediately understands what went down last night in #UCLA: The pro-Palestinian student encampment on the campus was attacked by "porros".
A porro is an individual who uses violent means to help achieve certain, often political, goals at universities there. The "grupos porriles" have been called the "shock troops" of Mexican universities.
“Based on survey and census data, our best estimation is that San Francisco metropolitan area residents would consider a household that makes about $700,000 per year to be rich.“
LOL. If I made a quarter of that I’d feel hella rich.
At $700k a year, even if I had to pay half in taxes, I would still have nearly $30k a month. I legit do not know what I would with that much money. Probably save $20k a month and comfortably retire in a decade or less?
@chema "Bay Area residents were more likely to think about wealth as being free from financial stress and having enjoyable experiences than as simply having a lot of money"
@chema my sense is that the Mission political culture is very much about control, not listening. Lots of claiming to represent the community, and strongarming others on that basis, but it’s always been unclear to me what that claim is based on.
The video of the Waymo #robotaxi driving the wrong way in my neighborhood was already bad enough, but Google's bullshit excuse makes it worse.
A reasonable human would have turned off and gone on one of the various parallel alternative or sucked it up and driven slowly behind the people riding their unicycles. Instead, the programmers decided the self-driving car was going to double down.
About a decade ago, San Francisco still had a small direct current (DC) power grid for elevators which PG&E was dismantling. Seems like a real missed opportunity given the recent growth of other types of electric conveyances like cars, bikes, and scooters now.
I keep thinking about a recent article in Nature by Talhelm and Dong that appears to confirm the theory that the staple crops (in this case wheat versus rice) can influence collectivistic cultural tendencies.
In particular, it makes me wonder how the #milpa impacted Indigenous North American cultures. A milpa is a #Native agroecological system largely centered around growing corn, beans and squash in the same field. It is intense, highly productive and also provides a complete and healthy diet in a very small amount of land.
I suspect that milpas lead to even more individualistic tendencies, which could explain the large linguistic and cultural diversity of North America and how it led to dense urban societies so quickly.
Chili peppers are such a successful Indigenous American export that many national cuisines in Asia, Africa and Europe would be unrecognizable without them.
Today's SF Chronicle article on the Mexican Museum really excoriates the institution. Maybe they can come back from it, but in the meantime, it looks like there will be more delays and uncertainty. Very regretful since we really do need a museum to highlight Mexican history and culture in San Francisco.
Before moving to SF, I lived in Lausanne, Switzerland for about a decade, so I end up comparing both quite often.
Like most cities in Switzerland, Lausanne is small. It only just crossed the 150,000 threshold. But it is a relatively cosmopolitan city, with two well-recognized universities, plenty of companies and with more than 42% of the population being non-Swiss.
One huge difference between Lausanne and SF is the density and the lived experience that creates. I lived in the Cité, the medieval downtown neighborhood of five- and six-story buildings, with a density around 10,500 people/km2. The core of Lausanne has a density of almost 8,000 people/km2. I didn't know anyone with a car and everyone had a bus pass.
Compare that to SF's overall density of around 7,200 people/km2, which is skewed higher by neighborhoods like the TL, Chinatown and Rincón Hill. Cars continue to dominate our streets and transit largely remains an afterthought associated with people that are too poor to own a car.
Meanwhile, a medieval city leaves us in the dust. SMH.
I am really excited to see the USPS deploy smart lockers in San Francisco. Once my post office gets them installed, I will be getting a PO Box and getting my mail and packages there even though my building already has parcel lockers. It is the same price, but I won't have to give out my address anymore and I might be able to worry less about packages being misplaced.