„We were chased out of SF after trying to give free Internet to the poorest“
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Let me see if I understand-- Google (dude's employer) was just going to gift internet to the entire city of San Francisco, starting with the poor, 100% free in perpetuity, and somehow promise to never use the data for any advertising purposes whatsoever?
Also-- at this moment my comment is the only one showing even mild skepticism wrt the veracity of this tweet. Good times.
Edit: clarification
Connecting to it is not great, but it is better than nothing. This would have helped the poorest people, yet SF turned it away without providing a substitute.
Internally, the terminals are two Android devices.
Sidewalk Labs' parent company? Alphabet. aka Google.
Free WiFi in exchange for prime on-street real estate for your sensors turned out to be a superb deal for them.
> Google (dude's employer) was just going to gift internet to the entire city of San Francisco, starting with the poor, 100% free in perpetuity, and somehow promise to never use the data for any advertising purposes whatsoever?
So, this is easily verifiable that what he claims is true.
Of course if they used Google or Gmail or Chrome Google would make more money. Doesn’t have to be linked to the Internet itself.
Speeds were pretty slow, which is why I didn't use it as my default connection, and presumably why the program was eventually discontinued (the official reason was lack of usage). It also wouldn't surprise me if they ran into abuse issues (eg. people downloading torrents on it all the time to avoid the RIAA).
IIRC, it was below 128kbit/s for me, though there was at least one mesh hop away from a node that had a directional antenna pointed towards 444 Castro. Perhaps it was faster if your local node happened to have a direct uplink to either 444 or the 'plex.
I’m sure other major metros supes would have no problems with freebies and would feel no pain from their campaign sponsors in competing interwebs markets.
It was just... regular old internet. No gotchas that I faced.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/17/google-ends-its-free-wi-fi...
The reality is the companies create a large inelastic demand for living space, and the local government and property owners of exploit that for profit. If you just create adequate supply (build residential), or constrain demand (don't build office space), the problem doesn't happen.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-peril-threatens-texas-refu...
Are you talking about poor or homeless? I've seen the footage and if it's the same in real life(drugs, hordes of homeless) then residents would be glad too.
Should cities be compelled to keep growing as long as there is demand? Are they not allowed to say "this much is enough - there are plenty other places to go"?
The only way around that is for localities to build out the backbone themselves and then request competitive bids, but the providers counter that strategy by lobbying state representatives to ban local Internet infra in the name of privatization or core competency.
One workaround for that would be what's done in old European cities where you can't dig or easily run wires/fiber: just build out a backbone for wireless infra, then let providers compete on last mile wifi/billing/service/price.
And I live in town! Head east of the freeway, and the best you can get is rotting DSL or oversubscribed microwave relay. It's ridiculous.
Just leave and spend your tax money elsewhere. I did. And please, don't make the same political mistakes. What matters should be helping the kids, not the career of some corrupt council members who care more about drama than reality.
Fiber is also supposed to go in when streets are repaved, but when I asked after mine was done, I was told nothing was trenched. The voters put up bond money for these repaves and it was poorly planned. RIP Mayor Lee, but that was under his watch.
Mayor who cares how their city looks like. An odd thing indeed!
So let’s discuss the actual situation that he is responding to. The $25mm donation towards summer school programs, that has been temporarily paused while they look into it. What exactly are they looking into? The fact that the donations are coming through an organization that is designated as a political lobbying group that can hide its donors, as opposed to a traditional charitable organization.
Is it really that much of a stretch to suggest that a donation from a group that has chosen to structure itself as a political lobbying group may be intended for political lobbying, and is unlike a charitable donation for a group that is setup as a charity?
At the very least pausing the donation while it’s investigated further seems reasonable.
The parents of the school district should be the ones deciding to send their kids/participate in it, not some corrupted bureaucrat throwing an ideological purity test/hissy fit.
we know that SF had a major corruption scandal just few years ago, with even the late Ed Lee being involved, and multiple people arrested.
What Sacca is telling seems completely believable given the backdrop of gross mismanagement, and corruption in the city. It is like those bannana republics that have hit oil, and yet keep grossly miss-managing the revenue/position that they are in.
This is just one of them, where this already a guilty plea: SF City Hall faces money laundering scandal, duo to plead guilty https://abc7news.com/zuniga-money-laundering-sf-city-hall-sa...
They are simply saying they don’t know enough to talk about it, so they are talking about something they know more about instead.
Not FUD and you really shouldn’t randomly attack people like that.
While here, may I point you to a decade-long rezoning plan which was delayed by "6 months" for any project which hadn't paid out extortions to favored "community groups." Nine months later, the purported "equity analysis" which the delay was for has yet to materialize: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2020/07/21/hub....
We let politicians still operate in the shadows, despite being deep into information revolution. It would cost next to nothing to copy , reproduce, organize serially everything that is said and done by a public official in their official capacity.
Its time for people to wake up and realize we don't work so we can pay their salaries, but that they work for us.
2)Introduce Sacrifice. Cap lifetime earnings to scare away career politicians, and actually bring people who intend to sacrifice. If you win an election, you sign an agreement with the IRS that any lifetime earnings in excess of your avg earnings before being elected, will be taxed at 99% tax rate.
Watch those "speaking fees" dissappear overnight!
3) Introduce more turnover. Max 8 years as a publicly elected or appointed figure, and perhaps 16 on public payroll for anyone making X times of poverty income level. No one should be able to life in luxury, off the govt, forever.
Always welcome in new blood.
What value is there in allowing politicians to keep their own statements of blatant self interest out of the public record?
I think that requiring politicians to make public their statements explaining their the decisions on behalf of their constituents would be and unalloyed public good.
Sure, this is fine, but that's very different from requiring all their interactions to be public. Put it this this: how often do you ever hear anything insightful or intelligent in a public congressional/senate hearing? It's always politicians trying to ask really stupid gotcha questions that will make them look good to the audience at home.
You attack someone, you better know you can be attacked.
I think this would work wonders to introduce principles into people that are anything but principled.
If you vote for someone that says he's for X, but then he actually secretly negotiating to drop X from the table, then what good was that campaign promise / vote ? Shouldn't it be necessary to know you were effectively defrauded ?
There's almost no instance where more transparency is a net loss to society. Politics is far and away one of least transparent undertakings. It is desperate for more transparency, not less
San Francisco’s problems are not caused by shadowy figures doing devious deeds in the dark.
They’re caused by rampant small-c conservatism: a constant drive to veto everything and anything. In the well meaning interest of allowing the public to participate, anything and everything can be stopped be very people.
What if we chose councilors from a pool at random? To get into the pool, you’d have to take some training and pass a series of exams. Training consists of how to write laws, how to read data and adapt policy to data, communication, consensus building, etc. People serve short stints on the council as an act of service.
I've long maintained most people are too easily manipulated and pandered to, and have too poor of an understanding of policy to vote. It's too bad poll tests have a bad history in the US.
>What if we chose councilors from a pool at random?
"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."
—William F. Buckley, Jr., 1963 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nf_bu-kBr4 )
What exactly will this recall prove? The justification for the recall on the website comes off as fatuous hearsay (and why is it also a JPEG?) without additional explanations.
I am extremely skeptical of the recall process providing any real value and think it has often been hijacked to serve dark influence interests preying on the frustrations of the public. The recall of Grey Davis was motivated and funded by Issa trying to get the governorship via a shortcut; I still remember him bawling at his press conference announcing he was stepping out of the race once Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy [1].
Also, his numbers of prosecution tells that he needs to go. Don't get elected if you can't are are not willing to do your job
This article is definitely a hit piece, but there's a lot of data in there.
That has led some situations where someone was arrested for a low-level crime, not prosecuted by the DA, set free, and later goes on to commit a larger, more violent crime.
It’s also worth noting that during the pandemic, crime in SF has shifted from shoplifting, to car and garage break-ins.
While overall crime has dropped, theses new forms of crime are experienced more viscerally by folks that live here.
Many people blame the DA for not “cracking down” on this type of crime. This gets into a lot of pointing fingers. The police fail to arrest people because they say the DA won’t prosecute. The DA says he won’t prosecute because the police won’t arrest people.
> The DA says he won’t prosecute because the police won’t arrest people
He fired all the prosecutors when he won... Or takes the criminals side and says they were just having a bad day or pushes some phony solution that puts the offender back on the streets.
Similarly, the DA's current enforcement rate is not significantly different than before: https://www.sfdistrictattorney.org/policy/da-stat/ In fact, it's higher than it was in 2014. And since crime overall has dropped dramatically, it's hard to say that the DA has lead to any significant lawlessness until after the pandemic.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, that your lived experience of crime is invalid, or that the DA isn't "bad" in some way. Nor does it mean that the DA's methods "work" or that they prevent crime rather than increasing it in the long run.
But I have yet to see evidence of any significant harms on the aggregate, only individual anecdotes.
Personally, it seems like the concern over the DA is a moral panic.
> McAlister has a long rap sheet and has been arrested numerous times in San Francisco since April 10, 2020, when he finished a sentence for robbery.
>Boudin has a history of referring cases involving repeat offenders to parole instead of prosecuting.
Moral panic? As I pointed out, Boudin fired all the prosecutes when he won. The city is in shambles and no one could say it’s gotten better due to Boudin’s soft on crime strategy:
https://abc7news.com/sf-hit-and-run-san-francisco-troy-mcali...
He’s basically inviting criminals to the city and giving them sanctuary while failing to protect the residents and tax payers. He’s a moron and needs to be held accountable. I support the recall and hope this scumbag is tossed out and leaves in disgrace.