So today, Fed Ex arrives with this 55 pound electric scooter from Mercane called the Wide Wheel Pro. I ordered the machine on Sunday, and got it today, on Thursday, at 1:33 pm. Oh blessed is the modern world of commercial shipping and transportation via the internet.

Oh. My. Fucking. God. OMFG. The thing is amazing. The wide wheels give the machine a lot of easily manageable traction. You can just release the throttle and tap the breaks just like a bicycle. Plus, OMG bonus times 2, the ability of the dual 500 watt wheel motors to go up hills is amazing. I am so looking forward to using this machine on Saturday to go to Simple Pleasure (3434 Balboa) and Wicked Donuts (1243 Noreiga) - 3 miles one way.

Here are my initial thoughts:

It is a bit bumpy on roads with holes, crags, issues, but is nevertheless stable. I also suggest releasing the throttle before breaking. Also I wouldn't ride it up curbs because the solid tires are not the same as pneumatic (air filed) tires, you could bust the rim.

After one ride over 6 city blocks and back I am fucking happy.

Here is a more sophisticated analysis of the Mercane wide-wheel pro

I just bought a bad ass scooter with wide wheels that never get flat and have 500W motors for each wheel. The scooter tops out at 26 mph but has a 22 mile range. If you cruise less than 20 mph the range is closer to 30 miles.

Hell yea man.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich sits down with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, to discuss how the GOP’s hypocrisy on the Supreme Court underscores the dangers of minority rule. They dig into how those with power, from politicians to billionaires, leverage it to gain more — at the people's expense.

My letter to the editor of which I spoke in a previous blog post was published.

Here it is.

I must say the editor gives everyone free reign of opinion, and is quite fair. I just hope the hordes don't pummel me with fury.

I have been writing letters to the editor since I was in high school. Back then I got something published in the Times Picayune (New Orleans) when I criticized the foreign policy hypocrisy of Robert Livingston. I have no trace of the letter since in the mid 1980's this was back in the days before the internet and my ownership of a computer. I actually mailed a type written letter to the newspaper.

Currently my neighborhood monthly district newspaper the Richmond Review has merged with the Sunset district. However, I have gotten my letters published before on two occasions.

• 1 May 2020
• 8 June 2017

At the trial of the assassin Dan White, the defense argued that he suffered diminished capacity as a result of his depression, a symptom of which was a change in diet from healthy food to Twinkies and other sugary foods. This court case led to what was called the Twinkee defense. Jurors convicted Dan White of "voluntary manslaughter".

Politics in San Francisco has always been unique because their are a lot of competing interests, and each neighborhood has strong community connect civic institutions that politicians have to respect. The result is a tendency for local politicians to genuinely represent the interests of their neighborhood communities. Corporation-ists have to pretend to care about (and often dupe) the community in order to effectively run a campaign. They are relentless because they have more money.

People like Quentin Kopp have been playing this game for a while. He plays the independent card. Republicans help fund his campaigns.

Here is my recent letter to the editor in response to his recent monthly article in the Richmond Review. Here is that article.

Why is the Commentary of an aged politician allowed on a monthly basis? I know there are persons who will protest that the monthly commentary represents alternative opinions to “leftist” extremism, but seriously, what value or substance comes from these monthly scribblings? What if any insight is gleaned from the smorgasbord of red herrings and straw man arguments sandwiched by choice quotations from cherry picked political agents in highly partisan media organs or out of context from the original quotation.

His recent cute quotes that begin and end his latest commentary is a perfect example. “An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.” So stated George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) in 1866. This was followed at the end by another quote: Walt Whitman once wrote: “I know nothing grander, better exercised, better digested, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in humankind, than a well-contested American national election.” That inspires me to recommend voting for supervisorial candidates .. blah blah.

In between these quotes were a bunch of paragraphs supporting or not supporting various propositions. Quick fly by hits that really don’t help anyone understand, and are also somewhat suspect in context. Regardless, can anyone explain what these quotes have to do with the wording that was in between? He cries about California being a one-party state, but never explains that this has occurred due to the utter hollow corruption of the entire Republican party. If that last sentence bothers you then you haven’t been paying attention. When your baseball team is bad, when your debate team is bunk, don’t lay down a subtle hit on the other side that has done the homework and has SOME INTEGRITY. This is the reason why elder Republicans (like the commentary individual) are now scurrying around trying to say they are “independent”, meanwhile saying the same things and spewing the same unsupported ideology. Zombie ideas just need a new political party, right?

Persons who support this kind of tripe want to use tired monikers of leftist and conservative, but those descriptions don’t describe the tawdry emptiness that is actually in these monthly commentaries. Arrogant slanted phraseology that does not evince any fair assessment of the issues is not a conservative opinion. Copious usage of cherry-picked statements and quotes are like cheap ornaments on a christmas tree, and are not remotely close to a cogent analysis of ideas and policy choices. The evidence is there every month.

Giving this charlatan a podium from which to spew nonsense is giving the label of conservatism a bad example. The smug language and dismissive attitude characteristic in every single article is blatant. And every single article that is pieced together by this inept firebrand speaks for no one except the clan. The rest of us get to have our sensibilities and intelligence insulted because we want to read the commentary in our district monthly newspaper, but instead get to experience convoluted jargon which speaks only to true believers.

All that aside, in all his year’s as a politician, the only claim to legitimacy that I see is jumping on the political bandwagon of getting BART to connect with SF Airport, as if this politician actually did all the heavy lifting to make that happen. Some might call that statesmanship.

Some might deflect the legitimate criticism by describing others as leftist. However that is the only criticism. Call something else a name in order to justify your own inability to understand the legitimate criticism being presented by multiple people. Nice. Funny thing though — that is the only criticism of what is perceived as the “other” side. No breakdown or analysis of the argument is presented at all. Just call it leftist, and the debate is over. Therefore the rest of us have to accept the illogical, border-line reactionary writings of someone who is not convincing, and has given ample ongoing evidence of his own inability to overcome his own biased prejudices.

The hypocrisy is too blatant at this point. So much so that players on sports teams are boycotting in protest in order to wake people the fuck up.

Trevor Noah does an excellent job.

Even the LA Times did an article on it.

This is from Pablo Rochat, a resident of North Beach (San Francisco) who makes these silly videos.

...saying the same thing over and over again, and expecting your argument to suddenly make sense.

The positivity rate is more indicative then both the number of tests and the number of positives. Having 100,000 new cases is different if only 1% of those tested (meaning 10 million tests) are positive. If it's 20% and 100,000 new cases that means 500,000 tests.

The are 5 types of people in the larger population.

1. People who have symptoms and seek out getting a test
2. People who have had contact with persons who have positive tests and were sought out
3. People who are asymptomatic that willingly seek out a test
4. People who are symptomatic who have had not had contact with a positive test person or do not willingly seek a test
5. Everyone else

-(Have I left anyone out?)-

If you do not have a track and trace system, groups 1 & 3 will be the only persons in your pool of testing. If you have a track and trace system, groups 1, 2, & 3 will be the only persons in your pool of testing. Note that here, everyone else (group 5) includes elements of groups 1 unless these persons can be contacted and traced (assuming such a system is in place at all).

I am not going make any conclusions about this. I haven't thought enough about this. However this pathetic argument that doing more tests means more positives is abhorrent. But the man-child lying denier is who he is.

The loose rule from WHO is that it's adequate if it's getting a positive rate of from 3% to 12%, but the countries where the disease really under control seem to be the ones where it's under 1%, like Uruguay, Germany, Malaysia, and Uganda. Those like the US where it's between 5% and 10%—Zimbabwe, Paraguay, Kazakhstan, Philippines, and Iran—are clearly in an order or two of magnitude more difficult situations.

But the relevant numbers for the US are really those for the state levels, where there's a huge range from 1% (New York) or lower (Vermont) through higher levels like California (6.5%), Kentucky (7.2%), and Texas (12.4%) to scary inadequate levels for Alabama (20.1%), Arizona (18.6%), Florida, (19.1%), Idaho (18.8%), Kansas (18.6%), and Mississippi (22.2%). If you increased testing in New York, you'd clearly find a negligible number of new positives—we are in principle catching them all—while if you increased it in Alabama or Florida you'd find relatively a lot.

But in Alabama and Florida you'd also find a lot more negatives, as has happened in California and Texas as testing has improved in those states, and the rate would go down. Which is where Trump is so pathetic: if he could only bring himself to understand the point, more testing would make him look better.

"We have more cases because we do more testing."

No. We have more cases in the US because

1. the cases exist; and
   
2. we do enough testing to find the number we find (which might or might not increase if we did more).
   

If the cases didn't exist, the amount of testing wouldn't make a difference. If you did more testing in UK (where the positive percentage is now down to 0.4%), the number of new cases would be insignificant. You can only find them if they're there. And this is where Donald seems to me not just pathetic, but cognitively impaired. And I don't mean suffering from senile dementia (on which I remain neutral) but from a failure to undergo the development most children are finished with by the age of seven or so. It's the insistence that the number of tests is the only factor:

"Think of this, if we didn’t do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing we would have half the cases,” Trump said at a press conference at the White House. “If we did another, you cut that in half, we would have, yet again, half of that. But the headlines are always testing." ~ Donald Trump (CNBC)

[SOURCE: No More Mister Nice blog | 2 August 2020]

Say what? Halving the sample size is not proportional to the rate of positives, because it completely depends on what groups are getting captured in the sample size. More than likely a smaller sample is more non-representative, drifting into a convenience sample. Which means you are only testing those people who have symptoms that volunteer to seek testing. You are not capturing the larger population at all.

That's why the positivity rate is a good proxy for how well a state or nation is at knowing where the virus is spreading.

Listen to the reality of monopolies, how they inhibit and how they strangle.

This is a radio show out of Los Angeles from Brad Friedman involving a conversation with David Dayen who recently wrote an excellent book titled "Monopolized" on the subject.

Click here

Tesla received “certain payroll-related benefits” from government coronavirus relief programs that, along with cost-cutting, almost made up for the losses it suffered during pandemic-related closures, the company said in its latest quarterly report. Tesla did not specify which governments provided benefits, through which programs, or the value of the benefits.

The Palo Alto electric car maker’s CEO Elon Musk has said the “coronavirus panic” is “dumb,” called coronavirus shelter-in-place orders “fascist,” attacked coronavirus testing and defied Alameda County’s coronavirus closure order by re-opening the firm’s Fremont factory in May. Last Friday, with Congress wrangling over a second huge coronavirus-relief program, Musk tweeted, “Another government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people” and followed up with, “These are jammed to gills with special interests earmarks. If we do a stimulus at all, it should just be direct payments to consumers.”

The company did not respond to questions about the payroll benefits.

[SOURCE: Ethan Baron | The Mercury News |30 July 2020 ]

I get the idol worship, but Elon is really in the end just another grifter. Getting Government hand-outs while screaming about government fascism is typical for this nascisstic hypocrite. He's been accused of reselling his recalled Tesla cars and booking it as "goodwill" in the financial statements.

Nothing against Elon's ability and acumen, but his boring company and SpaceX are really just government revenue sources from government contracts. The boring company has yet to actually produce the efficient public transportation pods, is perceived as a posh idea that will be extremely costly, AND is highly unlikely to be able to handle large throughput.

I try to keep an open mind about these things, after all the future is real and we need to invest now for the issues we will be facing 20 or 30 years down the road. It's just that complicated, high maintenance infrastructure might not really be in our best interest. Look at France and Germany. It doesn't have to be expensive.

1. From Wired
2. Curbed LA
3. CityBeautiful youtube channel