On a recent sunny day in San Francisco, I found myself in a situation most of us who live in California have confronted. Walking down a busy street, I came across an unhoused man lying facedown on the asphalt. Over and over, he screamed for help, one arm plaintively raised to the sky, the other limp at his side. A wheelchair that appeared to be his sat discarded on the sidewalk a few yards away.

A stream of cars and pedestrians passed by without stopping. To be fair, he was no waif. Lifting him into the chair, if that’s what he even wanted, would have been extremely difficult under the best of conditions — and these were not. The man was almost certainly either under the influence or suffering from mental illness.

He needed more help than any one stranger could give him. So I got out my phone and thought about whom to call.

If a recent story in the Atlantic is to be believed, residents of San Francisco, befitting our progressive values, have no shortage of compassionate options to navigate situations like this. We have the “Street Crisis Response Team, EMS-6, Street Overdose Response Team, San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team, Street Medicine and Shelter Health, DPH Mobile Crisis Team, Street Wellness Response Team, and Compassionate Alternative Response Team.”

But are any of these options actually available on demand?

In one of the most heart-wrenching anecdotes in the Atlantic piece, the author describes an added man lying naked outside a Safeway. A woman calls for help. But, tellingly, despite our city’s so-called wealth of services, it is police who respond. And do nothing.

It could have been worse.

When I was living in downtown Los Angeles several years ago, a homeless man, in a state of emotional distress, climbed to the top of a tall billboard near my apartment. Police officers who arrived on the scene tasered him; he fell several stories to his death before a crowd of onlookers.

Just last month, San Francisco police officers showed up to a dispute between two allegedly unhoused men — and shot them both dead.

For all our supposed compassion in California, it is the police who remain the primary point of contact with those suffering in our streets. And they are ill-equipped to handle the task.

All of this was on my mind as I tried to figure out what to do.

If I called 911, would the police come? What if they found drugs on him? Would an arrest record make it even harder for him to get a home one day? Or would the confrontation end with violence if he gave the officers trouble?

In the middle of these deliberations, a voice suddenly jumped up behind me.

“Keep walking,” it said.

I turned and saw a different homeless man staring back at me.

“Keep walking,” he repeated, “or I’m going to f— you up.”

His expression indicated he was serious. And I had no idea what to do.

Was the man standing up for his friend on the ground? Or were the two in conflict? Should I risk a fight to try to figure out how to help?

I could think of no answers — and the man before me was in no mood to talk. So I walked away.

“Do something.”

We hear the phrase repeatedly endlessly here in San Francisco and elsewhere in California in regard to the abject conditions on our streets. But what does it mean?

Any examination has to start with what California voters intended when they passed the endlessly controversial Proposition 47 in 2014. If we take voters at their word, they wanted to do as the bill says — to stop treating crimes of poverty and drug possession as felonies.

Unfortunately, while voting is undoubtedly one of the most assertive forms of mass communication, its message is rarely definitive. There is always a wiggle room for misinterpretation — or willful misreading.

When I recently spoke with conservative state attorney general candidate Eric Early, he argued that Californians didn’t know what they were signing up for with Prop. 47, thanks to the proposition’s misleading ballot title: “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.”

He’s not alone. And he’s certainly right that for a bill designed to ease or eliminate sentencing for low-level crimes, that title is Orwellian.

But in 2020, voters shot down the much clearer “Criminal Sentencing, Parole and DNA Collection Initiative” — which would have rolled back Prop. 47’s reforms — by a 62%-38% margin.

The majority of Californians have repeatedly stated that they do not want crimes born of poverty, mental illness and addiction resolved with jail cells.

But is that the end of it?

“If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it.”

The cynical implication of that line, pulled from the Atlantic piece, is that San Franciscans have willfully fashioned their city a civil libertarian paradise for the troubled. Misfits from across the country can draw from our city’s alleged font of resources or misbehave as self-destructively they see fit. In our naive compassion, we are happy to let them do as they please.

At least until this week’s recall.

Putting aside the blatant myths that San Francisco is a migration destination for the criminally indigent or a wellspring of social services capable of offering help to all who seek it, is anyone in this city really fine with rampant theft — even out of necessity? Or with people using the sidewalks as toilets? Or with addicts dying on the street with a needle in their arm?

It’s safe to say we are not.

Unstated, but implicit in our voting record, is a broad desire for alternatives to the old status quo of siccing police on poor people, the addicted, the homeless and throwing them behind bars. Voters, in the most direct way we are able, have repeatedly asked for policymakers for new proactive, compassionate solutions.

Instead — and this is true across California — the governmental response in the eight years since Prop. 47 passed has largely been to let chaos reign and argue about its causes. Police rarely respond to low-level crimes or street crises, but neither does anyone else. Meaningful alternatives have been ignored or slow-walked to the point of despair.

This is not what anyone signed up for.

Voters in most major metropolitan areas in California have passed measures allotting billions for supportive homeless housing and treatment services. They have also passed police accountability measures that strongly imply a desire to lessen non-emergency police interactions with the public — which have a history of ineffective, racially fraught and/or violent outcomes.

It’s safe to say that, at a bare minimum, Californians want to be able to call someone — not police — who can contact those on the street, intervene if they are in crisis or causing trouble, institute a mental health hold if necessary and/ or connect them with food, housing, treatment and social services as needed.

This service obviously isn’t the end all be all of crime and homelessness prevention (which, are two separate problems). But it is a prerequisite for meaningfully and compassionately improving our streets and restoring a basic sense of agency over our city’s condition.

Unlike most other cities in California, San Francisco has made inroads into building this infrastructure. Mayor London Breed’s recent budget noted that the city’s Street Crisis Response Team soon intends to field all behavioral 911 calls where no weapon is involved. It currently handles 46%-57% of such calls.

This progress, if it comes to fruition, would be welcome. But the fact that we’re still ramping up capacity while endlessly arguing about our district attorney and police staffing is gutting.

We’re eight years in waiting and voters still don’t have the most basic infrastructure we have repeatedly demanded. In its absence, hopelessness pervades — and a desire by some to return to the old status quo has risen.

Right now, the only sense of agency most San Franciscans feel over their city’s condition is recall. And that’s our biggest failure.

Matthew Fleischer is The Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: matt.fleischer@sfchronicle.com

The post What the San Francisco ‘failed metropolis’ narrative will get painfully improper appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Over the past month, our city has been caught in the crossfire of attacks on criminal justice reform following multiple high-profile thefts from luxury stores in the Bay Area and across the country — including San Francisco’s Union Square. The all too common response to these crimes has been calls for more policing and attacks on progressive reform, but these knee-jerk responses are short-sighted. To achieve lasting public safety, we need to think differently about these crimes. If we really care about preventing these crimes – like others – then we need to implement the systemic changes needed to make a real difference.

While these crimes have understandably frightened store associates and shocked those who watched viral videos capturing the events, these types of thefts, in which multiple people run into a store and steal items, are not new — reports of similar crimes abound years back. They happened during the Trump administration, and they happened in cities like Los Angeles under the previous rule of an anti-reform prosecutor. Nor are they isolated to the Bay Area or even progressive cities — retailers in Texas, Minnesota, Florida and beyond were all targets.

Still, some mistakenly blame criminal justice reforms—and reformers—for these crimes. Some have falsely accused progressive prosecutors like me of not being held accountable, despite my firm’s high prosecution rates for these types of crimes and our transparency on filing rates. And some have pointed to laws like Proposition 47 — which reduced some theft and drug possession charges to misdemeanor — as somehow responsible for those crimes. These are diversionary maneuvers.

Although Fox News might have you think otherwise, the truth is that as the District Attorney of San Francisco, I hold accountable those arrested in connection with the Union Square crimes. My office has filed criminal complaints against every person the San Francisco Police Department has arrested for these crimes. We presented evidence at a preliminary hearing where a judge agreed that there is probable cause to proceed for all offenses except looting – a reminder that aggressive charges do not necessarily lead to convictions. Accountability is important and my office is pursuing it vigorously, as we have done in 86% of the commercial burglary cases brought to us by the police this year. For comparison, police arrested just 8.8% of commercial burglaries this year.

Organized retail theft is not a problem that can be tackled through law enforcement solutions alone – they come after a crime has been committed. Public safety is the shared responsibility of police, city officials, prosecutors and courts — and also requires help from retailers, community groups, healthcare providers and community members. State and city officials make laws; police investigated and arrested; prosecutors bring charges and prosecute; and the courts dismiss or arrest and convict. Prosecutors receive cases only after a crime has occurred and the police have made an arrest. Fighting crime can only happen through a sense of shared responsibility.

Blaming legislative reform is also wrong. Reversing Proposition 47 would not solve the problems we now face. California’s $950 theft threshold is still among the lowest in the country — 38 states have a threshold of $1,000 or more — and Texas has a $2,500 threshold. Proposition 47 was also passed seven years ago and a decline in property crimes has followed. Its passage did not prevent prosecutors from prosecuting those responsible for organized retail theft; For example, all charges in Union Square were still felonies.

To prevent these crimes before they happen and ensure long-term public safety, we must focus on supporting victims and tackling the root causes of crime, rather than one-sidedly on law enforcement responses or pushing back on reforms.

Police stand guard outside the boarded up windows of the Louis Vuitton store in Union Square in San Francisco on Tuesday, November 23, 2021.

Charles Russo/SFGATE

Supporting victims means meeting the needs of all victims, not just the powerful or wealthy. The focus on increased surveillance to support high-end retailers has meant victims of theft targeting smaller businesses – including numerous Chinatown stores – have been largely overlooked. These incidents have not received mainstream media attention, and the city has not invested the same resources in protecting these businesses as the larger corporations in Union Square.

I have often found that we talk about punishing the perpetrators, but not about making amends for the harm done to the victims. Last year, my office ran a District 5 Victim Services pilot that compensated small businesses that experienced vandalism. This pilot project has now been extended to the whole city. I have significantly expanded our firm’s victim services department, hiring for the first time attorneys dedicated to serving victims of property crime.

Long-term security for all people requires more from us than simply responding to crime. We must work to reduce crime. Investing in the social safety net – which keeps everyone safe – goes a long way. Affordable housing, quality education, access to health care, and addiction services can provide the stability that empirical evidence suggests actually deters criminal activity.

Of course, not all crimes are crimes of desperation. We should focus our resources on opportunists who are intentionally trying to commit these crimes — like prosecutors my office announced Monday following a large-scale retail organized theft.

We are at a turning point in San Francisco; we run the risk of making fear-driven decisions. We should not go back to the days of jailing every person who committed even the smallest misdemeanor – a practice that not only failed to stop crime, but also had a disproportionately large impact on over-watched communities of color. Returning to these criminal justice policies offers no solution. We can have both security and justice.

I am committed to a comprehensive response that investigates, identifies and holds those responsible, supports victims, and prevents future crimes. Only through this multifaceted approach will we be able to build better, safer and more just communities.

Chesa Boudin is the District Attorney of San Francisco.

The post We’re blaming the mistaken issues for San Francisco retail theft appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

“There were dozens of hypotheses and basically no one took any of them seriously.”

That is, until Berkeley scientists – led by Luis Alvarez (a Nobel laureate in physics) and his son geologist Walter Alvarez – came up with the idea that the earth was struck by a meteorite or comet the size of San Francisco.

The theory and its supporters received a major boost a few years later with the discovery of a 110-mile-wide crater on what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

“With the discovery of the smoking weapon, the fact that there was a large meteorite became widely accepted,” Marshall said. “So it started to develop into the two hypotheses on meteorite versus volcanism.”

Charles Marshall examines a cast of a bird related to puffins and the great auk found in the Monterey Formation in southern California. (Daniel Potter / KQED)

In fact, volcanoes have been difficult to keep off the list of known suspects. Hundreds of millions of years ago, every other major extinction (with the exception of today’s) was associated with volcanism.

Around the same time as the meteor strike and the disappearance of dinosaurs from the fossil record (along with many species to tiny marine life), there was also a massive wave of volcanic activity in India – in a place known as the Deccan Traps.

Scientists have been arguing back and forth for years: Impact! Volcanoes! Impact! …

Until recently, when Berkeley geophysicist Mark Richards offered this idea: “I realized that the size of the impact is probably large enough to have triggered volcanic systems around the planet.”

Bigger than big

Richards calculated that the energy of a rock the size of Mount Everest from space was enough to trigger an 11-magnitude quake. This is not a typo. When I told Richards that I thought the scale would only go up to 10, he told me that it was actually not true.

In terms of earthquakes, 10+ is a nightmare. Such a quake would be a hundred times worse than the “big one” that hit San Francisco in 1906. Richards says it shook the globe – even the volcanoes on the other side of the world in India.

A relative of today’s Komodo dragon, the owner of this skull (left), wore flippers and could grow to be more than 20 feet long. To the right in Charles Marshall’s laboratory sits an Allosaurus foot. (Daniel Potter / KQED)

“So the idea is that the impact may have put the system into high gear.”

Richards carefully says that if he’s right and the two events are linked, we still don’t know exactly what killed the dinosaurs. Rather, the proposal points the way for a new investigation, says Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and co-author of Richards’ paper.

“We just have to give up the thought that it is one thing or the other,” said Renne.

Both the impact itself and a volcanic wave would have the potential to trigger massive eruptions of noxious gases that lead to sharp temperature fluctuations.

One factor could have been the release of CO2, for example from so much vaporized limestone, which, along with other greenhouse gases, leads to a long-term warming effect.

India’s Deccan Traps, described by geologists as a “great igneous province,” were formed over hundreds of thousands of years as layer upon layer of lava flowed and cooled, around the same time the dinosaurs died. (Paul Renne / BGC)

Renne says there could also have been an abundance of sulfate aerosols, “which, when released into the atmosphere, can actually reflect enough sunlight, causing cooling.”

In fact, one could argue for a double event – first sudden cooling, followed by a long, hot period from the greenhouse effect. Whether the dinosaurs died in a single bad weekend, or the lifespan of an animal when the food web collapsed, or several millennia, remains unclear.

“The potential effects of an impact or massive volcanism can be the same in many ways. The symptoms would be indistinguishable, ”says Renne.

Increase in precision

In order to better understand the effects and their possible connection with the eruptions in India, a narrower data range will be determined in the next step. For Renne, this means using a basement room full of mass spectrometers to test rocks from the Deccan traps. In the hallway in front of his office, canvas sacks full of such stones are piled up.

“I am a rock lover and I have a lot of beautiful rocks and large crystals. These are some of the ugliest rocks you will ever see, ”said Renne, pulling out a sample that, to my untrained eye, might as well have been gravel from a nearby quarry.

A fossilized pteranodon hovers over the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley. (Daniel Potter / KQED)

Dating these rocks is a slow process, with a few tens of milligrams shipped from the state to be irradiated and then sent back for testing. It can take months.

Nearby is a wood-paneled room that houses a magnetometer – another tool for dating prehistoric rocks. This is the Courtney Sprain’s specialty; She is a Ph.D. Student who also wrote Richards’ paper.

Sprain spends part of the summer in Montana collecting samples from coal seams and has told me that at the end of each day she resembles a chimney sweep.

When the Earth’s magnetic core shifts (we’re not sure why this is happening) it leaves a record in the rock. Sprain teases these cues to refine the timescale.

“We get an accuracy of 20,000 years,” she says, “while before it was 500,000, a million.”

Really ideal, albeit unrealistic, would be the accuracy up to the day of the week the impact occurred. But it would be helpful to bring it under 10,000 years.

Geologist Eldridge Moores, a distinguished professor emeritus at UC Davis known for his role in the John McPhee book “Assembling California,” says it is like a detective trying to find out the exact time someone died.

“You have to know that – this is essential information before you can answer the next question, that’s why. The same goes for the dinosaurs. “

Moores was sitting with me in his Davis house, a copy of Mark Richards’ newspaper on the dining table in front of him, when I asked him: Do we know what killed the dinosaurs?

The post If You Assume You Perceive the Demise of the Dinosaurs, You’re Fallacious appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

‘Maybe we’re having a bust right now, but it’ll boom again’

Mat Honan

OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts — edited for length and clarity — with notable figures in and around the tech industry.

To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BuzzFeed News Executive Editor Mat Honan has long covered the way society interacts with technology. He joins Big Technology Podcast this week to discuss the “Zoom Class,” the rise of NFTs, and how San Francisco may change after the pandemic.

Alex Kantrowitz: Hi Mat, Let’s talk about the “Zoom Class,” or the group of people who’ve been able to keep their jobs and work from home during the pandemic. Some have even moved to “Zoom towns” a few hours away from the cities they once lived in. What do you think the implications are of having a group of people who can do that, and a group who can’t?

Mat Honan: There’s a couple of really interesting things there. If you think about what this pandemic would have looked like 20 years ago, when it would not have been possible to have a Zoom class, or a work-from-home class, or a Zoom school, all that kind of stuff. Technology really, in a lot of ways, helped this from becoming a lot worse than it could have been. It clearly helped reduce community spread.

But it’s deeply unfair certainly that some people are basically able to ride it out at home, often all being paid very well to do that. I think it’s almost a cliché at this point — I wish I could remember who said it first because it’s a brilliant truth — about the pandemic being the black light that exposed all the problems in society.

In some ways, it was just a lot of right stuff and right time in terms of the fact that it did work. You worked on a story, when this was all starting, about video capabilities when the pandemic was getting going. So many people had gone to Amazon Web services, there was so much bandwidth, people had fiber to the house, and there’s all this stuff. But it’s just deeply unfair that so many people got to ride it out at home, and it’s deeply unfair that the kids whose families had the money to have a better computer and better internet connection got a better education, or got an education. In some families, their kids just sat alone at home all day while both their parents are essential workers.

It’s really exposed the divides in society and just what kind of inequalities we have to work on as a society; I think that’s more than anything else. “Zoom Towns,” is the most obnoxious phrase I’ve heard in a long time, it’s going to have a long-term transformative effect in society, but I hope we can make a positive one.

Let’s talk about the effect. What’s that going to look like?

Frankly, I don’t want to predict the future. Like I don’t know. I don’t know what it looks like, but I certainly hope that all these conversations that we’ve had about race and class in the past year aren’t for naught, and that all the things that we’ve learned about who has the privilege to do these things, that we don’t unlearn those.

I worry that this will just add another layer of division inside an already really divided country.

I do, too. I do hope that there is some good to come out of it and we can have some sort of realignment. I saw something recently about the massive number of people who are registered as Independents now versus four years ago, eight years ago, 12 years ago.

It’s been an increase?

Yes, I think that’s a positive thing. One of the worst things that we’ve done in American society is to divide everybody up into teams. It’s been incredibly harmful. I hope there’s a chance that we can learn from it, and people become more civic-minded, and people can get more involved.

Personally, all of a sudden I care a lot more about schools, and not just my kids’ schools, but other kids’ schools. Molly Hensley-Clancy wrote a story on schools in the spring, and about all these kids who have just been completely wrecked by the pandemic and left behind. I’m certainly not the only person talking about seeing that, but I think people are really thinking about that now, and I hope that we continue to think about that.

I hope that we can do things like make sure that all families have a fast internet at home. Why is that something that only wealthy families can pay for? Why can’t we have a more equitable distribution of broadband? Why can’t there be broadband in rural areas? Why can’t we do more to have the government create infrastructure where there’s not affordable internet that people can get?

Tech development already seemed like it was happening in a bubble, and now it seems to be further ensconced in a bubble?

Some things maybe became less bubbled, like for example grocery delivery. My mother, who’s in her seventies and lives in a rural area, and is on a fixed income and doesn’t have a whole lot of resources, had never been able to get groceries delivered. Now, she can get groceries delivered, order online, and curbside pickup, and that kind of stuff, and she’s been doing it for a year. It just wasn’t available in her area, and the grocery stores that were there then scrambled to implement it. You’ll see some things like that, where places that weren’t traditionally tech, like a rural grocery store, become happy about technology that makes them more useful to people’s lives.

But what happens if the builders of technology are less exposed to folks who don’t work in the tech industry?

I think what you’re saying is because of people’s ability to ride it out at Zooms, are they going to have even less empathy than they already did have for people who they’ve not been having any contact with. It’s definitely concerning. Did you see the “giraffe money” story?

Was it about having enough money you could buy a giraffe as a test for wealth?

Right. “Are you going to get giraffe money from this IPO?” or just fancy dog money. I don’t know. And you want to have giraffe money. Even that those discussions are taking place is messed up. The U.S. is pretty messed up. I think a lot of that is due to long-term tax policy, long-term policies around race, long-term policies around who got to get a loan to buy a home, and that type of thing. I would hope that the people who are listening to this podcast, who are the builders, are thinking about the unglamorous middle class and working class and working poor who are not living in those bubbles and are not able to be on the Zoom all day.

There’s a company that has an ad where one of their drivers says, “I’m my own CEO,” and it struck me as tone-deaf. Because yeah, you’re your own CEO, you don’t have health benefits, you don’t have unemployment benefits, you don’t have any of the safety nets that come with full employment, and actually, you’re not even your own CEO because you don’t really even set your hours.

You’re managed by an algorithm.

Yeah. But that that mindset could come out now is shocking to me and appalling. We talk about these people as essential workers, yet we treat them as if they’re completely inessential, and it’s discouraging to me that you could have so little empathy that you might not see that as a problem.

When meanwhile there’s a thing going on in San Francisco right now. There’s a driver, I believe it’s an Uber driver, maybe a Lyft driver, who was assaulted by some people because he had asked them to wear a mask in the car. People are out there scrambling and working hard and putting themselves at risk so that other people are able to be at home and sit there on Zoom and Google Docs, and get your work done and check your workflow in Asana, all that kind of stuff. You know? It happens because other people have ventured out and took risks. And I just hope we think about them.

Okay, what do you think about this whole non-fungible token craze and the fact that bitcoin is going to the moon? I think you have a mountain full of bitcoin sitting in some Wired server from your Wired days.

They burned that, actually.

We should tell the story of the Wired bitcoin server, if you’re able.

This wasn’t me, but it was while I was there and it’s pretty amazing. I believe it was Bob McMillan, who’s now at the Wall Street Journal, who had a Butterfly Labs bitcoin mine, and it was in the gadget closet, and it’s just in there churning away mining bitcoin.

What year was this?

2012, maybe 2013. And at first, it’s just in there churning out stuff at whatever bitcoin was at the time. Even when it was $100 a coin, nobody really thought about this being a big problem. Then, all of a sudden bitcoin shot up, I think it was a thousand bucks or something, and I’m not going to get these numbers right, but it became a problem, and people were like, “Wait a second. It’s a thousand bucks today. It could be 50,000 bucks tomorrow,” which I don’t think anyone believed.

Here we are.

Yeah. Here we are. And there was a big debate internally over what we should do with it. I remember Adam Rogers, who’s a longtime writer and editor there, who’s on the science desk there, making the case that we should give that money to charity, “There are people sleeping on the street. We can’t keep this and sit on this bitcoin stash because it could in some ways compromise our integrity.” At this point, I want to say it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 bitcoin. They had mined several, but not a lot. They didn’t have like a thousand bitcoin or whatever; it wasn’t that early. Anyway, at some point after a lot of arguing over it, they made the decision basically to get rid of the key, and so they burned the key; and once they did that, I mean there’s no getting it back.

How much is this worth?

Like when they trashed it. Let’s say it was 10 bitcoin. I don’t know, it would be worth what, half a million bucks now? It’s a substantial amount of money now the way that it wasn’t when they got it.

Do you kick yourself for not buying bitcoin when you knew it was happening back in the day?

You can’t just think about what could have been. You’ve got to go back to that moment in time to really think about it. But there was a point in time when, I want to say it was John Herman, maybe someone else who was there, bought some bitcoin for a story when it was still trading for pennies a coin, and they had to send a money order to somebody who literally went by the name Morpheus. Who could have seen that it became that?

I actually did buy some bitcoin, which I wish I still was holding, for a story one time, and I got beat by Kash Hill who wrote another story about living on bitcoins, which is what I wanted to do. When you think about the million-dollar pizzas or whatever, or whatever Kash spent, she spent some fortune on a bitcoin sushi dinner, I mean it wasn’t worth anything back then, and it became worth stuff because people bought pizza and sushi dinners. That’s why it’s worth something now.

Do you think it’s going to crash?

I think it’s less likely to be valueless now than it was because there’s so many institutional people in it. I have no idea where the money is going or what’s happening with it.

Can I talk about NFTs?

Let’s define NFTs first because I’m still wrapping my head around how someone could sell a JPEG for $70 million.

I think we can define it as not a JPEG that sold, but as a unique digital object; that’s the way to think about it. I think if you define it that way, that it’s a digital object that is one of a kind, you can understand why that’s exciting.

Digital stuff is replicable on pixels anywhere. If I buy a painting, at least that painting hangs in my house. If I buy a digital object, anyone can see it on the web. I can’t display it. I guess I could buy a screen and put it up there, but anyone could buy a screen and put it up there, so what’s going on here?

I can put a replica of the Mona Lisa in my house tomorrow, right? You can replicate anything, you can already do that.

Is this Beeple’s First 5000 Days thing that sold worth $69 million? I have no idea, man. Who knows? I don’t know.

Why do you think this is cool?

I think it’s cool when you start thinking about it not just in terms of art. I think it’s cool when you start thinking about the ability to have a unique digital item that is yours and yours alone that you have ownership of. I think art is an easy place to start. But I think just in the same way that you weren’t able to really use bitcoin for anything except drugs, you will at some point be able to buy and sell other things, and there’s some weird stuff.

There’s that tweet that Jack Dorsey offered up as an NFT, and so the tweet is always just going to exist on Twitter anyway. It’s the person that’s setting up my Twitter tweet, but someone else is going to own the NFT of the tweet, I think is how it works.

What prevents Jack from selling an NFT of the same tweet to someone different?

Right. But could you fork the tweet? I don’t know. Maybe.

Because it’s all made up.

Yeah. It’s all made up. But I think it’s an interesting way to transfer ownership. This is going to sound crazy, but what if all ownership became some of those transferred NFTs, not just art, but like anything that you own that you don’t necessarily have in your possession, like the title to your car? I don’t know. I possess my car, but the title lives on a blockchain somewhere? It’s just an interesting way to think about ownership. I think there’s obviously all these huge problems with the energy usage that people are talking about —

Because mining bitcoin takes the carbon of an absurd amount of computing power.

The energy involved in mining and transferring bitcoin, and transferring NFTs, is apparently quite significant. But I think being able to prove unique digital ownership is a pretty cool concept.

Do you think you’ll buy any NFTs?

Not $69 million.

But if we put this podcast up and sold the rights as an NFT, would it be valuable at all?

I don’t know, Alex. Why don’t you try it? There’s a service that you can use to sell your tweets, which is I think what Dorsey used.

Oh, yeah. I put something up on there; it didn’t sell.

One of the things I’m going to think about doing is selling. I had someone hack my Twitter a long time ago, they posted to my Twitter account, and it’s always been so interesting to me that when you look at Twitter’s — I own my account, right? Twitter owns my account, but I technically own the content and their terms of service because I created it, the content is mine. Well, I didn’t create that. I didn’t create it. I didn’t display it. Someone else did all that. I’ve been wanting to sell that tweet just to see how you transfer that, how it works to transfer ownership to something that I clearly don’t own and didn’t make.

Could people tell your Twitter was hacked? Because there was one time where you were tweeting one night like, “Oh, God,” and “No, not this,” and…

I was watching Game of Thrones and I was just reacting, I think it was a season finale or something, and I tweeted like, “Oh, shit!” something like, “Oh, my God. This looks terrible.” It’s that total context collapse thing, and then I went to bed. The show was over. And I guess Marc Andreessen saw the tweets and flagged them to Ben Smith, who flagged them to our security, who was trying to call me in the middle of the night. I had my phone turned off. I woke up the next day and there’s all these messages from Ben and our security team like, “Are you okay?” And I said, “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

Was this the moment when Marc Andreessen turned against journalists?

I don’t think so. This was before he went on the blocking spree. This is when he actually followed lots of reporters and was saying those things about how Twitter was his way to inject his thoughts directly into a newsroom.

You wrote a piece on Substack saying that you’re pretty optimistic about San Francisco coming back. What do you think is going to happen here and why are you optimistic?

I guess I see people doing interesting things in the city, especially around media. There are a bunch of small interesting media startups in the city now that I think are cool, but I also see people becoming more engaged, you know?

I do think that we’ve got so many problems to solve in San Francisco. It’s clearly got a horrible, absolutely just incredible, fentanyl crisis, not just an opioid crisis. It’s a fentanyl crisis. It’s got horrible issues with people’s authority to actually live there. Like if you want to rent an apartment, if you want to buy a house: good luck; it costs just a shit-ton of money to try and do that. I think they’re starting to do a little bit of building in San Francisco. Like even people are still fighting it, but you’re starting, for I think at least the first time since the 20 years that I’ve lived there, to see a lot more support for new construction and for affordable construction. And I’m seeing a lot more people involved in knowing what the Board of Supervisors is doing.

I think that, in some ways, having school board meetings, and board supervisors meetings, and all these other government meetings happening on the internet where people can tune in and see them, and not have to go to a building and be there in person, it encourages participation, and so that’s encouraging to me. I think it’s only encouraging though if people are willing to dive in and start doing things and trying to make a difference, and I certainly hope they are. But also part of the point of that piece was that San Francisco has always been a weird fucked-up place, right?

From the very beginning, and it’s been this kind of place that’s always attracted weirdos doing weird things, whether they’re looking for gold, or coming for the summer of love, or whatever. Certainly, there are the origin stories that are connected to Stanford and Xerox PARC, and Fairchild Semiconductor, and all that kind of stuff. But one of the reasons that there are a lot of tech people in San Francisco is that it was a place where people were trying interesting and different new things. There’s a great book called What the Dormouse Said about this, but there’s a direct line between people that experiment with drugs and experiment with technology.

And I think that San Francisco has been a town that’s had a lot of booms and busts, and maybe we’re having a bust right now, but it’ll boom again. It’s a beautiful place that’s on the ocean, you can ride your bike across the bridge and be in a national park. It’s got a lovely climate, even if we do have fire season now.

And people are going to want to live there. This myth that everybody’s vacating San Francisco for Miami — also a great city, but one that’s sinking underground and brutally hot in the summertime — it’s ridiculous. People are always talking about problems. But before 1990, San Francisco was pretty grim, and yet the tech boom happened after its grimness.

They tried to draft you to run for mayor at one point. Are you going to do that?

No. I tried to draft myself, honestly. But no, I’m not. Of course not. I could never do that. What a terrible job that’s got to be, right? Man, that’s a shitty job.

Maybe to be governor, but it’s also super interesting to me that San Francisco politics have become so dominant, in the sense that the politicians have become so dominant: Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris. All those people come out of San Francisco local politics, and it’s amazing.

If you think about the dot-com bust which happened in 2000, but it took a couple years to shake out, lots of interesting stuff happened in San Francisco in 2003-’04, ’05, ’06. Before, it was totally on its feet. If there are people who are there just for a job and they want to leave, they should be able to go.

Going back to one of your earlier questions, I do think that we’re never going to go fully back to the office, and there are going to be people who are working on Zoom, we’re going to be working from all over the place; and if they don’t want to be in San Francisco, they shouldn’t necessarily have to be. I think things will shake out, and things will change, and we’ll fix some problems, and we’ll get new ones.

I think you need to have a certain level of affordable rent to have the weird people that make a city enjoyable, so maybe this will be one of the silver linings, that San Francisco will be a place where weird can flourish again.

I hope so. And I hope it’s also a place where people who have grown up there can stay there. My wife, as you know, is a nurse, and she works with people who commute in from hours away because they can’t, especially if they’re younger, afford rent. I hope it’s a place where artists and nurses and teachers and musicians and people who are the soul of the city can live, and I think that all comes down to housing. I think when you think about the homelessness crisis, the people experiencing the homelessness crisis, that’s driven by housing. So much of what people complain about with San Francisco can be solved by starting housing, and it’s encouraging me that we’re starting to see a little bit more get built.

And it’s encouraging to see that some of the focus that’s been happening out of city hall, including today, is on livability. I think when you really start thinking about what makes a city livable, it’s people’s ability to fucking live there, right?

That sounds so stupid. But if you can’t actually live in the city because you can’t afford to, I mean it’s not going to be a lovely city. Like who cares how many slow streets you have. You’ve got to have a house.

You’ve written eloquently about the fire season here that’s become a fact of life. Are we going to have a fire season on the West Coast every year? This year was particularly brutal.

It was awful. I don’t remember how long it was. I just remember it was just absolutely awful. Especially combined on top of the pandemic, I mean it’s terrible. It destroyed some people’s homes and their lives. Peter Aldhous has written a lot about it, and everything that I’ve read that he’s written has made me discouraged that it’s going to get better anytime soon.

Yes. I mean the trend is certainly that they’re getting worse. I don’t know what the snowpack is like right now, but it was low, which is not encouraging for fire season. I think it’s a fact of life in the West. It was happening in Colorado, happening in Montana, in ways that it didn’t used to. To me, that’s the thing that’s really alarming about living in San Francisco and California and the West and the world is like, “Oh, shit. What have we done to the planet? And are we going to be able to do anything to fix it?”

My wife’s cousin was emailing us and they’re like, “Well, we wanted to come out in August, but we’re worried that it’s going to be very smoky,” and my response is, “Yeah. I don’t think you should come in August.” I wouldn’t plan a vacation in California in August right now.

The post Why Everybody’s Incorrect to Guess Towards San Francisco: A Dialog With BuzzFeed Information Exec. Editor Mat Honan appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.