Tootfinder

come to Cafe de Olla on 19th St and Mission/Capp! highly underrated casual restaurant and café. Oaxacan food with many vegan options including these two specials this week, the butternut squash soup and potato tacos

Tim Scott's video attacking CBO: Nine errors in 60 seconds (Glenn Kessler/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/16/tim-scott-cbo-nine-errors/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p25#a250616p25

poppies one month ago vs. today
(but the poor coyote mint hasn't grown a whit and is now being smothered)

How Google's Jigsaw and longtime pollster Scott Rasmussen plan to use AI to survey Americans to find common ground ahead of the US' 250th anniversary (Richard Nieva/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/

Google And Pollster Scott Rasmussen Will Use AI To Survey Americans’ Political Views
A collaboration between the tech giant and a longtime pollster will gather five to 10 people each from every congressional district to answer questions about the nation’s most pressing issues. If it works, it could upend the fraught world of political polling.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #SundaySoul
Jill Scott:
🎵 He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat)
#JillScott
https://redsoulmusicv2.bandcamp.com/album/jill-scott-he-loves-me-redsoul-edits

go ahead, keep ignoring my music posts. it only makes my references More Obscure
on that note, Deerhoof's Offend Maggie flows so much better with the vinyl track order. I don't know what they were thinking with the CD track order, it's so cooked

There is little about Scott Jennings,
or the words that come out of his mouth,
that corresponds to reality.
A decade into Trump’s capture of the Republican Party, Jennings is the premier crossover enabler.
He is perhaps CNN’s most recognizable face alongside its primetime anchors,
and he is feted on jokey, tough-talk shows like Bill Maher. 
But Jennings is a representation of our own malady,
a projection of a country whose political culture is now…

Scott Jennings in the Hyperreal and the Myth of the Escape Hatch
Jennings is like a simulation of a Trump enabler.

Netanyahu's Iran Attack Trumps Trump
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-13-trump-netanyahu-iran-war/

local restaurants I love you but please have a website that isn't your instagram profile and has your hours of business on it. kthx

every time someone invokes mom and pop landlords to argue against eviction protections, I want to scream: when do we talk about the mom and pop tenants? when is it time to care about the mom and pop tenants that landlords are throwing out on the street?

An interview with US Press Freedom Tracker Senior Reporter Stephanie Sugars on documenting nearly 62,000 anti-press social posts by Trump over the past 10 years (Liam Scott/Freedom of the Press Foundation)
http://freedom.press/issues/the-repor

The reporter documenting 10 years of Trump’s anti-media posts
Since Trump’s first term as president, Stephanie Sugars has managed an extensive database that documents each and every anti-media post from Trump.

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Jill Scott:
🎵 Golden
#NowPlaying #JillScott
https://kwamzy.bandcamp.com/track/jill-scott-golden-dj-kwamzy-amapiano-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/28EL5veTZtx38TqxIZwFyQ

'First I heard': Scott Bessent admits he didn't know Trump is withholding cash - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/scott-bessent-2672359294/

One of the RV dwellers Lurie plans to displace is a staffer helping Joel Engardio fight his recall. #sfPol
https://sfstandard.com/2025/07/11/l…

Lurie has a plan to get RVs off the streets. RV dwellers say it's cruel and misguided
The residents react to City Hall's voucher proposal: "That's a step down."

Will Carroll's 'Favorite Guy' Become Fan Favorite for the Raiders https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-pete-carroll-laki-tasi-scott-pioli-john-spytek

Today in "please stop saying 'environmentalism' when you mean 'being a snob'":
Caltrans ranked hydrogen trains, a fossil-fuel derived vaporware technology, as more environmentally friendly than electrification, because they think overhead wires look bad. That's the actual reason. htt…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #SaturdayMorning
Johann Sebastian Bach, Scott Tennant & The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet:
🎵 Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, BWV 1048: III. Allegro (arr. S. Tennant)
#ScottTennant
https://open.spotify.com/track/0qZZUF1YbuBpB4zBl6NiBU

Tim Scott Slammed with Community Note After False Claim About CBO History (J.D. Wolf/MeidasTouch News)
https://meidasnews.com/news/tim-scott-slammed-with-community-note-after-false-claim-about-cbo-history
http://www.memeorandum.com/250613/p87#a250613p87

MM-Food-100K: A 100,000-Sample Multimodal Food Intelligence Dataset with Verifiable Provenance
Yi Dong, Yusuke Muraoka, Scott Shi, Yi Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10429 http…

MM-Food-100K: A 100,000-Sample Multimodal Food Intelligence Dataset with Verifiable Provenance
We present MM-Food-100K, a public 100,000-sample multimodal food intelligence dataset with verifiable provenance. It is a curated approximately 10% open subset of an original 1.2 million, quality-accepted corpus of food images annotated for a wide range of information (such as dish name, region of creation). The corpus was collected over six weeks from over 87,000 contributors using the Codatta contribution model, which combines community sourcing with configurable AI-assisted quality checks; e…

All 5 SF YIMBY endorsed supervisors—Sauter, Engardio, Mahmood, Dorsey, and Melgar—voted to take $34 to $53 million away from building permanent affordable housing, *and* to ban RVs from all city streets.
So much for "legalize housing." With YIMBYs like this, who needs NIMBYs? #sfPol

SF folks: please call your supervisor and ask them not to redirect permanent affordable housing funds to temporary shelter
it’s likely illegal and it’s nonsense: the shelters would free up if people could exit to permanent housing!
https://dsasf.org/ocoh/

San Francisco is About to Defund Solutions to Homelessness
After a late-night session on June 26, the Budget & Appropriations Committee of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is moving forward with a set of proposed resolutions regarding the budget. T…

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.CL. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/new
[1/1]:
- Personalized Product Search Ranking: A Multi-Task Learning Approach with Tabular and Non-Tabular ...
Morishetti, Kumar, Scott, Nag, Sharma, Vashishtha, Sridhar, Chatter, Achan

It’s authoritarianism and in-your-face grift all in a neat little uniquely American package
That it it’s his personal brand, not the state, is just the cherry on top.
https://bsky.app/profile/scottlincicome.bsky.social/post/3lrqa6jslpy2x

Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome.bsky.social)
So the guy who can singlehandedly set US tariffs on smartphones is launching his own US smartphone company do I have that right

this potential — for AI companies to tweak their chatbots to give pro-Trump answers to appease MAGA — is one of the reasons I'm avoiding LLMs as a political practice. they are inherently extremely centralized, requiring massive resources to crawl data and train. to become dependent on such products is to subject ourselves to the owners' power. this is just one of the ways that can go disastrously wrong

The campaign to make it illegal for ChatGPT to criticize Trump
The conservative pressure campaign against social networks was hugely successful — and now it's coming for AI

Wow I did not remember that Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld got turned in to a series. What is fandom any more?
#tv #netflix #fandom

On minimal bases in homotopical combinatorics
Katharine Adamyk, Scott Balchin, Miguel Barrero, Steven Scheirer, Noah Wisdom, Valentina Zapata Castro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11159

On minimal bases in homotopical combinatorics
We present a development in the computational suite for the study of $N_\infty$ operads for a finite group $G$. This progress is achieved using the simple yet powerful observation that Rubin's generation algorithm can be interpreted as a closure operator. Leveraging this perspective, we establish the existence of minimal bases for $N_\infty$ operads. By investigating these bases for certain families of groups we are led to introduce and analyze several novel combinatorial invariants for finite …

BREAKING: Iran's Capital Struck By Israel, Air Sirens Sounding - WW3 Begins
https://youtube.com/shorts/oIYBFULCp0Q?si=cYxtljzLn21fF9t_

The challenger who narrowly lost to GOP Rep. Scott Perry wants another chance to beat him in 2026 (Marc Levy/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/scott-perry-stelson-congress-campaign-2026-election-39aee3eaf631b7dac92505cd1b5ab6cc
http://www.memeorandum.com/250714/p45#a250714p45

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Gil Scott-Heron:
🎵 Me and the Devil
#GilScottHeron
https://johnf.bandcamp.com/track/me-the-devil-ft-john-f-henny
https://open.spotify.com/track/0DfHeKRPWea6WPOXvmMRMQ

Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety
Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, Elizabeth Barnes, Yoshua Bengio, Joe Benton, Joseph Bloom, Mark Chen, Alan Cooney, Allan Dafoe, Anca Dragan, Scott Emmons, Owain Evans, David Farhi, Ryan Greenblatt, Dan Hendrycks, Marius Hobbhahn, Evan Hubinger, Geoffrey Irving, Erik Jenner, Daniel Kokotajlo, Victoria Krakovna, Shane Legg, David Lindner, David Luan, Aleksander M\k{a}dry, Julian Michael, Neel Nanda, Dave Orr, Jaku…

Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety
AI systems that "think" in human language offer a unique opportunity for AI safety: we can monitor their chains of thought (CoT) for the intent to misbehave. Like all other known AI oversight methods, CoT monitoring is imperfect and allows some misbehavior to go unnoticed. Nevertheless, it shows promise and we recommend further research into CoT monitorability and investment in CoT monitoring alongside existing safety methods. Because CoT monitorability may be fragile, we recommend that frontie…

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Gil Scott-Heron:
🎵 The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
#NowPlaying #GilScottHeron
https://sfbdhq.bandcamp.com/track/gil-scott-heron-the-revolution-will-not-be-televised
https://open.spotify.com/track/7ni78Vjslqo2VxiDOahYlV

new* mary timony is so good. late-career triumph
https://marytimony.bandcamp.com/album/untame-the-tiger-2
*feb 2024. i overlooked it so long despite her being an all time favorite vocalist and songwriter

Trump says 'it's possible' US gets involved in Israel-Iran conflict (Rachel Scott/ABC News)
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-us-gets-involved-israel-iran-conflict/story?id=122865561
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p64#a250615p64

the sidewalk is not "your driveway," SF motorists. enough with the entitled grabbing of public space
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/car-driveway-san-francisco-20763724.php

finally, there’s a pedestrian countdown signal at 17th St and Folsom!

 
A climate of fear is perceptible in the United States today,
and it must be resisted no matter what,
CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley says.
“People are silencing themselves for fear that the government will retaliate against them,
and that’s not the America that we all love,”
Pelley told Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview after CNN’s Saturday telecast of
“Good Night, and Good Luck.”
The Broadway play, which recounts CBS newsman Edwar…

‘If you fall silent, the country is doomed’: CBS News’ Scott Pelley stresses courage as network faces pressure campaign
A climate of fear is perceptible in the United States today, and it must be resisted no matter what, CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley says.

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.AI. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/new
[1/6]:
- Personalized Product Search Ranking: A Multi-Task Learning Approach with Tabular and Non-Tabular ...
Morishetti, Kumar, Scott, Nag, Sharma, Vashishtha, Sridhar, Chatter, Achan

"If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because 'violence' is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo."
https://organizingmythoughts.org/protes…

Protest, Power, and the Violence Debate
"We are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating."

Trump says he 'may' call Walz after Minnesota shootings, calls him 'grossly incompetent' (Rachel Scott/ABC News)
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-call-walz-after-minnesota-shootings-calls-grossly/story?id=122870353
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p65#a250615p65

with the bar for safe bike infrastructure as low as it is, it's hard to strike the right balance after a project between "hooray! it's so much better!" and "this, that, and the other thing still suck."
Streetsblog SF often errs on the latter side... I'm happier than ever with #ValenciaStreet, but their critiques are not wrong.

SFMTA Leaves Valencia Bike Lanes Unfinished - Streetsblog San Francisco
The center-running lane is long gone and some finishing touches are coming to the parking-protected section from 15th to 23rd, but the lack of concrete infrastructure remains problematic. And then there's the last four blocks from 23rd to Cesar Chavez, which is still just a striped lane wedged between parked cars and moving traffic.

"These vehicle homes sheltered dozens of working-class Latinx families, who could no longer afford the city’s soaring rents. Living in RVs was the only way many could keep their jobs in food service, janitorial work and construction while their children stayed enrolled in nearby schools.
"To city officials, it looked like homelessness. But residents didn’t see it that way. Living in RVs was a survival strategy—a way to stay housed, employed and near their communities."…

"Despite good-faith efforts by DSI [dense street imagery] providers to protect individual privacy through blurring faces and license plates, these measures fail to address broader privacy concerns. In this work, we find that increased data density and advancements in artificial intelligence enable harmful group membership inferences from supposedly anonymized data."
via @…

Privacy of Groups in Dense Street Imagery
Spatially and temporally dense street imagery (DSI) datasets have grown unbounded. In 2024, individual companies possessed around 3 trillion unique images of public streets. DSI data streams are only set to grow as companies like Lyft and Waymo use DSI to train autonomous vehicle algorithms and analyze collisions. Academic researchers leverage DSI to explore novel approaches to urban analysis. Despite good-faith efforts by DSI providers to protect individual privacy through blurring faces and l…

I wrote about why Zohran Mamdani's free bus fare policy is a good idea actually, and the difference between thinking about transit as a consultant versus as a voter and activist.
(public replies to this toot will appear as comments)
https://scott.mn/2025/06/11/consultant

Consultant's mindset, or why Jarrett Walker is wrong about free buses

good anthology of urbanist writing! fresh takes on topics like land trusts, urban noise, conservative business owners, fun guerrilla urbanist occupations, the ecological value of leaf litter
saw it at dog eared books and impulse bought!
https://

Some catnip for the transit nerds in here. 30X Marina Express to switch to trolleybus service, with tests for how much an off-wire section will wear down the battery. Adjustments to the 49 to reduce rush-hour crowding, and more!
https://carfree.city/@sfmtadocsbot/115017941639…

good piece. be warned there's a Garry Tan jump scare. #sfPol
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/san-francisco-zohran-democratic-socialism

San Francisco’s Ultrarich Are Blocking a Zohran-Style Agenda
For years, democratic socialists in San Francisco have been passing Zohran Mamdani–style policies in the city legislature and through ballot measures, only to see them blocked by Silicon Valley billionaires and powerful real estate interests.

3 years after car-free JFK/Overlook/Middle/MLK was made permanent, the signage for the non-JFK parts of the route is still so bad. No one but us nerds knows a car-free path to the beach even exists!
There should be a big banner on this overpass telling you to turn left then right. Instead there’s a tiny sign no one will see and even if you do it’s unclear (this isn’t “slow streets,” it’s car-free!)

Thread about the two Palestinians invited to speak at Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, who were instead detained at SFO with their visas arbitrarily canceled:
https://social.coop/@raph/114674710005408478

Minneapolis and Saint Paul are finally launching this BRT line that was already in the planning phase when I last visited in ... 2019.
Good, but if it's gonna take that long, maybe agencies should just incrementally upgrade the buses that exist instead of these big fancy unicorn "BRT" projects?
https://

Creating Buzz for the B Line
The Twin Cities’ newest BRT line is an attractive option that could turn more people into transit users — if they know about it!

SFMTA is adding left turns back to Valencia at 17th, 21st and 23rd streets with a new phase, which will cut down on time for pedestrian and bike crossings. The word is that Mayor Lurie directly ordered this. Signal modifications are very expensive and that money could have gone to safety or transit priority.
Seems small, but it's wasteful and adds to the "death by a thousand cuts" for Transit First in Lurie's SF.

Potrero Yard working group has an open seat for a representative of a senior-serving organization, if that’s you or someone you know.
The group advises SFMTA on the bus yard modernization housing development on the Mission/Potrero Hill border
https://www.sfmta.com/projects/potrero-yar

Potrero Yard Modernization Project
Rebuilding Potrero Yard to better serve you!

Headway management is a net good, but it's no fun being on the bus that's being slowed down to maintain headway. You've got places to be and that bus is draaaagging, missing every light on purpose.
https://www.sfmta.com/media/42843/download?inline

fucking finally, Brotherhood/Alemany/Sagamore is one of the most absurd intersections along "bike routes" in the whole city.
https://carfree.city/@sfmtadocsbot/114836632393411416

Mayor Danny Bluejeans' cruel crackdown on people experiencing homelessness in SF is... sending them instead to SFO. Displacement is not a solution. (But he's about to double down on displacement by banning RVs too) #sfpol

this looks pretty bad for Phil Ginsburg tbh
https://missionlocal.org/2025/08/phil-ginsburg-parks-alliance-drew-becher-crane-cove-port-of-s-f/

One call could’ve saved S.F. millions. Nobody picked up the phone.
Rec and Park GM Phil Ginsburg knew his nonprofit ally the Parks Alliance was in trouble, and kept quiet. Whose interests was he serving?

there's still kindness in San Francisco
https://missionlocal.org/2025/08/a-couple-of-hours-at-the-mission-district-soup-kitchen-that-almost-didnt-open/

A couple of hours at the Mission District soup kitchen that almost didn’t open 
The soup kitchen serves freshly cooked meals three times a week for up to 150 people. Visitors say the meals are a blessing.

proud to be a DSA member!
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/largest-us-socialist-organisation-passes-resolution-supporting-palestinian-resistance

Largest US socialist organisation passes resolution supporting Palestinian resistance
The resolution supports boycott campaigns against Israel and principles outlined by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation

the hardest 1990s Stereolab album for me to get into is Cobra and Phases Group, and I think it's because "Infinity Girl" and "Op Hop Detonation" sound so much like songs they made previously. it trips me up, like I'm listening to a remix with new lyrics. other than that it's a fine album

as a transit advocate, I would like to be able to embrace Scott Wiener as a champion for transit funding, but unfortunately he has also regularly attacked and defamed pro-Palestine activists. his actions have contributed to a neo-McCarthyist atmosphere around this issue that was immediately seized upon by Trump on coming back to power

Doctor Says UCSF Fired Her Due to Pressure From Wiener, Dillers Over Pro-Palestinian Speech
CA State Senator Scott Wiener and UCSF’s largest donor, the Diller Foundation, are named in new allegations by Dr. Rupa Marya, prominent physician, activist, and musician, who is suing UCSF over her recent termination stemming from public criticism of Israel.

male ladybugs should be called guy bugs

No one wants to live on Van Ness because it's a loud car sewer. Condo listings with a Van Ness address will tell you in all-caps if the unit doesn't face Van Ness. There's also no green space there. It makes housing on the corridor a passing-through place rather than somewhere to set down roots.

Van Ness Is ‘In Crisis.’ Revival Plans Hinge On Housing Towers and Chain Stores
This main SF thoroughfare once had grand houses and auto palaces. Now there’s a great bus line, but empty storefronts. Can it again be a place to live and linger?

"Although police officers per capita are above the median among OECD countries, the U.S. is an outlier in having few police per homicide. [This] is explained not by police staffing levels but by high levels of bureaucratic shirking... inefficient allocation, low effort, and the avoidance of bodily harm. We show that U.S. officers are paid significantly more (in relative and absolute terms) while not being at greater risk... than their international counterparts."

I realize there's a lot going on, but I'm surprised I didn't hear anything about the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge partially shutting down for emergency repairs. How does this affect the bike path debate? No word if it's affected by the shutdown.
https://www.

I've heard unhoused folks say they don't want tents because it makes them a target. A lot more people sleeping rough with just a sleeping bag, blanket, or merely a piece of cardboard. And of course the much-sensationalized open-air drug use at 16th & Mission is partly a result of taking tents away. This is a sign of degradation and further cruelty, not success.

San Francisco homeless tent tally hits new low
The number of homeless tents on the streets of San Francisco has reached its lowest point since before the COVID-19 pandemic, data shows.

Aaron Peskin's parting achievement
https://missionlocal.org/2025/07/sf-commission-streamlining-prop-e/

It's great how marketers assigned names to different generations so we can use them as insults. Imagine telling someone they have major person born between 1946 and 1960 energy. Just doesn't have the same bite

screaming into the void is bad opsec now. they put surveillance cameras in it.

writing a piece for Jacobin magazine about how political violence is never okay

my cat grass is always looking sad to try to guilt you into giving it more fertilizer. don't fall for it. it's already been fertilized

Protest filling the street at 24th and Mission in San Francisco
#ICEProtests #FuckICE

immigrant rights is a bike issue https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/05/02/freedom-to-move-why-immigration-belongs-in-the-mobility-conversation

Freedom to Move: Why Immigration Belongs in the Mobility Conversation — Streetsblog USA
"If movement is a right, then that right must apply to everyone regardless of identity."

nice coverage of new bus-stop benches kindly installed by some unidentified people!
https://sfist.com/2025/06/09/renegade-transit-activists-install-their-own-guerilla-benches-at-sf-bus-stops-that-do…

Renegade Transit Activists Install their Own ‘Guerilla Benches’ at SF Bus Stops That Don’t Have Benches
A rogue group of activists won’t stand for the lack of benches at many SF Muni stops, so they went and installed a bunch of their own unauthorized benches this past weekend. But we’ll see how this sits with SF Public Works.

Solnit: "It's...routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."

Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence
I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades – the advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with

Me in 2016: No one should have a billion dollars.
Me in 2025, accounting for inflation: No one should have $1.339 billion dollars.

these are so good https://mamdanitimes.com/

Mamdani Headlines
The New York Times coverage of Zohran Mamdani is getting desperate.

"At one point, an ICE agent addressed a protester, saying 'Just keep a distance. We get it alright, we get it.' A protestor responded, 'If you get it, why are you doing this?'
"'You know that’s not what I meant,' the agent said."
#FuckICE #IceOutofTheBay

Video: ICE agents brandish rifles, drive through protesters at S.F. immigration court
Immigration agents clashed protesters, who were trying to stop an arrest, in San Francisco’s most violent ICE encounter of 2025.

Just once I would like to see car advocates bitterly divided over whether limited car funding should be spent subsidizing free parking or building highways. They should all assume it’s a binary choice and call each other fake advocates and worse for disagreeing.

love to see this, surprised it hadn't been on my radar.
Protesters Against AI Militarization Rally at Scale AI in San Francisco
https://www.kqed.org/news/12051183/protesters-against-ai-militarization-rally-at-sca…

oh neat, went to check when the new Osees album is coming out and it came out today
https://ohsees.bandcamp.com/album/abomination-revealed-at-last

what name could we give urban pedestrian paths, that doesn't imply they're secondary and inferior to the road they run parallel to (which I don't like about "sidewalk")?

New Hairball fact sheet just dropped! Coming this year:
- 2-way protected bikeway from Marin to Jerrold (instead of path on sidewalk)
- Raised crosswalk and speed cushion approaching off-ramp crossing
- Road diet on Cesar Chavez under 101
https://www.sfmta.com/media/43046/download

they say if you want to elect politicians who are more supportive of transit, start building a bench.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-mystery-benches/3908902/

What to know about mystery benches popping up in San Francisco
A rogue Bay Area group is making waves by making benches in San Francisco. Here's what we know.

lovely overview of social housing's benefits and recent social housing successes in the US! https://theconversation.com/from-seattle-to-atlanta-new-social-housing-programs-seek-to…

From Seattle to Atlanta, new social housing programs seek to make homes permanently affordable for a range of incomes
Americans are realizing that the country’s two-tiered system of market-rate housing and government-operated, low-income housing isn’t doing the trick.

"There is no reason to believe [rent controls] have any effect on new housing construction. One could go a step further: economically, land use reforms and stronger rent regulations should go together."
https://jwmason.org/slackwire/can-zohran-do-it/

can we start a trend of California native plant inspired baby names?
Yarrow
Clarkia
Vervain
Quercus
Lupine
Gilia
Horkelia
Aster
Cypress
Penstemon
and bring back in fashion: Sage, Laurel, Myrtle

Everything sucks, with one exception: the excellent news that San Mateo County will be joining the Bay Area's regional transit funding measure!
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2025/08/07/samtrans-joins-regional-measure

SamTrans Joins Regional Measure - Streetsblog San Francisco
Add San Mateo to the effort to keep transit funded and moving. Next, VTA...

"Renters routinely offer more than the asking price in an attempt to beat out earlier applicants, which makes Griffiths uncomfortable. 'It feels like bribery,' he said."
but this is effectively happening all the time. rent is just bribery period.
https://www.

D4 is a mess because of incoherent alliances.
Engardio won by courting both urbanists (who skew progressive) and conservatives (who are car-brained). Now conservatives feel betrayed because he backed car-free space, while progressive urbanists who like car-free spaces still aren't wild about *him*.
Thus, he's likely toast in the recall. 1/

Recalls now ‘a thing we live with,’ political insiders say at Mission Local event
The insiders said Engardio is in big trouble. They added that new money, especially from tech, fueling city politics is behind recent recalls.

On Sunday, for the first time in years, you can take the bus to hike in Oakland's redwood forests.
"Line 31 brings back long-forgotten service to Redwood Regional Park. By choosing to restore service, planners made the case that parks aren’t a luxury — they’re an integral part of our lives and an important part of AC Transit’s mission." - @…

#SilentSunday

Finally, there'll be weekend transit service to Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park in Oakland once AC Transit's service changes launch on August 10
https://hikingbytransit.com/2024/09/14/realign/

What does AC Transit Realign mean for recreational access in the East Bay? - Hiking by Transit
Trailheads that are convenient to get to by bus, train, or ferry in the San Francisco Bay Area

I biked on a street similar to this in Vancouver! Could tell from the younger trees on the outside that the cycle track was a recent addition. We can do this here too
https://mastodon.online/@BrentToderian/114808060180884076

Brent Toderian (@BrentToderian@mastodon.online)
Attached: 1 image This is really important. The main thing that makes it hard to achieve integrated nature and green in cities isn’t density of buildings or density of people — it's density of cars. And the more well-designed and integrated density of people & buildings you achieve, the fewer cars you need or want.

"A paper published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association analyzed drug seizures by law enforcement in San Francisco and concluded that such interdictions were associated with an increase in fatal overdoses in the surrounding area the next day."
Mayor Lurie's #WarOnDrugs 2.0 is not just failing, it's actively killing people. Public health requires m…

In Jason Henderson's 2013 book Street Fight he writes of SF transportation politics as a function of 3 factions: conservatives, neoliberals, progressives. How the street fights go depends on how those factions align. If you slot in YIMBYish urbanist types—those who are pro-bike, pro-business, believe that Dean Preston was blocking housing—as the neoliberals, this holds up surprisingly well today.

Valencia Street desperately needs wider sidewalks: they're absurdly substandard for the pedestrian traffic they carry. But there’s no plan for that, so the city is about to plant a new tree here that will then be an obstacle in the middle of the sidewalk when finally widened 🫠

Katie Wilson, ahead in early results in Seattle's primary for mayor, emphasized housing in her platform.
But not the SF YIMBY vision of upzoning/market-rate only while slashing affordable housing funds. SOCIAL housing with major public investment.
Who will run for SF supervisor next year on that?
https://www.w…

some guy is putting placards all over the Mission labeling sidewalk plants with their common and scientific name and a QR code to his vibe-coded AI landscaping service.
not only does he seem to have nothing to do with the planting of the plants, he can't tell which ones are weeds and has faithfully labeled a "Spiny sowthistle (Sonchus asper)" ahaha

Sonchus asper - Wikipedia

This is so out of touch. ICE is ambushing and kidnapping our neighbors and we're going to "cover the entire city with drones"? The SFBOS should reject this "gift"
https://missionlocal.org/2025/06/were-

‘We’re going to be covering the entire city with drones’: Billionaire’s donation to SFPD accepted
San Francisco police commission accepts tech billionaire's gift, to provide cops with drones, cameras and a massive new office

In the US, most working-class people drive. It does not follow that it is pro–working class to double down on car dependency, a debt trap and tool of surveillance and control. https://www.jalopnik.com/1902012/1000-per-month-car-loan-norms/

A $1,000 Per Month Car Loan Is The Norm Now
The share of new-vehicle buyers who are spending over $1,000 is at 19.3%.

I’m a big enough Stereolab fan to know the song I can faintly hear issuing from the bar next door is off _Cobra and Phases Group_, but not to know the song title