patrick.net

The most astounding thing is that both the naked guy and the one who attacked him are wearing masks.

San Francisco sought a big return to office in March. Did it happen?
Mark CalveyMar 30, 2022, 5:06pm PDT

In early March, San Francisco Mayor London Breed elicited pledges from over two dozen of the city's biggest companies to help re-energize largely moribund downtown by making plans in March to bring workforces back on site under the title, "Welcome Back to San Francisco."

As the designated back-to-work month drew to a close, a momentum-boosting wave of thousands of workers streaming back to their downtown offices has as yet failed to materialize. But even as some of those companies, including Visa, Bank of America, Uber and Salesforce, unveil plans to return large portions of their workforces back to the office, hybrid work schedules and corporate policies that accommodate those who prefer to be fully remote mean that the effect of any eventual return is likely to be muted.

San Francisco's downtown, in other words, is not going to resemble its pre-pandemic self anytime soon, and whether it's enough to throw a lifeline to restaurants, retailers and others who have been waiting two years for the return of the downtown office crowd remains to be seen.

Those coming into the office in San Francisco stood at 31.2% of the pre-pandemic level for the week that ended March 23, up 1.1 percentage point from the prior week, according to the latest weekly occupancy report from Kastle, which provides workplace security systems. San Jose stood at 32.1%, up 1.9 percentage point from the prior week. The Bay Area cities are the lowest of any major metro in the country, far behind Austin at 52.9%, and even hard-hit New York at 36.1%

“I don’t think we’re going to be up there with the leading metros for some time. We’d be lucky to get there this year,” Ted Egan, chief economist in the controller’s office for the City and County of San Francisco, told me.

Egan is also monitoring daily exits from the BART stations in or near downtown San Francisco — at Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell and Civic Center. The numbers illustrate the long road back for the city’s downtown. Weekday riders exiting the four downtown stations combined is 25% of pre-pandemic normal at best, Egan said. The Powell station hits as high as 50% — on some weekends, when shoppers are coming downtown.

Other data shows downtown San Francisco is rebounding but is nowhere near pre-pandemic levels. San Francisco’s Downtown Community Benefit District saw just 42,000 unique workers in its district between January 1 and March 15. That's up from the 23,000 unique workers during that period a year-ago but far behind the 101,000 unique workers in 2020 or the almost 112,000 in 2019, according to the DowntownSF CBD, citing data from geolocation company Placer.ai. The DowntownSF CBD excludes Salesforce Tower and Embarcadero Center, two of the largest concentrations of office workers in downtown San Francisco.

Although Mayor Breed and business leaders made much fanfare of their call for a big return to work in early March, the Mayor’s Office had a more nuanced message this week.

“Downtown’s economic revival isn’t going to happen in one day or one month, but the major employers in San Francisco who joined the pledge are committed to the city’s economic success, and we’re going to continue to do everything we can to make downtown inviting to employees and appealing to employers,” Andy Lynch, a spokesperson in the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, told me Wednesday. “This month is the start of a transition for many of them to either return full-time to the office or to a hybrid model, and we know that will be an ongoing process as companies work out what their policies will look like moving forward.

“We expect that some version of work-from-home policies will remain,” Lynch added.

Still, major players are now fleshing out the terms and specifics of a return-to-the office.

Visa and Uber are among the Bay Area companies asking employees to be in the office at least half the time, while Bank of America expects employees in the office five days a week.

“We’ve chosen a hybrid working model where most employees will spend at least half of their time in the office,” Uber said on March 22. Last summer, Uber indicated that employees will have more freedom to choose their preferred office location from a list of team hubs instead of being limited to their pre-pandemic location. Employees will also have flexibility in deciding when they work in the office.

“While we still believe in the value of in-person collaboration and the community that builds, we also value our employees having the choice to decide where they want to work while they’re not in the office,” Uber told employees last summer in the company’s return-to-office blog. “Our hope is that this provides a chance to spend more time with family, an opportunity to explore new places, and a refreshing change of scenery.”

Visa, which employs 500 at its One Market headquarters in downtown San Francisco, has set April 5 as the return-to-office date for its entire workforce.

“We believe that our best thinking and most innovative ideas come from in-person collaboration with each other,” Visa said. Visa will require that employees be in the office half the time, with attendance required on so-called collaboration days on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Visa is also allowing employees to work remotely for four weeks a year, but must take that time in full-week increments.

Then there’s Salesforce, which is embracing work from anywhere but still sees value in meeting in person.

“Generally, we’ve been seeing week-over-week increases with employees coming into the office,” said Salesforce spokesperson Brittany Hendrickson. For the week of March 14, Salesforce saw more than 2,500 people come into the office, more than 25% of the company’s San Francisco workforce. The prior week was about 20%.

Some of those working downtown say they see the early signs of a renaissance.

“I walk to work everyday, so I see the difference,” said Bank of America market president Gioia McCarthy, adding that she’s seeing more commuter traffic, taxis in front of the Fairmont and other hotels and a busier Montgomery Street at lunchtime. “There’s so much that comes from having a strong downtown.”

Robbie Silver, executive director of the DowntownSF CBD, was eager to tout this week the 70% increase in workers coming back between January and March, with pedestrian traffic along Montgomery Street more than doubling over the first three months of the year.

“It is a big worry for me when tech companies say to their workforce, ‘Go ahead and work from home forever.’ They’re dangerous words to the sustainability and economic health of the city and downtown,” Silver said.

Pretty sure that's right downtown on the Embarcadero. Things like that didn't used to happen there.

I think this is Westfield Mall in SF.

Ashoot-out in downtown Sacramento, California, at two in the morning on Sunday, April 3 left six people dead and injured at least twelve. It might or might not have been gang warfare. The facts are still unfolding.

One of the shooters, Smiley Martin, twenty-seven, was out of jail on early release against the advice of the Sacramento county district attorney. “He poses a significant, unreasonable risk of safety to the community,” authorities said, opposing Martin’s release from state prison.

“Inmate Martin has, for his entire adult life, displayed a pattern of criminal behavior,” wrote Deputy District Attorney Danielle Abildgaard. “His history indicates that he will pursue his own personal agenda regardless of the consequences and regulatory restraints placed upon him.” Martin “has no respect for others, for law enforcement or for the law. If he is released early, he will continue to break the law,” prosecutors concluded.

In spite of dire warnings, the Board of Parole Hearings released Martin in February 2022 on account of time-served formulas used by the state department of corrections and wider pressure for decarceration.

A few weeks before, it was Asaahdi Elijah Coleman, twenty-one, also a documented menace. He opened fire as passengers exited a Los Angeles-bound Greyhound bus during a scheduled stop in Oroville, California. Karin Dalton, forty-three, with her two teenage kids on the way to a “new life” in New Mexico, died at the scene. Coleman wounded four others, then ran off into the night. He was arrested, naked, inside a Walmart after getting into a fight, according to the Associated Press.

Coleman had a warrant for his arrest on a firearm possessions charge and a probation violation out of Alameda County as well as an undisclosed juvenile record. ...

While outlaws and bandits come in all colors, a striking number of them are young and black. ...

Low-lives and bad apples of all ages and colors are now aware that the heat is off, that police tread gingerly out of self-interest and legal self-protection. As long as outlaws feel resisting arrest and menacing police is a constitutional right — or at least works — municipal lawlessness will escalate. ...

But the right-wingers that so bedevil Biden are usually armed defensively, worrying about threats to their liberty or confiscation of their fetishized guns. They are don’t-tread-on-me, and my-home-is-my-castle, perhaps with a garage full of canned goods, awaiting doomsday. Second Amendment absolutists might be far-out or obnoxious, but they rarely shoot up a crowd at two in the morning or a busload of innocent strangers in a fit of paranoia. If they do, the incident is amplified in behalf of the gun-violence narrative.


Can Nancy Pelosi, kneeling in her kente cloth, Merrick Garland, or the Northern California district court begin to help set things right? Can elected and legal mighties even imagine the harvest of sadness that their evasions and fictions have brought upon the innocent? The Karin Daltons are little people, struggling and invisible, of no political use to blue-state Democrats. They are riding the Greyhound, not on a personal jet somewhere in the skies between Georgetown and Pacific Heights. One-day news stories, their shattered lives disappear into the hole of progressive narrative.

Functional Americans across the political spectrum see governments and courts at all levels accommodating lawlessness. This can’t go on, they say, or can it? They behold a society hardened by distrust and predation, in the hands of highly partisan forces actively rearranging morality, abolishing civic standards, and deforming childhood.

Americans of all backgrounds are seeking safety, trust and civic order. They are walling themselves off from crazies and marauders, or trying, moving to safe havens, maybe across town, but if need be, to other states and regions. This normative pursuit has begun and might be accelerating. It is why law and order will be a potent political charm and rallying cry in this year’s elections nationwide.

The current state of Seattle - Car in flames while man exposes himself peeing on the sidewalk.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/thieves-target-Bay-Area-bikers-17074302.php?source=patrick.net

Armed thieves are targeting mountain bikers in the Oakland Hills

The death of San Francisco
There are no children here

Alex Berenson
Apr 28
1,103
284
San Francisco might be the most beautiful place in the world.

If you’ve ever been here, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The bay, surrounded by hills on all sides. The bridges and container ships and ferries and cable cars. The brightly painted townhouses and crazily curving streets. The people are pretty too, wind-kissed women striding the streets.

So why does the city feel like it’s dying?

I’m not even talking about the homeless crisis on the streets around the Civic Center and the Castro and the Mission District. I spent the day walking the city’s northeastern quadrant, neighborhoods that so far have resisted the tent encampments and open-air drug markets and sidewalks littered with needles and human feces to the south.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-death-of-san-francisco?s=r&source=patrick.net

The death of San Francisco
There are no children here

Alex Berenson
Apr 28
1,103
284
San Francisco might be the most beautiful place in the world.

If you’ve ever been here, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The bay, surrounded by hills on all sides. The bridges and container ships and ferries and cable cars. The brightly painted townhouses and crazily curving streets. The people are pretty too, wind-kissed women striding the streets.

So why does the city feel like it’s dying?

I’m not even talking about the homeless crisis on the streets around the Civic Center and the Castro and the Mission District. I spent the day walking the city’s northeastern quadrant, neighborhoods that so ...

All of the times I've been to SF over the decades I've never seen many kids walking with adults let alone playing. I thought there must be a lot of deviants and pedos around so any kids thwre were kept inside.

San Francisco’s medical examiner reported at least 1,300 overdose deaths citywide in the last two years, most commonly for illicit fentanyl combined with other drugs.

This is Housing First policy in action. The idea behind it is as simple as it is misguided: Put people who were living outside or who are at risk of becoming homeless inside four walls. Then, voilà, you’ve solved the problem of homelessness. It’s not true, of course. More people arrive in San Francisco every day, most seeking the city’s cheap narcotics and easygoing attitude toward usage. They end up on the street until they can score subsidized housing.

Stuffing thousands of people who should be recovering in hospitals, mental-health facilities, and drug-treatment centers into free or low-cost apartments has been disastrous. The places in which they are housed are ruined; people get hurt, and some die. Neighborhoods fall into disorder. ...

The city’s solution: more of the same, but waste even more money. Instead of addressing the rotting SRO buildings, the administration is on a real-estate buying spree. With an influx of funding from Proposition C—a measure that taxed the city’s most profitable businesses with the intention of fixing homelessness—it is purchasing pristine new buildings in which to house needy people.

The apartments that Mayor London Breed has been proudly showing off, with gleaming kitchens, sparkling bathrooms, and clean bedrooms, are all destined for ruin. Soon these units will be in the same uninhabitable state as all the others. This is exactly what happened when the city gave people “shelter-in-place” rooms in the Mark Hopkins and similar luxury hotels during the height of the pandemic. The destruction was almost immediate. Fixtures were ripped from bathrooms, blood and feces stained the rugs, mattresses were set on fire, and people died of overdoses, often alone. ...

Abstinence isn’t valued. Harm-reduction activists make sure residents always have access to free needles, pipes, and foil, but never promote free recovery assistance such as Narcotics Anonymous.

https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-housing-first-nightmare?source=patrick.net

San Francisco’s medical examiner reported at least 1,300 overdose deaths citywide in the last two years, most commonly for illicit fentanyl combined with other drugs.

Holy shit, that's 1.78 per day. Far worse than Detroit's murder rate in terms of deaths.

This is Housing First policy in action. The idea behind it is as simple as it is misguided: Put people who were living outside or who are at risk of becoming homeless inside four walls. Then, voilà, you’ve solved the problem of homelessness. It’s not true, of course. More people arrive in San Francisco every day, most seeking the city’s cheap narcotics and easygoing attitude toward usage. They end up on the street until they can score subsidi...

"They died doing what they loved to do"

Second, many criminal offenders have no desire to engage in conventional, productive adult conduct. In our experience as criminal-justice practitioners, researchers, and clinicians, thousands of offenders have told us as much. All the rigors and responsibilities of adulthood—from paying rent and utilities to maintaining relationships—are fulfilled, free of charge, by the criminal-justice system. Conventional adults are horrified by the idea of imprisonment, but many offenders view jail as a refuge from the demands of life. And, given the Left’s efforts, incarceration is increasingly devoid of stigma. ...

nevitably, of course, some people do deviate from these values. Too often, the Left’s answer is to remove the negative consequences of these choices. The Left’s current enthusiasm for large-scale release of offenders from prison is a good example. Its wrongheadedness is made clear by the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ recidivism data and the utter failure of reentry efforts—to say nothing of the deteriorating conditions and rising crime rates in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, and others, in considerable part because of their political leaders’ unwillingness to apply consequences to everything from disorderly behavior and vagrancy to violent crime. Admittedly, changing behavior is difficult, but robbing people of the motive to change by removing consequences also removes accountability. That some are unaffected by negative consequences is not evidence that consequences don’t matter but that some individuals are immune to social sanctions.

“The vision of the Left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom—whether black or white—who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and behavior,” economist and social thinker Thomas Sowell observed. Put more simply: behavior is what makes a society.

Libs of TikTok
@libsoftiktok
2h
Another Walgreens in San Francisco is hit by looters. Walgreens already closed 5 locations in San Francisco due to theft.

May 2, 2022

Volunteer For The Recall Team

Do you want to volunteer with the Recall Committee? We are seeking volunteers to pass out new posters, stickers, talk to voters, and spread the enthusiasm for the June 7th, 2022 recall election.

PLEASE EMAIL: join@RecallChesaBoudin.org

- Chesa Recall Boudin Cmte HQ (office@recallchesaboudin.org )

MAY 5, 2022
Folks Flee California For Two Years Running
It’s a trend worth noting, and it may continue if cities there continue to be dystopian landscapes.

The death of San Francisco
There are no children here

S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010

The contest that politicos will be watching is an up-or-down recall vote for San Francisco’s district attorney Chesa Boudin. It would be a major upset if he kept his job. He might be deposed in a landslide, as was San Francisco’s zany school board, or lose more narrowly. The results will help reveal progressive force at the polls come November.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-population-fell-6-3-most-in-nation-to-17199403.php

S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010

Ha! It looks like pro-crime SF district attorney Chesa Boudin will indeed be recalled by a 2:1 margin.