San Francisco, CA

Opinion | Another Reason for CNN to Avoid San Francisco

Published

1 year ago

April 11, 2023

Opinion | Another Reason for CNN to Avoid San Francisco

Photograph:

Justin Sullivan/Getty Photos

Final month this column famous the unlucky victimization of a CNN workforce in San Francisco that simply occurred to be on the town reporting on “voter discontent” with “rampant avenue crime.” This week brings extra unhappy information that certainly received’t encourage extra CNN visits to the Metropolis by the Bay.

Josh Koehn and Garrett Leahy report for the San Francisco Commonplace:

One of many largest supermarkets in Downtown San Francisco—the Complete Meals Market at Eighth and Market streets—intends to close down on the shut of enterprise Monday just a bit greater than a yr after the shop opened, firm officers instructed The Commonplace.

“We’re closing our Trinity location solely in the intervening time,” a Complete Meals spokesperson stated in a press release. “If we really feel we are able to guarantee the security of our workforce members within the retailer, we’ll consider a reopening of our Trinity location.”

A Metropolis Corridor supply instructed The Commonplace the corporate cited deteriorating avenue situations round drug use and crime close to the grocery retailer as a motive for its closure.

To San Francisco politicians on the progressive left, this will likely sound like simply one other case of “primary metropolis life experiences.” Nevertheless it’s a tragedy for San Francisco residents each time avenue crime drives one other enterprise to shut its doorways. And for CNN, given the overlap between the Complete Meals buyer base and the workers of the information community, it represents nonetheless one other impediment to overlaying an vital story.

CNN’s Jordan Valinsky experiences from New York concerning the San Francisco retailer closure:

The almost 65,000-square foot location at Trinity Place within the metropolis’s Mid-Market neighborhood shut its doorways Monday to “guarantee the security” of its workers, a Complete Meals spokesperson stated… The shop’s web site has additionally disappeared.

Heralded as a “flagship retailer” following its March 2022 opening, the Complete Meals was one of many largest supermarkets in downtown San Francisco. The shop offered 3,700 native merchandise and was designed with “nods to traditional San Francisco,” in accordance with a information launch.

Years from now residents will regard as traditional the politician who lastly decides to rescue a gorgeous metropolis from continual lawlessness.

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Annals of Socialized Drugs
Sachin Ravikumar experiences for Reuters from London:

Junior docs in Britain started a four-day strike over pay on Tuesday that’s more likely to trigger unprecedented disruption to the state-funded Nationwide Well being Service (NHS), prompting the federal government to warn of a threat to affected person security.

Tens of hundreds of junior docs — certified physicians who make up almost half of the medical workforce — are hanging for pay rises higher aligned with inflation, in a walkout that follows a three-day docs’ strike final month….The strike is the most recent to contain NHS workers, following walkouts by nurses, paramedics and others…

It comes because the NHS experiences one in all its most extreme crises in its 75-year-history, overwhelmed with some 7 million sufferers ready for hospital therapy, severely affecting areas corresponding to cardiovascular care.

Sadly, the government-run well being system is so poor that for some sufferers it most likely feels as if the strike started way back. Nick Triggle reported for the BBC final month on medical backlogs, together with in most cancers care, “with simply 54% of sufferers beginning therapy inside two months following an pressing referral by a GP.”

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Annals of More and more Socialized Drugs
Ann Kempski and Ge Bai write in The Hill:

North Carolina just lately grew to become the fortieth state to broaden Medicaid. No politician desires to speak about an inconvenient fact — employers and staff in North Carolina can pay larger premiums and out-of-pocket prices as a result of the Medicaid growth will drive up hospital costs. And it’s the federal authorities’s fault.

North Carolina legislators will levy a tax on North Carolina hospitals’ prices because of the growth. Hospitals will then obtain federal matching funds greater than thrice the tax they pay to win hospitals’ help, beneath a program referred to as Well being Care Entry and Stabilization Program. The deal is being touted by North Carolina’s politicians as a win for state taxpayers as a result of federal taxpayers are on the hook to pay.

Within the first post-expansion yr alone, a minimum of $3.2 billion in federal taxpayers’ cash will arrive. This huge open-ended movement of federal cash incentivizes hospitals and the state to repeatedly hike hospitals’ prices…

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Why Is

Joe Biden

Ready to Announce He’s Operating Once more?
There are a lot of the explanation why the president may wish to maintain off on saying a re-election marketing campaign. Amongst them is that till he’s a candidate, it’s simpler to permit taxpayers to choose up the tab for what are basically marketing campaign occasions touting his alleged achievements.

Mike Memoli, Peter Nicholas, Carol E. Lee and Monica Alba report for NBC Information:

High White Home advisers are set to make ultimate selections on launching President Joe Biden’s re-election marketing campaign, even because the would-be candidate appears to point out little urgency to formally declare his 2024 plans, a number of sources acquainted with the discussions instructed NBC Information…

One concern that White Home advisers have talked about privately, an individual acquainted with the matter stated, is that Biden can’t increase marketing campaign cash till he declares his candidacy. The trade-off is that Biden can look and act presidential by making full use of Air Drive One and the presidential bully pulpit to unfold his message…

Deciding when to announce one’s candidacy “at all times comes all the way down to cash,” a Democratic marketing campaign strategist stated. “Biden doesn’t want a platform; he doesn’t have to lease a airplane to journey across the nation and discuss to individuals. He doesn’t want a marketing campaign proper now.”

… Michael Toner, a former chairman of the Federal Election Fee, famous that working a marketing campaign creates bills that Biden can keep away from by delaying his announcement. “The actual burn fee comes from workers hiring and occasion prices,” Toner stated. “These presidents are used to essentially good occasions which might be costly to stage. They only are. It’s a chicken-and-egg difficulty: The later you begin your marketing campaign, you don’t want as a lot cash.”

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Reader Mail

Utilizing the local weather change logic to clarify the rise in MLB residence runs, we are able to surmise that the rise in motor-vehicle fatalities is as a result of improve in EV site visitors.

Kelly O’Brien

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James Freeman is the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi” and likewise the co-author of “The Price: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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Comply with James Freeman on Twitter.

Subscribe to the Better of the Net e mail.

To recommend gadgets, please e mail greatest@wsj.com.

(Lisa Rossi helps compile Better of the Net. Due to Tony Lima.)

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San Francisco, CA

The Bono fountain is broken. Is SF too broke to fix it?

Published

7 hours ago

June 21, 2024

Press Room

The Bono fountain is broken. Is SF too broke to fix it?

A huge concrete fountain that Bono famously graffitied during a free concert at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza in 1987 has been drained after “a major mechanical failure” forced the city to shut the water off.

The last pump that serviced the Vaillancourt Fountain, also known as “Quebec libre!,” failed about two weeks ago, Tamara Aparton, a Recreation and Parks Department spokesperson, told The Standard. Now, the 53-year-old brutalist sculpture must have its mechanical and electrical systems replaced. The cost? Upward of $3 million.

“The fountain systems were extremely antiquated and past the end of their useful life,” Aparton said in an email. “Due to [the] age of the infrastructure, the fountain systems require a full renovation.”

It’s unclear if or when those repairs could happen. Aparton said there was “no timeline.” For now, the department is working with the Arts Commission to install temporary container plants in the fountain.

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San Francisco, CA

Waymo expanding beyond San Francisco

Published

14 hours ago

June 21, 2024

Press Room

Driverless taxi company, Waymo, once again got the go-ahead from state regulators to begin picking up passengers on the Peninsula. The CPUC reaffirmed its decision to let the company expand beyond San Francisco.

By Zak Sos

Posted June 20, 2024 10:34pm PDT

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San Francisco, CA

SAN FRANCISCO: 239 square miles packed with life

Published

21 hours ago

June 20, 2024

Press Room

SAN FRANCISCO: 239 square miles packed with life

Make no doubt about it.

My soul is in the Sierra but my heart is in San Francisco.

One of the great things about living in the Northern San Joaquin Valley aside from the fact it is a great place to live and you have the world’s largest and most varied “farmer’s market” in your backyard, is the fact we are nestled between San Francisco and Yosemite National Park.

You can go cosmopolitan one weekend and wild as nature intended the next.

And you don’t have to do it while living in an aging, cramped flat that rents for $3,500 a month or having to dig yourself out from under five feet of snow just to trek 25 miles to the store to get milk.

It’s almost a tragedy that people who end up living here don’t venture west to the ocean’s edge or east to the mountain’s crest with any regularity to sample the endless smorgasbord of manmade and natural delights.

People from all over the world travel here just so they can take in San Francisco and Yosemite.

My love affair with The City started as a kid.

We’d go to San Francisco several times a summer to stay with my late Aunt Grace Towle who was an emergency room nurse at St. Mary’s Medical Center.

She lived out in The Avenues off Clement Street that parallels Geary Boulevard in western San Francisco. Clement Street — as well as Geary — offers every imaginable dining option possible at significantly less than the restaurants in and around San Francisco tourist traps.

The most unusual restaurant I’ve ever been in was a Mexican restaurant on Clement Street owned by a Chinese immigrant who had a waitress who was Filipino and a cook who was a Greek national that immigrated to the United States after ending his career as a cook on a freighter ship.

The enchilada and chili relleno were the most unusual I ever had but what I remember was how all three of them, owner, waitress and cook, were open and engaging.

And if you want real great Mexican food, head to the Mission District. There are great mom and pop places left that will have your tastebuds thinking they’ve died and gone to Puerto Villa that the gentrification of the high-tech crowd hasn’t pushed out yet.

If you get away from Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 39, the Embarcadero, Market Street, Union Square, and other high-profile locations there are countless nuggets awaiting.

Although, I confess if I’m anywhere near Pier 39 I’ll head to Chocolate Heaven and fork over $10 for two truffles.

There’s plenty of interesting places to go in a city with 49 hills, 239.84 square miles, and 865,000 residents without feeling you’re running into every tourist on the planet.

Everyone flocks to the block of Lombard Street on Russian Hill between Hyde and Leavenworth streets to go down the so-called “Most Crooked Street in the World” that switches back and forth going downhill to tame a 27 percent grade much like a slalom skier would.

Vermont Street, though, in Potrero Hill between 20th and 22nd streets, is just as crooked if not more yet has less traffic than a rural road in northern Alaska.

Given it is in more of a working-class neighborhood (if such a thing exists anymore in San Francisco), doesn’t have red paver bricks or ornate gardens, and is away from the beaten tourist paths it might be why most people haven’t heard of it.

There’s endless shopping. If you’re feeling rich you can head to Union Square and duck into Neiman Marcus and rifle through the few discount racks there and discover you’re too poor to be even a thrift shopper along the 1 percent.

Then there are endless boutiques in places like Haight Ashbury, the epicenter of the Summer of Love, where you won’t only find one-of-a-kind offerings but you won’t need to pay with an arm and a leg.

The dining and cultural offerings would fill a book. They range from the California Academy of Sciences and Steinhart Museum in the heart of the 1,017 acres composing Golden Gate Park as well as the Palace of Fine Arts to the Walt Disney Family Museum.

Live music from opera to underground music is available every night of the week. There’s live theatre, street performers, and everything in between.

There is a reason why San Francisco is rated as a world class city in the same league as Paris, London, and New York.

Then there are things that tug at your heart as in those “little cable cars that climb halfway to the stars.”

I must have ridden them two dozen times growing up. My last ride — although it was aborted — was my favorite.

I had driven Cynthia to Drake’s Beach at Point Reyes Seashore where I proposed and she said “yes.”

On the way home we stopped at Alioto’s at Fisherman’s Wharf for dinner. Even though the late May skies had turned threatening after sundown, we opted to hop aboard a cable car grabbing onto poles as we took the last two standing positions just as the rain started falling.

As we stood there kissing and apparently blocking the view of a middle-aged French tourist, he uttered “les imbeciles, sortir de la voie.”

Those few words changed the myth that all Frenchmen were romantics.

How can you be idiots in San Francisco where part of the view are people in love with life?

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