539 things come together

Let's see here... What screencraps do we have to look at today?

This is kind of old news, but since we have a history of tracking covid here, let's look at the charts. Above is San Francisco a couple weeks ago. The dark blue lines and the light blue lines seem to have become disconnected, but the news is this:

With basically the same curve, Alameda county implemented a mask mandate. Did it work?

Here we are now:

And here's Alameda now:

Yeah, maybe we're all a little burnt on wearing masks.

Or maybe this variant is just, uh, hard to avoid?

So progressives in SF just got shellacked by some big money spending and the conservative Western neighborhoods.

What did Joe have to say about that?

Oh. Once again, Joe is a little disconnected from the left, and talking tough about crime. FYI, world, violent crime, in fact all crime, did not get worse under Chesa Boudin. Cops didn't like him because he prosecuted them when they did fucked up shit, and right wingers didn't like him because he's a lefty, but that has nothing to do with crime. Unless, of course, you understand that cops sometimes do illegal things, too.

Here's what Chesa had to say about our loss:

In other news, there's another Blake who thinks AI is awake.

Google insists it's just a dumb algorithm, but their (now fired) researcher says it passed the Turing Test.

He couldn't objectively tell the difference between chatting with LaMDA and talking to a young person.

But his bosses said that's just total nonsense. 

Now, he had a reputation for being ethical and telling the truth.

But clearly he's lying! Why else would he get fired?

Ok, maybe he got the AI to admit it doesn't want to die. Let's just say this one more time: #singularitynow

You've probably heard all about the bear market by now. But did you know who is driving it?

Or, in other words...

And finally, on to the housing crisis slash empty office conundrum.

For the first fifteen years I lived in the city, Mid-Market consisted of some old school businesses hanging in there, theaters closing, and some empty lots.

Then Twitter arrived, and Uber, Block and Dolby. Then a few residential towers. The old businesses mostly went away, a theater got renovated, a couple (still empty) malls were built, restaurants came and went, street life died and was replaced by...uh... Currently not very much.

Is there anyone else who thinks entropy isn't actually the natural state of things? 

We've been wondering around now for a hundred plus years with the idea that the universe is gradually dying, dissolving into a blob of no organization.

But really? Everywhere I look, I see things coming together like a miracle. Galaxies forming out of space dust and gas. Complex atoms being born out of simpler stuff inside stars.

But physics keeps saying things fall apart. What if they don't? What if things come together?