She's a Stanford professor of math education who's arguably most responsible for the new California Math Framework — a set of curriculum recommendations that advocate against teaching algebra to most of the state's gifted middle-schoolers in the name of equity. But she's sent her own children to a $48,000/year private school that teaches its middle schoolers algebra, and now she's accused of significantly distorting citations in her research to support conclusions the original studies never reached. Much of this research underpins the new Framework. Meet Jo Boaler, California's architect of "equity-based algebra" in @metaversehell's piece today 👇

JUST IN: Barbara Lee is Oakland’s next mayor. The former congresswoman took an insurmountable lead over her main opponent Loren Taylor, according to the latest results released Friday. trib.al/rfNe69s

i was recently discharged from the icu at the sf hospital after traumatic brain injury due to a man hitting me on the back of my head with a metal pipe, completely unprovoked, in the mission in san francisco. this man is known to the police since he’s done this before to other people. afaik they will not be pressing charges or prosecuting this individual due to the state of sf politics.

California’s Impending Tax Apocalypse Last week, Governor Newsom and state legislators agreed to a balanced budget for California’s upcoming fiscal year, closing the multibillion-dollar deficit that has hung over the state for months. Despite eliminating thousands of vacant government jobs, and making deep cuts to prison funding and affordable housing programs, the approved $288 billion spending plan appears unlikely to resolve the structural revenue and spending concerns that led the state off a fiscal cliff in the first place. Newsom’s office’s own projections, which are often rosier than those of the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, already suggest California will face a deficit exceeding $36 billion in FY 2025-26. The Governor made good on his promise to not raise taxes this time around. But the approved budget retains billions of dollars in funding for the recent expansion of free healthcare and in-home supportive services to low-income illegal immigrants, the state’s disastrous high-speed rail money pit, and a multibillion-dollar homeless services industry recently found to not consistently track program spending or results. Worse, around 36% of the deficit was closed by using gimmicky one-time spending deferrals or transferring about half of the state’s “rainy day” reserve fund to its general fund. The latter is highly unusual and required Newsom declare a formal “budget emergency,” suspending a constitutional rule that precludes such transfers, while the former simply kicks the can down the road. And this is to say nothing of the state’s over $600 billion in public employee pension debt, of which $150 billion is unfunded. Likely aware California will not be able to indefinitely stave off tax hikes as its deficit grows, Newsom and the state legislature sued the citizen’s group that fielded a proposition which would’ve required voters approve any new state tax increases — successfully keeping it off the November ballot. But California’s top marginal tax rate is already the highest in the country, and if the state raises taxes to balance the budget, it risks triggering a mass exodus of its most successful firms and wealthiest residents. Though this would be concerning anywhere, it would be particularly catastrophic in California, whose extremely progressive tax system means a significant portion of tax revenue comes from just a handful of high-earning households and businesses. If California continues to push these highly wealthy (and mobile) contributors out, as recent proposals for exit and wealth taxes suggest it may, it risks sending itself into a fiscal death spiral — wealthy out-migration leads to declining public services and perpetual budgetary crises, which in turn lead to more tax hikes, pushing out even more top earners and shrinking the tax base further — a doom loop that could irrevocably transform the state. ━━━━━━━━━━ This is the intro of @metaversehell's latest for Pirate Wires. Read the full piece on the site today. ⬇️

A host of San Francisco non-profits and city departments offer a bevy of services and programs to homeless transplants, including: • Free tents • DoorDash-style delivery for drug paraphernalia • Pet food delivery • Lawsuits against the city for clearing encampments • Taxpayer-funded settlements for "emotional damages" The cruel reality of this system — fueled by cheap fentanyl and permissive law enforcement — is that it draws in addicts from across the country, who are 'kept' within the city's confines, where they get high until they die. Read @metaversehell's new report today on our site 👇

"Downtown is for drug users" didn't happen in a vacuum. These are the people helping to drive drug policy in San Francisco. No more radicals!

In 2018, San Francisco voters approved Prop C, the largest tax increase in city history. Its advocates claimed the measure — which levied a tax on businesses generating over $50 million in gross receipts and allocated those funds to homeless services — would make a clear impact on the city's homeless crisis. “When it comes to Prop C, you’re either for the homeless [or] you’re for yourself,” said Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO and “Yes on C” campaign’s largest financial benefactor. But data shows San Francisco’s homeless population has increased since the measure went into effect, and an audit this month determined the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is failing to adequately track where its grant money goes. Meanwhile, the city’s tech industry has cratered — particularly fintech, which is disproportionately affected by Prop C’s tax mechanisms. Stripe, Block, PayPal, Coinbase, Credit Karma and others have left SF or significantly reduced their SF headcounts. Today for Pirate Wires, @metaversehell explains how San Francisco sacrificed its fintech ecosystem to “solve” homelessness. Read in on our site 👇

The 16th Street BART plaza is home to an ever-fluctuating market of sidewalk vendors, and while many of them are selling stolen goods, there are deals to be found. sfstandard.com/2024/11/29/ba…

"they are sterilizing kids"--- who is "they"? is this "sterilization" a government procedure? are the "kids" young children? does this happen at school? (T***p was claiming this absurdity.) which schools, when? this is actually news to many Americans who (presumably) don't watch Fox News or other rightwing outlets that have been demonizing a tiny fraction of the US population. but trying to understand those who do; realizing that, for those who believe that this is a threat tantamount to the threat of climate change/ our endangered environment, it is a very real issue.

Imagine if there were only 1 brand of peanut butter, 1 brand of pasta sauce, etc. Rather than spend your time in the grocery wondering "Which brand shall I buy?", you'd have the mindspace to wonder: "What person shall I become?"

"A disgraced education 'guru' and reality TV star, who vanished from Britain after becoming embroiled in a string of financial scandals." That's how The Independent described California “math equity” policy consultant Yolande Beckles — a woman who left her native U.K. with 19 standing court judgements levying almost £70,000 in fines at her defunct businesses and a front-page exposé revealing that she had defrauded underprivileged schoolkids of £12,000. Now over a decade later, Beckles has infiltrated the education policymaking establishment in California, having consulted for the new math framework that recommends against teaching most gifted middle schoolers algebra at SFUSD public schools. She’s currently serving as vice chair of LAUSD’s Parent Advisory Committee, and is set to give a webinar at Stanford next month with Jo Boaler, the Stanford professor who is arguably most responsible for California’s ‘equitable’ math curriculum recommendations. Explosive new reporting from @metaversehell today for Pirate Wires. 👇

Mr. Beast and Logan Paul just launched a Lunchables competitor called Lunchly. Each box will contain PRIME and Feastables. This is going to crush it.

Scandal has erupted around the Dream Keeper Initiative, but it's not the only race- or gender-specific City Hall program that deserves legal scrutiny. sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/…

Kamala Harris’ protégé Lateefah Simon will likely win the federal congressional seat representing the East Bay in the elections this November. Simon has campaigned on defunding the police throughout her career. Using her positions at the head of a nonprofit and on the board of another, she's funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like the Anti Police-Terror Project, which helped architect the successful push to defund the Oakland Police of $18 million. But the Terror Project appears to have used a significant amount of their money to fund a kickbacks scheme, with the org's leadership giving out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to other nonprofits and LLCs which they themselves co-founded or run, and that have employed their friends and family. Today, as Simon’s stock rises in California politics, @metaversehell takes a closer look at the future Congresswoman’s role in the Oakland Defund the Police movement — which has turned into a case study of what can happen when you throw millions of dollars with little-to-no oversight at activists working toward a nebulous political goal while concurrently stripping resources from law enforcement in the middle of a national moral panic. Read the full piece today on our site 👇

This is a masterclass in DARVO from Julie Pitta. (That's Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender - a classic manipulation tactic used by abusers) You see, it's not Julie Pitta who did wrong — it's actually the people who are calling out her illegal actions.

What a joke. Desperate Dean Preston thinks he is running against me, a private citizen who loves SF. I’m a moderate Democrat sick of Dean’s virtue signaling destroying our beautiful city. Dean Preston in D5 is a disgrace and in November 2024 his political career will be over.

This proves her right

Today, California state lawmakers are set to vote on a package of 14 anti-crime bills intended to curb retail theft and drug trafficking. But there’s a catch — top Democratic leaders in the state are trying to implement poison pill provisions that would make these new anti-crime bills automatically revoked and inoperable should a separate, citizen-led effort to repeal Prop 47 succeed this November. Prop 47 downgraded a handful of crimes (including theft of goods worth less than $950 and personal drug possession) from felonies to misdemeanors. A decade after its approval, overdose deaths in California have skyrocketed and serial shoplifting has become commonplace statewide. However, if state Democrats are successful in their strategy, they will force voters to choose between the reform of this measure and the slate of new anti-crime bills — ensuring the state remains incapable of effectively addressing endemic serial shoplifting. That’s not all — newly leaked emails seem to confirm that one major proponent of Prop 47 instructed lawmakers to insert these poison pills. That proponent? None other than Gavin Newsom himself. @metaversehell has the latest on the governor’s attempt to keep serial retail theft legal in California. Read the full piece today on our site 👇

A Santa Cruz man who raped and murdered an 8 year old girl may be released in the Tenderloin, where 3500 children live. We should not be housing people with this background in a neighborhood so full of kids. The Tenderloin is not a dumping ground. kron4.com/news/bay-area/madd…

They don't want you to know that eating steak, eggs, and butter every day will get you into the best shape of your life.

San Francisco's Homeless Ticking Time Bomb the majority of the city's homelessness budget goes to keeping people in no-contingency housing units, permanently. what happens when the city can't pay the bill? by @metaversehell ━━━━━━━━━━ “It is not designed to be solved. It is designed to be perpetuated.”  — Former Mayor Willie Brown on San Francisco’s homelessness crisis ━━━━━━━━━━ This month’s catastrophic Hayes Valley fire, which damaged five buildings before a crew of almost 150 firefighters managed to put it out, now appears plausibly linked to a row of tent encampments along Octavia Boulevard, prompting renewed interest in a question often asked about San Francisco: why do so many people live in outright squalor on the streets of one of the wealthiest cities in the world? This year, San Francisco allotted $672 million to its Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), whose stated mission is to “make homelessness in San Francisco rare, brief, and one-time.” Since its inception in 2016, the HSH’s budget has tripled; in total, it has received over $3.3 billion in public funds. Yet the number of people on the streets continues to grow. HSH estimates that, on any given night, around 4,400 people sleep on the city’s streets and 3,400 sleep in shelters[1], putting the total number of homeless people in San Francisco at around 7,800, up over 20 percent from 2005. Where is all the money going? Is well over half a billion dollars not enough to provide temporary shelter and emergency care for all 3,400 people sleeping in tents, blankets, and cars on San Francisco’s streets? Is it not enough to improve the appalling hygienic conditions that once led a UN rapporteur to compare Downtown’s encampments to Mumbai’s slums? As it turns out, most of that $672 million does not fund temporary shelter and care for people on the city’s streets. The majority — 56 percent in this year’s budget — is spent on permanent supportive housing (PSH): single-occupancy units that the city indefinitely subsidizes for those it believes would otherwise be homeless. Leased and maintained at enormous cost to taxpayers, PSH units underpin San Francisco’s dysfunctional ‘Housing First’ approach to homelessness, which prioritizes connecting people on the streets with permanent homes over providing them with temporary support. Since San Francisco places no sobriety requirements or maximum income cutoffs on this housing, and tenants need only certify that they would otherwise be homeless through third-party or self-declaration, PSH is, in effect, permanent for all who choose to stay — irrespective of participation in rehabilitation or job training programs. But San Francisco cannot build or lease new homes fast enough to house the influx of new homeless migrants drawn to the city either for the temperate weather and lax drug laws, or for the promise of a subsidized home. As these new applicants crowd the lengthy housing waitlist, vying for units with low turnover rates, the city spends increasing sums on ‘resolving’ its homelessness crisis — which in this case means providing more permanent supportive housing. This increased spending, in turn, reinforces the perverse incentives drawing people to the city in the first place. Now, San Francisco faces a forecast budget deficit and, for the first time in a quarter-century, a shrinking tax base — a ticking time bomb for its homeless policy. How long will SF be able to sustain its runaway spending on homelessness? What will happen to people on the streets and in supportive housing when the money runs out? THE TOP OF THE FUNNEL Contrary to popular narrative, it is not true that most people sleeping on San Francisco’s streets are from the city. In fact, the overwhelming majority are not originally from San Francisco, and most seem to have arrived quite recently. Confusion on this point arises mainly from the city’s deceptive method of collecting and interpreting homelessness demographic data. The HSH estimates, for instance, that “for every household San Francisco is able to permanently house through its Homelessness Response System, approximately four households become homeless,” suggesting that an endemic force is pushing longtime San Franciscans into homelessness. But a cursory look at the department’s data methodology shows that this frame is misleading. First, HSH does not collect data on where homeless people in San Francisco were born or raised; they collect data on where people were living immediately prior to becoming homeless. In 2022, they reported that 71 percent of people on San Francisco’s streets were living in the city when they became homeless. According to HSH methodology, “place of residence” can include living with friends, family, partner, or even a motel. This means that if someone stays with friends or family in SF for a month (or even a night) before winding up homeless on the city’s streets, the HSH could technically count them as ‘from San Francisco.’ On top of this, the Department classifies these “San Franciscans” in only three ways — those living in the city for less than a year prior to becoming homeless (17 percent, according to the latest data), between one and 10 years (52 percent) and for 10+ years (31 percent). But a duration window as expansive as between one and 10 years makes it impossible to know whether this 52 percent figure includes more people closer to the one- or ten-year ends of the residency spectrum. Regardless, we should be wary of reading too much into specific numbers — all of this data is self-reported, and anecdotal reports have emerged of homeless people being “coached” by non-profit workers to say they are from SF. Once settled in San Francisco, these homeless transplants are free to take advantage of the city’s lax drug laws, vast apparatus of homeless support services, and federally imposed injunction against clearing encampments, while they decide whether to apply for housing or remain on the streets. THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL There are currently over 9,000 people living in San Francisco’s PSH units, and over 33,000 have either applied or been referred to the housing waitlist [2]. The cost of building and maintaining these units is, in general, exorbitant. Construction fees can exceed $100,000 per unit, and on-site services (which may include case management, nursing, food security support, behavioral therapy, and job training) can cost tens of thousands of dollars per unit, per year. In total, the HSH now operates over 13,000 units of supportive housing for around 9,000 individuals [3] and spends around $389 million per year on housing-related expenses. Though in theory tenants pay up to 30 percent of their income toward rent, in practice few are evicted from PSH for non-payment; of the 216 PSH eviction notices issued by the city last year, only 6 percent were related to outstanding rent, while the rest were related to nuisance activities or property damage. Despite sky-high operating costs, living conditions in many HSH-run supportive housing units are often miserable. Residents frequently complain of vermin, plumbing issues and unchecked violence in their buildings. Still, the annual turnover rate in the units is only around 12% per year, suggesting that most who enter the city’s permanent supportive housing choose to stay. Why do most remain despite the often unsanitary and unsafe living conditions? Perhaps because the supportive housing system gives them few incentives necessary to become independent. Many PSH tenants suffer debilitating addiction problems, but California state law prohibits sobriety requirements at supportive housing sites. In some cases, San Francisco even seems to predicate addicted tenants’ access to PSH on their ongoing status as addicts. For example, having a ‘disability’ is one of three eligibility requirements for PSH (the others are reporting personal income, if any, and the HSH's assessment of risk of homelessness), but this disability need not be related to mobility, learning, or ability to communicate — it can also be “a physical, mental, or emotional impairment, including an impairment caused by alcohol or drug abuse that... is expected to be long-continuing or of indefinite duration [and] substantially impedes the individual’s ability to live independently.” Tenants can lose their units if “the adult household member with a qualifying disability… no longer [resides] in the unit, and there is not a certified qualifying disability among any other adults in the household.” In other words, if a person cites addiction as their disability when applying for PSH, then they risk losing their unit if they manage to get clean. Finally, there are no PSH-wide income maximum or minimum cutoffs, and no PSH-wide requirement that the tenant show progress in becoming financially independent, such as by working an ever-increasing number of hours, or even regularly looking for a job. If you're hopelessly addicted to drugs, SF will essentially enable your addiction in perpetuity, or for as long as you want. WHY IS SAN FRANCISCO DOING THIS? The foundation of San Francisco’s approach to solving homelessness is a philosophy called Housing First, which was first tested at shelters in New York City in the 90s but has been most widely implemented in cities throughout California. Proponents of Housing First believe ‘housing is the solution to homelessness,’ and advocate for providing long-term, state-funded housing to homeless people over temporary shelter. San Francisco’s foray into Housing First policy began around 2004, when then-District 2 Supervisor Gavin Newsom championed a ballot measure called ‘Care not Cash,’ which diverted cash payouts to homeless people toward investments in building PSH. In 2016, California enshrined SF’s pilot into law, requiring that all state-funded homeless programs adopt the principles of Housing First, which include connecting homeless people “to a permanent home as quickly as possible” and “remov[ing] barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history.” That same year, Mayor Ed Lee consolidated San Francisco’s homelessness response, which had previously been administered through various public offices and non-profits throughout the city, into a single department — the HSH — and pledged to spend over $1 billion in the next four years to move approximately 8,000 homeless people into permanent supportive housing. The HSH received an additional windfall of cash in 2018, when SF voters passed Proposition C, which imposed a gross receipts tax on companies whose yearly revenue surpassed $50 million and designated this money to funding supportive housing and homelessness services. Since then, San Francisco has received over $600 million in Prop C money, major revenue generators like Stripe and Block (formerly known as Square) have left the city due to the tax, and the number of homeless people on the streets and in shelters has risen from around 6,800 to almost 8,000. THE TICKING TIME BOMB This past April, in response to legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors mandating that the city offer all unsheltered homeless people a “safe, dignified place to sleep,” Mayor Breed and the HSH unveiled a new five-year plan to reduce street homelessness by 50 percent, and overall homelessness by 15 percent. The almost 100-page plan, put together with Focus Strategies, a Los Angeles County-based homelessness policy consulting firm that the department hired for over $300,000, requires $607 million in extra funding to cover “start-up costs” over the next five years, followed by an extra $217 million each year for program maintenance. It seeks to place “at least 30,000 people” into permanent housing by building 3,250 new units of PSH, and to install an additional 1,075 beds in shelters throughout the city. In keeping with the 130-page equity action plan that the HSH submitted in early 2021 to San Francisco’s Office of Racial Equity (inaugurated in 2019 by executive order of Mayor Breed as a sub-department of the city’s Commission on Human Rights, which received over $15 million in funding last year), the new five-year plan cites “advancing racial equity and housing justice” as the “leading focus within our community’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness.” To this end, it will provide “infrastructure and sustainability supports… to more BIPOC-led organizations and organizations deeply rooted in historically marginalized neighborhoods and communities” while “specifically focusing on supporting the capacity-building efforts of Black-led organizations.” Provisions are also included to “design, launch, and implement the Ending Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming (TGNC) Homelessness Initiative,” which involves dedicating 150 PSH subsidies to “transgender and gender non-conforming households.” Initial implementations of the plan were set into motion this past May and a full roll-out began in July. Yet macroeconomic concerns cast doubt on how long San Francisco will be able to sustain its ballooning spending on homelessness. Two years ago, the city’s tax base shrank for the first time in a quarter-century. Recent projections suggest it will face a $1.3 billion budget deficit in five years. Faced with these numbers, even the HSH acknowledges that “when the needs exceed available local resources, households unable to resolve homelessness on their own may need to leave San Francisco or remain homeless for long periods of time.” But ‘when’ is now; the needs have already exceeded the resources, and thousands of people are already on the streets, living and dying in utter abjection as they wait for housing paid for on someone else’s (rapidly dwindling) dime. Those placed in supportive housing often don’t fare much better. Deprived of incentives to find work or get clean, most remain stuck in a cycle of addiction and poverty. Many end up dying of overdoses, alone in their state-subsidized, dilapidated one-bedrooms apartments. This is the crude reality of San Francisco’s approach to solving homelessness. And until it changes, the tents will continue to crowd the streets and the city will continue to burn. -Sanjana Friedman ━━━━━━━━━━ ✍️ Footnotes [1] The point-in-time count is conducted once every two years by a group of people who visit every block of the city on a single night and count the number of people who seem homeless; this tally is the primary source for the city’s data on homelessness numbers. [2] It is not clear where all of the people on this waitlist live while they await placement; the HSH only collects demographic data on the race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and age of those in its housing system. [3] The high vacancy rate in PSH units is due to two factors: first, many of the city’s units are ‘offline’ due to janitorial or maintenance issues, and second, the HSH is chronically understaffed and struggles to move tenants into their units once they’ve been referred off the housing waitlist. ━━━━━━━━━━ 📚 References Mayor Willie Brown quote on homelessness designed to be perpetuated marinatimes.com/fraudenbach-… Hayes Valley fire linked to encampments sfstandard.com/2023/08/02/ha… Homeless numbers up over 20 percent since 2005 hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/upl… UN envoy compares SF downtown to Mumbai theguardian.com/us-news/2018… SF's deficit numbers sfstandard.com/2023/03/31/sa… SF's shrinking tax base therealdeal.com/new-york/202… Local media saying most SF homeless are from SF sfstandard.com/2023/05/22/sa… HSH estimates for every one household that's housed, four become homeless hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/upl… Homeless people coached to say they're from SF nitter.app/garrytan/status/… Description of SF's lax drug laws sfstandard.com/2023/06/12/wh… Info on federal injunction against clearing encampments kron4.com/news/bay-area/fede… PSH figures hsh.sfgov.org/about/research… PSH can cost over $100,000 per unit sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s… HSH inventory of PSH units hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-h… Overview of previous HSH budgets hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/o… PSH eviction trends hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/upl… Description of poor living conditions in PSH sfchronicle.com/projects/202… Description of Housing First hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/ac… PSH eligibility requirements hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/upl… History of Housing First cato.org/blog/evidence-also-… Info on Newsom's "Care Not Cash" kqed.org/news/11802346/gov-n… Mayor Breed's 5-year plan to halve homelessness cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/new… City paid LA consulting firm $300,000 to help come up with plan sfstandard.com/2023/04/14/sa… HSH equity plan hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/upl… SF will face $1.3b deficit kqed.org/news/11957640/budge…

To my fellow white dudes - join me in supporting Vice President Kamala Harris to be our next President. She is exactly the leader who we need to protect our freedoms and provide a better life and future for our families 🥥🌴 Learn more: whitedudesforharris.com

Imagine being 42, child-free, and not having to pay for a babysitter so you can go to a bar on Thanksgiving. The right hates this.

A friend was asked to write a recommendation for his daughter who is applying to Yale. Worth a read. Dear , I am unwilling to write a letter of recommendation in support of your daughter's application to Yale. I no longer do that. It is not that I don't believe that she is qualified, on the contrary it is because I do. You wouldn't ask me to write a letter of recommendation for her admission to Hamas. But Yale is no different than Hamas, a cult that abides no disagreement, and a cult certain of its purpose and mission beyond reflection. Yale is potentially even more dangerous. Hamas will be defeated shortly. Yale will continue to send its graduates into positions of power for years. A recent study at Harvard found that roughly 50% of the students and professors wouldn't discuss "uncomfortable" topics. An essential life skill is the ability to change your mind. She won't learn that at any Ivy league school. Their reputations are still so strong that their faculty, staff and graduates all possess the arrogant certainty of religious fanatics. I am sorry to disappoint you. I wish her the best in her search for a school, Signed xxxxxxxxxx

On the route we all fam

Our statement on... whatever that was

How San Francisco's DEI Industrial Complex Works In December, San Francisco Mayor London Breed scrambled to cut costs across city departments in an attempt to close an exceptionally large budget deficit, which currently hovers around $800 million but could top $1 billion in a few years. In October, when the deficit was supposedly ‘only’ about $500 million, Breed sent a letter requesting city departments submit preliminary spend reduction proposals by the end of the month. “We need to ensure that every dollar our city departments spend, either directly, or through contracted parties, is done so responsibly and with accountability,” she wrote. This is rich talk of fiscal responsibility from a mayor who's presided over record high city budgets from the start of her term in 2018 onward. The headline numbers of this spending spree are well known: a near-tripling of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s budget, massive increases in spending on addiction-related services, and tens of millions in pandemic-era bailout programs, to name a few. But less discussed is the way Breed has quietly greenlit huge funding increases to a handful of activist-staffed city departments, including the Human Rights Commission (HRC), the Department on the Status of Women (DOSW), and the Office of Transgender Initiatives (OTI). In 2018, when Breed assumed office, the HRC, which “works in service of the City’s anti-discrimination laws to further racial solidarity, equity, and healing,” received $4.2 million. Today, it receives just over $19 million. Similarly, DOSW, whose mission is to ensure “equality for women, girls and nonbinary people” in San Francisco now receives $18 million, up from $8.4 million in 2018. And the budget of OTI, which “advocates for and uplifts the voices and needs of transgender, gender non-conforming, intersex, and 2-spirit (TGNCI2S) San Franciscans,” has increased from around $466,000 in 2018 to around $1 million. Politically popular rhetoric about ‘equity’ and ‘advocacy’ for the marginalized has ensured the specifics of how this windfall has been spent have gone largely unscrutinized in a city as left-leaning as San Francisco. But a closer look at these departments’ finances reveals most seem to function largely as make-work and vote-buying schemes. That is, their primary role is to provide jobs for activists and buy political support. HRC’s Dream Keeper, which writes $200,000 checks to one-person “media companies” with almost no following and whose “Senior Home Repair Program,” funded by part of a $20 million grant, was recently found to have only repaired three homes since its inception two years ago, offers clear examples of wasteful, clientelist spending. But so too does the Office of Transgender Initiatives, which spends most of its budget on guaranteed income and rent payments offering a combined $3,200/month to around 150 “transgender and gender non-conforming people.” (Judicial Watch, a nonprofit, recently filed a lawsuit against the city on the grounds OTI's guaranteed income program violates the California Constitution's equal protection clause.) More generally, we could say most of the money spent on these departments serves one of three interconnected purposes: (1) to provide work for activists tasked with either (2) distributing government funds to select client-constituents, incentivizing their ongoing political support or (3) manufacturing internally-directed identitarian propaganda to agitate for more government funds. We have come to call this nearly $100 million a year clientelism scheme — in which all involved actors are perversely incentivized to demand ever-increasing sums of money for themselves, and in which every dollar spent brings in more participants — San Francisco’s “DEI-industrial complex,” and outlined some of its most flagrant excesses below. DIRECT CASH TRANSFERS As we have said, the primary function of the city’s DEI industrial-complex is to incentivize client-constituents to support their political patrons. These incentives can include things like no-bid contracts, though often administrators favor a simpler approach: providing direct cash transfers to their target voter base. In general, these cash transfers take one of two forms. Either administrators will funnel money through identity-specific welfare schemes, or they will give it to nonprofits, which will distribute it to clients in small grants. All three departments discussed in the introduction — the Human Rights Commission, the Office of Transgender Initiatives, and the Department on the Status of Women — have their own identity-specific welfare schemes. HRC’s operates indirectly through its subsidiary Dream Keeper Initiative, which in addition to providing “direct cash stipends” for “small or emerging Black-owned businesses,” also provides cash in the form of grants to tiny nonprofits like Clari-T Media, which got $200,000 from the program, or Both Sides of the Conversation, which got $300,000. On the other hand, OTI offers up to $3,200 a month to 145 “transgender and gender non-conforming people” through two stipend programs it runs directly: • Guaranteed Income for Transgender People (GIFT), a program providing 55 “economically marginalized transgender people with unrestricted, monthly guaranteed income” of $1,200/month for a year-and-a-half. • Our Trans Home SF, a housing and rental aid program for 90 “low-income transgender adults” that offers five-year subsidies of up to $2,000/month. This year, DOSW plans to launch its own guaranteed income programs, which will offer monthly payments of unspecified amounts to “justice involved women” (e.g. those currently or formerly incarcerated) and “those from our Indigenous communities.” These departments also funnel money to their constituents indirectly through the nonprofits they fund. A representative example is Dream Keeper’s $3 million grant to the African-American Arts and Culture Complex (AAACC), a nonprofit where, incidentally, Mayor Breed worked for over a decade, and which was recently barred from receiving state funding due to failure to submit appropriate revenue documentation. Despite renting a massive 32,000 square foot space in the heart of the Fillmore District, since this past October, AAACC has put on only one event per month — a “Season of Black Art” series showcasing the work of participants in its “cohorts of artists and entrepreneurs.” —————————————————————— This is the first half of @metaversehell's "How San Francisco's DEI Industrial Complex Works." Read the full piece on our website or by subscribing to @PirateWires on @x.

Thanks to @metaversehell of @ycombinator from coming on to talk about - how ambitious YC founders get her excited about the future - writing on SF politics @PirateWires - the need for more techno-optimism in media Full interview here, also on YT or wherever you get podcasts

If tech's days of forced ideological conformity are on their way out, no postmortem of "tech's silent winter" can be complete without an analysis of former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao and how she became "Silicon Valley's #1 feminist hero" after her 2012 #MeToo lawsuit against her former employer, VC firm Kleiner Perkins. The case was a dramatic failure on all counts. The jury rejected each of her four sex discrimination claims, and though she had sought $16 million in damages from the firm, she ended up paying KP an undisclosed sum to offset its legal fees instead. Nevertheless, the lawsuit catapulted Pao to media darling status, and kickstarted a wave of activism in tech workplaces across Silicon Valley that would last more than a decade. Today for Pirate Wires, @metaversehell looks back on Pao's story, and examines her legacy in the context of the industry's recent pivot away from workplace activism. Read it today on our site.

Cheers to my husband getting back into his workout routine! 🙌🏼

The President of the United States just called for the arrest of a sitting Governor. This is a day I hoped I would never see in America. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican this is a line we cannot cross as a nation — this is an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism.

"A disgraced education 'guru' and reality TV star, who vanished from Britain after becoming embroiled in a string of financial scandals." That's how The Independent described California “math equity” policy consultant Yolande Beckles — a woman who left her native U.K. with 19 standing court judgements levying almost £70,000 in fines at her defunct businesses and a front-page exposé revealing that she had defrauded underprivileged schoolkids of £12,000. Now over a decade later, Beckles has infiltrated the education policymaking establishment in California, having consulted for the new math framework that recommends against teaching most gifted middle schoolers algebra at SFUSD public schools. She’s currently serving as vice chair of LAUSD’s Parent Advisory Committee, and is set to give a webinar at Stanford next month with Jo Boaler, the Stanford professor who is arguably most responsible for California’s ‘equitable’ math curriculum recommendations. Explosive new reporting from @metaversehell today for Pirate Wires. 👇

Everyone thinks Europe is finished. In 20 years, they'll wish they had bought in early. AGI takes over. Productivity is infinite. Everything is automated. So, tell me: what actually becomes scarce? NOT another piece of software — but authentic human experience. When machines handle everything, what do people crave? Beauty. Meaning. Significance. And Europe has been accumulating that for centuries. It's sitting on the most undervalued asset of the AI age: - 500+ UNESCO World Heritage sites (the US? 25) - The world's greatest museums - 50M+ cultural tourists in France alone - Centuries-old universities, libraries, cafés - The birthplace of opera, ballet, fine wine The real arbitrage? Owning land in places machines can't replicate. In the AI age, people will split into two groups: - New "landlords" stacking assets - New "renters" living off AI welfare (UBI, digital credits, whatever comes next) So where will the new “landlords” want to live? Not in a sterile AI-optimized city. Not in a hyper-efficient pod. They'll want Paris, Rome, Vienna. Cities that weren't built for algorithms, but for the soul. Europe today is like Bitcoin at $10—misunderstood, underpriced, and wildly asymmetric. I talk to global investors every day. The smartest ones see it: In an AI-dominated world, the ultimate luxury won't be another software tool. It'll be the ability to feel human. Europe has that. What's your take on this?

Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone.

A Bus Driver Killed a Man, the City Blamed Tech from activists and journalists to government officials, a sprawling web of disinformation has distorted the narrative around self-driving taxis — and now it’s being exposed by @metaversehell Yesterday, San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and Fire Department (SFFD) released a joint statement announcing that the pedestrian who died in the South of Market neighborhood on August 14th had been struck and killed by a Muni bus. The statement, which described the man’s death as “an all-around heart breaking [sic] and tragic incident,” clarified that — contrary to initial reporting — the incident had nothing to do with the Cruise autonomous vehicles that happened to be present at the time of the accident. “Press reports, relying on an internal report from an SFFD staff member on the scene, have suggested that the San Francisco Fire Chief attributed the death of the pedestrian to Cruise AV interference with first responder operations. This is inaccurate: The San Francisco Fire Chief has not attributed this pedestrian death to Cruise AVs,” Stephen Chun, SFMTA’s spokesman, wrote. In other words, it wasn’t the Fire Chief who lied about the incident — it was someone else at the SFFD. The statement marked the end of a protracted battle between, on one side, journalists and anti-AV activists who insisted that Cruise vehicles had blocked the egress of first responders rushing the man to the hospital and, on the other side, Cruise, which insisted (with video evidence) that their cars had immediately and appropriately yielded to ambulances. Though the city has now definitively rejected claims of Cruise’s involvement in the pedestrian’s death, the weeks-long, anti-AV press cycle fueled by the incident led, among other things, to a partial pause on the roll-out of AV in San Francisco; a barrage of anti-AV vandalism; and a wave of social media hysteria denouncing out-of-control ‘robotaxis.’ Here’s how it all happened. On August 14, at around 11 pm, a homeless man was crossing a street in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood when he was hit by a bus. When first responders arrived on the scene and found the man unresponsive and bleeding heavily, they quickly transported him to the hospital. He was pronounced dead shortly after arrival. The following day, one of the paramedics present on the scene submitted a report to the SFFD’s Deputy Chief of Operations claiming that a Cruise autonomous vehicle had blocked ambulances as first responders attempted to transport the man to the hospital. “When we arrived at scene, the only open lanes for egress from the call were blocked by (2) Cruise vehicles that had stopped and were not moving or leaving the scene. The [patient] was packaged for transport with life threatening injuries, but we were unable to leave the scene initially due to the Cruise vehicles not moving,” the paramedic, whose name has been redacted from the leaked report, wrote. “This delay, no matter how minimal, contributed to a poor [patient] outcome…the fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress and egress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable.” Two days later, on August 16, San Francisco filed a motion with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) requesting a temporary suspension of the authorization allowing Cruise and Waymo to operate paid rides throughout the city at all hours of the day. The week before, the CPUC had voted 3-1 to lift all restrictions on Cruise and Waymo autonomous vehicle operations in San Francisco. “San Francisco will suffer serious harms from this expansion of driverless AV operations that will outweigh any potential harms from a minimal delay in commercial deployment Cruise [or Waymo] may experience,” City Attorney David Chiu wrote in his letter. On August 18, the California DMV announced that it was investigating “recent concerning incidents” involving Cruise vehicles and ordered the company to take half its autonomous vehicles off the roads. Two weeks later, Forbes broke the story of Cruise’s ‘involvement’ in the pedestrian’s death. “According to public records from the San Francisco Fire Department,” the journalist stated (citing the single eyewitness account mentioned above), “two Cruise autonomous vehicles (AVs) were blocking the ambulance [transporting the victim].” He subsequently acknowledged that “Cruise provided video which shows that one of the Cruise cars quickly left the scene, while another remained frozen at the intersection with a free lane to its right where traffic was moving,” but still framed the AVs’ involvement in the deadly incident as a “mystery.” SFFD Chief Jeanine Nicholson, speaking to Forbes, was unsparing in her criticism of AVs. “All a car has to do is stop somewhere and we’re screwed,” she said. “Seconds matter, when it comes to an emergency. A fire can double in size in a minute, or in a medical call, an extra minute literally means more of your heart will die.” Outlets including the SF Standard and Chronicle quickly parroted the narrative pushed by Forbes. “Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocks San Francisco Ambulance, Fire Department Says,” wrote the Standard. Anti-AV activists on social media then amplified these claims on Twitter/X. “Another cursed crossover episode: Cruise robot cars delay emergency vehicles trying to save a pedestrian’s life at 7th and Harrison a few weeks ago,” wrote Safe Street Rebel, the activist outfit behind the push to “cone” autonomous vehicles. “@Cruise is now literally helping people get killed by interfering with emergency response vehicles,” wrote another user. Vandalism of autonomous vehicles, which had periodically occurred throughout the summer, also flared up after the incident. Anti-AV activists announced their intention to continue coning autonomous vehicles throughout the city, and this past Monday, a video of a masked man smashing a graffitied Cruise car with a hammer went viral on social media. But as on-scene video footage showed, and the city’s joint statement yesterday echoed, claims of Cruise’s responsibility in the fatal accident were false — and based entirely on a single, inaccurate eyewitness report. Why would a first responder distort the facts in an incident report sent to his superior? Why would the Fire Chief give an interview shortly afterwards in which she indirectly validates this distortion, but then insist, weeks later and through a PR agent, that she had never did? Maybe because a significant contingent of the city’s emergency response departments are involved in a concerted, union-driven effort to delay the roll-out of AV. Regardless, the takeaway for journalists here is clear: be skeptical of your sources, triple-check your facts, and don’t ever assume that your colleagues are doing the same. — Sanjana Friedman ━━━━━━━━━━ 📚 References @terronk tweets SFMTA and SFFD's joint statement on the incident nitter.app/terronk/status/1… SF Standard covers incident with headline "Person Dies After Cruise Robotaxi Blocks San Francisco Ambulance, Fire Department Says" sfstandard.com/2023/09/01/pe… Paramedic's report blaming Cruise for the man's death documentcloud.org/documents/… City officials immediately press CPUC to roll back AV expansions after vote removing most restrictions techcrunch.com/2023/08/17/sa… Fire Chief gives interview to Forbes about the incident, is quoted as saying “All a car has to do is stop somewhere and we’re screwed. Seconds matter, when it comes to an emergency. A fire can double in size in a minute, or in a medical call, an extra minute literally means more of your heart will die.” forbes.com/sites/cyrusfariva… SF Chronicle says SFFD blames death on AVs sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti… Safe Streets Rebel blames death on Cruise nitter.app/SafeStreetRebel/… Anti-AV activists announce their intention to continue coning autonomous vehicles throughout the city autonews.com/mobility-report… Video of person smashing AV with a hammer nitter.app/BrokeAssStuart/s… Sanjan's piece on "labor's shadow war with self-driving cars" nitter.app/PirateWires/stat…

In the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, activists across the country have begun routinely blocking bridges, roads, and tunnels at rush hour in major cities across the country to make political statements. The First Amendment protects the right to peaceful assembly, but not to intentional obstruction of public ways. Why do so many feel emboldened to break the law? The short answer is that, in general, they almost never face consequences. In fact, from the Floyd riots of 2020 to today, activists have successfully managed to invert the consequences for engaging in many forms of illegal protest, with the following rough playbook: — Financed by millions of dollars in tax-deductible nonprofit donations, they organize protests designed to maximally disrupt everyday life. — Police arrest and immediately release them (in effect producing earned media used to garner donors and sympathy); — Activists enlist progressive litigators (like the ACLU) to sue cities for alleged mistreatment at the hands of police; — The city coughs up tens of thousands of dollars in class action settlements paid out directly to individual protestors. Nowhere is this clearer than New York where: — Hundreds who participated in mass looting, rioting and arson (which severely damaged over 450 businesses and 300 police cars across the city) had their charges completely dropped by DAs across boroughs. — The ACLU sued NYPD over “excessive force” used against the protesters, and NYPD agreed to a settlement under which whenever a protest “temporarily blocks vehicular or pedestrian traffic or otherwise obstructs public streets or sidewalks, the NYPD shall whenever possible accommodate [it].” — The National Lawyers Guild, a progressive nonprofit, represented 1,400 arrested protesters in a class action lawsuit alleging they were “subjected to force” by NYPD. Officials agreed to pay each protester $9,950 apiece ($13.7 million total). Read the full piece by subscribing to @piratewires on @x, or check it out on our site.

How the EU Weaponizes Regulation to Extract Billions from American Tech With its new Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), European Union regulation threatens to significantly cut profit margins necessary for R&D, capital expenditures and other strategic investments that help companies maintain incumbency and increase shareholder value. The fines permitted under both regulations are unprecedented; the DSA permits fines of up to 6% of a company’s global annual revenue, while the DMA permits fines of up to 10% of a company’s global annual revenue, and an egregious 20% for repeat offenses. For context, per most recent company figures, a 10% DMA fine on Google would cost the company $30.5 billion and shave nearly 40% off its annual net income; on Meta, its net income would be reduced by over 30% with a $14.3 billion fine; and on Microsoft, the EU would claim over 27% of its net income with a $23.6 billion fine. Today for Pirate Wires, @metaversehell takes a closer look at the scope of the EU's growing tariff-in-all-but-name racket it's been running on Silicon Valley for over a decade. Check it out on the site. 👇

Earlier this morning @sfgov @sfcityattorney @DavidChiu announced legal action against online tobacco retailers for violating local flavored tobacco and e-cigarette bans. Click the link to view the Press Conference: sfgovtv.org/CityAttorneyPres…