Linkage

It’s difficult for me to understand how anyone could see this data- which finds the rate of Long COVID after 3 infections to be a whopping 38%- and not understand why “let it rip” is an unsustainable approach to COVID. But let me spell it out: people are catching COVID frequently, between 1-2 times a year. Each infection carries a high risk of long-term illness, which does not decrease, but compounds with reinfection. Immunity is short-term, and often circumvented by the fast pace of COVID variant evolution. Add these factors together: how do you run a society with a constantly, rapidly increasing subset of the population long-term ill? Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not only a moral issue; yes, I believe it’s wrong to forcibly infect everyone with a vascular disease with unknown long-term health effects over and over again. But it’s also just practically unfeasible to operate a functional economy while rapidly disabling the workforce.

How did we get here? When we were first vaccinated, many of us in early 2021, was this the future we were promised? Constant reinfections that will surely disable many of us, but hopefully it won’t be you, so go about your day?

A controversy in planning concerns the degree that upzoning can increase affordability.

I reviewed this issue two years ago in Planetizen columns, The Housing Supply Debate: Evaluating the Evidence, and A Critical Review of 'Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land', and in a Governing Magazine article, The Housing Affordability Recipe. Recent studies support the conclusion that broadly-applied upzoning that allows more compact housing types (townhouses, multiplexes, and multi-family) in multimodal neighborhoods, with complementary policies such as reducing parking minimums, can increase housing supply, drive down prices, and increase overall affordability.

This research has not prevented skeptics from arguing the opposite; that upzoning increases rather than reduces housing prices and reduces affordability. Such skepticism is understandable: housing prices tend to be higher in dense urban areas and a parcel's value tends to increase if it is upzoned. However, upzoning a large urban area has very different effect: it creates a competitive market for land prezoned for higher density housing which minimizes lane value increases, as discussed in UCLA Professor Shane Phillips' report, Building Up the "Zoning Buffer": Using Broad Upzones to Increase Housing Capacity Without Increasing Land Values.

As 2023 ends, Britain may not be facing a famine, as people are in north-eastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen or Somalia, but that is a low bar. The UK’s current levels of food insecurity will damage physical and mental health and increase health inequalities for years to come.

The Food Foundation tracks moderate or severe food insecurity in the UK, which is defined as how many people in the past month had smaller meals or skipped meals; had been hungry but not eaten; or had not eaten for a whole day – each because of lack of access or inability to afford food. In June 2023, the latest tracker, 9 million adults in the UK, 17% of households, experienced moderate or severe food insecurity (a massive rise from 7.3% in June 2021). Nearly a quarter of households with children experienced food insecurity.

As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine. (A recent poll found that 66 percent of all U.S. voters and 80 percent of Democratic voters desire an end to Israel’s current war, for instance.)

What makes this trend particularly disturbing is the power differential: Billionaire donors and the politically-connected, non-Jews and Jews alike on one side, targeting disproportionately people of vulnerable populations on the other, including students, untenured faculty, persons of color, Muslims, and, especially, Palestinian activists.

“The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job,” says Paul Saffo, a futurist and adjunct professor at Stanford University.

But even among corporations that were sure in their preparations, there was sufficient doubt to hold off on declaring victory prematurely. The former IT director of a grocery chain recalls executives’ reticence to publicize their efforts for fear of embarrassing headlines about nationwide cash register outages. As Saffo notes, “better to be an anonymous success than a public failure.”

After the collective sigh of relief in the first few days of January 2000, however, Y2K morphed into a punch line, as relief gave way to derision — as is so often the case when warnings appear unnecessary after they are heeded. It was called a big hoax; the effort to fix it a waste of time.

Justifiable cynicism is one thing. This is absolute hopelessness. It's not apathy; it's anger and despair.

On Friday, December 29, Ohio governor Mike DeWine announced a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for transgender minors as well as new restrictions on clinics providing gender-affirming care to adults. But you wouldn’t know it from the headlines, most of which simply describe Gov. DeWine’s veto of HB 68 as a victory for trans youth.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has agreed to settle a $5 billion privacy lawsuit alleging that it spied on people who used the "incognito" mode in its Chrome browser — along with similar "private" modes in other browsers — to track their internet use.

The class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 said Google misled users into believing that it wouldn't track their internet activities while using incognito mode. It argued that Google's advertising technologies and other techniques continued to catalog details of users' site visits and activities despite their use of supposedly "private" browsing.

The ‘Tragedy of Commons’ thesis, and the ways in which it is accepted as ‘common sense’, has been wildly successful at obscuring what we are actually experiencing: a Tragedy of the Non-Commons. Non-common governance and inequalities are at the heart of the climate and ecological crises.