Tag Archives: francisco

What’s It Like To Run a Condom Company?

by MollyDruitt Posted on May 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

During her time documenting natural disasters as a Red Cross photojournalist, Talia Frenkel saw first-hand the devastating effects of HIV and AIDS in Africa. She wanted to help combat this preventable disease, so in 2010, she created a women’s health company with a mission: For every L. Condom purchased in the United States, the company donates one condom to a person in the developing world. L. also employs HIV-positive women in Swaziland—they design wrappers for the condoms and package them. Meanwhile, business in the United States is booming: L. has rolled out bike delivery service in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Manhattan. Next up: an app that offers foreplay tips while you wait for your condoms to arrive, and expanding into other women’s healthcare products. I spoke with Frenkel about weird condom additives, being perceived as “shady” because of her job, and how L. distributes condoms to women who need them most.

Mother Jones: What’s the most surprising thing that you’ve learned working in the condom business?

Talia Frenkel, founder of the condom company L. Image courtesy of Talia Frenkel

Talia Frenkel: Most packaged consumer goods companies are actually owned by men, so there are very few women who are involved in the manufacturing and branding of products that women are predominantly purchasing. I think there’s something really broken about that, when women aren’t being included in the thought process. And the condom industry even more so, right? Me going into the manufacturing facility, I’m like “I’m the CEO, I promise!” It was really hard to be taken seriously at first.

MJ: Would you say that was one of the biggest challenges of starting the company? Being a woman?

TF: Not only not being taken seriously, but being perceived as shady. You tell someone you own a women’s health company and they ask what your product is and you say, “Oh, it’s condoms.” They look at you like you’re a porn star or something. This is a basic woman’s health product that I think every woman should have in her purse. It’s not taboo to carry a birth control pill case, but it is with a condom, so I don’t understand why we act like condoms cause promiscuity. Condoms don’t cause promiscuity anymore than umbrellas cause it to rain.

MJ: How did you come up with the idea of one-hour condom delivery via bike messengers?

TF: Condom aisles can be uncomfortable. It’s like you have to make an announcement to the entire store, “Aisle 6, I’m having sex!” They’re not always that easily accessible. We started talking to these messenger groups, and the bike messengers themselves are really ecstatic about it. They like knowing that what they’re doing is involved with a cause. It truly is in line with our values of sustainability by having a low carbon footprint.

MJ: Why is it important to have environmentally friendly and chemical-free condoms?

TF: Our shampoos and conditioners have “paraben-free” on them but our condoms don’t. It’s just crazy. A lot of people have really negative experiences with condoms not knowing why. When you look at it, the complaints about condoms are they smell bad, they taste disgusting, they dry out, they’re physically irritating. All of these issues can actually be addressed in the materials that are being sourced, and then in the manufacturing process. If you look at an L. condom it’s a lot clearer than other products, and has a lower latex odor and taste. We made sure that the products are glycerin- and paraben-free, and don’t contain any potentially harmful additives.

MJ: What makes latex sustainable?

TF: Condoms are typically made from polyurethane or natural rubber latex. Polyurethane is a plastic so it has the environmental issues that all plastics have. But natural latex doesn’t have those issues.

MJ: How do you make sure your condoms get to the people who need them most?

TF: The international development NGO BRAC is one of my favorite organizations because it employs so many women on the ground. They train women as health care providers and they educate them, and they teach them how to teach their peers about basic health products. And then these women go out from community to community, and they sell products like condoms at the low market cost. By doing that, they are making a living wage for themselves, they become breadwinners in their families and their communities, and they have more of a say in making decisions, such as negotiating condom use.

MJ: The one-for-one model has its critics: Some people say that well-meaning businesses don’t do their research about what people in the developing world actually need.

TF: Every community needs access to contraception, and in Africa this is the most basic tool for fighting the HIV epidemic. Something that was important for me coming into this was speaking to the local program officers, asking them where their needs were, and telling them we’re not coming in and dropping off our product without communication. For example, in Haiti they wanted a new condom because they had tried different condoms and weren’t happy with the brands they were distributing, so they wanted to try L. They also wanted the packaging and art from HIV-positive women to help with removing the stigma. But in Uganda, they said “we’ve been socially marketing a product, we’ve had good momentum and progress, we don’t want to start distributing a new brand of condoms right now.” I said okay, tell me which brand you want to distribute, let’s identify it, and we’ll support the purchase of that product. We’re not Coca-Cola here trying to get our brand into Africa. We’re here to support their work. We’re not disrupting the local condom seller.

MJ: Have you encountered any type of resistance in the countries where you distribute condoms? Is any part of your distributing condoms perceived as controversial?

TF: We’ve obviously encountered some of the stigma and taboo, hearing comments like using a condom is eating candy with the wrapper on. You also hear things like that in America. We talk about how we can overcome those barriers to condom usage, but for the most part we’ve been really overwhelmed with how incredible these programs have been, and how eager the women are to educate their peers. That has been inspiring and humbling.

Read this article: 

What’s It Like To Run a Condom Company?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What’s It Like To Run a Condom Company?

The California Drought May Mean More Earthquakes

by LKCWilliams Posted on May 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the San Francisco Public Press website.

Depletion of groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley is having wide-ranging effects not just on the agricultural industry and the environment, but also on the very earth beneath our feet. Massive changes in groundwater levels in the southern Central Valley are changing the stresses on the San Andreas Fault, according to research published today.

Researchers have known for some time that human activity can be linked to localized seismic effects. In particular, much of the debate about fracking in California in the past few years has centered on evidence that the process of injecting large volumes of liquid underground can lubricate fault lines and increase local earthquake risk.

Now geophysicists in Washington, California and Nevada have gathered evidence that human activity can have much farther-reaching seismic consequences.

This research was spurred by the observation that the southern Sierra Nevadas and the Coastal Ranges are rising by 1 to 3 millimeters a year. Geologists have been observing this movement, which they call uplift, using a network of GPS sensors planted along these mountain ranges. They’ve batted around theories about why it might be happening, with no clear answer.

“It looks like there’s a big bullseye of uplift in the mountains surrounding the south Central Valley,” said Colin Amos, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

Ten years of satellite data show that groundwater use in the Central Valley is outpacing its replenishment, a trend that is intensifying in the current drought. Amos wondered if the two things might be connected. “What if uplift in the mountains is a response to sucking water out of the ground?” Amos said.

Amos and his collaborators found something that goes deeper than that—something that could look to a paranoid environmentalist like a grand unified theory of California problems: drought, water use, and earthquake risk. “We found a link between what humans are doing on the ground and the rate of earthquakes,” Amos said. His data and model are published today in the international scientific journal Nature.

There are trends on two timescales. First, there’s a seasonal one. In the late summer and early fall, it rains less and people use more water. During this time, Amos’s group discovered, there is a corresponding peak in the height of the Coastal Ranges and the Sierra Nevada. There is also a long-term trend: Over time, as the groundwater is being depleted, these mountains are growing taller.

To picture how water can play a role in this, think of the Earth’s surface like a flexible sheet of plywood with a weight on it. “The upper portion of the earth is elastic, and the ground water is weighing it down like a brick,” Amos said. Removing groundwater is like lifting that brick. The earth’s crust literally flexes up. As it moves up, it pushes up the Sierra Nevadas and the Coastal Ranges.

The researchers also looked at how this movement might stress the San Andreas Fault, which runs parallel to the San Joaquin Valley. The San Andreas Fault runs roughly the length of the state, stretching from the Palm Desert in the south, up through San Francisco, and north nearly to Eureka. It marks where two of the Earth’s tectonic plates meet. Friction and stress are currently holding the plates locked in place.

When the balance shifts and the faults slip, it leads to tremendous earthquakes, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. And even decades after the smaller but still deadly Loma Prieta quake of 1989, Bay Area cities are still grappling with the need to brace billions of dollars worth of vulnerable infrastructure against the Big One. (Read more on San Francisco’s retrofitting efforts at sfpublicpress.org/earthquakes.)

Last year, researchers at the US Geological Survey estimated a 28 percent chance that an earthquake of at least magnitude-6.7 would hit the Bay Area within 10 years. But the ground could shift at any time, and the risk increases the longer the pressure builds in a fault.

Water’s Geologic Effects

If massive changes in groundwater are big enough to move mountains, might they also change stresses on the fault? Amos has calculated that yes, they can. Again looking at short-term and long-term trends, the researchers found that patterns of seasonal microseismicity—rashes of tiny earthquakes—track with yearly changes in water use.

And they suggest a major long-term change: destabilization of the San Andreas fault over time.

“Long-term withdrawal of water in the San Joaquin Valley is leading to a decrease of stress on the San Andreas fault, and this promotes earthquakes,” said Paul Lundgren, a geophysicist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Lundgren is familiar with the research but is not associated with the project.

Andrew Michael, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, who was also not involved with Amos’s research but has read the results, said that for now it gives scientists a fuller picture of how faults like the San Andreas work. But it is not that useful for predicting earthquake risk in the short term, he said.

This linkage between water and seismic effects is not a new idea, nor is it unique to California. In 2001 and 2003, researchers led by Kosuke Heki at Hokkaido University in Japan showed that variations in snow loads in that country’s mountains tracked with variations in seismic activity.

What is unique in the current research is the link to human activity. California’s groundwater depletion is certainly tied to the drought. But it is also driven by the state’s thirst for drinking water and irrigation, said James Famiglietti, an earth systems scientist at the University of California, Irvine.

Famiglietti directs the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling. The center now has about 10 years’ worth of detailed satellite data tracking groundwater depletion in California. From October 2003 to March 2010, the Sacramento and San Joaquin River basins lost nearly 31 cubic kilometers of fresh water. That’s almost the volume of Lake Mead. The latest data show that since the start of the current drought, the decline in groundwater storage has sharpened. From November 2011 through November 2013 alone, an additional 20 cubic kilometers have been depleted. And that does not yet include this year’s record-dry winter. (The center’s latest water advisory, from February, is available in a PDF.)

Geologists’ working assumption is that human activity is too insignificant to play any role in whether large quakes happen. But the new model shows that may not be true, Lundgren said.

That is not to say that this research can give us any fine-grained predictions about when the next big one will be. “Right now we’re considered overdue for an earthquake, but the statistics aren’t good enough that we have a clock,” he said. The time between major earthquakes, he explained, is like time spent going up an escalator where the top is not visible. What the new groundwater model shows, Lundgren said, is that human factors have put us another step or two closer to the next big quake.

More: 

The California Drought May Mean More Earthquakes

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The California Drought May Mean More Earthquakes

Why is Alaska fighting the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay?

by KlaraGuzm Posted on April 30, 2014

Why is Alaska fighting the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay?

By

Shutterstock

The EPA has a plan to clean up Chesapeake Bay, which has been polluted by agriculture interests for decades. A “pollution diet” finalized by the agency in 2010 would reduce the amount of animal waste and fertilizer that gushes into the bay from the 64,000-square-mile watershed every year, causing dead zones.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, corn growers, pork and poultry producers, and home builders are fighting that plan in a federal lawsuit, accusing the EPA of making an illegal power grab. Twenty-one states — including Alaska and many others that are nowhere near the Chesapeake watershed — have joined the suit, worried that the cleanup plan could set a dangerous precedent and spread ecological health to their own tainted waterways.

Monday was the deadline for submitting briefs in the case, and fortunately some of those briefs have been in support of the EPA’s plan. Maryland and Virginia, the two states that actually border the bay, are all for cleaning it up. “This lawsuit attacks our efforts to restore the health of the Chesapeake Bay and strengthen its crucial economic value,” said Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler. “Maryland must preserve its partnership with an effective EPA to safeguard our environment and sustain the thousands of jobs supported by the bay.”

Nearby Delaware and Washington, D.C., are in support of the EPA’s plan too, as are six major cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Four Florida conservation groups have also filed a brief in support of the EPA’s plan, making this cogent point: “The heart of the Clean Water Act is the principle that the Nation’s waters cannot be used — directly or indirectly — to dispose of waste. This appeal [by the Farm Bureau] represents a challenge to that principle.”

The case is a big deal, as the Associated Press points out:

Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, says the appeals court ruling could go a long way in shaping environmental policy. “A win will keep intact the EPA’s policy approach, while a loss would not only have an effect on the Chesapeake but similar policies in other parts of the U.S.,” Coglianese said.

The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia is expected to begin hearing oral arguments in the case this summer.


Source
Challenge to Chesapeake Cleanup Tests EPA Power, The Associated Press
Six Major Cities Add Their Support To Chesapeake Bay Cleanup Plan, ThinkProgress

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Food

,

Politics

Link to original – 

Why is Alaska fighting the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay?

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, Free Press, GE, ONA, organic, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why is Alaska fighting the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay?

Tom’s Kitchen: Stir-Fried Beef with Celery, Carrots, and Kohlrabi

by ChangHamblen Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This recipe owes its existence to the confluence of three unrelated events:

• At the very end of a busy recent trip to San Francisco, I ate lunch at a restaurant called Mission Chinese, a hipster homage to Americanized Chinese food. I had the “Kung Pao pastrami”—an expertly rendered twist on a venerable strip-mall standard.

• While on the plane home, I read a New York Times style piece on “#normcore,” an internet meme/elaborate joke/contrived fashion trend that involves the “less-ironic (but still pretty ironic) embrace of bland, suburban anti-fashion attire”: stuff like “dad jeans” and Teva sandals.

• The night after I returned from my trip, my mother invited me over for dinner—a simple stir-fried pork dish familiar from my childhood. She brandished a book I hadn’t seen in years: an opulently splattered first edition of Joyce Chen Cookbook, the 1962 opus that taught a generation of Americans (including my mom) how to cook Chinese. Just like in the old days, she served it over white rice—a swerve from her decades-long fixation on brown.

Sitting there, transported by that vintage stir-fry to my ’70s childhood of Toughskins and pre-hipster Chuck Taylors, it hit me: old-school, US-inflected Chinese is a culinary embodiment #normcore. Plus, it’s really good! (When made with decent ingredients.)

It wasn’t long before I was busy in my own kitchen, contriving my own #normcore stir fry. Since I was having a few friends over, I wanted to find the “less-ironic (but still pretty ironic)” sweet spot—and produce something delicious.

From Joyce Chen‘s recipe for beef with green peppers—a childhood staple—I settled on a protein: “Flank steak is fairly inexpensive and easy to slice,” Chen instructs. And she’s as right in 2014 as she was in 1962. I found a beautiful cut of it at Austin’s excellent neo-old-school, whole-animal butcher shop Salt and Time. I also borrowed from Chen the method for flavoring the stir fry: you marinate the meat in soy sauce sweetened with a little sugar and thickened with corn starch—which gives the finished product a lovely glaze—which I goosed up with ginger, green onions, garlic and chili pepper (Chen treats aromatics like ginger and garlic as potent substances to be used in tiny amounts, and her book is devoid of hot peppers.)

For vegetables, green bell peppers felt too on-the-nose #normcore for me. So from that Kung Pao dish I had at Mission Chinese, I lifted the idea of celery, which strikes me as both a pretty #normcore vegetable itself, and also quite delicious and underused. Carrots, too, seemed right. But I only had a little of each, so I filled out the dish in decidedly un-normcore fashion: with a gorgeous bulb of kohlrabi leftover from the previous week’s farmer’s market run. That kohlrabi bulb sported a generous set of leaves—similar to kale, a related vegetable—so I threw those in, too.

A vegetarian was among the guests, so I had to come up with a non-meat alternative protein. Tofu would have been the straight-ahead #normcore move, but all I had in the fridge was a block of tempeh, so I went with it. Here’s what I came up. Enjoy with canned beer—Bud Light if you want to go full-on you-know-what, or a new-wave canned craft brew like Dale’s Pale Ale if you want a twist.

Stir-Fried Beef With Vegetables

(Serves four, with leftovers.)

4 spring onions
2 cloves of garlic, crushed and peeled
1 knuckle-sized nob of fresh ginger, peeled with the edge of a spoon
1 tablespoon (organic) corn starch
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon of crushed red chili flakes
Freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons of good soy sauce (my favorite is the Japanese brand Ohsawa Nama Shoyu)
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 pound of flank steak
2 stalks of celery
2 carrots
1 bulb of kohlrabi
A few kohlrabi leaves (optional; kale will do as well).
Peanut oil, for stir frying
More soy sauce, rice vinegar, and black pepper, to taste

First make the beef marinade. Cut the spring onions to separate the white and green parts. Slice the green parts into two-inch sections, set aside. Coarsely chop the white parts, and place them in the bowl of a mortar-and-pestle (a small food processor will also work here). Chop the ginger and garlic and add it to the mortar. Top with the corn starch, sugar, chili flakes, and a good grind of black pepper. Crush everything vigorously together into a paste. Add the soy sauce and vinegar, and mix it with the pestle. Dump the marinade into a medium-sized bowl. Cut the steak, against the grain, into quarter-inch strips about two inches long. Add the beef to the marinade, along with the green onion tops, and toss to coat well. Set aside.

Now prep the vegetables. Slice the carrots, kohlrabi, and celery into two-inch matchsticks. (Here’s a great Jamie Oliver video that explains how to do that better than I ever could in words). Set the carrots and kohlrabi aside in one bowl, and the celery in another. Slice the kohlrabi or kale leaves, if using, into thin strips, and set aside.

Now the stir fry begins. Set a bowl large enough to incorporate all the ingredients by the stovetop. Put your biggest, heaviest skillet—or wok—over high heat and add enough oil to cover the bottom. When the oil shimmers, add the celery sticks and sauté, using two spatulas to keep them constantly moving. Continue until they’re just cooked—they should retain a little crunch. Place them in the large bowl.

Put a little more oil in the pan—still over high heat—and add the carrot and kohlrabi sticks. Cook them as you did the celery sticks, and then dump them in the same bowl when they’re done. Repeat with the kale leaves, if using.

Again, add a bit of oil to the hot pan. Dump in the meat, onion greens, and the marinade. Spread the meat out across the pan’s bottom, so it forms a single layer. Let it sizzle for a minute—this will allow it to caramelize a bit, and then toss with the two spatulas as with the vegetables, until the meat is cooked through. Add the meat to the big bowl, and toss everything together—the glaze that coats the meat will also coat the veggies. Taste, add a bit more soy, pepper, and vinegar to taste. Serve over brown rice—or white.

The tempeh version: #notsonormcore, but still delicious.

If there’s a vegetarian coming to dinner: Before you start the vegetables for the main dish—in a medium-sized bowl, mix two tablespoons of olive oil, two of soy sauce, and a dash of maple syrup. Take a block of tempeh and cut it lengthwise into quarter-inch strips. Add the tempeh to the bowl and toss. letting it marinate for at least 5 minutes. (This is a twist on the tempeh technique from Heidi Swanson’s great cookbook Super Natural Every Day.) Put a separate skillet over medium heat, add a little peanut or coconut oil. When the oil shimmers, remove the tempeh from its marinade with a slotted spoon and stir fry until it’s cooked through. Place it in a bowl. Then, as each round of veggies come off the main skillet, add a portion to the tempeh. When done, toss together, along with a bit of the marinade.

Source: 

Tom’s Kitchen: Stir-Fried Beef with Celery, Carrots, and Kohlrabi

Posted in alo, Anchor, Aroma, FF, food processor, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Sprout, Uncategorized, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tom’s Kitchen: Stir-Fried Beef with Celery, Carrots, and Kohlrabi

Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever

by BettinaYLPM Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This morning, a few dozen housing and inequality activists from Heart of the City surrounded a Google shuttle at 24th and Valencia Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. The purpose: to draw attention to a proposed tax hike on San Francisco’s Municipal Railway (Muni) public transportation system and to get the Bay Area’s technology companies to pay more for using public bus stops to pick up shuttle riders. It was the latest in a series of attempts to raise awareness about the tech industry and its effect on the city. What followed was a unique bit of performance theatre that might just be the most San Francisco protest ever.

As an April Fool’s day parody, protesters announced that Google would unveil a “Gmuni” program. They handed out fake bus passes to bystanders, set up a microphone for a Gmuni spokesperson, and surrounded the Google bus with a dancing team of colorful acrobats—one dressed as a Google surveillance camera on stilts, while six others in futuristic clown costumes toted yoga balls emblazoned with a logo fashioned from the search engine’s omnipresent typography.

Clad in a pinstripe suit and fake Google Glass, Judith Hart, the acting President of Gmuni, took over the loudspeaker.

“The Gmuni program is here today to offer free privatized bus service to the citizens of San Francisco. The Muni program is in decline because of underfunding. They’ve been cutting lines. We thought, you know what, let’s try a pilot program and see if we can use our customary bus service to go ahead and provide service to all the citizens of San Francisco.”

After a round of cheering, she added:

“Everyone in the entire Mission—in the quad, really—should be able to get on the bus with one of these passes. As you can see,” she announced, pointing to a stranded bus, “the Muni is not adequate enough to stop at their own stop—the Google bus got here first, so we’re just trying to let people on.”

The crowd then jokingly asked questions about the program, “Excuse me, will there be regular coffee or gourmet coffee?” “Gourmet coffee, absolutely–it’s all Blue Bottle.” “Will there be yoga?” “Will there be yoga on the bus? Currently, there is no plan for on-bus yoga practice; however, we have been looking into a development study about what we can do with the luggage compartment.”

Throughout Hart’s speech, several people tried to board the real Google bus with their fake passes, but were quickly stopped by the driver and police. After about a 20 minute delay, the police pushed back protestors far enough to allow the bus to roll along its way.

Following the speech, organizer Amanda Ream dropped the tongue-in-cheek circus act to explain the move. This afternoon, the Board of Supervisors are considering a series of transportation changes, including a Muni fare hike and a proposal to generate $1.5 million by charging tech companies $1 a day per stop. Ream and the other activists would like tech companies to pay more. “While we appreciate the proposal and that Google funded the free Muni for Youth program, we want to see that the tech industry in San Francisco pays their fair share and actually pays taxes so the people of San Francisco can fund Muni.”

Deepa Varma, a housing rights attorney and spokesperson for the protest, elaborated. “Today, there are hearings about Muni increasing their fares and that’s happening at a time when wages aren’t going up for most people in the city, but they’re going up for the people riding the free buses. To pay even more for transportation to just get to and from work is not viable and it’s not fair.” As a result, she says, many people are being displaced.

She went on to explain that the Google bus is largely a symbolic stand-in for issues of gentrification and fare hikes, and that the protests aren’t directed at employees of Google or any other tech giant. “It’s absolutely not a housing activist against tech worker dynamic. It looks like that right now, but it’s more about trying to draw attention to the fact there is this disparity in terms of how people are treated and in terms of what people have access to at city hall.”

Ream agrees, “We want to stop the gentrification, and the displacement, and the Ellis Act. We believe that all these issues are tied together. The tech industry has an opportunity to show real leadership and be a good neighbor and make it possible by paying taxes for Muni to actually be affordable and accessible to people all year round—not just with their gift to the city.”

According to polling by EMC Research on behalf of the Bay Area Council, San Franciscans are generally positive about tech buses, although 48% of those surveyed do believe employee shuttle buses are contributing to gentrification and 38% think they’re causing the growing gap between rich and poor.

For more on the protest, our friends at Mission Local have a great video of the demonstration here.

Source:

Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever

How Do San Franciscans Really Feel About Google Buses?

by BenitoStingley Posted on March 27, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Earlier this month, the Bay Area Council, a coalition of Bay Area businesses, commissioned EMC Research to ask 500 likely voters in San Francisco how they felt about the much discussed commuter shuttles that take people from The City, Oakland, and Berkeley to tech-company campuses in Silicon Valley. The EMC researchers wrote in the ensuing report (PDF), released this week, “Despite what it might look like from recent media coverage, a majority of voters have a positive opinion of the shuttle buses and support allowing buses to use MUNI stops.” (MUNI is San Francisco’s municipal transportation agency.)

But I’m not so sure that rosy conclusion is warranted. For starters, Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation, which contracts with several tech companies to provide bus service, is a member of the Bay Area Council. So are Google, Facebook, and Apple. There’s also the fact that the survey found an awful lot of shuttle riders to poll. Six percent of respondents said that they rode one of the shuttle buses. Now, estimates of shuttle bus ridership vary wildly, but San Francisco’s total population is only about 836,000—six percent of which is about 50,000. A spokeswoman from the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency recently told me that an estimated 4,125 San Franciscans ride the tech buses. That’s closer to 0.5 percent of city residents. The San Francisco Examiner points out that the survey excluded Spanish speakers.

And then there’s the delicate phrasing of the survey questions. Last week, Pacific Standard had a great little post explaining why surveys are not always accurate measures of public opinion. The post looks at a recent survey conducted about the movie Noah. The group Faith Driven Consumer asked respondents: “As a Faith Driven Consumer, are you satisfied with a Biblically themed movie—designed to appeal to you—which replaces the Bible’s core message with one created by Hollywood?” Unsurprisingly, 98 percent said they were not satisfied. Variety reported the survey’s findings in a story titled “Faith-Driven Consumers Dissatisfied With Noah, Hollywood Religious Pics.”

I thought of the Noah survey as I read the the tech-shuttle survey’s script. Here are two examples of the questions, plus the percentage of respondents who strongly agreed with the given statements.

Please tell me if you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with the following statements:

Image courtesy of Bay Area Council

Now, thinking specifically about employee shuttle buses in San Francisco, please tell me if you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with each of the following statements:

To be fair, the survey did include a few questions that allowed respondents to express negative opinions about the buses. But those questions tended to include loaded language. For example:

Now, thinking specifically about shuttle buses in San Francisco, please tell me if you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with the following statements:

I’m guessing that if the word “causing” had been replaced with “contributing to,” more people would have agreed with the statement. Same if the word “ruining” had been replaced with “changing.”

Rufus Jeffris, the vice president for communications and major events at the Bay Area Council, wrote to me in an email that the Council stands by the survey. “The poll was intended to provide some broader context and perspective on some of the wrenching and painful issues we’re dealing with,” he wrote. “We feel strongly that scapegoating a single type of worker and single industry is not productive and does not move us forward to solutions.”

See the original article here:

How Do San Franciscans Really Feel About Google Buses?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Do San Franciscans Really Feel About Google Buses?

Chevron creates its own news outlet for a poor city that it pollutes

by Dedra Temores Posted on March 24, 2014

Chevron creates its own news outlet for a poor city that it pollutes

By

Daniel Arauz

Don’t expect to hear what these folks think in the pages of the

Richmond Standard

.

Big Oil’s influence on corporate media has American news outlets shamefully shirking climate coverage. But oil companies won’t be satisfied by merely controlling the national news. In the poor Californian city of Richmond, where Chevron wants to upgrade a polluting refinery that is wont to explode, the oil giant has started an online newspaper.

The Richmond Standard is a hyperlocal journalism site launched in January with the hallmarks of a typical Patch site (before said service was dumped by AOL): minimally reported stories about local crime, public meetings, and sports, told with the inverted-pyramid style of traditional news writing.

But the Standard is not your typical, well-intentioned but underfunded local reporting initiative; it’s a Chevron propaganda rag that’s run and written by the company’s flacks. The San Francisco Chronicle delves into the ethics of such an initiative:

The idea of the nation’s second-largest oil company funding a local news site harkens back to an era of journalism when business magnates often owned newspapers to promote their personal financial or political agendas. Now that mainstream newspapers are struggling to survive, online news sites are testing ways to fund their operations, said Edward Wasserman, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

But the idea of a company sponsoring news in a community where it operates still poses problems, he said.

“The tradition of press independence — even though in many times it’s more aspirational than real — is nevertheless a cornerstone principle,” Wasserman said. The Standard “is a different model. It’s clearly meant as a community outreach effort, so it’s born in an ethically challenged area.”

The Standard claims to be Richmond’s first “community-driven daily news source” since prior to 1990, yet Wasserman’s school runs Richmond Confidential — a rival site that frequently covers Chevron. The Standard has a “Chevron speaks” section, which has so far been used to introduce the website (which it says could “blaze the trail for a new model of corporate-sponsored, community-generated news”), and to criticize negative press coverage of its plans to upgrade the refinery. But the positive coverage of Chevron and its refinery also spills into the “News” section.

Chevron’s San Francisco-based PR consultants poached colorful crime reporter Mike Aldax away from the San Francisco Examiner late last year, hiring him to work as an account manager and to write Richmond Standard’s articles. A Chevron spokesperson described the writer as “independent,” but a recent tweet reminds us that Aldax’s loyalties lie with his client:

“Richmond residents are not going to be fooled — they know where we’re coming from,” Aldax said. “The onus is on me to provide information that’s factual and accurate.”

Note that Aldax doesn’t say anything about “balance.” As the Chronicle points out, Aldax didn’t quote activists who oppose the refinery upgrade in a recent story about the project’s “robust” environmental impact report.

Perhaps we can look forward to more such ventures in other communities where Chevron operates. The Ecuador Standard, anyone?


Source
New Chevron website covers Richmond news, San Francisco Chronicle

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

See the article here:

Chevron creates its own news outlet for a poor city that it pollutes

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Keurig, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chevron creates its own news outlet for a poor city that it pollutes

America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

by Seymour89E Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was conceived as a place to put the worst of the worst. The prisoners that kept starting problems at the other prisons. Put them all together, the thinking went. It wasn’t a place for rehabilitation. It was a place to isolate the infection. Over the 29 years it operated, starting in 1934, “Hellcatraz” earned a reputation so fearsome, it has a powerful hold on the American imagination to this day.

Alcatraz was finally shuttered, 51 years ago today, not because it was brutal, though it was, or because living conditions were inhumane, though they were. It simply cost too much.

This isn’t a secret. But it’s easy to forget. Because people tend to know three things about Alcatraz: 1) It was brutal 2) No one escaped and lived to tell about it, and 3) It’s closed. Lost along the way was “very inefficient from a budgetary standpoint.”

You could be forgiven for assuming that one morning in the spring of 1963, everyone woke up and said, “hey, wait a minute, let’s treat our prisoners better!” Maybe JFK was there and the wind was blowing in his hair and he smiled, and Bobby was there too, and he looked very serious and maybe one of them quoted Dostoyevsky’s line that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” and then they shut the prison and went sailing and Jackie was there and everyone was happy. But that didn’t happen. Everyone was fine with the prisoners being treated the way they were.

And 51 years later, so are we, really. The United States operate 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Like Alcatraz, they aren’t about rehabilitation. They’re about punishment. 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement every year. As many as half of all sexual assaults in prisons are carried out by prison guards. One fourth of the people incarcerated on Earth are incarcerated in the United States. We have 2.3 million Americans behind bars. They aren’t held on an island off San Francisco, they’re held at ADX Florence, or Pelican Bay, and Rikers Island, where an inmate recently baked to death in his cell.

Baked to death.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary—the one that Clint Eastwood broke out of and Nicolas Cage broke into—may be dead. But what we mean when we talk about Alcatraz is very much alive.

Originally from: 

America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

Sleeping In Ignites Teenager’s Passion

by Traci B. Jackson Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The New York Times tells the story of Jilly Dos Santos, a Missouri student who took an AP world history class that “explores the role of leadership”:

Students were urged to find a contemporary topic that ignited their passion. One morning, the teachers mentioned that a school board committee had recommended an earlier start time to solve logistical problems in scheduling bus routes. The issue would be discussed at a school board hearing in five days. If you do not like it, the teachers said, do something.

Jilly did the ugly math: A first bell at 7:20 a.m. meant she would have to wake up at 6 a.m.

She had found her passion.

Jilly is my hero. The kids these days are all right in my book.

Originally from: 

Sleeping In Ignites Teenager’s Passion

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sleeping In Ignites Teenager’s Passion

Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners

by ErnestoCTL Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Marco Rubio, still engaged in his campaign to reconnect with his tea party roots after blowing it on immigration reform, announced today that he plans to introduce a bill that would “prevent a ‘takeover’ of the Internet by the United Nations or another government regime.” Steve Benen is puzzled:

To be sure, there are foreign governments that censor their citizens’ access to online content, but it’s not at all clear why Rubio sees this as a domestic threat here in the U.S. As best as I can tell, there is no effort to empower the United Nations or anyone else to regulate the Internet on a global scale. Such a policy would certainly be scary, and would require opposition, but at present, it’s also non-existent.

For the most part, Rubio is probably just glomming onto a random bit of jingoism that he thinks will rile up his base. Still, there’s actually a kernel of substance to this. Right now, the US Department of Commerce exercises ultimate control over the DNS root zone, and ICANN, a nonprofit that administers the DNS naming system, does so under contract to the Commerce Department. And while ICANN has a global governance structure, it’s based in Los Angeles and has historically had a heavy American management presence.

But that could change. Last year, in response to some of Edward Snowden’s spying revelations, ICANN’s board of directors issued a statement that called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.” Last month the European Commission joined in, releasing a statement that lamented a “continued loss of confidence in the Internet and its current governance” and proposing new governance that would “identify how to globalise the IANA functions” and “establish a clear timeline for the globalisation of ICANN.” A week later, rumors surfaced that ICANN might try to move its headquarters to Geneva.

Now, this kind of squabbling has gone on forever, and the politics behind these statements is usually pretty murky. There’s no telling if it will ever amount to anything, and in any case it certainly has nothing to do with UN control over the internet. Nonetheless, other countries have long chafed under effective American control of the internet’s plumbing, and the Snowden leaks have given new momentum to calls for that control to end. It’s possible that this is what Rubio is thinking of.

Original link: 

Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners