The Burlingame Voice

Covid Tracking: Here come the holidays

Halloween was a success this year; on my street anyway.  We had more Trick or Treaters than we have had for at least five years.  Tonight we turn back the clocks--yet another pointless changing of our bio-rhythms.  The grocery stores are full up with turkeys and in-boxes are filling with "early Black Friday deals".  Talk about unclear on the concept.  So let's use this past week as our Covid baseline for tracking purposes as the holiday gatherings accelerate and the boosters come available to those who will avail themselves.

Here's the data from San Mateo County for this week:

91.7% of the County over age 16 is vaccinated. Up another 0.4% from last week.

Total Cases: 53,201   +349 in the County for the week.  The new positives have been running about +350 for weeks.

Positivity: 1.0%   This gauge is flat again and with a mandate for weekly testing of those who refuse vax, it will likely stay very low as the denominator increases.

Burlingame Cases: 1,631  Up by 13 from last week. Cases in the last 30 days up a little to 60.

Even with some office workers being required to show up in the office and families thinking it's time to act like families again, the foundation of a safe holiday season seems like it is in place in San Mateo County.  Let's hope so.  Here is a chart from the Daily Post that shows the variation in death rates by county in the Bay Area--a 22.9% swing is huge and somewhat unexplained to date.

San Mateo County: By the Numbers

The 2020 census data dropped this week and with it we get a view of how our County has been growing and changing.  The Comicle lists the numbers for San Mateo County as shown below; with the Change column added by me because that is what any numerate person would be interested in seeing without having to calculate it themselves.

                                        2010                2020            Change

Population                       718,451            764,442        +45,991

% Age 16+                           77.8%             79.8%           +2.0%

Then there is the constant need to highlight Ethnicity

White                                   42.3%            36.1%            -6.2% 

Hispanic                               25.4%            25%               -0.4%

Black                                    2.6%              1.9%             -0.7%

Asian                                    24.5%            29.8%            +5.3%

Other                                    5.2%              7.2%             +2.0%

Now a bit of analysis.  The ten-year growth in population is 6.4% which equates to a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 0.622%.  That is a little more than half the growth rate of Alameda County (11.4%) and a shade below our southern neighbor Santa Clara County at 8.7%.  I'm not sure I trust the SF County number of 8.5% given the exodus accelerated after the start of the census.

Given that we have the exact same water storage capacity as we had ten years ago, I would have to conclude that any "crisis"-driven move to add lots more high-density housing on top of the massive amount that is already approved and/or being built is misguided.  There is more data to come soon on how much more efficient we are getting in our water usage, but taking 6.4% up to 8.7% or 11.4% without a comprehensive plan is crazy.

The Burlingame Voice is Now Legal

Happy 18th birthday to the Voice.  Being 18 years old used to be the adult demarcation--the draft, marriage, legal alcohol purchases and the like.  With the juvenilization of society you could argue that 21 is now the demarcation, but let's go with 18 for now.  As I was thinking about what to highlight that is different from last year's 17th anniversary, I was stumped.  Then I read today's SF Comicle Pink section article about some lame Netflix show that has been in their top-watched list for a week or more.  People are apparently "hate-watching" it.  According to the Pink

“Hate-watching could be seen as an act of active critical viewing — viewers want to actively participate and have a say, rather than simply absorbing,” said Jeffrey Skoller, associate professor at the film and media department at UC Berkeley.  “I think viewers these days are more sophisticated than the media that’s been given to them,” Skoller said. “They understand that certain narrative elements are cliché, and there’s a pleasure in picking up on that.” Camacho adds that while media professionals like herself can give a detailed explanation about why a show doesn’t work, everyday viewers, too, have become adept in finding narratives that “don’t make sense” or spotting directorial decisions that are lazy and annoying.  Unlike the genre of camp, which assumes a degree of irony and self-awareness, hate-watched shows normally take themselves seriously, which only adds to the fun.

That pretty much sums up why I still pay the SF Comicle money to land in my driveway every morning.  It's "hate-reading".  It's fodder for the Voice.  I use critical reading skills rather than simply absorbing their drivel.  More sophisticated than the lightweights writing the drivel?  Check.  Narratives that are cliché?  Check.  Take pleasure in picking up on that (i.e. picking it apart)?  Check.  Finding "narratives that don't make sense"?  Check.  Spotting "directorial decisions" -- meaning editorial decisions -- that don't make sense?  Check.  Lazy and annoying?  Check.  Does the SF Comicle take itself seriously?  Oh my, double check.

There is a lesser amount of that in our local press.  I give the Daily Post a lot of credit in this regard, I just wish they would actually put the paper in the empty blue boxes that have been all over town for years.  The Daily Journal is good too--not as critical when it could be, but good.  In the meantime, visit here for free.  Enjoy it, hate it, laugh at it, think about it.  What evah.

Covid Updates: Yellow Tier, Now What?

With the big move to the yellow tier in San Mateo County this week, the Saturday update deserves a fresh post.  You can find our year+ of tracking at this post and the prior one.  Dinner downtown last night was a full-house affair with the conversational noise levels reaching pre-pandemic levels plus a tad.  I went up to the new Outdoor Supply Hardware as well and a few people were wandering the outdoor nursery area sans masks--it felt a little weird, but we will get used to it.  I will still track the numbers for the week which are:

77.4% of the County over age 16 is vaccinated and the age limit to do so dropped to 12 (Pfizer).  That is a small increase from last week.

Total Cases: 41,909 (+162 in the County)

Positivity: .7% (down another tenth)

Burlingame Cases: 1,244 (ONLY ONE new case this week; 34 in the last 30 days).

Now you see how we got to yellow.  Here's what that means:

Dr. Curtis Chan, deputy health officer with San Mateo County, said the change moves the county away from the mentality of strict government restrictions and toward a new era of common courtesy, community agreements and more relaxed mask scenarios.

“We are not emphasizing health officer orders. We want to emphasize caring. For fully vaccinated people, face coverings are not required, but also social agreement and common courtesy could be taken into consideration,” Chan said.  Chan believes there will be a reduced need for mask restrictions in the coming months, and he hopes mask restrictions will be additionally loosened by July 4.  “I would hope that would be around the date when mask social agreements are going to be eased up a little bit,” he said.

"Social agreement".  Got that?

Electric Cars: Not So Fast

Someday I will probably buy an electric vehicle (EV).  Most of us probably will because we will be forced to via government policies--overt and covert.  The overt policies are moves like mandating tight emissions standards, rebates and credits and the like.  The covert policies slip in as dedicated parking spaces or stopping new gas stations from being built.  But the switch over won't happen anytime soon as the AP reported awhile back with this article: America’s gas-fueled vehicles imperil Biden’s climate goals

In a rare display of data analysis the reporter gets to the bottom line conclusion that some of the big headline goals from politicians like Biden and Newsom are just not feasible.

For President Joe Biden to reach his ambitious goal of slashing America’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, huge reductions would have to come from somewhere other than one of the worst culprits: auto tailpipes.

That’s because there are just too many gas-powered passenger vehicles in the United States — roughly 279 million — to replace them in less than a decade, experts say. In a typical year, automakers sell about 17 million vehicles nationwide. Even if every one of the new ones were electric, it would take more than 16 years to replace the whole fleet.  What’s more, vehicles now remain on America’s roads for an average of nearly 12 years before they’re scrapped, which means that gas-fueled vehicles will predominate for many years to come.

Last year, fewer than 2% of new vehicles sold in the United States were fully electric.  To increase sales of electric vehicles, the administration plans to spend $15 billion to build a half-million charging stations by 2030, as well as offer unspecified tax credits and rebates to cut the cost.  Swapping the entire fleet of gas burners for electric vehicles could take even longer than 20 years. Todd Campau, associate director of automotive for IHS Markit, estimates that the number of mostly gas-powered vehicles on U.S. roads, will keep growing — to 284 million by 2025.  “If half of new cars sold around the world in 2035 are zero-emission vehicles, 70% of the vehicles on roads will still be burning gasoline or diesel,” the report said.

There are other fun factoids about the real, achievable pace of change to EVs, their batteries and other energy uses for those interested in clicking through to read them.  The other half of the story, that is not part of this article is how gasoline is a by-product of refining petroleum for benzene and other chemicals which will still happen because they are still needed in millions of products, including aspirin and other drugs.  Gas vehicles become a smaller portion of the fleet, but gas is still being produced and that equals a bargain at the pump and a tougher sell for EVs.  

Zoom Public Meetings: Pros & More Cons

I connected the dots this week between a headline and article in my hometown newspaper in Massachusetts and a letter to the editor in the DJ.  The connection is a continuation of a link I've mentioned before about how public meetings (i.e. city council, school board, planning, etc) are changed by the "Zoom ethos".  I've seen some council comments that might not have happened if there were 20 or 30 people in chambers staring at the council members.  The hometown headline read The writing's on the screen: Municipal meetings via Zoom might be here to stay.   In some contexts that sentence construction is ominous and this might be one of them.  Here are a couple of snippets:

Jane Doe likes to be able to “pop in” to a town government meeting remotely on her computer.  She’ll typically view discussion about the agenda item she finds of interest, possibly add a comment and then pop out of the meeting and get on with her evening.  “It’s like a whole new paradigm — a whole new world,” she said. “And a lot of it has been absolutely fabulous. I think there is a democratizing element in some ways. More people can access the meetings, and they don’t have to rearrange their whole lives to go there in person.”

Bearing in mind that this is a place with less tech savvy than the Peninsula where the video of the meetings isn't typically on cable TV or Granicus for review later.  But now the downsides

“Maintaining a civil discourse can be a bit more challenging,” the town manager e said. “I think, in the remote setting, there is a reduction in social inhibitions that leads people to speak more freely.  We have a lot more people participating, but in some cases, the meeting format is new to them. And you lose a lot of the personal connection — there are people we’ve been engaging with who none of us have ever met in person. In a way, we’ve lost the sense that we all live in the same town together."

Cue the letter from a San Mateo resident

I read the 4/1 article, “San Mateo Begins Housing Discussion” with interest and amazement. It described a “discussion” I would have liked to attend. Wait a minute! I did participate in Let’s Talk Housing’s online meeting. My experience was not even close to what the article described. Everyone lost 20 minutes due to technical problems. Many who registered were unable to log in. We also lost an essential poll of attendees. Residents? Workers here? Property owners? It might have supported my observation that many attendees did not live here.  It became clear that this was like a written “open mike.” People began posting random ideas, suggestions, beliefs, on the “chat” feature, even as the presentations were going on.  At two points, some of those ideas (often out of context) were pulled into “word clouds” of what people cared about — with zero sense of the writers’ intent.

One of the moderators finally pulled down the chat because the 180 degree back and forth was getting so out of hand.  The city should view this meeting’s results to be as questionable as residents who attended know them to be. If this is supposed to be what a productive workshop and discussion of housing looks like, we might as well stop right now.

I spent more than a decade of my professional career refining the way to have video-conferenced meetings with in-person and remote attendees, some well-known, others like clients that were identified but perhaps not well-known to other attendees and all tech savvy.  Cisco WebEx pre-dates Zoom by years and still renders a good viewing experience.  It is not easy even when the bulk of the people mostly share a similar community, time zone and language.  Don't get me started on the global version of this challenge.  It's clear the cities, the county, the school boards and various agencies and commissions will need some ground rules.  I think you will eventually see "chat" disabled in favor of typed questions and comments to the admin, pre-registration with a verified identity and even town of residence required (hear that Delta, Coke and the MLB?) and a return to in-person meetings with preference given to those that appear live when time runs short.  Can't happen soon enough.   

ECR: The Newest City Dump

I wonder if, like the drain maintenance, Caltrans expects the City to pick up the trash and dumped furniture along El Camino?  In this instance, maybe it's SamTrans responsibility?

It's-It Goes East

The Chronicle picked up a story about our very own ITS-IT ice cream confection starting to be sold on the East Coast.  Here's their take with the key correction

It’s-It, the San Francisco Burlingame ice cream treat little known outside the Bay Area, is invading the East Coast for the first time.  “A taste of the West Coast is making ITS way to the East Coast,” It’s-It Ice Cream announced in a post on its Facebook page earlier this month. The company likes to spell the name of its most-popular product in all capital letters, as if screaming for ice cream.

Since It’s-Its are just starting their assault on the East Coast, it’s unclear how many enthusiasts will be won over. But judging from the reception on Facebook, former Bay Area residents are clamoring for a frozen taste of the region. Dozens of people — from Alabama, Iowa , North and South Carolina and other states — posted requests to sell It’s-Its in their vicinities.

It’s-Its have been around since 1928, when George Whitney scooped some vanilla ice cream between two freshly baked oatmeal cookies, squished them together and dipped the ice cream sandwich in dark chocolate, It’s-It says on its website.  It’s-Its have developed an enthusiastic group of followers that not only buys the sandwiches in bulk (at factory stores now closed by the coronavirus) but buys merchandise including hoodies, caps, T-shirts and onesies and turns the labels into crafty light-switch plates.

I stopped by the Factory Store on Burlway Rd. just north of the Hyatt and directly abutting 101 to snap this photo.  Note the sandwich on the rooftop (upper right).

Economic Lesson for Rent Controllers

I was having a chat with a friend who owns two rental units last week and has been doing some regular maintenance.  He told me generally the same thing that the Wall Street Journal has crisply quantified

Prices are surging for the raw materials used to build American homes.  Lumber, one of the biggest costs in home-building after land and labor, has never been more expensive and is more than twice the typical price for this time of year. Crude oil, a starting point for paint, drain pipe, roof shingles and flooring, has shot up more than 80% since October. Copper, which carries water and electricity throughout houses, costs about a third more than it did in the autumn.

Prices for granite, insulation, concrete blocks and common brick have all pushed to records in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s producer-price index, which measures the change in prices that producers receive for their output. Drywall and ceramic tiles are short of records but have also climbed.

Building supply chains weren’t prepared when Americans began swarming model homes and Home Depots in April. Sawmills and factories shut down like most other workplaces early in the lockdown.  Suppliers never caught up. Now building permits for residential construction are being issued at their highest rate since 2006.

Can you imagine if B'game had passed rent control?  There would be deferred maintenance all over town.  You have to wonder how the neighboring towns that did (looking at you, Mountain View) will view the creeping neglect that has to occur when prices go up 80%, double, or a third on key materials.  The Law of Unintended Consequences isn't an economic law, but it should be.  I'm unclear on how the Fed can say they don't expect inflation to hit soon.  Oh, and gas is right behind.  "In California, the most expensive market, average prices stand at $3.88, according to AAA."

The Wheels of Justice

I had jury duty yesterday along with about 300-400 other people.  As the courts restart, a few people have noted that lots of people are getting called in, but yesterday was a whole lot more people than I have ever seen called.  It all happens at the San Mateo Event Center and uses the Jockey Club as the entry point.  The photos below don't capture even half of the crowd.  For the size of the group and the Covid state we are in, it was pretty well run.  When we each were asked if we could be available for a six-day trial, I figured we were in for a long day.

The last time I was called, it was an full-day affair just to seat a two-day jury and this looked like it could be several days.  But two and a half hours in, just as the first group of us were being told to turn off our phones and remove any hats to enter, we were all excused.  Now I know why as described here.  Taking the plea was my guess at the time.  If you get called soon, be sure to follow the instructions about dressing in layers, bring snacks and water, avoid 25th Ave eastbound getting there (it's closed) and make sure your phone is fully charged.  The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they do turn.  I just wonder if there isn't a more efficient way that wouldn't violate the randomness of the process.