Here Come China's Food and Drink Chains

Get ready, America: Here come China’s food and drink chains (NYT/ST)

The economic relationship between the United States and China is as fraught as it has been in recent memory, but that has not stopped a wave of Chinese food and beverage chains from moving aggressively into the United States for the first time.

Chinese tea shops in New York and Los Angeles are offering consumers drinks topped with a milk or cheese foam. Fried chicken sandwich joints are trying to lure diners in California with affordable fast food. Restaurant and drink brands, some with thousands of stores in China, are taking root in American cities to escape punishing competition at home.

Heytea, a tea chain originating in Jiangmen, a city in southern China, has opened three dozen stores nationwide since 2023, including a flagship operation in Times Square in New York. Two other rival tea brands, Chagee and Naisnow, opened their first U.S. stores this year. Luckin Coffee, a chain with three outlets for every one Starbucks in China, opened several spots across Manhattan.

Wallace, one of China’s largest fast-food chains with more than 20,000 stores selling fried chicken and hamburgers, landed in Walnut, California, for its first shop. Haidilao, China’s largest hot-pot chain, is redoubling its efforts in the United States after entering the market more than a decade ago.

The American expansion comes at a challenging moment for China’s food and beverage industry. The Chinese economy is no longer growing at a breakneck pace, hampered by a long-running real estate crisis and sluggish consumer spending. To survive, restaurant chains are undercutting one another on prices, inciting an unsustainable, profit-killing race to the bottom. 

by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Joy Dong, NYT/ST |  Read more:

Image: Ava Pellor/The New York Times

[ed. Not to mention Japan's plans to give 7-11's a complete workover.]

The ‘New’ Solution for the N.Y.C. Housing Crisis: Single-Room Apartments

Single-room apartments once symbolized everything wrong with New York City. They didn’t have private kitchens or bathrooms and were seen as cheap places where crime festered, drugs flourished and the poor suffered daily indignities.

Today, city officials say the solution to the housing crisis involves building a lot more of them.

Councilman Erik Bottcher, a Democrat who represents parts of Manhattan, introduced a bill on Tuesday that would allow the construction of new single-room-occupancy apartments as small as 100 square feet for the first time in decades. The legislation, backed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, would make it easier to convert office buildings into these types of homes, also known as S.R.O.s.

The apartments can resemble dormitories or suites, and could become cheaper housing options in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

“We’re trying to make housing more affordable and create more supply,” said Ahmed Tigani, the acting commissioner of the housing department.

Such apartments, where kitchens and bathrooms are often shared, can cost $1,500 or less in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, where median rents easily exceed $3,000 per month.

The push underscores how an extreme shortage of housing has led to a turnaround in attitudes toward forms of shared housing, which have long been a controversial feature of cities worldwide.

Cities like London, Zurich and Seoul, with a thirst for cheap homes, are exploring similar ideas, as are other places in America. Other cities, like Hong Kong, still struggle to make the homes livable.

Few cities, though, have their histories as intertwined with these types of homes as New York. A population boom in the first half of the 20th century led to thousands of people cramming into flophouses, boardinghouses and S.R.O.s.

There are about 30,000 to 40,000 left, down from more than 100,000 in New York City in the early 20th century, according to a 2018 study from the N.Y.U. Furman Center. But the homes became associated with poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.

The city passed laws preventing the construction of new units and the division of apartment buildings into S.R.O.s, leading to their steady decline over the decades.

“Overcrowding, overcharging and the creation of disease and crime-breeding slums have been the direct result of this conversion practice,” Mayor Robert F. Wagner said in 1954 when signing one of these bills. An adviser to a City Council committee said at the time that the growth in S.R.O.s would “reduce New York City to cubicle-room living.”

In some ways, that is now part of the idea.

The obvious benefit, city officials said, is that S.R.O.s and other shared housing would be cheap. But they might also better match the city’s changing demographics.

The number of single-person households grew almost 9 percent between 2018 and 2023, city officials said. The number of households with people living together who are not a family — for example, roommates — grew more than 11 percent over that same time period.

Because of the housing shortage, many people end up joining together to rent bigger homes better suited for families, said Michael Sandler, the housing department’s associate commissioner of neighborhood strategies. Building new shared housing might free up those apartments. (...)

The new legislation would also improve certain safety standards for shared housing, such as allowing only up to three apartments per kitchen or per bathroom, Mr. Sandler said. It would require shared housing to have sprinklers and provide enough electricity per room to run small appliances.

Allowing new shared housing could help provide new living options for young single people; people experiencing homelessness; older people and people just moving to city, city officials said.

“These are not yesterday’s S.R.O.’s,” said Mr. Bottcher, the councilman. “They’re modern, flexible, well-managed homes that can meet the needs of a diverse population.”

by Mihir Zaveri, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
[ed. These and other types of housing options should always be available. Just don't make people commit to 12 month leases (making tiny housing problems even worse). These are transitory spaces. Month to month, or six month leases should be fine, and probably more flexible for most people.]

Rethinking Housing Design

via: Haden Clarkin (transportation engineer/planner)
Images: uncredited

[ed. Higher density/infill housing doesn't have to be just ugly rectangular boxes (bottom photo above: built in 2014). Nor is space always a problem: the urban cores of many mid-sized American cities are covered by surface parking lots (below, in red). Des Moines:]

On the Death of Tech Idealism (and Rise of the Homeless) in Northern California

One can imagine a young Steve Jobs digging the communalism of today’s Bay Area camps, whose countercultural idealism shares many threads with that of the Valley’s early hippie-nerds—ironic given the bulldozing of camps in the shadows of contemporary tech campuses and their tightly conformist corporate cultures. The commonalities don’t stretch very far: A rather thick thread in the hippie-techie braid is individualism, a whole lot of which hid behind the Me generation’s “New Communalist” movement. The marriage of these Bay Area cultures is alive and well, but today has more of a New Age–Burning Man vibe. (...)

Unhoused communities don’t randomly burble up from the sidewalk. They are born of the housed communities around them, which in the Valley’s case is a particularly curious one. The Valley’s valley is wide and smoggy enough that some days you can’t see the mountain ranges that form it. The scorching Diablo Range, where cattle roam oceans of desiccated grass, lies to the east.

On the other side, the lusher Santa Cruz Mountains, a place of dank redwood forests, organic farming communes, and uppity vineyards, form a verdant curtain between the Valley and the ocean. Here the tech elite build their villas and take to the fog-kissed ravines for athleisure-clad recreation.

The valley started to become the Valley in 1943 when IBM opened a factory to manufacture punch cards in San José. At the time, orchards carpeted much of the region. When the trees blossomed in early spring, the honey-scented flowers intoxicated bees and lovers alike. During the late summer harvest, the air was a punch bowl. Maps referred to it then as the Santa Clara Valley, but romantic minds of the day christened it the Valley of Heart’s Delight, after a 1927 poem by a local writer with Wordsworthian sensibilities, named Clara Louise Lawrence.

No brush can paint the picture
No pen describe the sight
That one can find in April
In “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

Cupertino did not exist back then. The Glendenning family farmed the land where the Apple Spaceship now sits. Prunes were their specialty. The farm was on Pruneridge Avenue—the valley was considered the prune capital of the world, supplying 30 percent of the global market—which passed through their orchards near the present location of Steve Jobs Theater, a smaller circular building next to the mothership.

But Apple bought the road from the city—$23,814,257 for a half mile—so you can’t drive through there anymore. Between the steel bars of the fence you can still catch a glimpse of the Glendennings’ old fruit-drying barn, which has been renovated and is now storage for landscaping equipment. The new orchards and the old barn help soften the Pentagon vibe with a little farm-to-table ambience.

The Valley’s valley is not a stereotypical one because it lacks a mighty river meandering between the mountain ranges. Instead, there is the southern leg of San Francisco Bay, a shallow, brackish estuary fed by measly creeks that barely run in the dry season. It’s a bird and crustacean paradise, but the lack of fresh water and ocean currents make for a putrid aroma that’s further intensified by the landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and commercial salt-harvesting operations clustered around the waterfront.

The smell is so intense that it’s spawned a South Bay Odor Stakeholders Group “dedicated to identifying and resolving odor issues.” One finds Reddit threads with titles like South Bay Fucking Smell: “south bay people, you know what i mean. where the fuck is this rancid ass smell coming from. it’s pretty common for it to smell like shit here, i’ve smelled it my whole life, but i just want to know where it’s comin from. My guess is the shitty salty shallow south bay water spewing out smelly air, but idk.”

“That, or else it’s your mom,” replied another user, who referred to the odor as “the ass cloud.” The poetics of the region have shifted since Lawrence’s day.

The ass cloud did not dissuade the early tech settlers, who followed the money flowing from the patron saint of the Valley’s venture capitalists: DARPA, the Department of Defense’s secretive research agency, which commissioned much of the basic science from which the IT revolution sprang. While farms like the Glendennings’ continued to pump out prunes on the arable land between the Bay and the mountains, the military-industrial complex set up along the mud flats. The Navy built an eight-acre dirigible hangar in Mountain View, still one of the largest freestanding structures ever erected. The CIA quietly rooted itself among the reeds and spread rhizomatically. During the Cold War, aerospace companies blossomed between DOD installations. Lockheed was the Valley’s biggest employer when Kent and Steve Jobs were growing up in the suburbs that slowly consumed the orchards.

The American tech industry was born in the Bay Area because its defense industry parents came here to ward off the Japanese—during World War II, this was the gateway to the “Pacific Theater,” as the Asian front of the war was euphemistically referred to. This first generation of the Valley “seeded companies that repurposed technologies built for war to everyday life,” writes Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian. “Today’s tech giants all contain some defense-industry DNA.”

Jeff Bezos’s grandfather, for instance, was a high-ranking official at the US Atomic Energy Commission and at ARPA, the precursor to DARPA. Jerry Wozniak, father of Apple’s other Steve—Steve “The Woz” Wozniak, the company cofounder and part of the gang tweaking on computers in the Jobs’ garage—was an engineer at Lockheed. The military forefathers of the Valley must have been horrified at the hippies their children became, though by the eighties the arc of flower power had bent toward the common ground of Wall Street.

The Navy’s dirigible hangar still looms over the Bay, but Google now rents the property from the government for the parking of private jets. The company dominates the neighborhood to the west of the hangar, a spread of dull office buildings revolving around the central Googleplex, with its employee swimming pools, volleyball courts, and eighteen cafeterias. There are no houses or apartments in the neighborhood, though there are residential districts—of a sort. These are surprisingly affordable, which means that some of the folks who smear avocado on the techies’ toast and stock the kombucha taps have the good fortune to live nearby.

It’s easy to miss their humble abodes, however. An out-of-towner who gets off at the Google exit to take a leak could be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled across some sort of RV convention. But those aren’t recreational vehicles lining the backstreets of the Google-burbs—those are homes on wheels.

RVs parked on the side of the road are the new desirable real estate, and like the old industrial cores of American cities that have evolved from roughshod hangouts for unemployed artists to haute loft developments for upwardly mobile professionals, their inhabitants aren’t immune to class stratification. Most of the rigs are older, ramshackle models, but here and there shiny coaches broadcast the relative wealth of their inhabitants—techies who could afford an apartment but don’t want to waste their money on rent.

They roll out of bed, hop on a company bike, and are at the office in three minutes, in the meantime saving up for a big house in the outer, outer, outer burbs, where you can still get a McMansion for under $3 million. Some already have the McMansion and use their RV as a workweek crash pad.

The more-rickety RVs belong to the avocado smearers and lawn mower operators. Crisanto Avenue, five minutes from the Googleplex, is the Latin America of Mountain View’s homes-on-wheels community. It’s like a museum of 1980s RVs—Toyota Escapers, Winnebago Braves, Chevy Lindys, Fleetwood Jamborees—most of them emanating Spanish banter, many with blue tarps over the roof, and some leaking unmentionable juices from onboard septic tanks. Apartments line one side of Crisanto, but the side with the RVs fronts onto train tracks. A shaded strip of earth along the tracks, maybe twelve feet wide, serves as a communal front yard, complete with potted plants and patio furniture, for pets and kids to play.

An older Peruvian woman named Ida invited me into her RV, where a half-eaten pineapple sat serenely on an otherwise empty table. She used to live in a two-bedroom apartment with sixteen other people—“Fue imposible!” she said—until she learned of the RV scene. She couldn’t afford to purchase one, but there’s a growing industry in the Valley for old-school RV rentals; residents on Crisanto told me they pay between $500 and $1,000 per month, depending on the RV, plus a $75 fee to pump sewage.

Since Ida arrived in the US in 2003, she has worked mainly as a nanny, often for around six dollars per hour. Work was sparse during the pandemic, so she accepted whatever pay she was offered. One family gave her twenty dollars for taking care of their two children for twelve hours. She’d held America in high esteem before living here. “La vida en los Estados Unidos es terrible,” she said.

My visual experience of the Valley began to shift. My eyes had once flashed at views of the water, clever billboards (“Hey Facebook, our planet doesn’t like your climate posts”), and homes with the billowy, buff-colored grasses and scrawny wildflowers that signify the aesthetics of people who can afford expensive landscaping designed to look feral.

But the more time I spent with the Valley’s have-nots, the more my focus became trained on the visual language of the income inequality ecosystem: the camouflage patterns of desiccated vegetation pocked with blue tarps and plastic bags flapping in the branches; the hulking silhouettes of recreational vehicles parked in non-recreational environments; the bodies splayed out on the sidewalk. (...)

“Vanlife has become the norm here,” a veteran gig worker named Chase, who’s driven for Uber, Instacart, and Amazon Flex, told me. He was not talking about hipsters who move into a home on wheels because it sounds like a fun and Instagrammable lifestyle. He was referring to his colleagues who have no other choice.

by Brian Barth, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Exploring the Implications of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson

[ed. Why it's now easier to remove or relocate homeless tent encampments.]

On June 28, the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Johnson v. Grants Pass that enforcing camping regulations against homeless persons is not a “cruel and unusual punishment.” Local governments can now enforce camping regulations without fear of being sued for violating the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Johnson effectively struck down and overruled the underlying Ninth Circuit case, Martin v. Boise. The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Martin had led to widespread tent encampments throughout the western U.S.

Martin held that enforcing camping regulations against homeless people violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment if there were more homeless people in a city than available shelter beds. (...)

Homelessness Turned into a Legal Storm

Martin v. Boise

The Ninth Circuit first held that camping regulations could not be enforced against homeless people in Martin v. Boise. The Ninth Circuit then expanded Martin with its decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass.

Under Martin, the Eighth Amendment means that if there are no “available” shelter beds, it’s cruel and unusual punishment to issue a homeless person any kind of criminal penalty for violating a city’s camping ordinance.

The Ninth Circuit reasoned that because the unhoused have to exist somewhere, fining them for violating camping ordinances is no different than criminalizing their status as a homeless person. This new rule made it very difficult for cities to push homeless individuals into services.

Instead, the ruling empowered homeless individuals to push back at local government. Justice Gorsuch, who authored the decision in Johnson, describes how people in San Francisco who were homeless would cite the Martin case by name when rejecting city services and “as their justification to permanently occupy and block public sidewalks.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 9 (2024) (citing San Francisco Brief at 8-9).

Johnson v. Grants Pass prior to reaching the Supreme Court

Within weeks of Martin v. Boise being decided, the same lawyers filed Johnson v. Grants Pass in the U.S. District Court for Oregon. Johnson expanded upon Martin. While Martin only prohibited issuing criminal fines to the homeless, Johnson held that even issuing civil citations to the homeless was a cruel and unusual punishment that violated the U.S. Constitution.

The city of Grants Pass’ single homeless shelter was never more than 60% full. Despite that, the trial court held that there were no “adequate” shelter beds available. The court observed since the city’s only shelter was operated by Gospel Rescue Mission, and included a religious component, it was not “adequate” for everyone. Some people did not want to be exposed to a religious message.

 
A second way that Johnson expanded Martin was by finding that homeless individuals did not have to wait until they were cited or prove that no shelter bed was available to sue the city. Instead, all homeless persons could join together in a single class action lawsuit and sue the city preemptively. It was then the city’s burden to prove that “adequate” shelter beds were available for everyone.

Finally, Johnson expanded Martin by giving homeless persons not only immunity from camping laws, but also an affirmative right to protection from the elements. In other words, Martin ruled you can’t cite someone who has no place to go. Johnson said they were also entitled to protection from the elements as well.

The Ninth Circuit rulings left local government officials and law enforcement paralyzed, creating an unmanageable focus on “adequate” daily shelter space. Cities wishing to enforce camping regulations had to count the number of involuntarily homeless people each evening and then how many shelter beds were available. Additionally, each shelter bed had to be matched to each homeless person. Shelter space didn’t count if the shelter didn’t allow pets and the person had a dog, or the shelter didn’t allow smoking and the homeless person used cigarettes, or the shelter was organized by a religious organization and the homeless person didn’t want to be exposed to a religious message.

Practically speaking, matching the various needs of the homeless to the different types of shelters and keeping a daily count of available beds was an overwhelming task for any city. Local government could no longer compel homeless individuals to use services, resulting in widespread tent encampments.

Ending the Storm: Petitioning the Supreme Court

Because this unworkable rule tied the hands of local officials throughout the western United States, there was widespread frustration with Martin and Johnson. CIS encouraged the city of Grants Pass to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. After that, something remarkable happened.

Amicus briefs were filed by numerous entities including: 

• National League of Cities;
• League of Oregon Cities (LOC);
• Association of Oregon Counties (AOC);
• Special Districts Association of Oregon (SDAO);
• California Governor Gavin Newsom;
• San Franciso Mayor London Breed;
• League of California Cities;
• Association of Idaho Cities;
• League of Arizona Cities and Towns;
• North Dakota League of Cities;
• Cities of Anchorage, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Honolulu, Colorado Springs, Milwaukee, Providence, and Saint Paul;
• District Attorneys of Sacramento and San Diego;
• California State Sheriffs Association;
• California Police Chiefs Association;
• Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs; and
• 20 Different States, and more.

In fact, there was a record number of friend-of-the-court briefs filed in support of Grants Pass’ Supreme Court petition. In response, the Supreme Court not only granted review but made clear that the court heard what cities and counties were saying.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass

On April 22, 2024, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case. The focus was not on who should do what but on interpreting the Eighth Amendment. They debated whether it was cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to ticket, fine, or jail someone repeatedly trespassing on city property because they were homeless and had “nowhere else to go.” The issue for the court was whether the Eighth Amendment regulates the type of punishments applied to a crime or whether it regulates what types of behavior can be considered a crime.

Those in favor of upholding the Grants Pass case argued that the Eighth Amendment prohibits punishing someone for their “involuntary” status, such as homelessness, deeming it cruel and unusual. The opposing side contended that the Eighth Amendment only addresses the type of punishment, not the status of the person being punished.

The Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled, addresses methods of punishment, not who can be punished. The punishments in question were a ticket, a small fine, or very short jail terms. The court found none of these to be cruel and unusual. In fact, these are commonly used punishments across the country. The other side argued that these punishments were cruel and unusual as applied to the homeless. But the majority opinion maintained that the Eighth Amendment regulates types of punishment, not who can be punished.

The court specifically found that the Ninth Circuit inappropriately limited local governments’ tools for tackling the homelessness issue. In so doing, the court recognized that homelessness is a multifaceted problem not suited to a single policy. The opinion emphasized that decisions on how to address homelessness should be left to community leaders, not judges:

“Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it. At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 34 (2024).
The court observed the historical tradition of communities working hard to solve difficult social issues, then stated:
“If the multitude of amicus briefs before us proves one thing, it is that the American people are still at it.” Johnson, 603 US ___ at 34 (2024).

The opinion quoted extensively from the League of Oregon Cities’ amicus brief, highlighting Oregon’s specific concerns. Our local concerns were heard by the Supreme Court, thanks to the collective efforts of government officials throughout the western states (even throughout the nation) contributing their voices and resources through amicus briefs that told real stories of the struggle to address homelessness under a one size fits all approach mandated by the Ninth Circuit.

The Supreme Court concluded by stating that the Ninth Circuit opinion in Johnson was reversed, and the Eighth Amendment does not prevent local officials from crafting unique solutions to homelessness. (...)

One thing we know for certain, with Johnson v. Grants Pass now overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, local control has returned. Community leaders are no longer in danger of being sued for the “cruel and unusual punishment” of requiring everyone to abide by camping regulations. 

by Kirk Mylander, League of Oregon Cities |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Just got back from Honolulu, my old home town. One thing I noticed right away, coming from the airport, was that there weren't any homeless encampments, which in previous years had exploded all over the city. The next day I saw police actively clearing one site down the street that had sprung up just the previous night - they were right on it.  So I asked one of my friends where everyone had gone to and he said Waianae, a small rural community pretty far removed from town on the northwest coast of Oahu. Sounded good to me (maybe not to Waianaeans), but I wondered how the city had figured out how to be more proactive in addressing a problem that had seemed so intractable for years. I'm not sure, but it might have had something to do with this ruling, which I'd never heard of before (thanks, major media). See also: What Happened To SF Homelessness? (ACX)]

AI-Powered Nimbyism Could Grind Planning Systems to a Halt

The government’s plan to use artificial intelligence to accelerate planning for new homes may be about to hit an unexpected roadblock: AI-powered nimbyism.

A new service called Objector is offering “policy-backed objections in minutes” to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.

It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as “high”, “medium” or “low” impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to “influence councillors”.

Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.

For £45-a-time, they are offering the tool to people who, like them, could not afford a specialist lawyer to help navigate labyrinthine planning laws. They said it would help “everyone have a voice, to level the playing field and make the whole process fairer”. (...)

Hannah George, a co-founder of Objector, denied the platform was about automating nimbyism.

“It’s just about making the planning system fair,” she said. “At the moment, from our experience, it’s not. And with the government on this ‘build, baby, build’ mission, we see that only going one way.”

Objector has said while AI-created errors are a concern, it uses two different AI models and cross-checks the results in an effort to reduce the risk of “hallucinations” – a term used to describe when AIs make things up.

The current Objector system is designed to tackle small planning applications, for example, repurposing a local office building or a neighbour’s home extension. A capability to challenge much larger applications, such as a housing estate on greenbelt land, is in development, said George.

The Labour government has been promoting AI as one solution to clearing planning backlogs. It recently launched a tool called Extract, which aims to speed up planning processes and help the government carry out its mission to build 1.5m new homes.

But there may be an AI “arms race” developing, said John Myers, the director of the Yimby Alliance, a campaign calling for more homes to be built with the support of local communities.

“This will turbocharge objections to planning applications and will lead to people finding obscure reasons [for opposing developments] that they have not found before,” he said.

A new dynamic could emerge “where one side tries to deploy AI to accelerate the process, and the other side deploys AI to stop it,” he said. “I don’t see an end to that until we find a way to bring forward developments people want.” (...)

Paul Smith, the managing director of Strategic Land Group, a consultancy, this month reported on the rising use of AI by people to oppose planning applications.

“AI objections undermine the whole rationale for public consultation,” he wrote in Building magazine. “Local communities, we are told, know their areas best … So, we should ask them what they think.

“But if all local residents are doing is deciding they don’t like the scheme before uploading the application documents to a computer to find out why they don’t like it, is there really any point in asking them at all?”

by Aisha Down and Robert Booth, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Rui Vieira/PA

Clam Control

via:

Please Do Not Ban Autonomous Vehicles In Your City

I was listening with horror to a Boston City Council meeting today where many council members made it clear that they’re interested in effectively banning autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the city.

A speaker said that Waymo (the AV company requesting clearance to run in Boston) was only interested in not paying human drivers (Waymo is a new company that has never had human drivers in the first place) and then referred to the ‘notion that somehow our cities are unsafe because people are driving cars’ as if this were a crazy idea. A council person strongly implied that new valuable technology always causes us to value people less. One speaker associated Waymo with the Trump administration. There were a lot of implications that AVs couldn’t possibly be as good as human drivers, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. Some speeches were included lots of criticisms that applied equally well to what Uber did to taxis, but now deployed to defend Uber.

Most of the arguments I heard were pretty wildly off-base. Many of the speakers didn’t factor in the basic safety benefit of AVs to the riders or pedestrians at all, and many of the arguments fell apart when poked at. Here are all my arguments for why a city should legalize AVs, with some concerns at the end:

• AVs are ridiculously safe compared to human drivers

• There is no real difference for a city between an AV fleet and a very cheap rental car service

• Protecting ride share driver jobs is a bad basis for policy

• Should we build fewer bike lanes to save Uber jobs?

• Ride share jobs are bad for the drivers

• Losing these jobs is still a loss

• Eyes on the street

• AVs can open up opportunities for disabled riders

• Waymos are fully electric

• Would you ban AVs if they were already widespread to create Uber driver jobs?

• Freedom

• Real problems with AVs

• Cybersecurity

• Could make traffic worse

• Environmental impact

AVs are ridiculously safe compared to human drivers

The most obvious reason to allow AVs in your city is that every time a rider takes one over driving a car themselves or getting in a ride share, their odds of being in a crash that causes serious injury or worse drop by about 90%. I’d strongly recommend this deep dive on every single crash Waymo has had so far:

[Very few of Waymo’s most serious crashes were Waymo’s fault (Understanding AI).]

This is based on public police records rather than Waymo’s self-reported crashes. It doesn’t seem like there have been any serious crashes Waymo’s been involved in where the AV itself was at fault. This is wild, because Waymo’s driven over 100 million miles. These statistics were brought up out of context in the hearing to imply that Waymo is dangerous. By any. normal metric it’s much more safe than human drivers.

40,000 people die in car accidents in America each year. This is as many deaths as 9/11 every single month. We should be treating this as more of an emergency than we do. Our first thought in making any policy related to cars should be “How can we do everything we can to stop so many people from being killed?” Everything else is secondary to that. Dropping the rate of serious crashes by even 50% would save 20,000 people a year. Here’s 20,000 dots:

The more people choose to ride AVs over human-driven cars, the fewer total crashes will happen.

One common argument is that Waymos are very safe compared to everyday drivers, but not professional drivers. I can’t find super reliable data, but ride share accidents seem to occur at about a rate of 40 per 100 million miles traveled. Waymo in comparison was involved in 34 crashes where airbags deployed in its 100 million miles, and 45 crashes altogether. Crucially, it seems like the AV was only at fault for one of these, when a wheel fell off. There’s no similar data for how many Uber and Lyft crashes were the driver’s fault, but they’re competing with what seems like effectively 0 per 100 million miles.

by Andy Masley, The Weird Turn Pro |  Read more:

Image: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

What To Know About Data Centers

As the use of AI increases, data centers are popping up across the country. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the controversial facilities.

Q: What do data centers need to run?

A: Water, electricity, air conditioning, and other resources typically wasted on schools and hospitals.

Q: Do data centers use a lot of water?

A: What are you, a fish? Don’t worry about it.

Q: How are data centers regulated?

A: Next month, Congress will hear about data centers for the very first time.

Q: Do I need to worry about one coming to my town?

A: Only if your town is built on land.

Q: How long does it take to build a new data center?

A: Approximately one closed-door city council vote.

Q: What’s Wi-Fi?

A: Not right now, big guy.

Q: What will most data centers house in the future?

A: Raccoons.

Image: uncredited

via:

Model Cities: Monumental Labs Stonework

Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are:

1. Ornament costs too much

2. The modernist era destroyed the classical architecture education pipeline; only a few people and companies retain tacit knowledge of old techniques, and they mostly occupy themselves with historical renovation.

3. Building codes are inflexible and designed around the more-common modern styles.

Getting robots to mass-produce ornament solves problems 1 and 2, and doing it in a model city with a ground-level commitment to ornament solves problem 3. 

Sramek writes:

Our renderings do not tell the full story. Getting architecture right in a way that is also scalable and affordable is hard. And until now, we’ve been focused on the things “lower down in the stack” that need to be designed first – land use plans, urban design, transportation, open space, infrastructure, etc. But I started this company nearly a decade ago precisely because I felt that so much of our world had become ugly, and I wanted to live, and have my kids grow up, in a place that appreciates craft and beauty.

via: Model Cities Monday - 10/27/25 (ASX)

[ed. Sounds good to me.]

Gerrymandering - Past, Present, Future

‘I think we’ll get five,’ President Trump said, and five was what he got. At his prompting, the Republican-dominated Texas legislature remapped the districts to be used in next year’s elections to the federal House of Representatives. Their map includes five new seats that are likely to be won by the Republicans, who already hold 25 of the state’s 38 seats. Until this year, the Democrat Al Green’s Ninth Congressional District covered Democrat-leaning south and south-western Houston. Now, it ranges east over Republican-leaning Harris County and Liberty County, with most of the former constituency reallocated to other districts. Green has accused Trump and his allies in Texas of infusing ‘racism into Texas redistricting’ by targeting Black representatives like him and diluting the Black vote. ‘I did not take race into consideration when drawing this map,’ Phil King, the state senator responsible for the redistricting legislation, claimed. ‘I drew it based on what would better perform for Republican candidates.’ His colleague Todd Hunter, who introduced the redistricting bill, agreed. ‘The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance.’

King and Hunter can say these things because there is no judicial remedy for designing a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a different case, Roberts contrasted the ‘sociological gobbledygook’ of political science on gerrymandering with the formal and objective science of American constitutional law.

‘Sociological gobbledygook’ teaches that the drawing of the boundaries of single-member districts can all but determine the outcome of an election. Imagine a state with twenty blue and thirty red voters that must be sliced into five districts. A map that tracked the overall distribution of votes would have two blue and three red districts. But if you can put six red voters and four blue voters in each of the five boxes, you will end up with five relatively safe red districts. This is known as ‘cracking’ the blue electorate. Or you could create two districts with six blues and one with eight blues, making three safe blue districts by ‘packing’ red supporters – concentrating them in a smaller number of districts. The notion that democratic elections are supposed to allow voters to make a real choice between candidates, or even kick out the bums in power, sits uneasily with the combination of untrammelled redistricting power and predictable political preferences that characterise the US today. But if it is so easy for mapmakers to vitiate the democratic purpose of elections in single-member districts, doesn’t neutrality demand some constraint on the ability of incumbents to choose voters, rather than the other way round?

After the Texas redistricting, Roberts’s belief that neutrality requires inaction appears even shakier. By adding five seats to the expected Texan Republican delegation, the Republican Party improves the odds it will retain, or even increase, its six-seat majority in the House in November 2026. Even a slight advantage gained through redistricting may have national implications because the Democrats’ lead in the polls is consistently small (around two points). Congressional maps are usually redrawn once every ten years, after each decennial census (the next one is in 2030). Mid-cycle redistricting does sometimes happen – Texas did the same thing two decades ago – but it is unusual. So is Trump’s open embrace of gerrymanders. In 1891, Benjamin Harrison condemned gerrymandering as ‘political robbery’. Sixty years later, Harry Truman called for federal legislation to end its use; a bill was introduced in the House but died in the Senate. In 1987, Ronald Reagan told a meeting of Republican governors that gerrymanders were ‘corrupt’. (...)

Democratic states have threatened to retaliate. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has scheduled a special election on Proposition 50, which would temporarily suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission, making it possible for the Democratic legislature to flip five Republican seats (43 of California’s 52 seats are held by Democrats). Like California, New York has a bipartisan commission, which usually redraws its maps once a decade. The Democrats have brought in legislation allowing mid-decade changes, but new maps won’t be in place until 2028. Democrats who used to be fierce advocates of independent commissions are now asking themselves whether they’ve been too slow to fight back. From a party that has a habit of bringing a knife to a gunfight, the question answers itself.

In the late 20th century, there were only ten seats nationally that repeatedly changed hands as a result of partisan gerrymandering, with control of the House flipping on just one occasion, in 1954. But in 2012, Republicans started to change this. Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia were all sliced up. The increase in gerrymanders was in part a result of Redmap, the Redistricting Majority Project, a Republican initiative set up in 2010 which invested in the races for the state legislatures, such as Texas’s, tasked with drawing district maps. In 1981, Democrats controlled the mapmaking process in 164 seats, while Republicans controlled it in 50. By 2021, the Republicans controlled line-drawing for 187 seats, the Democrats 49. At the same time, computers had made it cheaper and easier to design maps optimising one party’s performance without breaking the legal constraints on redistricting, such as the Voting Rights Act and the prohibition on districts drawn on the basis of race. In the 1980s, it cost $75,000 to buy software to do this; by the early 2000s, programs such as Maptitude for Redistricting cost $3000.

Just as in the late 19th century, urbanisation is now producing new political geography: migration from Democrat-leaning states such as California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois means they will lose House seats after the 2030 census. Meanwhile, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which lean Republican, are set to gain seats. Texas’s gerrymander, in other words, foreshadows a change in national political power that is coming anyway.

by Azia Huq, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: The Ninth Congressional District in Texas, before and after this year’s remapping.

[ed. If you can't win fair and square, cheat. It looks almost certain that all national elections going forward will be a nightmare.]

The '3.5% Rule'

 How a small minority can change the world.

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.

In each case, civil resistance by ordinary members of the public trumped the political elite to achieve radical change.

There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. (...)

Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field. They primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals both within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities. A regime change resulting from foreign military intervention would not be considered a success, for instance. A campaign was considered violent, meanwhile, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, the destruction of infrastructure – or any other physical harm to people or property.

“We were trying to apply a pretty hard test to nonviolent resistance as a strategy,” Chenoweth says. (The criteria were so strict that India’s independence movement was not considered as evidence in favour of nonviolent protest in Chenoweth and Stephan’s analysis – since Britain’s dwindling military resources were considered to have been a deciding factor, even if the protests themselves were also a huge influence.)

By the end of this process, they had collected data from 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns. And their results – which were published in their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict – were striking.

Strength in numbers

Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.

This was partly the result of strength in numbers. Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed because they can recruit many more participants from a much broader demographic, which can cause severe disruption that paralyses normal urban life and the functioning of society.

In fact, of the 25 largest campaigns that they studied, 20 were nonviolent, and 14 of these were outright successes. Overall, the nonviolent campaigns attracted around four times as many participants (200,000) as the average violent campaign (50,000).

The People Power campaign against the Marcos regime in the Philippines, for instance, attracted two million participants at its height, while the Brazilian uprising in 1984 and 1985 attracted one million, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 attracted 500,000 participants.

“Numbers really matter for building power in ways that can really pose a serious challenge or threat to entrenched authorities or occupations,” Chenoweth says – and nonviolent protest seems to be the best way to get that widespread support.

Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable. (...)

Chenoweth admits that she was initially surprised by her results. But she now cites many reasons that nonviolent protests can garner such high levels of support. Perhaps most obviously, violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground. (...)

“There are more options for engaging and nonviolent resistance that don’t place people in as much physical danger, particularly as the numbers grow, compared to armed activity,” Chenoweth says. “And the techniques of nonviolent resistance are often more visible, so that it's easier for people to find out how to participate directly, and how to coordinate their activities for maximum disruption.”

by David Robson, BBC |  Read more:

Images: Getty Images

[ed. I'll be at the No Kings 2.0 rally tomorrow. As a rule, I tend to avoid these things since they mostly seem performative in nature (goofy costumes, dumb signs, mugging for the media, etc.), or devolve into violence if a few bad actors aren't immediately reigned in. But in this case, the issues threatening our constitution and democracy seem so great that merely voting every few years and writing letters isn't enough. I doubt it'll change anything this administration does or has planned, but maybe some other institutions (eg. Congress) might actually be scared or emboldened enough to grow a spine. I only wish they'd named it something other than No Kings (many countries actually support constitutional monarchies - Britain, Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Norway, Spain, etc. It's the absolute ones - now and throughout history - that give the term a bad name: think Saudi Arabia, Oman, North Korea, etc.). I'm especially concerned that we may never see an uncontested national election again if one party refuses to accept results (or reality).]

Golf Carts Have Taken Over Suburbia. Cue the Resistance.

A slow-rolling cavalry is conquering America’s public roads.

Golf carts are becoming street legal in one community after another as families ditch their minivans and SUVs when they want to run a quick errand or ramble around town.

Dan Pearson bought a six-seat cart this summer after the village board he leads in the Chicago suburb of East Dundee, Ill., approved the vehicles. As he drove through downtown on a recent afternoon, pedestrians gawked and diners waved. “Dude, I love it,” a man called out as Pearson cruised past.

“It’s fun to get out,” Pearson said. “People tend to talk to people in a small little cart as opposed to a big car or truck.”

But with the boom has come a backlash. Some residents of cart-friendly towns say slow drivers are clogging the streets and reckless ones are making them unsafe. They grumble about cart drivers, including tweens and young teens, speeding, swerving and treating the road like their own private parade route.

 
East Dundee Village President Dan Pearson was one of the first in town to get a registration sticker for his golf cart. He thought the open six-seater would be a good way to meet voters.

“We all hate you,” a Florida motorist snapped on TikTok when slow-moving carts on a coastal road clogged traffic in both directions. “Get off your golf cart and drive a regular car.” (...)

The momentum, however, belongs to the carts. Golf carts designed for the road have been around since the early 2000s, but demand has soared in the past five years. Mark Rickell, a sales executive at cart maker Club Car, estimated the total U.S. market for the vehicles at $5 billion, up from $1 billion before the pandemic.

“One thing you could do in Covid was get outside,” he said. “I think that really spurred on the popularity of the golf cart lifestyle.”

Many of today’s carts have little in common with old-school fairway ramblers. Street-ready versions usually come with seat belts, headlights and turn signals, and can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than $25,000. Manufacturers typically cap their speed at 20 or 25 miles an hour, though some owners say that can be boosted with a little tinkering.

 

Johnny Horn bought a four-seater this year that looks like a cruise ship crossed with a UFO.

It has a turquoise frame, white seats and orange rims, along with four-wheel drive for the rare occasions when it snows in his hometown of Gaffney, S.C. The dashboard has a built-in refrigerator. The sound system has 24 speakers, all of which can light up and pulse to the rhythm of the music.

“It’s like a parade,” said Horn, a Realtor who sometimes drives it to showings.

South Carolina law allows golf carts to travel on public roads with a speed limit of 35 mph or less and within 4 miles of the driver’s home. The vehicles don’t need a license plate but must have a permit. 

by John Keilman, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. All for it.]

A Slow Moving and Viral Civil War

The Trump occupation arrived in Chicago and Portland in full force this weekend. And with prominent Republicans like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller salivating on X about civil war, it seems likely that what we’re seeing in these two cities will soon be deployed to more blue states across the country. In fact, you could argue that a new kind of slow moving and very viral civil war has already started.

The plan was to federalize National Guard members already in Portland, but that was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge. So the Trump administration decided to get around the block by sending troops from other states to the city. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Trump administration is sending 400 Texas National Guard members and 300 California National Guard members to Portland and Chicago. “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Pritzker wrote on X. “America is on the brink of martial law,” Newsom wrote.

For those of you scratching your heads as to why sleepy Portland, Oregon, was chosen for the next stop on President Donald Trump’s occupation tour, it seems almost undeniable that it was picked for any reason other than it was a hotbed for Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Trumpism punishes anyone or anything that can steal its viral spotlight. And the White House has now activated every part of the MAGA ecosystem to make sure they control the attention economy as they storm Democratic cities.

And, right on cue, right-wing influencer Nick Sortor quickly made himself into the main character of the Portland occupation. On Friday, Sortor was arrested for disorderly conduct while making content at a protest in front of a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Now the Department of Justice says they’re investigating the arrest, and there was some chatter among right-wing influencers on X that there was even a briefly considered plan for ICE officers to personally yank Sortor out of jail.

As for what Sortor is actually filming, it’s exactly what you would expect. It’s the same kind of content-based aggression made popular by Charlie Kirk. Videos of left-wing protests chasing Sortor down the street while he screeches about how unhinged they are. And he has, obviously, made the rounds on Fox News.

A very dark lesson that right-wing influencers like Sortor have seemingly learned from Kirk’s death is that the more violent the situation they provoke, the harder the White House will respond. “Hey Antifa — just FYI: the more times you assauIt me, the higher the chances you have active duty Marines deployed to the streets of Portland by the end of the week,” Sortor wrote on X, offering himself up to the MAGA meat grinder. Anything to get those views, I guess!

The more malicious parts of the MAGA movement also know that these clashes, between citizens and the military, filmed by influencers, are a perfect venue for more explicitly violent intervention...

The Trump administration is not just occupying cities with soldiers and ICE officers, but creating flashpoints for propaganda. Every eventual showdown on the streets of a Democratic city is first teased by hysterical X posts from Trump administration members, Trump supporters and militias face off against local protesters, and then the chaos is livestreamed and clipped by right-wing influencers that just so happen to have the budgets to fly from city to city following the circus. And, of course, Fox News scoops up the best bits and packages them for viewers at home. Finally, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security does a victory lap, collecting the best footage for a stupid music video about how they’re keeping us all safe. It’s the exact same playbook that was used for Trump’s endless rallies during his first term. The Trump hurricane comes to town and viral content and political violence follows in its wake. The key innovation of his second term is figuring out how to both scale the localized MAGA frenzy beyond just him and, also, most importantly, figure out a way to force it on blue states.

by Ryan Broderick, 404 Media |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. An ecosystem of disinformation. See also: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland (NYT):]

***

To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. (...)

Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.

Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.

“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action...

“BREAKING,” Bo Loudon, a 19-year-old influencer and friend of Mr. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, wrote on social media. Ms. Noem “just stared down violently Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” he wrote.

The video attached showed Ms. Noem on the roof of the building looking down at a small clutch of protesters far away, one of them in a chicken suit.

The man in the chicken suit, Jack Dickinson, 26, who had been coming to the ICE building to protest federal immigration policies for months, said he was struck by the disconnect. Mr. Dickinson said he watched one of the pro-Trump influencers, Nick Sortor, film outside the ICE building, then heard the narration.

“He was talking about this looking like a third-world country,” Mr. Dickinson said as he surveyed a riverfront neighborhood of apartment buildings, coffee shops and an Italian restaurant popular for holiday meals and graduation parties. “It’s just clearly not.” (...)

Mr. Sortor was initially charged with second-degree disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor in Oregon, after he took a burning American flag from a left-wing demonstrator and a fight ensued. The response from Washington, D.C., was intense and immediate. Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Mr. Sortor had been “ambushed by antifa.”

For his efforts, Mr. Sortor found himself at the White House on Wednesday, as the president praised the actions of right-wing activists and pledged to dismantle antifa, a loose-knit group of anarchists whose presence in Portland has long angered Mr. Trump.

Mr. Sortor had been “assaulted in Portland by a flag-burning mob,” the president declared.

Mr. Sortor responded, “The Portland politicians literally are willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these antifa terrorists.”

Marc Lester, Anchorage, Alaska
via: Anchorage Daily News

Hawaiʻi Loves ‘Genki Balls’. New Studies Say They Don’t Work

A new two-year research project found the balls not only were ineffective, they might make water quality worse. Supporters of the effort don’t believe it.

In the past six years, several thousand elementary school students and other volunteers have tossed over a quarter million tennis ball-sized globs of soil, molasses and rice bran into the Ala Wai Canal in a valiant effort to help clean Hawaiʻi’s most notoriously polluted urban waterway.

The goal is to get those globs, known as “genki balls,” to release special sludge-eating microbes into the Waikīkī canal’s murky depths and boost its water quality. Since the effort started, canoe paddlers and others have at times observed clearer water and more fish. They’ve even spotted the occasional monk seal and an eagle ray.

But new research from Hawaiʻi Pacific University done on Oʻahu’s Windward side casts doubt on whether the genki balls actually led to any of that improvement — or if the novel approach that inspired the community is too good to be true. (...)

The balls, according to HPU Associate Professor Olivia Nigro and Assistant Professor Carmella Vizza, did nothing to improve water quality in the marsh canal. And in the aquarium tanks, the microbes the balls were supposed to release failed to appear in any meaningful way, the researchers said, plus the water quality actually got worse.

Specifically, phosphate levels were almost 20 times higher in the tanks with the balls than in tanks without them, Vizza said, and oxygen levels in the tanks with the balls fell by about 50%.

The nonprofit that organizes those cleanups, Genki Ala Wai Ball Project, is firmly pushing back against the research, saying insufficient genki material was used and its ball tosses into the Ala Wai remain effective. Yet one of the project’s leaders sold the balls used in the HPU study and recommended how the researchers should use them.

The HPU ecologists who completed the study don’t want to dampen any of the community enthusiasm. But far more rigorous study of the Ala Wai is needed, they say, to know exactly how the genki balls are impacting water quality there, if at all. (...)

If We Do This, We Can Do Anything

The Ala Wai, a 1.5-mile canal that developers carved across Waikīkī in the 1920s to sell real estate, has long been a stark symbol of how much urban runoff is affecting Hawaiʻi’s fragile watersheds. (...)

It now bears the brunt of storm debris from Hawaiʻi’s densest and most heavily populated watershed, in the heart of Honolulu. For decades, state officials have prohibited anyone from fishing or swimming in its waters.

In one high-profile 2006 incident, an Oʻahu man who fell in the Ala Wai died of “massive bacterial infection” following weeks of heavy rain across the state. Canoe clubs and high school teams regularly paddle up and down the canal and do their best not to huli, or flip over, into its murky waters.

... the Genki Ball Ala Wai Project launched with a goal of making the canal safe for swimming and fishing within seven years by deploying 300,000 balls. Genki translates to “health” or “energy” in English.

The key ingredient baked into every dry, cured ball tossed in the water is a trademarked substance called “EM,” short for “effective microorganisms.”

It was pioneered in the early 1980s by a horticulture professor in Okinawa, Japan, who combined naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria to help boost farm crop yields. Since then, people also found that they could take it to improve digestion and gut health.

by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: David Croxford

[ed. Ouch.]

Is America Ready for Japanese-Style 7-Elevens?

The Japanese parent company of 7-Eleven is betting billions of dollars that it can expand its business in the United States by making its convenience stores more like the food meccas they are in Japan.

Convenience stores, or konbini, are an indispensable part of daily life in Japan, known for high-quality fresh food — from seasonal bento boxes to egg salad sandwiches that the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once called “pillows of love.”

Leading the push to expand Japanese-quality fresh food to 7-Eleven in North America is Stephen Dacus, a Japanese American former Walmart executive who started as chief executive of Seven & i Holdings, the 7-Eleven parent company, three months ago.

Seven & i is under intense pressure. Over the past year, it has fended off a takeover attempt by a Canadian rival. When Alimentation Couche-Tard, the owner of Circle K convenience stores, withdrew its $47 billion bid in July, Seven & i’s stock price collapsed. Mr. Dacus and his team were left to to prove they can deliver growth and returns on their own.

Now, facing a stagnant and highly competitive retail market in Japan, Seven & i’s growth is expected to come from overseas. The strategy could hinge, industry experts say, on Mr. Dacus’s ability to successfully introduce Japanese-level quality foods in the more than 13,000 stores that 7-Eleven operates, franchises and licenses in North America.

“Whether it’s hot food or cold food or any kind of food, we have to lean into how we improve the quality and the experience,” Mr. Dacus said in an interview on Friday. “That’s what Japan does extraordinarily well.”

Over the next five years, Seven & i is considering investing more than $13 billion to expand overseas. In the United States, this means initiatives like refreshing existing sites, adding more than 1,000 in-store restaurants and building a network of companies to provide more of its 7-Eleven brand prepared foods.

“And we’re launching the egg sandwiches,” Mr. Dacus said. They are, he noted, the top item purchased by the millions of American visitors descending on Japan each year and visiting 7-Eleven stores.

The sandwiches are made with the fluffy Japanese “milk bread,” and a team in Texas worked with Japanese suppliers to learn how to produce it in the United States. Milk bread and Japanese mayonnaise give the egg sandwiches “the heavenly pillow thing,” Mr. Dacus said.

Seven & i’s new fresh-food push in the United States orients it squarely in a place already stocked with competition.

“Prepared food is increasingly what sets different convenience brands apart,” said Jeff Lenard, a vice president at the National Association of Convenience Stores. Prepared goods have relatively high profit margins, particularly important for convenience stores that face declining sales of traditional staples, including tobacco and gasoline, Mr. Lenard said.

In the United States, 7-Eleven is the biggest convenience store chain, but the market is fragmented. Tens of thousands of store operators compete for fresh food, not only with one another but also with fast-food retailers.

Mr. Dacus, 64, has worked in retail for more than three decades. He was on the Seven & i board of directors when he was tapped to spread overseas the qualities that make 7-Eleven so loved in Japan.

In the past, he said, “we took a low-risk, low-return approach.” Management was too focused on Japan and too hands-off with operations in other countries. “We could have been much more aggressive,” he said. “The flip side of that is there’s that much opportunity out there for us as we shift our focus.”

Industry experts and Mr. Dacus acknowledge, however, that there are a number of reasons the Japanese convenience store model cannot easily be replicated in the United States.

Two decades ago, the Japanese convenience store FamilyMart tried to introduce its concept to the West Coast, but the business struggled to adapt. The company found it difficult to convince Americans that a convenience store could be more than a gas station selling snacks. By 2015, all the stores had closed.

Challenges include the difficulty of transporting fresh food to locations in the United States far from city centers. In Japan, the average convenience store receives multiple fresh-food deliveries per day. Beyond that, “it’s the ways in which they maintain stock and freshness, attention to detail,” said Gavin Whitelaw, executive director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard.

by River Akira Davis, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Kentaro Takahashi

[ed. Can't wait. See also: Why 7-Eleven and Other Convenience Stores in Japan Are So Special (NYT).]