Colin Downs-Razouk

@MattBruenig @AlecStapp Also, should we be looking at the census Supplemental Poverty Measure instead? CA and MS have almost the same supplemental poverty.

@AlecStapp Due to cost disease, you are meant to adjust for state differences in wages for workers that are comparable to teachers. NCES publishes an index for this called CWIFT. CA spends same as LA and MS.

This is a really astonishing claim: Students in Mississippi & Louisiana score higher on reading tests than students in California & New York despite spending way less money per pupil and having higher child poverty rates. Decided to double check the data because, if true, this should be alarming for blue state leaders. And yup, it checks out. Reading performance (NAEP 2024, Grade 4 reading, average scale score): Mississippi: 219 Louisiana: 216 New York: 215 California: 212 Child poverty (SAIPE; “estimated percent of people age 0–17 in poverty,” 2023): Louisiana: 25.2% Mississippi: 24.3% New York: 18.6% California: 15.0% Per-pupil spending (public K–12 “current expenditures per pupil,” FY2023, inflation-adjusted to FY2023 dollars) New York: $29,588 California: $18,568 Louisiana: $14,822 Mississippi: $12,238 It should be unacceptable to spend that much more taxpayer money while delivering worse results for students.

@TheOmniZaddy @KelseyTuoc @noahsloss I don’t disagree that some sort of automatic cost of living/inflation adjustment would be better than this bargaining happening every several years. It feels a lot like the federal debt ceiling, and equally dysfunctional.

@TheOmniZaddy @KelseyTuoc @noahsloss I don’t know if I would characterize anything about this plan as “perfectly clear”. Are the comparison private sector wages local, national? For SFUSD, would the comparison wages be private school teacher wages or all wages? Private schools don’t require teaching credentials.

"many teachers are making below $109,000" this is like a strike perfectly engineered in a lab to be maximally unsympathetic

@KelseyTuoc @noahsloss SFUSD has a teacher shortage, notably with a number of TK classrooms with no permanent teacher. I think without the threat of a strike teacher pay would be lower and the shortage would be worse.

@KelseyTuoc @noahsloss The thing is, for SFUSD and other unions striking is their only leverage. SFUSD has done many strike *votes* over the last several years, without which their wages would probably not have kept up with inflation.

@KelseyTuoc @noahsloss The purpose of a union is not advancing public interest. And who is to say a demand is “reasonable”? Sounds like you just want public sector unions to not have the ability to strike at all.

@noahsloss I am enormously hesitant about public sector strikes, but can be persuaded to support them if there's a strong case for a public interest or if the demands are reasonable. Neither are true here.

@SFMTA_Muni This shuttle bus service is really delayed. It seems like there are two busses but they’re taking a long break in between or something. Waited more than 20 minutes.

UPDATE: Westbound N trains will switchback at Judah/19th. No Eastbound rail service btwn Judah/La Playa & 19th. Transfer from bus shuttles at 19th for svc to downtown.

@SFMTA_Muni inbound N train seems stuck at Sunset, any idea what’s wrong or how long until it’s fixed?

@SFMTA_Muni what’s up with IB N Judah?

@MHurabiell @SFMTA_Muni @MikeChenSF @JulieKirschbaum @DanielLurie @JanetTarlov Your idea would definitely cost more. The oak street quick build involves no paving, just paint and bollards. Cheaper and faster, and also a better solution. Have you been in the panhandle? Where would the path go? Right through the playground and basketball courts?

An open request to .@SFMTA_Muni .@MikeChenSF .@JulieKirschbaum .@DanielLurie Alfonso Felder .@JanetTarlov So many street redesign projects have damaged our city. (Valencia bike lane cost millions and is now millions to reverse.) Please re-consider the Oak Street Quick Build - there is a better solution. I cannot take credit for this, but several .@connectedsf members & X commenters have suggested: Add another paved lane in the panhandle just for bikes. This would cost significantly less and makes more sense than repurposing a driving lane which would create congestion and stress for hard-working residents. .@sfchronicle .@sfstandard .@kqed .@MissionLoco @MLNow .@EricaJSandberg .@bettersoma .@sfmayoroffice form.jotform.com/250835920347156

@nicksummy @big_pedestrian And you could have googled that yourself

@colindr @big_pedestrian This map says California gets 99.7% of its road funding from usage fees….

In 2021, states spent over $200 billion on roads and highways. Depending on the state 80% to 35% of this comes from the general fund. Meaning everyone pays with their taxes whether they drive or not.

@nicksummy @big_pedestrian Let me Google that for you: taxfoundation.org/data/all/state…

@big_pedestrian lol the map is from 2016 and pretty sure this doesn’t include gas tax. I know for a fact California isn’t using their general fund for 40% of their roads.

@MHurabiell @SFMTA_Muni What is a “finance expert”? Sounds like you’d like to just burn more money on consultants. What would you like SFMTA to spend less money on, and how much could they save on it?

.⁦@SFMTA_Muni⁩ working group focused 99% on increasingly squeezing the public instead of cutting costs. Where are the finance experts? There is a way to cut significant costs and not cut MUNI … but there are too many pet projects getting in the way.

@SFMTA_Muni the N train that stops at 34th and Judah at 8am this morning was 5 min early, and now this 8:10am train is packed. Doesn’t help that it’s a train with lots of seats.

@KelseyTuoc It’s funny because his suggestions get worse and worse through the memo. It just reads like someone who’s upset his colleagues are liberal, and the diversity programs make him feel bad. It’s obviously going to piss off women (it pisses me off) so no wonder he was fired. 🤷🏻‍♂️

read the memo here: web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teachin…

Yeah, all right, let's talk about James Damore. It's been eight years, and I really doubt Harj (who was my boss at the time) is the only person for whom it was a formative experience. For those of you who have no recollection of any of this, either because you are wisely an offline person or because you got outraged for five minutes and then forgot all about it, James Damore was a Google software engineer who wrote a memo arguing that, while diversity and inclusion were good goals, bias was not the main reason there weren't more women in tech, and differences in personality between men and women probably explained a lot of it. There was a lot in the memo that felt like a distraction to me, or where I had a nitpick, but fundamentally it was not only basically correct (women are less likely than men to become software engineers, and this is not only because of bias), but also Damore was saying this for the sake of having a more productive conversation about how to get more women into tech, a goal that everyone around him was fervently espousing. The memo has a painful-in-hindsight quality of earnestness: "you want more women in tech, and I think you're mistaken about how to get there! if I show you some published psychology research we can actually design better means to your goal!". Anyway. The internet was outraged. He got fired from Google. And he applied to the tech hiring startup I worked at, Triplebyte, which offered background-blind screening to anyone who wanted to be a software engineer. We really believed in the mission, at Triplebyte. I think I ended up kind of badly calibrated about how earnest to expect people to be everywhere else. We found people working as janitors and line cooks and homemakers who could code, and we got them 6 figure jobs, and we were proud of it. James Damore did very well on our tests. I got assigned to write him a profile for our companies. And then people freaked out. A lot of them had the impression that he would create a hostile environment for any woman he worked with, and thought that trying to help him get a new job was tantamount to endorsing everything in his wildly controversial memo. I didn't even like the memo that much, but I was kind of horrified, because - it's one thing to get fired for talking about politics at work in a way that causes a massive national firestorm. I kind of expect that we would all get fired for that. But it is another thing entirely to get effectively blacklisted from your industry, to have people decide on the basis of your political opinions that we shouldn't even put you up on the platform and let companies decide individually whether to schedule interviews. Tech jobs were not that hard to come by in 2017 if you were really good at your job, and Damore was. Firing isn't that threatening to software engineers. Blacklisting is terrifying. I'd been at Triplebyte for like six months at this point, it was my first job after graduation, and I was honestly way out of my lane, but I made a pretty big fuss internally. (It helped that I suspected a lot of people agreed with me but I was a woman and it was safer for me to say it.) I said that we were not in the business of deciding who had good politics, that we shared this country with many people who profoundly disagreed with each other, that companies could assess for themselves if he worked respectfully with female engineers, and that we should put him on the site and let them decide. We did. And then Harj was immediately contacted by recruiters from companies we worked with that were horrified that we had. They felt that by not banning him from our platform we were endorsing his memo, that we were showing values not in line with their priorities. Harj talks about this more in the linked podcast. James Damore was egregiously wronged. To my knowledge he's a good software engineer with extremely reasonable, approximately accurate opinions about the reasons there were fewer women in software engineering, which he shared in good faith, and a lot of people who should've known better really did try to drive him out of the industry for it. It was wrong. If it is done to people on the basis of any other political opinion it is also wrong then. We need, as a society, the ability to live with disagreement, to dislike each other without trying to destroy each other, to find common ground instead of finding heretics; I believed that at Peak Woke and I believe it now.

@mattyglesias If you’re ever wondering why Ezra is more successful than you, it’s in part because he would not communicate like this. Using a word that has been a slur for the last 30+ years is beneath you, or so I thought.

@SFMTA_Muni Thanks for the reply. An announcement on the train would be good.

@colindr Due to an ongoing trackway switch issue just past Embarcadero, we're having to cross eastbound trains over after Montgomery Station. This is causing downtown congestion, so it will take longer for J & N trains to proceed into the subway from the surface.

@SFMTA_Muni N Judah is stopped at duboce and church for 5 min. Driver hasn’t said anything (or speakers aren’t working). Any idea what’s going on?

@TheUnsaid11 @lihanlihan Opposition to prop k is not about pedestrian safety. The same people opposing prop k opposed slow streets, and currently oppose intersection daylighting. They only care about cars and parking.

@lihanlihan It's generational, local, & racial because the Outer Sunset is predominantly Asian, and have kids that go to schools in the area. The Prop K bike bros want to divert Rush Hour traffic into cross streets where kids walk to school. There's already a huge beach, & dedicated paths.

The Great Highway madness: Prop. K has become one of the nastiest political fights in this election season, sowing division along economic, racial, and generational lines. sfstandard.com/2024/10/02/gre…

@JoelEngardio Don’t listen to the haters, you’re doing a good job, keep it up.

San Franciscans should be able to decide whether the Great Highway becomes an oceanside park or remains a road for cars. I will not remove a ballot measure under threat of recall. A ballot measure lets residents who oppose a park organize against it. And it gives supporters a chance to make their case for why we need it. Every voter deserves to have their voice heard. What to do with the Great Highway is a policy issue that reasonable people disagree on. I believe voters should get to hear the facts and make their own decision. I understand why people are nervous about turning the Great Highway into a park. I get that being stuck in traffic or not being able to find parking means spending less time with family. It’s a concern I take very seriously. My husband and I drive the same roads and deal with the same traffic that every Sunset resident endures. We don’t want more traffic on Sunset Boulevard and we don’t want drivers speeding through our neighborhood streets as shortcuts. As the city supervisor for the Sunset, I’ve been studying every angle of this issue since before I was elected. I’ve met with many experts on parks and open space, traffic mitigation, small business activation, and beach erosion. The community can now weigh in with their vote. I’ve always talked about the pending closure of the highway South of Sloat due to coastal erosion and how it would create the opportunity for a permanent oceanside park between Lincoln and Sloat. The compromise to allow weekend closures was a good thing two years ago, but a lot has changed since then. Notably, voters in 2022 said no to a fulltime reopening of the road to cars. This year, the Coastal Commission denied an appeal to end the compromise and bring cars back 24/7. I’ve come to believe that transforming a section of the Great Highway into an iconic oceanside park is the right thing to do. Creating this space will help the environment, boost local merchants, and bring people joy. I also believe it’s a once-in-a-century opportunity to create a catalyst for a renaissance in the Sunset and San Francisco. As we plan this park, we can ensure westside residents can still get to work, take their kids to school, drive an elderly parent to the doctor, and run essential errands. We will implement solutions to keep traffic away from local streets and make it flow better on arterials like Sunset Boulevard and Lincoln Way. We’re only talking about closing the section of the Great Highway between Lincoln and Sloat, which has never had any on/off ramps for cars to access the Sunset. The Great Highway north of Lincoln will remain open to cars 24/7 for direct access between Richmond and Sunset residents. Also, remember that the section of Great Highway south of Sloat is set to close due to coastal erosion — California’s Coastal Commission will not let the city rebuild this road at the expense of the beach. This has already been legislated and is a done deal. Without a direct connection to Daly City, we have to think about what is the best use of the section between Lincoln and Sloat. I believe we can reimagine it as an oceanside park. Read more details about the ballot measure and the plans to mitigate traffic in my blog post: engardio.com/blog/great-hig… Opponents of the park recently threatened me with a recall if I didn’t pull the ballot measure for this November’s election that asks voters to decide if the city should plan for a section of the Great Highway to become a permanent oceanside park. I put this measure on the ballot with four other supervisors (Dorsey, Mandelman, Melgar, and Preston) along with support from Mayor Breed. My colleagues and I are asking a momentous question: Should a coastal highway remain what it was the past century or should it become something new for the next 100 years? Our coast is not owned by drivers, cyclists, or one neighborhood. It belongs to all San Franciscans. A decision of this magnitude deserves to be made directly by voters. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi attended a Fourth of July parade I helped organize on the Great Highway on a day it was closed to traffic. She gave a speech to the crowd, which gathered around her. As she spoke, she looked at the community of families, kids, seniors, local musicians, and artists who expressed their desire to make the space a full-time park. “This is a dream,” Pelosi said, “and let’s hope that it can come true.” She also spoke about the need for everyone to have a say in the decision. “Everybody might not have his or her way at the end of the day,” Pelosi said. “But at least they know their voices will be heard, and that is what a democracy is about.” For residents who are opposed to the park or undecided, I invite you to imagine the benefits of transforming the section of the Great Highway between Lincoln and Sloat: — It’s good for the environment as we face coastal erosion and climate change. — Small businesses throughout the Sunset district will benefit. Two train lines offer a direct ride to the beach. Locals and tourists alike will become new neighborhood customers as they hop off the train for lunch, dinner, or drinks on their way to or from the park. — Generations of kids will learn how to ride a bike and play in a car-free space, seniors will have better access to the coast, and communities will have a gathering place to celebrate art, music, and culture. The decision to tear down the Embarcadero freeway was controversial 35 years ago, just as the decision about the Great Highway is today. I wonder, will the Great Highway for cars become as forgotten as the old Embarcadero freeway? Will our kids and generations after them be able to imagine San Francisco without an oceanside park? Will we be the lucky ones who get to create this joyful place that will define San Francisco for the next century? We get to decide this November.