Farrah Bostic

If this person had read my whole thread in good faith they wouldn’t have decided this was the path to take.

Ordinary grandmas absolutely do go to protests and some are NIMBYs - of course! - but they’re not paying for the lawsuits & funding the propositions & campaigns.

That’s all I’m saying.

I don’t think that and didn’t say that. I said there’s rich people paying for the organizing.

Again! I’m sure normies go to the protests. But they’re organized by people who are politically connected. And those people either have a lot of money or are connected to people who do.

And when it comes to local politics, $15k, $50k, $250k or whatever goes a LONG way.

You don’t *have* to be rich to set up a website and buy some ads, but to conceal the source of those ads behind website design agencies in Colorado and lawyers in Manhattan and so on, well, you’re either wealthy or connected to the wealthy.

But then again I live somewhere that a completely astroturfed campaign with no clear attachment to any local people popped up to oppose closing the local (private) airport.

They did a better job of concealing their identities, probably because all they did was anonymously buy ads from Meta.

It’s very messy and kind of confusing and I don’t live in SF, but it’s not unlike NYC politics where all sorts of people who should not be around politics and campaign donations are nevertheless very much around, giving cash to reporters in a bag of chips, things like that.

And to tell you the truth, the way big city machine politics works is fairly disgusting.

Why is a software engineer who owns a media company that hasn’t updated its website in 10 years consolidated as a family liaison in the SFUSD after running for school board and making vile antitrans comments?

I’m sorry that I have time on my hands to search through LinkedIn profiles, domain registrations, instagram posts, local news coverage and financial disclosure databases to show that where there is a nimby protest there is a (often very modest!) donation from a group of very wealthy people.

It is absolutely, 100% true that middle class folks participate in these protests. That they don’t want certain kinds of development. That they believe (rightly, often!) that they are excluded from deliberation.

But there’s always money around, and what the money wants, the money gets.

BigMoneySF: How one group quickly became the 800-pound gorilla of S.F. politics Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, started in 2020 and led partly by Republican donors, is now San Francisco's top political spender.

That PAC is funded by tech founders, billionaires, republicans, network state types, etc.

Loads of reporting on the money behind the NIMBY movements here: missionlocal.org/2024/04/bigm...

And here: www.phoenixprojectnow.com

Okay so another 45 min to discover that the owner of the San Francisco Sunset Community Alliance (which organized a lot of the opposition to 2550 Irving) website is someone who works for SFUSD, ran for school board, and owns a media co that got 6-figures from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco.

I am going to start screen capping the absurd answers. It routinely not only gets it wrong, it tells me my prompt is wrong, when… it isn’t.

In response to “who played young Robert Redford in Sneakers” Google’s AI summary says “young Martin bishop (Robert Redford’s character) in Sneakers was played by Jo Marr (as college-aged cosmo, though Redford played bishop) and River Phoenix played the young hacker Carl but the actor playing young Redford’s counterpart in the flashback, cosmo, was Ben Kingsley (who played the older Cosmo) while Jo smart played the college-aged cosmo in the intro.”

Google’s AI summary function can’t work out the answer to anything.

It’s like if you asked Trump this question, the way it nonsensically twists itself around the wrong answer.

From the @wsj.com chief foreign correspondent

(Meanwhile we know when they’re coming because the leaf blowers are blaring.)

Anyway.

Nimbyists aren’t middle class hippie freaks. They’re people with family offices and David Yurman jewelry collections.

By wealthy I mean they have enough money to simply wait out through lawsuits & demands for environmental impact studies the local govt, who is not as deep pocketed as the large number of rich people who all want the homes they visit about 30 nights a year to be in a place that Carrie’s no sound.

A wealthy family in a neighboring village prevented letting the middle school turn its lawn into a play field for school PE classes because they didn’t want to hear the noise.

So the kids have to cross a road every delivery truck speeds through to get to the village owned park behind it.

I live in a community like this.

There is an actual culture war between millionaires and billionaires here. They fight over things like the local airport & private jets.

It’s the finance weekenders and the construction company owners.

The middle class is not at the center of the action.

The photo from earlier thread features a dozen obviously wealthy people.
A quick search of the org sponsoring the ballot measure shows its major donor is someone who does angel investing through a family office. So, as you can see, totally ordinary parents & grandparents.

I am interested in what the children of such violent people will turn out to be.

Laptops in the Long Run: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program in Rural Peru Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

One Laptop Per Child, 10 years later: "we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression... computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills" www.nber.org/papers/w34495

The real task isn’t “teaching people to spot misinformation.” It’s rebuilding conditions where verification, deliberation and accountability are possible. Critical thinking only works when the world around it gives those skills a place to take root.

Finland is one comparatively successful model, but not just because schools teach critical thinking. Finland has high social trust, strong public-service media and coherent institutions. The whole system supports verification and open deliberation, you can’t copy the surface without the structure.

I have seen some saying “crimes against humanity” might be more apt here.

War crimes, human rights crimes, murder - it’s all crimes.

But we get what Gonzalez argued was a risk - that not honoring the laws of war could “undermine military culture which emphasizes the highest standards of conduct.”

Well see, some (all?) of the Geneva Convention provisions on how to treat enemy combatants were “rendered obsolete” or “quaint”, and anyway non-state actors (“terrorists”) aren’t covered so like can it even be war crimes? <sarcastic>

nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEB...

It really cannot be stressed enough that if we don’t have birthright citizenship we don’t have citizenship.

The only Americans who have any proof of citizenship are either naturalized adults or the tiny fraction of natural born citizens who are born abroad. Everyone else has birthright citizenship.

I’m not sure I can think of something worse than screwing in plywood while propping yourself up on your knees on floor joists. Just 1.5” wide pieces of lumber torturing the knee.

If this is part of your job & we ever cross paths, please let me buy you a drink or at least some ice packs and advil.

Stancil: “Like there is no possible way to explain that consumer sentiment peaked in APRIL 2021”

The explanation, and what happened next:

1. data.sca.isr.umich.edu/reports.php?...

2. www.crisesnotes.com/one-election...

3. www.kff.org/medicaid/an-...

4. jacobin.com/2025/09/bide...

A thing I think is rarely captured in these surveys is that a lot of people follow news accounts on social media sites. In countless interviews people have told me they "subscribe" to various news sources, but often mean they "follow" the news outlet's social media account.

When some men say "masculinity" they mean violence.