Gleaning & Observations
June 1, 2013
Tough on Law and Order: Homeless tents block the streets. Drug use is rampant. A Whole Foods flagship store recorded 568 emergency calls over 13 months as machete- gun- and knife-wielding people threatened employees and defecated on the floor. Amazon, which owns the upscale food chain, threw in the towel and closed the store. As have Old Navy, Gap, Saks, Office Depot and Nordstrom, a few of the 19 stores that once populated the downtown Union Square area.
San Francisco officials know when enough is enough. Susan and Joe Meyers were dealt with severely when they placed a book-sharing cabinet and a bench in front of their house. Run on the honor system (which might have contributed to the inability of the local regulators to understand its purpose), The Little Free Library allows residents to take or leave a book, no charge, or thumb through the stack while seated on the bench, perhaps tossing one of the free dog biscuits if accompanied by a pet.
Acting on a single complaint, perhaps filed over the city’s 311 call line, city inspectors ordered the Meyers to “Remove unpermitted encroachments from public way” reports the WSJ, or purchase a $1,402 “Minor Sidewalk Encroachment Permit”. A local official concedes, “This is a situation of a well-intentioned rule gone wrong,” and is working on a simplified, cheaper permitting process.
Certainly an improvement on a former San Francisco police commissioner and “Progressive” candidate for Mayor who, reports a Bay area local newspaper, advised someone complaining he or she found crime in the city a shattering experience, “Maybe city living just isn’t for you.”
Power corrupts: In India one Rajesh Vishwas, a government food inspector, was picnicking with friends when he dropped his brand new, $1,200 Samsung Galaxy S63 Ultra cellphone into a reservoir. The phone, claimed Mr. Vishwas, contained official government data.
Some villagers spent two days diving for the gadget, reports the NYT, but had no luck. So the bereft Mr. Vishwas rented a diesel pump and drained about three feet of water from the reservoir over the next two days, “by some estimates, enough to irrigate 1,500 acres of farmland.”
The good news is that the phone was found. The bad news is that it was unusable. The worse news for Mr. Vishwas is that officials in the water-short country say “He will face consequences for draining the water, and this won’t be tolerated.”
The Old School Ain’t What It Used To Be: Schools in several states have adopted what is called “equitable grading”. The idea is to measure what the student knows about the subject at the end of a term without penalties for behavior, which the method’s adherents say, according to the WSJ, “can introduce bias”. By judging only what the student knows at the end of the term, the method downplays homework and tests, which favor those with a stable home environment. The grading scale starts at 49 or 50 per cent rather than zero so that a few missed assignments don’t prompt those students to give up.
Result: honors students don’t bother with homework and exams during the term. Some teachers worry that students will leave school with “a false sense of reality” -- believing they can always skip work and play catch-up with no penalty.
In New York there is a new topic on the agenda, the modern version of respect your elders. The hope is that high school students who study “ageism” will abandon stereotypes and relate better to old folks, who might be 35 or 46 or 72 according to a survey of students. “Senior centers” is out, “older adult centers” is in. Photos of older adults struggling with calisthenics are out, photos of older adults doing amazing exercises that younger people can’t manage are in.
Teachers hope that foreign usages, “wrinklies” in Australia, “oldies” in Britain, do not rear their ageist heads here.