Talk About Tennis 2.0

Only thing I would add. In TRAFFIC (Tom Vanderbilt), the author talks about how there is a phenomenon called "risk homeostasis". Roughly, there is a floor to how low traffic deaths can go because there is a point at which, because the cars and roads are so good, people start driving faster and more aggressively. An example: the driver of the brand new MB S500 believes he is in a super safe car, which he is, but he takes more risks with it. So the increase in safety is negated by the new, riskier attitude.
Excellent post, Dry.

Thanks for the article @dry.

How it started:

In California, College Students Are Now Officially Considered an Environmental Menace
A local judge has ruled that UC–Berkeley must freeze its enrollment so it can assess the ecological impact of its undergrads.
BY HENRY GRABAR
AUG 31, 2021 10:26 AM

How’d we get here? Under California law, universities are periodically required to prepare a long-term development plan that includes enrollment forecasts and an environmental impact study. In 2005, UC–Berkeley produced one projecting that its headcount would stabilize at about 33,500 students. Instead, the school ended up enrolling more than 42,000 by 2020, with plans to admit more still in the years to come.

The university didn’t think that welcoming more students to campus required it to perform a whole new environmental review. But a state appeals court in San Francisco disagreed in 2020, ruling that increasing enrollment counted as a “project” that needed to be evaluated under the CEQA, just like building a stadium or dorm would be.

In doing so, the judges sided with a local community group, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, which sued UC–Berkeley in 2019 and set the stage for last week’s lower court decision officially hitting pause on the school’s enrollment ambitions. California’s flagship public university must now assess the ecological cost of its student body at once. (A spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that school officials were “optimistic that we can file documents with the court very soon that will satisfy the judgment.”)

(...)

Bokovoy’s view is that the university ought to have built more housing to keep up with its rising enrollment. Over the course of our conversation, however, it became clear that he didn’t actually want Berkeley (the city or the university) to build that housing now. Instead, he wants UC-Berkeley to establish a satellite campus on the industrial waterfront 5 miles to the north, on the other side of the freeway. A Berkeley graduate himself, Bokovoy warned of dire consequences if the university added more students without additional infrastructure.

“We’ll end up like Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur—dense Asian cities where there’s no transportation network,“ he said. “Nobody’s talking about that.”

https://slate.com/business/2021/08/judg ... ation.html

How it's going:

I'm seeing a lot of anger about NIMBYs in the comments, so it seems like there's some ill-intent here that I'd need to read more about.

But as someone who knows and loves Berkeley from my childhood (my mom went to grad school there), that enrollment number is insane. Undergrad enrollment in the late 90s/early 2000s was in the neighborhood of 20-23k. It's 42,000 now?!?!

The city of Berkeley is small. The campus is small. The area was almost nearing congested was when I was little. To think they crammed an extra 20k-30k since I was living there is crazy. Where are they putting the dorms?

Also. If you are going to use Asian cities as examples, get them right. I have been to Kuala Lumpur and, at least in 2009, it had a superb public transportation system. To the point that the direct train from the Airport to the central train station costs about $5, and takes you there in 20 minutes.
Petronas was surprised when I once told them I would get to my hotel by myself. The chauffeured car they would send to pick me up would take at least 45 minutes. And the scenery was not so pretty.

His use of Asian cities is seen by some as him saying the quiet part out loud.

Coffee klatch or rally. You be the judge.

Kevin

One of the worst things I've ever seen done by a politician.

But good on the kid on the left.

Hopefully the ones who did not remove the masks when told to will be the leaders of the future.

As a side note, I really dislike the exaggeration that is so commonplace in society today. It is, of course and sadly, a product of people on 'social media' needing attention paid to them.
De Santis is a jerk - fine. And saying what he said in that clip was obviously stupid and wrong. But he did not YELL at those students. That's a sensationalistic over-dramatisation of the circumstance - something that is woefully typical today.
To exaggerate like this is to minimize the times when something very grave actually happens.

Just in time for interrupt the State of the Union address as planned to protest the mandates that don't exist.