Lee Hepner
@LeeHepner
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anti-monopoly law and policy at @econliberties . sf, ca. 🏳️🌈🍃
San Francisco, California
Joined May 2010
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Pinned Tweet
It's been nearly six months since the close of trial proceedings in US v Google, but we're back for closing arguments this week.
The delay provides a useful reminder: Time is on the side of the monopolist.
How we got here, and what comes next, below.
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Hasbro, who owns the rights to Monopoly, has gone to great lengths to conceal that it was invented in 1903 by a leftist Georgist named Elizabeth Magie, out of her frustration with the grotesque income inequality of her time.
Magie originally called it "The Landlord Game."
Margot Robbie to produce a ‘MONOPOLY’ movie for Lionsgate.
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“Uber has developed algorithms for tailoring customer prices based on what they believe individual customers would be willing to pay and tailoring payments to individual drivers so they are as low as possible to get them to accept trips.” 👀👀👀👀
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The owners of 399 9th St painted over San Francisco's oldest, continuously operating queer bar this week. In the middle of Pride Month, no less.
Pardon the lapse in civility, but fuck gentrification.
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This is what showed up to evict black mothers from their home in Oakland last night. This is the weaponized arm of speculative real estate investment capital.
#Moms4Housing
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At McKinsey they teach politicians how to deflect from valid criticism that they’re not doing their job by responding to made-up criticism that they are doing their job too hard.
We are prepared to face this kind of criticism for being too aggressive on airline performance and customer service.
The truth is that USDOT has both the responsibility and the authority to support the traveling public, and we will continue to do so.
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The path to profitability for Uber and Lyft has always been about depressing wages for gig workers.
If a company can’t afford to pay their drivers a livable wage, maybe that company doesn’t deserve to exist.
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Newsom just vetoed SB90, a bill that would have capped insulin copays at $35/mo. It passed both chambers unanimously.
Impossible not to see this in context of Blue Shield, Anthem & United Health contributing tens of millions to Newsom and his initiatives over the past decade.
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An independent, family-owned hardware store in San Francisco closed down one of its 7 locations this weekend. Their stated reasoning:
“San Franciscans need to understand that the efficacy of their neighborhood shopping areas is precarious due to their addiction to Amazon.”
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Me reading the news that the Fillmore Safeway is closing because of shoplifting, with no mention that Safeway was acquired in 2015 by Cerberus Capital Management who are now selling to a developer with no observable plan because the land is more valuable than the grocery store:
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This is a jaw-dropping data point:
“SFPD continues to arrest a number of Black people equal to the entire Black population of the city every 87 months.”
1. OUR NEW REPORT: SF’s $689M police dept. fails to solve crimes, arrests Black residents at the highest rate of any major CA city, and reports faulty data.
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That fleeting moment where Chair Khan looks into the camera and into the eyes of every single Apple executive and board member at once.
🚨NEW: Apple didn't allow
@jonstewart
to interview
@linakhanFTC
or discuss certain topics when his show was on AppleTV+
A clear example of concerns
@JusticeATR
highlighted in its antitrust suit.
Apple can use its power to exercise control over content it doesn't approve of.
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This refers to a change in pricing strategy implemented by Uber in 2022 and probably explains why rides feel much more expensive recently.
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40 out of 40 California State Senators agree to
#BreakUpTicketmaster
.
SB 829 ends Ticketmaster's exclusive ticket seller agreements with venues, a vertical restraint at the core of their monopoly power.
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Just tried to call in a takeout order to Arinell’s and some guy picks up and yells GO AWAY WE HATE YOU and hangs up.
Hands down my favorite pizza joint in SF.
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I can’t imagine the new owners who jacked up the rent nearly 300% to constructively evict The Stud are particularly interested in replacing this building with dense, affordable housing leased through the City’s trans housing program!
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Credit where due: Hubert Horan has done yeoman's work to shed light on Uber's business practices. Inspiring is an understatement.
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The culprit here is $11,800/month in rent. Throughout the pandemic, Scarlet Sage never missed a payment.
Neighborhood commercial landlords need to come back to reality. Their failure to stabilize cornerstone small businesses is a crisis.
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Judge Corley, a Biden appointee, has just ruled against the FTC's bid to enjoin Microsoft-Activision, the largest tech merger in history.
The Opinion is laced with inexplicable disdain for the FTC, and replete with legal and factual errors. The FTC should appeal. 🧵
“When Microsoft’s own emails say they are building a ‘moat’ and trying to ‘spend’ their competitors ‘out of business,’ that should be enough for the court to hit pause,” says
@LeeHepner
.
His full statement on the Microsoft-Activision result in
@Vox
.👇
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First the street fireworks, now the annual hill bomb. The Mayor and SFPD are crushing small but spontaneous things that give this city life.
SFPD has kenneled several dozen seemingly young kids & skaters at Dolores Park after an hours-long slow-moving chase to shut down the annual “hill bomb”
Cops have trapped the group between rows of officers
The group is being forced to sit, it is unclear if they are under arrest
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Woke up wondering how it's okay for governments to tell people they can no longer work and still require them to pay rent.
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Hey, this sounds strangely like the privatization and financialization of everything else people need to survive
THREAD: Pennsylvania law encourages municipalities to sell their water and sewage systems to private corporations, then allows those corporations to jack up utility bills to the benefit of investors.
Today, PA state senators heard about what this law is doing to communities.
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Incredible. One day after
@californiapuc
voted to open public streets to AVs, incidents across the city of gridlock and blocked emergency vehicles. What an absolute embarrassment.
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“One of the challenges we face in San Francisco is we need the rent to go back up.”
It is so refreshing to hear YIMBYs say this stuff out loud. Private developers have no plan for building new housing when rents actually go down.
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New disastrous monopoly just dropped. Two private equity firms control 60% of the carrot market, driving a 40% price increase on carrots since 2019. Not to mention they’re obliterating water supply in the Cuyama Valley northwest of LA.
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The California Assembly just passed an outright ban on noncompete agreements (they were previously void and unenforceable, but still used to bind workers who don’t know or have the resources to assert their rights).
The vote was bipartisan: 72-0.
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As far as I can tell, nothing in the FTC's proposed rule on noncompete agreements prevents an employer from retaining their employees by offering better wages and working conditions...
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Cole Hardware owner Rick Karp goes into much more detail on the store’s website.
“The next time you need something you know your local shop can provide, stroll through your door instead of scrolling from your couch.”
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Spoiler alert: it’s corporate consolidation.
NEW: Have you noticed a new train derailment story every day this year?
It’s not just you. There are 1700 train derailments every year and the rate of train accidents has risen 27% over the last 10 years.
This is a safety crisis. We investigated what’s behind it.
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The Mayor has appointed 4 out of 7 School Board Members, the City Attorney, the Assessor-Recorder, 3 Supervisors, and - if Prop H succeeds tonight - the District Attorney. San Francisco is an extremely strong Mayor town.
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Hmm, former Paul Weiss antitrust & securities defense counsel Ankush Khardori? The firm repping Google in the ad tech case? The same guy? Got it.
NY Mag's Ankush Khardori talked to FTC alums about
@linakhanFTC
's leadership.
"The most common area of concern was Khan’s temperament and management style...[which explains] why the agency has been bringing cases with shaky legal underpinnings..."
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Live Nation-Ticketmaster tries to explain why ticket prices are so high by saying they are a powerless agent of event venues. "Fans tend not to understand that."
Ok, so they think fans are dumb. Here's another fact: Live Nation owns 64% of major venues in the country. 🧵...
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Speculative venture capital plundered San Francisco and then pulled out, firing tens of thousands of employees, spurring a bank crisis & leaving office space at record levels of vacancy.
Garry Tan has a giant hole to dig himself out of before he talks about “techies” saving SF.
.
@garrytan
took a tally of the recent political victories for what he characterized as "common sense" in San Francisco, citing the successful recalls of three school board members and former DA
@chesaboudin
as examples.
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TIL that AA flight attendants have to arrive to gate an hour before flight, open up boarding 35 mins prior, but don’t start getting paid until doors close.
That’s absurd even without unprecedented flight delays and cancellations.
99% 🔥✊🏼
BREAKING: 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines just voted to authorize a strike.
These workers haven't gotten a raise since 2019, and with 99% voting yes they're ready to win big.
Pilots at American Airlines just won a 46% raise, now it's flight attendants' turn.
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I absolutely love this story on who is reshaping the Dem Party in SF: lonely, very wealthy (median home price in Sea Cliff is $9.8M) Republicans.
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Those are actual serious concerns, but no. It's driverless cars. Driverless cars are probably the weirdest thing about SF right now.
Even crazier is how a totally unaccountable body like
@californiapuc
is about to write a blank check for 1000s more of them on our streets.
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Note how Uber and Lyft frame the degradation of worker conditions as a benefit to consumers. Reprehensible, yet consistent with the construction of our modern economy around a “low price at whatever cost” ethos.
Poverty wages are inconsistent with a fair economy.
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I suspect one reason people say
#DefundThePolice
is because *54* of them have been outside my front door for going on 8 hours responding to a man holding a metal pipe.
Update: Dozens of police officers remain in standoff with Vietnam vet who does not want to drop what appears to be a metal pipe. We are into hour 5 now.
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This was first reported by Mission Local, but goes uncredited here. We are a small, non-profit newsroom, and we work hard to break news.
This is bad form.
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Here’s the moment outside the Department of Elections of anxiety-laden campaign staff and volunteers seeing
@ChesaBoudin
for DA up ~2440 votes and
@DeanPreston
for D5 Supervisor expanding his two-day 35 vote lead to ~170 with nearly all (all?) ballots cast. Amazing.
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Snapped these photos on my way out of City Hall last Friday, not knowing what the decor was for, and remember wondering who would do something sooooo tacky 🥴
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Drug testing welfare recipients. Face-scanning drone surveillance. Reducing reporting of police use of force. Eliminating taxes that fund affordable housing.
This isn’t “progressive.” This is a realignment being forced on San Francisco by a handful of billionaires.
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A very disturbing current pricing trend is the use of surveillance and competitor information exchanges to set prices at "the max amount a customer is willing to pay."
From a lawsuit filed this week alleging every major hotel chain is fixing daily rates above competitive levels:
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Updated.
#BlackLivesMatter
#WeWillNotBeErased
🏳️🌈🔻
The owners of 399 9th St painted over San Francisco's oldest, continuously operating queer bar this week. In the middle of Pride Month, no less.
Pardon the lapse in civility, but fuck gentrification.
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Free Market Urbanist Twitter: "Housing prices in Houston are cheaper because they don't have the byzantine zoning laws of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York."
Houston:
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Wow. Big deal for
@FTC
and
@JusticeATR
to jointly weigh in on algorithmic rent fixing, responsible for rent hikes up to 20% in some markets.
An agreement to use rent fixing software algorithms is per se unlawful. The ability to deviate does not immunize participating landlords.
1. As landlords turn to algorithms to set rents, they should be aware that price fixing through an algorithm is still price fixing.
A brief by
@FTC
& Department of Justice makes clear that there is no AI exemption from the antitrust laws.
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Yeah I think it’s extremely relevant that the writer who believes being homeless and engaging in unsafe drug use is an issue of “choice” is heir to one of the largest landowning oligarchies in California history
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Yesterday's big news was about Westfield mall leaving downtown SF. It was struggling against online retail pre-pandemic, so let's start there...
The larger lesson: people don't want to shop in-person for mass-produced goods they can easily find online.
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Uhh, caught your breath yet? Tech venture capitalists are launching a PAC the day after Election Day… for an election happening 2 years from now… against one of the most effective elected leaders at holding them accountable.
They’re terrified.
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Invitation Homes, née Blackstone, increased rents on 1,900 homes above CA state limits on rent increases, settles for $3.7M.
But sure, private equity & corporate consolidation of housing are just emotional foils that we prop up to achieve some phony moral high ground…
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They buried the lede here: ShotSpotters don’t work. They hurt police response times by sending officers to false alerts. Meanwhile one company rakes in $100M per year while peddling public safety concerns.
NEW: A leaked document reveals the locations of ShotSpotter microphones around the globe, which have been kept secret from both the police that use the system and the public.
@dmehro
and
@joeyneverjoe
have the scoop:
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It’s very sad that we’re losing San Francisco’s last great movie palace because
@apeconcerts
doesn’t like movies or understand the market.
There were two 1400-seat sold out movies at the Castro Theatre yesterday, yet APE says film is dead.
@framelinefest
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Private equity giant Brookfield is acquiring 2,165 apartments in SF, making it the city's largest landlord.
Not mentioned: Brookfield is currently being sued as part of the RealPage price fixing scheme, which has contributed to 12% rent hikes across SF.
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I have lots of friends who visit San Francisco from all over the place. You know the ONE thing they all comment on? Not open air drug markets, not feeling unsafe, not downtown vacancies...
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A dozen rideshare firms are vying to enter the market where Uber and Lyft threw a tantrum over having to pay drivers a livable wage.
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It’s really bad faith to label as “housing supply denialists” those who are fighting for more affordable housing and progressive price controls, to combat the market-driven rent gouging that has become ubiquitous in urban life. Just wantonly bad faith.
Housing supply denialists—which are component of climate denialism, even as so many claim to be progressive—do not respond to evidence.
For some it's identity-based faith, for others its about power. And often the latter pose as the former.
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Safety concerns aside, it's dumb as hell that
@californiapuc
is permitting thousands of profit-generating autonomous cars while roads fall into disrepair and public transit faces a new funding cliff every 6 months.
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The barrier to entry for hot takes about CA election results is acknowledging the following:
$6.5M spent to recall DA Boudin - at $98/vote, the most expense per vote spend in history.
$34M of Caruso’s own money spent to launch his campaign for LA Mayor - 11x his lead opponent.
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The thing about being a California “progressive” is you can get there by supporting things like gun control and LGBTQ representation while being terrible on the issues that actually lift up people living on the margins.
“I hope this goes to the Supreme Court,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said. “And that’s a hell of a statement coming from a progressive Democrat.”
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Today in San Francisco, City leaders are exploiting Amazon’s decision to temporarily close a food access point in the heart of the City as leverage for an off-cycle increase to the police budget.
This, in the city with the highest police-to-citizen staffing ratio in the state.
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Incredible exhibit in
#USvGoogle
, a doc called "Antitrust Basics for Search Team."
First bullet point: "Avoid any reference to 'markets' or 'market share' or dominance.'"
Google evades antitrust scrutiny not with compliance, but by training staff not to talk about violations.🧵
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Now do the United States.
The New York Times studied China’s surveillance capabilities by examining more than 100,000 government bidding documents.
China’s ambition to collect personal data is more expansive and invasive than previously known, our investigation found.
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Another day, another lawsuit alleging property managers used price fixing software to hike rents on 8 million apartments. Dozens of these lawsuits have now been filed across the country.
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Google spent much of the morning telling us defaults don’t matter bc users are free to switch.
DOJ’s first witness, Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian, now reading from a 2007 doc he authored titled “On the Strategic Value of Default Setting to Google.”
Uh oh!
#USvGoogle
🧵
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This story is sad, but you have to understand that restricting a landlord's ability to triple the rent of a 50yo thriving cultural institution would be too much of a burden on the landlord.
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Convenience has the power to make every other consequence irrelevant, and any other option inconceivable.
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Another day, another nytimes reporter embedded in war-torn San Francisco, quoting 4 versions of the same person complaining about their income taxes
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Kind of wild for the DA to openly admit her office can’t bring winning cases. Last week’s big headline, which Jenkins I’m sure is happy to bury, is that her office dismissed 82 drug cases due to SFPD misconduct.
Not really a problem with the courts, is it?
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins ripped the county’s criminal courts on Thursday, saying they free drug dealers from detention and have a poor conviction rate for those who do go to trial, specifically for dealing the deadly drug fentanyl.
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Damning transparency in this “moderate” eblast:
“Redistricting is going better than I could have ever dreamed. The current draft map will flip 3 districts with Progressive Supervisors to moderate majorities.”
This is partisan gerrymandering. The definition of voter suppression.
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Why did DA Jenkins bring this to trial? Why didn’t she charge the former Fire Commissioner who went on a documented bear spray spree against unhoused people?
BREAKING -- SF Jury Acquits Unhoused Man Who Defended Himself Against Death Threats and Bear Spray Attack by Marina District Resident via
@sfdefender
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Now this is how you do a State of the Union address.
"It's an old trick the billionaires play. Time and time again the wealthy divide the masses over single issues, and the rich walk away with all the loot." —
#UAW
President Shawn Fain
#StandUpUAW
#Solidarity
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What an irresponsible tweet. Theft didn’t close this store. Online retail did. From a CVS spokesperson:
“The closure is part of a broader effort announced in November 2021 to reduce CVS's national retail footprint by about 900 stores as customers buy more online.”
San Francisco CVS Where Soda Is Locked Up Will Close
The 499 Haight St. location will shut its doors on Jan. 11. A customer said the store, where soda is locked away, sees daily thefts.
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Counterpoint: they’re leaving bc Elon Musk publicly called for the imprisonment of 2 Jewish Supervisors. Because they’re now receiving violent threats to their homes. Because this escalation, with which GrowSF is complicit, has real consequences. You absolute clown.
SF Supervisors who have quit Twitter: Connie Chan, Dean Preston, Myrna Melgar, Hillary Ronen, Shamann Walton.
Our worst Supervisors can't take the heat when constituents publicly tell them they are doing a bad job. They need to go.
November 2024 we'll have a common sense board.
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Not a single mention of the pending mega-merger of Kroger and Cerberus/Albertsons/Safeway, expected to cause more closures, layoffs, and food deserts. Has anyone asked UFCW for comment, while they fight that larger battle?
The shoplifting narrative is wrong, stale, and boring!
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What kind of clouds were these over SF today? I’d like to invite them to stay for a while
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San Francisco has issued more detailed advice for how to safely have your kitchen renovated than it has for how to safely shelter in a tent if you are homeless.
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Congrats to the 36 online bots who just purchased every ticket to Joni Mitchell’s probably last concert ever in just 30 seconds!
#BreakUpTicketmaster
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The only problem with rent control is it doesn't apply everywhere.
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It's malpractice to write about the D4 or D6 Supervisor races as any sort of referendum on "moderate" or "progressive" policies without mention of the fact that both districts were redrawn 6 months ago to undermine the progressive vote.
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HUGE: Epic Games just won its antitrust case against Google's $46B Play Store empire.
From Epic's Complaint: "Epic does not seek monetary damages for the injuries it has suffered. Instead, Epic seeks injunctive relief that would make good on Google's broken promises."
Boom.
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It’s no secret - the US economy is increasingly controlled by a handful of massive corporations who conspire with each other to increase profits & arbitrarily raise prices on working people.
The
#StopPriceFixing
Act is a model for stability. Let’s go, PA!
@econliberties
Today, I’m introducing the the Stop Price Fixing Act to help put money back in the pockets of working Pennsylvanians. Prices are going up, but we need to ensure that profiteers can’t collude to raise prices just to pad their own profits!
Read more:
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Based on this threat of capital strike, you'd think the law they're upset about was more draconian. It's not. It requires minimum compensation and a process for driver termination.
All this proves is that Uber and Lyft's preferred business model is predicated on harm to drivers.
Inbox: Uber says it will cancel service in greater Minnesota and only provide “premium” services in the Twin Cities if Gov. Tim Walz signs the Uber/Lyft regulations into law
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The obvious condition would be for
@californiapuc
to adopt a nexus study and collect a fee from Cruise/General Motors ($50 billion market cap) and Waymo/Alphabet ($1.66 trillion market cap) to help fully fund road repair and public transit. Not even on the table, afaik.
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I find it so interesting that people have full faith in the private housing market to bring down rents while it openly boasts about new ways to extract as much rent as possible.
🧵Want to know why rents have been skyrocketing? This jaw dropping
@propublica
investigation has one answer--collusion.
@RealPage
's YieldStar proprietary software is helping the nation's biggest landlords and property managers jack up prices together. 1/10
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I think San Francisco should be extremely proud of its public library system. It’s one of the best public information systems in the world. Vote Yes on Prop F to extend stable funding for libraries. 📚
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What if I told you these things are related
@LeeHepner
Driverless cars are not the weirdest thing about SF. The weirdest thing is that we are a rich city totally incapable of fixing our problems with drug dealers, rising crime, mentally ill and addicts on the street. That is super weird.
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Not a single report - not even the industry rags - have identified Cerberus PE as the owner of Albertsons/Safeway. No one has asked Aspen Real Estate how they plan to finance a theoretical housing development while 70,000 pipeline units across the city can't break ground.
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Biden just said he’s cracking down on landlords who violate antitrust laws with price-fixing software algorithms.
#SOTU
🔥🔥🔥
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San Francisco voted for rent control. San Francisco voted (overwhelmingly) to reform Prop 13 and excise the ghost of Howard Jarvis. San Francisco voted for fair wages and benefits, and against Big Tech’s $200M power grab. San Francisco voted for affirmative action.
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This was a coup. Oberndorf and other right wing crypto VC’s captured public attention with a multi-million dollar misinformation campaign to install a carceral chief of law enforcement. They succeeded spectacularly.
SF has been played. This piece by
@mdbarba
is nothing short of a bombshell.
This marks the first time Jenkins publicly disclosed the earnings…of more than $100k—all while repeatedly claiming to be a “volunteer” for the recall.
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San Francisco's 2020 ballot is taking shape:
- Removing SFPD staffing minimums
- Authorizing 10k units of social housing
- New taxes on stock comp, overpaid CEOs & property transfers >$10M
- Allowing noncitizen service on City Commissions
- Lowering voting age to 16
(Hell yeah.)
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