Wertheimer

Seventeen hundred dollars.

Death to America.

Edit - I was able to resolve it through this site: https://www.paxlovid.com/enroll-in-co-pay-program . You probably have to call the number if you're in a situation like mine (wrong state, etc.), but you will get the drug for free, after consenting to waive all of your privacy rights and allow them to send you billions of text messages. It's all bullshit and I hate Pfizer and I hope they die painfully, but at least I can get my meds.

It helps in this regard that the American liberal understands very little about politics outside an American-centric frame. He has barely even learnt to question the framing narratives of mainstream U.S. news media. He disapproves of white supremacy at home but is rarely as troubled by the expressly articulated Jewish-supremacist project of the Israeli far right. Instead, he naively takes the Israeli government at its word and pardons its open embrace of genocide as intemperate statements born of grief. He purports to stand against border walls, state surveillance, and militarized policing but turns his gaze away when these forces are weaponized against Palestinians. He complains about the power of dark money but doesn’t challenge the political lobbies that advocate for Israeli state interests in the highest echelons of power. He proudly supports human rights but won’t acknowledge years of reporting by human rights organizations on atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli military. He proclaims that Black lives matter but admonishes radical Black writers, intellectuals, and activists who rally for Palestinian freedom. He solemnly agrees that an irreparable harm was done to Native Americans during the European conquest of the “New World,” but cannot fathom why they — and people from across the postcolonial world — recognize their own history in the Palestinian experience.

Perhaps this is not surprising, for the American liberal is only recently and haltingly educated about the entrenched history of structural racism and white supremacy in the U.S., so he inevitably finds it difficult to apply the lessons of that history to the world around him. He fashions himself a hero who would have stood against Jim Crow, Japanese internment, the Vietnam War, and South African apartheid in their time, but somehow the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” appears too “complicated” to take a moral stand. In his mind, American democracy is an inexorably self-perfecting experiment, even though the institution was founded on genocide, slavery, and apartheid and is incessantly subject to anti-democratic capture today. Indeed, the liberal believes so wholeheartedly in this received concept of democracy that he invariably fails to apprehend how democracy can be democratically suppressed in ethno-majoritarian societies, and doesn’t ask himself whether any country can truly call itself democratic — let alone the “only democracy in the Middle East” — if a significant proportion of its population cannot participate in the democratic process. But then, perhaps he is reassured by the knowledge that democracy eventually comes to those who demonstrate their worthiness by dying in large enough numbers. After all, isn’t that why the Western powers “gifted” Israel to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, so that Palestinians could pay for the West’s guilt?

. . .

But let us not despair. Progress has never relied on a liberal’s courage to recognize that change is necessary. Progress occurs when enough people are moved to reject not only neofascist populism, but liberalism’s racist hypocrisies masquerading as humanism. And there are millions of such people marching for Palestine all over the world. Ultimately, the American liberal will be transcended by his own irrelevance. Palestinians have no need of his allyship; they will secure their own freedom and future. When that day eventually arrives, we can look forward to the liberal’s revisionist memory that he was on the right side of history all along.

Archive

While at any given time these groups may purport to speak for individual homeowners, small landlords of color, or the general public, the board members of the real estate groups behind them are almost exclusively white men who own, on average, five thousand units of housing each. Between 2018 and 2022, these groups collectively donated a combined $8.8 million to political candidates, spent over $2.3 million on legal efforts to overturn rent stabilization, and dropped $7.7 million on lobbying, including hiring the MirRam Group, cofounded by the father of Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

. . .

The narrative of the “woke” mom-and-pop landlord has since been taken up across the country. During public hearings about a new rent control program in St. Paul, an opponent—on Zoom from a beach vacation, naturally—characterized the policy as a form of redlining. Small landlords seeking to roll back rent control in Portland, Maine, adopted progressive language to do so, with ​​some arguing that their willingness to rent to asylum seekers, those on federal housing vouchers, and other marginalized communities demonstrates notable liberal bonafides. In Seattle, opposition to a local measure was led by a mom-and-pop group called Seattle Grassroots Landpeople. A Democratic city councilwoman in Minneapolis who led the charge to scrap consideration of a rent control program derided tenant advocates as “wealthy beer drinking pants rolled up white men” who need to “get out of mommy’s basement.” In a landlord forum, she described her role as “getting ready, putting my lipstick on, curling my hair and selling our message. [Landlords] are the experts at giving me what I’m selling.”

Outside of New York, this dynamic has played out most notably in California. The successful fight against Los Angeles’s pandemic eviction moratorium was led in part by the ​​Coalition of Small Rental Property Owners, “a California-based advocacy group that mostly represents black and Latinx landlords.” This past February, one small landlord launched a hunger strike to push for the end of Alameda County’s eviction moratorium, calling himself and other immigrant landlords “victims of government abuse.” The moratorium was ended by April.

Can’t wait for it to also not have any housing!

Archive hasn't been working for me lately but maybe someone in the comments can help.

As many as 10 Cruise driverless cars stopped working in San Francisco’s North Beach on Friday night, causing traffic to back up and leaving some questioning the decision of state regulators a day earlier to approve the expanded use of robotaxis in the city.

The autonomous vehicles appeared to be stopped in the middle of Grant Avenue, according to social media posts, with hazards on, blocking other cars from moving.

In a response to the incident, Cruise said the backup was caused by “wireless connectivity issues” that immobilized the driverless cars. San Francisco police confirmed that the cell connectivity issues were caused by the large number of people at the nearby Outside Lands music festival overtaxing the system.

“We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again and apologize to those impacted,” Cruise said in a statement.

According to a text message exchange between San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin and a Cruise government affairs manager reviewed by the Chronicle, the cell connectivity affected the company’s remote ability to reroute the cell-connected cars. According to Peskin, approximately 10 cars stalled at the intersection.

. . .

Transportation and fire officials told state regulators that the spike in robotaxi activity in recent months coincided with disruptive incidents, such as unplanned stops and erratic driving. They warned that such disruptions were likely to occur more often as the companies expanded service.

The road that the cars were paralyzed on was a “tiny street,” Peskin said, and there would have been no way for emergency vehicles to get through had there been an emergency.

“The irony is that this happened the night after the CPUC irresponsibly gave them the green light for unlimited vehicles over the city’s objections,” Peskin said.

The CPUC’s approval did not include a cap on fleet sizes, and Cruise and Waymo are not required to report to state regulators how many driverless taxis they operate in the city.