Notices by Chema Hernández Gil :sf: (chema@social.sanfranciscan.org)

Someone should lend him Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i.

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469636061/cattle-colonialism/

One of the possibilities is mind-blowing: the estimated dates raise “the intriguing possibility that, upon their arrival, Polynesian settlers encountered a small, already established, Native American population“ in Fatu Hiva, South Marquesas.

I’ve always considered the sweet potato in Polynesia to be the “smoking gun” when it came to Pre-Columbian contact between the Americas and the “Old World”.

Now, genetic evidence appears to back up this theory. The article below concludes:

“[We] find strong genetic evidence for pre-Columbian human trans-Pacific voyaging contact (at the turn of the twelfth century), contemporaneous with the Polynesian voyages of discovery in the remote eastern Pacific.“

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2

San Francisco asks residents to rate their feelings of safety in their neighborhood during the day and at night. This is used in part to measure the overall “feelings of safety and trust in police“ of residents.

The neighborhood with the lowest safety rating isn’t the Tenderloin or South of Market.

It is Seacliff.

Seacliff is a former residence park. Very exclusive neighborhood on the far side of the city, next to the Presidio, filled with single-family homes and for the longest time white-only.

It is also conveniently left off the map, but appears on the chart. It is the only neighborhood with a D rating.

Are electeds really expected to legislate around people’s feelings based on surveys like these?

https://sf.gov/data/city-survey-safety-and-policing

#SanFrancisco #SF #sfpol

Recent research (citation below) suggests #advertising has a negative effect on our collective well-being. That’s why I am excited about the massive drop in advertising revenue at #Twitter.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, Twitter’s advertisement revenue was $1.41 billion. Some of the worst companies in the world were paying billions of dollar each year to try to sell us things and making us unhappy in the process.

Another reason to be excited about the move away from #BigTech #corporate social media.

(See Michel, Chloe, et al. “Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction: Cross-national evidence on one million Europeans.” The economics of happiness. Springer, Cham, 2019. 217-239. http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019EasterlinVolume.pdf)