lazyforgetful

This review is written from a solidly Jewish-American perspective, and your experience of Sebald's work may differ. Just get a copy of Austerlitz and start reading. It won't make sense for a while. Don't get bogged down, skim if you have to. Peer at the photos, as if from a distance of fifty years. The narrator is in a kind of fog, as if the only way he can express his emotions is through some metaphor about European history. I don't know any other book like it - in film, it reminded me of Tarkovsky's Solaris.

If you read the virological.org link, the first comment is from a Japanese team that independently reached the same conclusion as Tang et al.

I've seen a bunch of scientists who will nitpick any Chinese paper to bits. Mostly older scientists. In the case of this virus, the need to publish before the usual review means there are guaranteed to be flaws. The Glasgow call to retract was a pretty aggressive way to go after the people who know the most about the virus but couldn't prove everything they had learned.

Remember that SF's rent stabilization ordinance was the renter's response to Prop 13, enacted one year later. It shouldn't be used as an excuse to preserve a bad law.

This is going to be difficult to unwind fairly but it is only going to get worse if we don't.

The Castro area has more retail vacancies than most. Many of the vacancies are owned by a single landlord, last name is Natali I think. He kept the Patio Cafe space vacant for something like 15 years. Thanks to Prop 13 it costs him very little to do so and he has plenty of profit from the other buildings. There is a pattern of landlords raising rents to a level that existing businesses will not be able to afford, and then leaving them vacant. Supposedly there are big brands that will pay these rents, but they are kept out by a San Francisco law against chain stores. Without this law, the Castro would turn into a sort of high end rainbow themed mall. Some of the writing about Greenwich Village in NYC captures this dynamic better - there are national brands that can afford to run a flagship store in a tourist neighborhood, at a loss. The granolashotgun blogger has pointed out that in much of the US, there is simply more retail-zoned space than is necessary in the delivery age. I don't think that's what's going on in the Castro though. Prop 13 is a massive market distortion and the distortion is only growing, just as it was designed to do. That which is not sustainable must end, preferably before it gets worse.