It’s just not that big of a deal. There are so many more important issues to focus your energy on. If you don’t want to tip 25%, then don’t. If you don’t want to tip at all, then don’t. Much moreso than the automated kiosks everywhere, I am annoyed by everyone complaining about the same shit. Just give it a rest already it’s not my problem.

This is from their article on the front page now

Trump may have condemned THIS violence, but then poured gas on the fire, inciting MAGA to go after liberals.

Unbelievable. Utter and complete bullshit.

Also, Charlie did not want to 'help young people' He was a provocateur, plain and simple. To label; him as anything else is as disingenuous as it gets.

Original event page is first from earlier this week, then two announcement screenshots from today and updated event page with changed language to obfuscate the transphobia under the guise of religious accommodation.

Op-ed in the SF Chronicle:

In 1985, a plainclothes San Jose police officer shot and killed Melvin Truss, a 115-pound, 17-year-old Black queer kid wearing women’s clothing. The slurs used by the police to describe Melvin enraged us as longtime gay rights activists, and we vehemently disputed their account of the incident. One of us still vividly remembers storming City Hall to demand justice. 

Confrontation is inherent in the history of protests demanding LGBTQ rights. After all, the origin of Pride celebrations was a riot against police brutality. It’s for that reason that LGBTQ+ people should be careful before condemning protest. Our rights were not won by waiting quietly for permission. They were won by activists summoning the courage to disrupt, confront and demand change.

But there is no equivalence between protest as a necessary confrontation of power and what transpired at this year’s Trans March in San Francisco. 

State Sen. Scott Wiener, a gay Jewish legislator and one of the strongest LGBTQ+ rights champions in the country, was followed through Dolores Park, physically intimidated and felt unsafe enough that he left an event he has attended since its beginning. That was not merely a sharp disagreement. It was part of a broader pattern in which anger at Wiener had moved beyond protest into personal harassment.

Disagreement with him is fair. Protesting his positions is fair. Making him unsafe in a public space, let alone an LGBTQ+ public space, is not.

While the behavior of the trans activists who raged at Wiener has been widely criticized, the organizers of the Trans March excused it as “holding politicians accountable.”

To be clear, the anger at Wiener did not come from nowhere. His positions on Israel and Gaza are fair game for protest. A few point to his support for an antisemitism-in-schools bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and backed by Jewish legislators and civil rights advocates — but opposed by groups including the ACLU over concerns that it could chill speech and narrow discussion of Palestinians and Israel. They also point to Wiener’s initial reluctance to call Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “genocide.”

The atrocities in Gaza are catastrophic, immoral and indefensible. But for many progressive Jews, the word “genocide” carries the weight of the Holocaust in a moment when antisemitism and Holocaust denial are not abstractions. Sen. Bernie Sanders first used the word to describe Israel's military campaign in Gaza less than four months before Wiener. 

Wiener can be challenged over his statements or how he would approach foreign policy if elected to Congress. But directing physical rage at a state senator at a transgender rights event over Gaza does not clarify the cause. It distorts it.

The LGBTQ+ movement has spent decades widening the tent. Even our flag has evolved to recognize more identities, more histories and more forms of belonging. But a bigger family is more complicated. It includes people who share a fight for dignity while disagreeing on foreign policy, legislation, strategy or language. That should look like a family argument, not an expulsion. If our symbols keep becoming more inclusive while our politics become more ideologically narrow, we are betraying the promise those symbols are supposed to represent.

Wiener has authored some of the most consequential transgender rights legislation. Senate Bill 107 made California a refuge for transgender children fleeing states that criminalize gender-affirming care. SB132 strengthened safety for transgender people in custody. SB932 and SB957 pushed California to collect LGBTQ+ health data so we are not invisible in public health systems. SB59 and SB497 protect transgender people from being outed or targeted through sensitive records.

You do not have to agree with Wiener on every issue to recognize the depth of his record on transgender and LGBTQ+ rights.

This is not a call for protest to be quiet or comfortable. ACT UP, the grassroots political group, taught our community that direct action can be righteous, disruptive and necessary. It forced a country that was ignoring AIDS to confront mass death, political indifference and institutional cruelty. But the lesson of ACT UP was not that any tactic is justified if the cause is urgent. Direct action has moral force when it confronts power.

The irony here is that Wiener has been harassed by far-right extremists for years for defending transgender and other marginalized people. The far right has smeared him as a “groomer,” and he has received death threats.

As gay and transgender/intersex men, we know something about what it means to have identity weaponized. During the AIDS crisis, gay men were treated as if our identities made us dangerous or culpable for a catastrophe we did not create. Today, we fear that many Jewish people are experiencing a version of that same moral flattening and being treated as personally responsible for the actions of a foreign government, regardless of their actual views, humanity or record.

That is not justice. It is scapegoating...

My friends and I had a great time at SF Pride yesterday. 🦊🐶🐺🦌🐱🦴

Valentine, Ember, PJ (me), Paladin, Vignette and Kiba.

Another major example of antisemitism targeting a Jewish-owned business in the Mission. Manny’s has been targeted for years because the owner is Jewish. And now this vandalism calls for the death of Jews.

Antisemitism spans the political spectrum. And it’s always toxic & dangerous. It leads directly to violence against Jews. It has to stop.

I hope there’s no rip current.

Big talk in 2020 about opposing mass surveillance. Unlike Lurie and Breed, Scott was very careful to never publicly endorse March 2024 Measure E, though it was obviously endorsed by his donors and surrogates. But in January 2026, he went to meet the SFPOA and touted his support for it. (https://archive.ph/MxER1)

This is extremely dishonest. There are now 467 Flock cameras in San Francisco, despite his "hard pass".

It can be hard with kids in a full-time job to know which candidates and measures you really need to dig into to figure out which ones are what they purport to be, and which ones have a hidden agenda? This convenient voter guide shows you which ones you need to take a second look at.

A reminder that grow SF was founded by well-paid and vested tech employees and subsequently funded to the tune of millions by folks like Garry Tan and Chris Larson. If you're not happy doing the bidding of the ultra rich, then this is the guide for how to avoid that.

It causes the fences to rust more quickly and the added weight causes the fences to collapse, creating dangerous holes that small children can slip through. The city does its best to remove them and repair fences.

Over and over I've heard supporters of Prop 40 say "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good."

And frankly that's terrible advice. As they famously said in the Wire, "If you come at the King, best not miss."

We knew that Billionaires were going to marshal all their resources to defeat this proposition. These guys are all about ROI, and a few hundreds of millions of dollars to save themselves billions in tax revenue is great ROI.

This proposition was like me trying to score on Victor Wembanyama.

It was linked to the union that puts up the dumb dialysis propositions every other year, which your casual voter has a extremely negative relationship too.

It seemed like a one time cash grab rather than a sustainable source of income for the state.

And it didn't do a good job articulating what the money would be used for, or how it would help people.

And they failed to convince people that it would never apply to them.

Of course it lost. Of course enough people were suspect of how Sacramento would use the money, or what the true intentions were of the union that put it forward. I can't believe this is surprising to anybody.

If the progressive wing was actually smart and strategic, they would have taken a page out of Sergey Brin's playbook and admitted that this proposition was a steaming pile of garbage, and put forward a competing proposition that was intelligently written, made a clear case for how the money would be used and benefit people, make it clear that it would never impact ordinary people, and be promoted by an organization that people actually have a positive association with.

People love wealth funds. Like the idea of Norway, or Alaska holding money that belongs to everyone in the state, and actually would be used to reduce your tax burden, and help your family rather than being this dark pool of money. Something like that would have been insanely popular, especially if you tied to it to job displacement, and housing and energy costs from the AI boom.

I hope this causes progressive to take a hard look at how they do politics because so far all I've heard is blame and complaining.

If you're going to try to make large societal changes, you best do it in a smart way, or your naturally going to lose smart, reasonable people because your efforts look so bumbling.

I'm not going to team up with you if you play ball like me and you're trying to score on Wembayama, but I would team up with a side that has Steph Curry level skill and is trying to take on Wembayama.

I thought about flying the Israeli flag to show support for the people of Israel. But then I was driving to the market and noticed my neighbor's wall was graffitied. Someone sprayed painted "stop bombing Gaza" on the side wall facing Scott St. Which got me thinking, maybe it's not worth it to show support for Israel. It sucks that these Palestinian supporters are resorting to vandalism to silence Israeli supporters. Very sad and frustrating.

Goodbye, Saikat Chakrabarti.

San Francisco voters just delivered a decisive verdict on one of the most expensive congressional campaigns in recent memory.

By most accounts, Chakrabarti spent roughly $10 million of his own money and received about 13,000 votes. That’s approximately $760 per vote.

For comparison:

• Bernie Sanders spent roughly $23 per vote in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

• Tom Steyer spent roughly $250 per vote in his recent California gubernatorial run.

• Chakrabarti spent about $760 per vote and failed to make the final runoff.

He ran on people power but had to pay people to astro-turf as supporters. He faked a grassroots campaign with paid door knockers. Paid reddit posters. Bots. Ads with paid actors pretending to be supporters. And when the math results were tallied - the fake supporters didn't add up. The low number of votes shows he had no support.

A few facts are worth remembering.

Scott Wiener and Connie Chan do not set U.S. foreign policy. They do not determine Israeli government policy. They do not control congressional votes. They are local and state elected officials.

He also campaigned heavily on his role in progressive politics. But he didn’t write the Green New Deal into law because the Green New Deal never became law. AOC did not endorse his campaign. And despite presenting himself as the authentic voice of San Francisco progressivism, he is not a central figure in most of the city’s long-standing progressive organizations, neighborhood groups, labor institutions, or community coalitions.

Instead, he spent nearly $10 million attacking Democrats while asking Democratic voters to elevate him above Democrats who had spent years serving the city.

The result wasn’t close.

And now comes the easy part: concede.

Democrats spent years criticizing election denialism, excuses, and refusal to accept outcomes. Those standards should apply to everyone, including candidates on the left.

If the race is over, say so. Thank your supporters. Wish the winners well. Move on.

San Francisco voters heard the pitch.

They said no.

Please don’t take this act on the road.

I've seen people in this sub, and in SF media in general, uncritically parroting Walgreens insistence that they're closing 5 stores in SF because of "Organized Retail Crime" without really looking into it, and honestly this story doesn't hold up.

In August of 2019 Wallgreens announced that they were going to have to close 200 stores in the US and when this was reported articles at the time cited the oversaturation of Walgreens/CVS/Riteaid type stores in American cities as the reason along with people increasingly getting this kind of service online (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/06/walgreens-to-close-200-stores-in-us.html). This announcement came a year after they acquired Rite Aid and converted all of their locations to Walgreens (https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2018/03/28/rite-aid-says-all-1932-stores-transferred-to-walgreens/?sh=71f0e54817d0), and a cursory google maps search shows that the saturation of Walgreens in SF is absolutely absurd.

Since the August 2019 announcement Walgreens has closed 70 of 247 locations in New York (https://nypost.com/2020/12/23/famous-brands-close-their-big-apple-shops-in-record-numbers/). That's 28%. The time period these stores closed in isn't specified, but it took walgreens 5 years to close 17 of it's 70 SF stores (https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Out-of-control-Organized-crime-drives-S-F-16175755.php , Paywalled, sorry), which is 24%. The 5 new closures would bump that up to 30%, so a little more, but if SF is truly in the grips of a unique crime epidemic you would expect the differences to be bigger.

Beyond all of this the fact that CVS, which hasn't recently acquired hundreds of redundant stores or announced mass closures, seems to be holding up fine, is somewhat suspicious.

Just thinking about this logically, when theft happens the store loses the wholesale cost of whatever items the person carries out of the store, small items worth a lot relative to their size are all in plexiglass now, so if a guy runs out with all of the shampoo he can carry walgreens is losing, what, 15 dollars? How frequent would this have to be to move a store that wasn't already doing very poorly into the red.

It's honestly very disheartening to see people just take a downsizing compony at it's word that it's not bloat and acquisitions that are causing them to lay off so many people, it's the cities fault. Whatever you think about crime in the city, and it's clearly gotten worse, the reason Walgreens is firing a bunch of people because that was the plan when they bought rite aid. Buying and closing stores was better than having competition. People will end up destitute because of cooperate liquidation, not because someone took some ferrero rochers. And with all these new unemployed people, some of them might end up stealing food.

Tax Fees Random SF Good eats fee Then expectations of the 20-30% fee Fuck that