What Happened Today: August 23, 2022
Newsom vetoes safe drug sites; Ford cuts 3,000 U.S. jobs; “Sake Viva!” in Japan
The Big Story
California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill on Monday that sought to permit an unlimited number of drug consumption sites in multiple cities where drug overdoses and public drug use have become perennial problems. Overdose deaths continue to rise in Oakland and Los Angeles but have been the worst in San Francisco, where more than 1,600 people have died because of overdoses since January 2020. The law sought to allow for the creation of new facilities where drug users could bring their illegal substances to inject with the provided clean needles or otherwise consume the substances under the supervision of medical professionals who would be shielded from criminal culpability or threats to their medical licenses. In his veto letter, Newsom wrote that he was a longtime champion of such “cutting edge” harm reduction strategies but that he remained “acutely concerned” about the lack of evidence-based operational plans at the sites that could ultimately result in “unintended consequences” for cities already reeling from the impact of the overdose epidemic. “Worsening drug consumption challenges in these areas is not a risk we can take,” he wrote.
Though Newsom is often an outspoken advocate for issues like gun restrictions and abortion access that are popular with his progressive base, his potential candidacy as a Democratic nominee for the White House in 2024 elevates the risk of those “unintended consequences.” Indeed, as Jessica Levinson, a political analyst at Loyola Law School, put it, if he were to back the biggest statewide safe-injection legislation in the nation, “the ads kind of write themselves: He becomes ‘Governor Heroin.’”
Proponents of so-called safe injection sites say the facilities save the lives of those who would take the drugs regardless and risk overdosing in the streets. A pair of unsanctioned sites in New York City say they’ve reversed 400 overdoses already, but there’s little data yet to show if those sites have seen increased crime or public nuisances or made the use of dangerous narcotics easier than it was before—both concerns frequently raised by neighbors in the communities where proposed facilities often meet intense opposition. Despite Newsom’s veto and the local resistance, San Francisco lawmakers continued to press for the opening of the facilities, with both the mayor, London Breed, and city attorney, David Chiu, vowing to bring them to the city.
In the Back Pages: New Dating Apps All Have the Same Problem
The Rest
→ Ford Motors will lay off 3,000 workers as it “redeploy[s] resources” toward manufacturing electric vehicles. Two thousand salaried workers and 1,000 contract workers will be fired, primarily from the company’s main headquarters in Michigan. “We have an opportunity to lead this exciting new era of connected and electric vehicles,” a company memo said. “Building this future requires changing and reshaping virtually all aspects of the way we have operated for more than a century.” Ford plans to make all of its European cars electric by 2030 and to drastically ramp up sales of electric vehicles in the United States by 2026. In June, the company announced that layoffs like this one would be coming while pledging to hire 6,200 manufacturing workers in the United States in the coming months and to put $50 billion toward building out its EV manufacturing capabilities by expanding plants across the Midwest, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
→ Small-batch cocaine proprietors in Colombia let out sighs of relief on Tuesday when the nation’s top law enforcement officials said they would no longer seek out and destroy the artisanal crops of the smaller farmers growing the coca plant, which is the raw material needed to make cocaine, but would instead focus on how to take down the “big mafias” running the larger drug operations, according to Henry Sanabria, the director of the national police. In 2015, police stopped the practice of killing coca crops with herbicides sprayed over farms from planes, citing fears of carcinogens leaking into the land and other crops. But the practice of police trying to coerce farmers to voluntarily dig up their own coca plants and replace them with legal plants hasn’t taken root. Colombia now yields more cocaine for the black market than both Bolivia and Peru combined.
→ Indian law enforcement organizations are increasingly relying on facial recognition software to identify suspects and are accepting alarmingly low “match rates” of 80% accuracy to label a suspect as a positive identification. “This could lead to harassment of the individual just because the technology is saying that they look similar to the person the police are looking for,” one critic noted. Others have voiced concern about the absence in India of any real data protection laws and have pointed to the disconcerting fact that, according to Wired, “even if a match is under 80 percent, it would be considered a ‘false positive’ rather than a negative, which would make that individual ‘subject to due verification with other corroborative evidence.’”
Read More: https://www.wired.com/story/delhi-police-facial-recognition/
→ To get its people drinking and to increase the government’s tax revenue, Japanese officials have announced the “Sake Viva!” campaign, which invites 20- to 39-year-olds (apologies to Japan’s quadragenerians) to submit ideas to boost the country’s alcohol consumption. This comes as young people in Japan are drinking less, with 2020 marking the biggest single-year drop in tax revenue from alcoholic beverages in Japan’s history. Beer has seen a particularly large decline—a 20% decrease in sales volume in 2020, with officials believing that remote work is keeping people from their happy hour brews.
→ FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange company founded in 2019 by 30-year-old Crypto King Sam Bankman-Fried, saw more than a 1,000% increase in revenue in 2021, from $90 million in 2020 to just over $1 billion in 2021, according to leaked financial documents. “Fwiw numbers here are correct ballpark,” Bankman-Fried tweeted of the leak. FTX not only raked in record-breaking profits but also bought up fledgling and failing companies across Europe and Australia. The company also reported a 2,182% percent year-over-year increase in profit, raking in $388 million in 2021 compared to $17 million the previous year.
→ Weeks after President Biden visited Saudi Arabia—a trip that critics cautioned would embolden the Saudi government—a Saudi woman has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for using Twitter and retweeting material critical of the government’s human rights abuses. Home in Saudi Arabia on holiday from Leeds University, Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother of two, was first sentenced to three years in prison and then resentenced to another 31 for her Twitter use. It’s an example of the Saudi government’s odd reliance on Twitter as both a surveillance tool and an investment; high ranking Saudi officials and the Saudi government’s sovereign wealth fund previously invested as much as half a billion dollars in the company.
→ China’s bellicose behavior notwithstanding, more international officials are making visits to Taiwan, including diplomats from Japan, a country with strong ties to both Taiwan and China. Japanese officials are divided about such public displays of support for Taiwan, with some worrying about how these diplomatic missions will impact Japan’s relationship with China. “This happens to be the 50th anniversary of Japan-China [diplomatic relations],” one senior Japanese official told the Financial Times. “There is pressure from the business community, but also we as diplomats prefer a stable relationship with China. From that perspective, we should not encourage Japanese lawmakers to visit Taiwan.” Such pressures didn’t stop Japanese lawmakers, led by Keiji Furuya of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, from traveling to Taiwan on Monday, nor from being more critical of Beijing in recent months. Still, China remains Japan’s largest trading partner, with more than a fifth of Japan’s exports—worth more than $160 billion—going to China.
→ Hats off to Tablet’s European culture correspondent, Vladislav Davidzon, who’s reporting on the conflict in Ukraine has been recognized with the 2022 Freedom of the Media Award from the Transatlantic Leadership Network. To check out Davidzon’s writing, see his Tablet stories here: https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/vladislav-davidzon
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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By Katherine Dee
The Right Stuff, the invite-only dating app for conservatives that launches this fall, will not take off. But you don’t need me to tell you that.
It’s not its corny name or its typical conservative branding, which, unsurprisingly, meets at the intersection of “free template” and “no creative directors were willing to work with us.” It’s not even the ham-fisted commercial the app released, in which Ryann McEnany, the sister of former Trump press secretary and Fox News host, Kayleigh McEnany, does everything in her power to drive the point home that this app is for natal men and women only.
Even if you’re somebody like me, who considers our current political polarization to be less about a conflict of genuinely held principles and more about tribal (fandom) warfare, political dissension is a fire that continues to burn hot. One would then think there would be intense demand for an app that serves conservatives seeking conservatives, but I’m not so confident.
There is, already, a substantial catalog of failed dating apps launched in the wake of Tinder’s explosive popularity, including the astrology-themed Struck; Spoonr, for cuddle-enthusiasts; and Righter, just one of several apps geared toward like-minded patriots. If there’s an exception to this rule, it seems to be dating platforms that cater to people with specific fetishes, like FetLife, which has survived a remarkable 14 years on the market, or Feeld, recently profiled in The New Yorker. Even bigger players like Facebook parent Meta have stepped into the matchmaking arena only to see their dating app crash and burn.
This may very well be because these new apps aren’t iterating on the right features and therefore aren’t attacking the root problem: the reason people might want to use a different app in the first place. It’s true that people are dissatisfied with their romantic lives—Pew Research data tells us that 67% of people don’t think their dating lives are going well at all—but offering them more of the same with different branding isn’t going to fix that. A new dating app for a certain group is all well and good, but when you create a Tinder clone, all you’re doing is re-creating the same problem with a smaller pool of people.
The Right Stuff suggests that the underlying problem with dating in the United States is that the big apps disadvantage conservative daters ostensibly because they cater to intolerant, gender-variant users. I think I know what conservatives are getting at, though: The charitable interpretation is that by continuously emphasizing their disinterest in people outside of the gender binary, what they mean is, “It’s hard to find people who share our conservative values.” That is believable: Dating apps leave little room for you to declare what it is you’re after, exactly. Instead, you’re thrown into a melting pot of people who want to hook up, who want to get married, who just want to talk, as if those are all the same things. Additional issues arise when you consider other factors, like people who want to have kids. Even if the current model for dating apps is not quite in the failed state some people claim it’s in, I can sympathize with serious, conservative-minded daters who feel it doesn’t serve them.
My issue with The Right Stuff, then, is that it doesn’t appear to introduce any meaningful changes to the idea of a dating app, just as conservative social-media copycat platforms like Truth Social, Gettr, Parler, and Gab have failed to innovate on their liberal precedents. The Right Stuff advertises “less talking, more dates” and an option to broadcast potential date ideas … but is all else equal? Imagine a hypothetical young conservative man who struggles to find dates—a demographic that, if you’ve spent any time on social media, you would imagine struggles the most with dating.
Read the rest here.
What Happened Today: August 23, 2022
Mazal tov to Vladislav Davidzon -- it wouldn't be the same war without his writing.