I had a lovely long stay in Tahoe this past week.  It's as good or better than in the winter even for an avid skier like me.  My wife and I hiked, golfed, friends have a boat that they shared and so one.  It's a great part of California.  As I rolled "down the hill" yesterday, three thoughts came to mind:

1.  Somehow a series of little towns and ski areas manage to put on more live music in a week than we see in B'game in a month or more.  It's sort of embarrassing.  I hear talk of "community" all the time in the Bay Area and yet Tahoe manages to quadruple the quality community time with seemingly little effort and great results.

2.  The livability problems in San Francisco are doing serious, probably permanent harm to its reputation as a world-class city.  The Wall Street Journal is one name-brand news source talking about the problems.  For example, this weekend it noted

The website RealtyHop.com dubs San Francisco “the doo-doo capital of the U.S.” They noted that the city’s poop reports almost tripled between 2011 and 2017.  The problem draws attention because the poop increasingly comes not from dogs but from humans.  There are myriad causes at work, no doubt. But there was no “defecation crisis”—a term usually associated with rural India—in the 1930s, even with unemployment at 25%, vagabonds roaming the country, and shantytowns and “Hoovervilles” springing up everywhere. Today’s homeless and the hobos of the Great Depression are different in many ways. 

In California at least, one is struck by the contrast between the fastidious attention paid to the social duty of scooping up and disposing of dog feces, and the rather more paralyzed and guilty reaction to the plague of human feces. The former is treated as a moral imperative among the enlightened—and the thin plastic bags used as the means to this moral end have so far escaped the fate of plastic straws, well on their way to being outlawed as an environmental outrage. Even social-justice warriors don’t consider it their personal duty, however, to tidy up after their fellow human beings on the streets.

For us locals that is hardly news, but what is news is that elsewhere in California (like Tahoe) long time nearby visitors to EssEff have stopped visiting.  We were paired up with a lovely older woman on the golf course who only waited until the second hole to note that she and her husband used to come to SF every month for 40 years for "dinner and a show" or museums and such.  No more.  One wonders how bad it has to get before the laissez-faire mindset gets whacked on the side of the head?

3.  Who's in charge of infrastructure?  It took three hours to drive from Tahoe City (on the North shore) to Berkeley– about 190 miles.  That's pretty much the usual time without winter weather.  Then it takes more than an hour to go the last 37 miles to Burlingame on a sunny weekend afternoon with the Giants out of town.  Where are the environmentalists decrying the air pollution of thousands of cars idling in traffic?  Where are the transit officials with new ideas?  Where are the housing advocates smart enough to see the cart might be in front of the horse?  Did all of the urban planner decamp for Boise or Spokane?  Just wondering.