Month: October 2019

While searching for the person who grifted me in Chicago, I discovered just how easy it is for users of the short-term rental platform to get exploited.

by Allie Conti / Vice / Oct 31 2019

The call came about 10 minutes before we were set to check into the Airbnb. I was sitting at a brewery just around the corner from the rental on North Wood Street in Chicago when the man on the other end of the line said that our planned visit wouldn’t be possible. A previous guest had flushed something down the toilet, which had left the unit flooded with water, he explained. Apologetic, he promised to let us stay in another property he managed until he could call a plumber.

Recently – and to their credit – the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune raised the question, “who’s to blame for San Diego’s secret streetlight cameras?” – and natch, they answered their own question.

In December 2016, when the San Diego City Council preliminarily approved a $30.3 million “Smart Streetlights” project, a key detail — that contractor GE would equip thousands of streetlights with cameras to monitor their surroundings — was never shared publicly. Awareness spread with the sensors themselves, and there is now a set of 4,000-plus cameras that are on all the time — and a sense of conspiracy. Critics complain the contract gave GE an “irrevocable, permanent, worldwide, royalty-free” right to use footage for its own commercial purposes.

By Miriam Raftery / East County Magazine / Oct. 31, 2019

A day after Governor Gavin Newsom ordered the California Public Utilities Commission to create tough new rules limiting mass outages by utilities seeking to limit their liability for fires and mandating compensation for ratepayers, PG&E announced it will credit its ratepayers for blackouts, Newsom announced.

But San Diego Gas & Electric is refusing to do the same.

In respond to East County Magazine’s inquiry, SDG&E communications manager Wes Jones responded yesterday,

The US House of Representatives – in an historic move – just voted to approve the rules to be used for the impeachment inquiry into president Trump. By a vote of 232 to 196, the House passed rule that will:

From 10News:

San Diego Animal Control officers are looking for two large dogs that attacked and killed an 86-year-old woman’s beloved pet.

The owner of the dog, Ocean Beach resident Mary Cooper, said it was two large pit bulls that mauled her beloved pet, Gracie, a 10-year-old Bichon-Poodle mix. It happened Monday at around 11 p.m. on Voltaire Street.

“At night, just before I go to bed, we go out for her last potty break. And this is when it happened,” Cooper said.

By Marjorie Cohn / TruthOut / Oct. 15, 2019

This term, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether people can be fired for being transgender or LGBQ, if people brought to the U.S. as children can be deported, whether states can impose restrictions on abortion that disproportionately harm poor women, how firm the separation between church and state is, the scope of the Second Amendment and whether criminal defendants can be convicted by less-than-unanimous juries.

Millions of people will be impacted by the results of these cases.

by Mary Plummer / inewsource / October 28, 2019

The California Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit challenging inewsource’s lease with San Diego State University, bringing to a close a four-year legal battle that inewsource’s editor contends was in retaliation for its investigations of attorney Cory Briggs, now running for San Diego City Attorney.

“The lawsuit is over, dismissed and inewsource won the war,” said Lorie Hearn, executive director and editor of inewsource, in a written statement. “It’s been a long and expensive four years, fighting a lawsuit that was filed against us for exercising our responsibilities as investigative journalists.”

San Diegans for Open Government sued inewsource in 2015 after it published 10 stories about attorney Cory Briggs.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / Oct. 29, 2019

When offered an interview with author and playwright Joseph Caldwell, it was not In Such Dark Places, his first novel with its gay protagonist, that launched me from my desk to dance a delighted jig. Neither was it Caldwell’s more recent and charmingly absurd Irish mystery series, The Pig Trilogy— nor anything in between.

No, it was Caldwell’s notoriety as a writer for the cult classic soap opera Dark Shadows that transported me to the late 1960s when we—every kid in the neighborhood—happily raced home from school to grab a slice of baloney and settle in for a new episode.

All the more satisfying then, was reading in Caldwell’s new memoir, In the Shadow of the Bridge

Now there’s a new effort to cash in on the vacation rental craze in Ocean Beach.

Rent your driveway.Yup.

The Friends of the Ocean Beach Library want you! Or more accurately, they want your feedback and input on the new design for the expansion of the library.

So, check out the (really) rough-draft floor plan. What would you change, add or subtract?

By Colleen O’Connor / Times of San Diego / Oct. 25, 2019

Want to scare yourself this Halloween? Forget witches, goblins, ghosts or haunted houses. Instead, read Christopher Wylie’s book Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America.

It is a must-read primer on the dark arts of cyber politics — ”scaled online disinformation, fake news, and mass profiling.”

If half of what Wylie writes is true, everyone should be seriously frightened.

It comes as no surprise that much of what high-tech, fin-tech, med-tech and cyber-tech have unleashed is a mixed bag of tricks and treats, that remains to be sorted.

By Richard Riehl

My 38th district State Senator, Brian Jones, emailed me yesterday. The subject line, “Will I see you?”made me wonder where I had met him, on what occasion, and where and when he hoped to see me again.

But the senator’s salutation: “Dear Friends,” suggested his fondness for me only began with his discovery of my name on a list of his district’s registered voters.

My new friend’s form letter alerted me to his legislative open house next month. “Hundreds of local elected officials and community leaders have already RSVP’d,” he gushed. “Believe me, the Open House will be the place to be in East County this fall!”

Well, it won’t be the place for me.