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Closing camps isn’t
solving homelessness
The relocation of the homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area is an issue that must be fixed. The relocation and gentrification of the people experiencing homelessness right now is essentially putting a Band-Aid on the bullet wound that is the housing situation of the Bay Area.
Caltrans spent more than $29 million between 2012 and 2017 cleaning up homeless camps. In 2023, Caltrans closed 2,682 encampments. Often, these camps soon reopen elsewhere or sometimes in the same spot. This is a massive waste of resources and time.
The government’s “fix” to this issue is not working. I urge readers to help anyone they know suffering from homelessness get into programs that will help them get back on their feet instead of shipping them away. It does not benefit either side if this issue is still here.
Francisco Lupian III
Pittsburg
Resist attacks
on ranked choice
I imagine that as usual, those who lost due to ranked-choice voting will launch attacks on this highly democratic and cost-saving process, rather than simply accept that the majority of voters did not choose them.
I hope we’ll withstand this onslaught of grievances and will stick with a system that continues to work exactly how it’s intended to work. We can now move forward, rather than facing expensive run-offs that would have been highly manipulated by monied interests.
Avi Rose
Oakland
With election over, let’s
focus on Mideast peace
The defeat of Kamala Harris was attributed to the refusal of President Biden to withdraw earlier from the race. His weak performance negatively impacted the opinion of the voters on the Democratic Party and its candidates. Some suggest that the United States was not ready to elect a woman president.
The other factor is the failure of the Biden administration to put an end to the Israeli wars that caused the deaths of more than 43,000 Palestinians by continuing supplies of weapons. The administration prevented the United Nations Security Council from ending the war and ushering in the peace process by ensuring a cease-fire and Israeli troops’ withdrawal from Palestinian and Arab occupied territories as well as convening the Middle East peace conference to admit Palestine to the United Nations and adopt the final steps including concluding peace treaties and other arrangements to ensure that peace will prevail.
Amer Araim
Walnut Creek
AI is having brutal
impact on climate
Increased AI usage has been marked by the readily accessible, digestible and disposable stream of information that grants users the ability to generate nearly anything. However, the environmental effects of AI remain largely overlooked.
One search through artificial intelligence chatbots generates an exponential amount of 25 times more electricity than a Google search and will become the predominant energy consumer across several countries in a mere number of years. Furthermore, the training and cooling of AI models can consume nearly nine liters of fresh water for every kWh of energy, heightening the global freshwater scarcity already impacting millions of people. Many users are unfamiliar with AI’s environmental footprint.
Legislation regulating the environmental impacts of AI while protecting regional communities must be enacted to minimize the impacts this technology will have on climate change, communities worldwide and, soon, us.
Elayna Ong
Hayward
Source: www.mercurynews.com