Link Log Roundup for May 3, 2020
In this edition: testing and tracing, innovation, restaurants, urban density, Cassandra, and ghost kitchens.
Your daily look at links I’ve saved to my Link Log (RSS) over the course of each day but didn’t necessarily address or highlight here on the blog. These are the links I logged yesterday, and not necessarily links to things published yesterday.
But a draft plan, obtained by WW, outlines six criteria for allowing counties to reopen. The criteria include declining cases, significant testing capacity, a system in place for tracing cases, isolation facilities, adequate health care resources, and adequate masks, gowns and other personal protective devices.
Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation
The pandemic has made clear this festering problem: the US is no longer very good at coming up with new ideas and technologies relevant to our most basic needs. We’re great at devising shiny, mainly software-driven bling that makes our lives more convenient in many ways. But we’re far less accomplished at reinventing health care, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and, in general, turning our technical know-how loose on the largest sectors of the economy.
Few businesses are obligated to build as much parking as restaurants. Most city codes force restaurant owners to provide 10 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of restaurant—or approximately three times as much room for cars as for the diners who drove them. In normal times, this policy has many negative consequences: It makes running a restaurant more expensive, uses up an enormous amount of land, and creates a landscape checkered with asphalt that’s hard to navigate on foot.
Urban Density: Confronting the Distance Between Desire and Disparity - Azure Magazine
This begins by acknowledging what Roger Keil, an urban scholar and public intellectual, frames as the mixed and diverse densities that “manifest themselves at the peripheries.” His radical body of work establishes the foundation for casting our gaze beyond the gentrified density championed by mainstream urbanists to the multitude of dense typologies within cities themselves and across the globe. Building upon Keil’s discursive framework – which positions density as both pluralistic and decentralized – I’ve coined two terms for better understanding coronavirus related health risks faced by those from historically marginalized groups.
Opinion | She Predicted the Coronavirus. What Does She Foresee Next?
If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.”
The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry
Yet there is another path. Instead of VC-backed ghost kitchens, labor advocates hope that the current lockdown sparks a rise in worker-owned cooperatives. Co-ops are not only an equitable way for employees to share in a restaurant’s profits, but some are also delivering food themselves.