Salesforce wasn't really thinking strategically or long term when they built that fancy ass tower with the gondola.

Salesforce can easily fill its trophy tower with workers. It's the other, older towers they own and lease downtown that might eventually get subleased.

They didn't build it.

The story is very complicated but it was built by a consortium of Hines, Boston Properties and, as I recall, another minority member--again it was complicated and my recollection is Hines was the original winner but they sold most of their interest to Boston Properties before construction began. They won the competition for the design and biggest payment to the city for the land (on which had stood the old pre-War TransBay Terminal).

Salesforce lentered into a lease pre-construction.

Previous to that, Salesforce had a parcel of land in Mission Bay that the new Warriors Arena now sits on--they were going to build a new midrise campus there (height limits forbad a tower) but they held a vote of employees as to whether they wanted to be closer to downtown and the employees said they would (transportation down Market St from the popular Castro, Haight, Noe Valley, Hayes Valley and Mission is much simpler), so Salesforce began assembling parcels at the intersection of Mission & Fremont. I can't recall which came first but they bought the building on the northwest corner and leased the new one on the northeast corner. Then they leased the tower they slapped their name on when leasing started on it pre-contruction. Since it's the tallest in town, it was a plumb they couldn't resist. And then they paid to also put their name on the adjacent new terminal.

That none of this was a mistake looking at it pre-COVID is shown by the fact that they were looking for even more space and had entered into negotiations for space in (if not the entire) Oceanwide Center which would have been (will be??) SF's second tallest and just half a block away.

As things look now, Oceanwide was clearly a step too far. Whether they still need all three of the other towers, just two of them or only the one with their name on it is hard to say but that they need at least the iconic tower is not in doubt.

And Benioff likes to throw his (considerable--literally and figuratively) weight around in SF and the Bay Area. He put his name on a children's hospital. He backed and got passed a tax measure (similar to one that failed in Seattle I believe because Bezos opposed it) to tax corporations and raise $300 million annually for homeless services. Surely he needed to have his name on the biggest phallic symbol in the city, visible from almost everywhere.

San Francisco now has a 7-day moving average of just 21 new COVID cases a day--2.4/100,000 residents.

It just feels so great . . . like we are coming out of it. 55% of the over-16 population is "fully vaccinated" and 74% have had at least one shot. From everything I read, you can probably add 5-10% to those numbers for people who have immunity from having had COVID meaning as much as 80-85% of the city's adults probably have some immunity; maybe more.

When the FDA approves the Pfizer vaccine for the 12-16 group, I see no reason their vaccinated parents won't be getting most of them vaccinated and then we should be within the range Tony Fauci and others said would be needed for "herd immunity" from the beginning.

Finally, if the FDA also gives final (not just conditional or "emergency") approval to the Pfizer vaccine, it could be required for school attendance (like other shots), people in the military, employees of medical care facilities (some are already doing that elsewhere) and so on. I have my doubts liberal California and San Francisco will do that, but a fully FDA-approved vaccine COULD be required just like schools and the military require other shots and some hospitals require their staffs to have flu shots.

I, my family, and my Mom and Dad dined indoors last night.

It is noteworthy because it is the first time my elderly parents dined indoors.

My Mom griped a bit with the "are you sure it is safe?" stuff (not even sure what that means exactly--is anything really 100% safe?).

Hopefully none of us get ill and die over the next 7 days. But I'm going to wager that, ya know, the vaccine works :tup:

Undercounted in most of the world because most of the world didn't test like we did. There are only 2 other countries with a population of at least 10 million that had more tests per capita that the US and they are Czechia and the UK. Nominally the US has conducted the most tests in the world, over 458 million as of today.

That shouldn’t feel great. It should feel like people have been subjected to too many restrictions for too long because political leaders have given control to epidemiologists on some quixotic mission to eradicate an endemic virus.

The numbers you quote mean that all Covid-19 restrictions, social distancing, and masks should disappear immediately.

Wah, wah, wah. I don't know. Getting back to normal and having been vaccinated feels pretty great to me.

Are you pro-virus or something?

That seems like what is going on in some places, like here or in Florida.

The study suggests that the U.S. has one of the biggest raw total undercounts in the world.

The US is officially reporting 581,000 deaths but everyone agrees that's something of an undercount. Over the weekend, the figure 900,000 was proposed to Tony Fauci and he said he thought that was higher than he would guess. So splitting the difference maybe we are undercounting the deaths by ⅓ or so.

In terms of cases, the official number now is 32.7 million. Maybe that should be around 50 million using roughly the same methods and I've seen that figure suggested in print. Frankly, I hope it's more. I hope the cases number is MUCH higher, because every case that didn't die now has some level of immunity that can be added to the vaccination figures. If it's 50 million, then that's around 20% of adults and if we take that figure, 1/5 and apply it to the 55% of the population that has not yet had a shot of vaccine, we can add another 10% to the proportion with some immunity and get 55% (10% with natural immunity post-infection plus 45% vaccinated including the 10% who have had COVID but have also been vaccinated).

Add in the kids who will soon be vaccinated and the willing but lazy adults who will also eventually and we could get to the 70% immune figure people have been tossing out for "herd immunity" which, to repeat, doesn't mean no more COVID. It means few if any regularly occurring cases (which would constitute endemic disease) and only sporadic outbreaks amenable to contact tracing and quarantine.

Why didn't they do studies with children at the same time as adults? Is there a doctor reason or is it a government reason? California now has 50% of the entire population vaccinated, at 20.3M with their first shot (sac bee). After we vaccinate the new age groups I wonder how far we can get as far as a %.

I just assume they thought it would take too long to recruit enough and parents would be too reluctant to let their kids be "experimented on". Remember, the idea was to get the vaccines out and approved as quickly as possible and the most willing volunteers for the trials were the people most worried about what would happen if they got infected. We all believed kids wouldn't have serious disease even if they caught it so there wasn't much incentive for people to offer their kids up as test subjects.

Ok, now go for it kids:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-aut...d=hp_lead_pos1

Another reason to reopen everything.

Kids shouldn’t need to be vaccinated. They are at zero risk from Covid. It’s almost unethical to give it to them.

You probably wouldn’t get useful data because both the group given the vaccine and the control group would have the same incidence of severe disease or death (i.e., zero). And then if there are any side effects whatsoever it would actually weaken the overall data.

If it's an endemic disease, should parents wait until they're 16? And if so, what's the point? Why not get them vaccinated at an early age?

Exactly. That's why kids are now vaccinated for the chickenpox. He's starting to sound like an anti-vaxxer.

I can't wait to get the shingles and pneumonia vax, both are age restricted, but yeah, I'll get those as soon as possible once I reach the age requirement.