I had just turned 20. I didn’t care about a career. Nor did I care about health care (every job provided that then). It was the $16-an-hour thing. That’s what I cared about. That and proving to my father I could be worth something in the world. All I had to do was show up every day and work really hard, and then maybe I’d get into the union. And then, after four years of apprenticeship, I’d get the big dollars, make my father proud, and buy whatever the hell I wanted. Like a new thing I’d read about called a CD player.

Get The Primary Source

Globe Opinion’s weekly take on politics, delivered every Wednesday.

I had tried the college route. For a year and a half. But I didn’t want to be behind a desk, as I had been for the previous 13 years. I wanted to be outside. Move. Drive around. Actually do things. So I took the job with the HVAC shop in Newton, and my career as a refrigeration mechanic began.

One of the dispatchers handed me a beeper. And when it beeped, I’d drive around till I found a payphone without the handset ripped off, scrounge a quarter from my coffee holder, and dial the office.

The author repairs an exhaust fan on the roof of the Iowa River Power Restaurant in Coralville, Iowa.Danforth Johnson

As a changer of air filters, I was always on the move, picking up my order at Filter Sales in Charlestown and then driving to the first businesses on my list so I could set up my ladder. I wore out more than one Arrow Street Atlas trying to find my way around eastern Massachusetts. Charlestown to Jamaica Plain to Allston to Somerville to South Boston. Not only did I not know where I was going, I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never even handled a pipe wrench before. I remember one journeyman, laughing at me when, on a snowy rooftop somewhere in Brighton, I tried to loosen a ¾-inch union by pushing a pipe wrench in the wrong direction. “You know,” he said, “those things only go one way. See the teeth on it? You gotta pull ‘em. See?”

I attended union school a few nights a week in Dorchester and worked in the trade in the daylight hours. After four years of apprenticeship, I was making the big money. I distinctly recall feeling rich and accomplished one warm spring day in Boston when I walked out of a mechanical room beneath a parking ramp near Storrow Drive and across the parking lot to Strawberry Records and Tapes, where I purchased my first CD, “September of my Years,” by Frank Sinatra. And I didn’t even fret about the cost. Because I was now a journeyman.

I got used to spending most of my time in the company of machines. About half the machines were located on rooftops, so I learned to enjoy being outside in all weather. First, I’d determine what the machine wasn’t doing that it was intended to do, in what ways it deviated from the spirit of its original design. And then I’d align it with that spirit. It was a fine life.

It gave me a boost to repair a broken thing. It made me feel sort of like a miniature god. And the math worked. After I fixed a machine, I got paid. After I fixed two machines, I got paid twice. It was a good, simple, miniature-god-like life.

After nine years in the trade, I gave college another go. I paid my way by doing jobs under the table for a union outfit on the North Shore. I fell in love with a girl during a literature class, eloped with her to Niagara, and soon thereafter left Boston for Iowa, where I found work at yet another union shop in Cedar Rapids. I’ve been running my own one-man shop for the past 20 years.

When COVID hit, my phone stopped ringing. It might sound like I’m being dramatic, but even after working in the trade for four decades, it took only a week of inactivity to convince myself that I was unable to fix anything. All the years of experience boiled down to nothing at all. What is the worth in the world of a mechanic who sits on the couch and watches “Gunsmoke” all day? The answer to that math problem is zero. Zero worth.

The stream of cash that once flowed into our reservoir slowed considerably. We ceased going to restaurants and shows. We didn’t fly anywhere. Didn’t rent any hotel rooms. Didn’t remodel the downstairs bathroom the way we’d planned. Didn’t buy the new work truck I thought I needed.

My wife and I took walks. I read more. Listened to more music. I set aside the calculus of productivity and worth. I slowed down. Allowed myself to be happy. And lazy. I decided that 40 years was a long enough stretch of being responsible for all that equipment. All those people. I was tired of working. I didn’t want to work anymore. Even though my longtime customers were still closed for business, I informed them that I intended to continue with my sabbatical for an entire year.

My year, however, lasted only eight months. That’s when the cash ran out. I took my first call on a hot day in early June. Old Chicago, a large restaurant I’d serviced for a number of years, had no air conditioning. “Joe, you gotta help me,” said Bill, the owner. “They shut me down.”

“Who shut you down?”

“Well,” he said, “I called some big outfit from Cedar Rapids about the AC, and they said it couldn’t be fixed. They shut it all down and said it needed to be replaced. But the thing is, they can’t get the new equipment shipped till October.”

When I showed up on the job, I found the kitchen eerily still and quiet. Bill, a man I’d guess to be somewhere in his early 80s, was waiting for me at the bar. The air temperature inside the empty restaurant was over 90 degrees. “I sent everyone home a week ago,” he said.

Six rooftop HVAC units served the kitchen and dining area. One unit had a bad supply fan motor, so I replaced it. Two had refrigerant leaks. I repaired them. One needed a new expansion valve, and one needed a new thermostat. I replaced them.

I had felt a little guilty about leaving my customers hanging, given the shortage of service technicians available. Besides, I realized that I missed working. I missed the rooftops. Being so close to all that weather. I missed the humming mechanical rooms. The customers I’d come to know. That fleeting jolt of joy that comes when the broken piece of equipment whirrs to life. I’d missed the easy reassurance of my worth that taking walks doesn’t provide.

Bill reopened Old Chicago the following day. As I was handing him the work order, I noticed that the conveyor on the large pizza oven in the kitchen wasn’t turning.

“Oh,” he said, “That thing hasn’t worked for eight months. The guy said it needed a part, and it’s been on order.”

“For eight months?” I said.

“Yeah.”

I ordered the part online and replaced it two days after that. Then I quickly went through the rest of the equipment. The ice machine was operational. The coolers. Freezers. Air conditioners. Coffee machines. Infrared cheese melters. Ovens. Grills. Exhaust fans. I changed a few fan belts and gas valves, and then everything was perfect. I believed I’d done a good thing.

Two months later, however, Bill told me he’d had enough. He was closing the place for good.

“I can’t keep it going,” he said. “I can’t hire anyone! Nobody wants to work anymore!”

Joe Blair is an author and refrigeration mechanic in Iowa.

The post The great, easy, miniature-god-like life of 1 HVAC repairman appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

By Devon Kurtz

By Devon Kurtz

A recent Post-Dispatch editorial suggested a “housing first” solution that seeks to build more free housing while removing accountability measures like mandated drug treatment could help the city manage its growing homelessness crisis. (“

St. Louis’ approach to homelessness clearly isn’t working. Here’s what might.

” Oct. 8.) Yet, mounting evidence shows that housing-first policies fail to address the underlying drivers of chronic homelessness — mental illness and substance abuse. It’s something policymakers are increasingly coming to understand. Similarly, as the public has witnessed and endured the consequences of these quixotic policies, opinion has shifted away from policies that deprioritize and, in many cases, outright ignore the crucial role of mental health and substance abuse treatment in favor of policies that center on accountability, transparency, and long-term outcomes. Housing-first policies do little to help program participants transition to independent and flourishing lives. To make matters worse, the qualifications for housing disincentivize mental health stability, sobriety, and financial well-being. And the housing-first approach isn’t just ineffective — it’s expensive. San Francisco has a $1.1 billion budget that is mainly allotted to permanent housing, in addition to federal funding that flows into the city for the same purpose. Like a line from the famous Eagle’s song, results have been disastrous and even deadly — trapping people in their own devices. An investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle found that despite the program’s high price tag, individuals were living in squalor, with toxic mold, dilapidated ceilings, and rampant crime. Sadly, 166 people overdosed in these hotels between 2020 and 2021. Housing operators who turned a blind eye to dangerous drug use and crime in their housing units never faced any accountability for these failures. Though program proponents claim that “wrap-around services” are a central tenant of their policies, all participation in those services is optional. And there is little transparency into how widely available those services really are. Studies have found that Housing First programs do nothing to reduce criminal activity among homeless people. These cracks in the system have stretched across the country. St. Louis is not immune. Making services and treatment optional for tenants struggling with substance abuse and mental illness is woefully ineffective and carries fatal consequences. A 2021 study by the Urban Institute found that 12% of Denver permanent supportive housing program participants died over three years, compared to 8% in the control group who did not enter the program. The good news is that there is a better way for cities like St. Louis to address this growing crisis. Empowering people to transition out of homelessness through short-term shelters and mental health and substance abuse treatment would help them get a stable footing while building a community of support. A meta-analysis of studies comparing the impact of housing-first programs and recovery programs on substance abuse found that the latter had much more effective outcomes for those looking to rebuild their lives. But accountability and recovery can’t stop there. Those who refuse to take advantage of much-needed services like short-term shelter and treatment services for mental health and substance abuse cannot be allowed to put themselves and others in the community in danger. A vital component of this is removing and cleaning up dangerous tent encampments, as Phoenix has recently done. To do this, policymakers must swiftly address the shortage of temporary shelter space. The creation of sanctioned camping facilities away from residential and business areas is one immediate solution. Sanctioned camps can be monitored by law enforcement and provide sanitation, clean water, and services, creating a safer environment for homeless individuals than city streets. Denver recently took this approach, serving 242 people in 2021 and helping 47 to transition into more stable housing. Despite crime in Denver increasing by 14% during this time, crime in the sanctioned camp actually decreased. Policymakers should consider ways to expand short-term shelter options as well. St. Louis has options and examples of alternatives to housing first that work well in addressing the homelessness crisis. Providing immediate help to individuals on the street is a more compassionate path to sustained independence — and growing research shows the public supports it. Pursuing innovative policies that target the underlying causes of homelessness will help restore communities and the lives of those experiencing homelessness.

People are also reading…

A recent Post-Dispatch editorial suggested a “housing first” solution that seeks to build more free housing while removing accountability measures like mandated drug treatment could help the city manage its growing homelessness crisis. (“St. Louis’ approach to homelessness clearly isn’t working. Here’s what might.” Oct. 8.)

Yet, mounting evidence shows that housing-first policies fail to address the underlying drivers of chronic homelessness — mental illness and substance abuse. It’s something policymakers are increasingly coming to understand.

Similarly, as the public has witnessed and endured the consequences of these quixotic policies, opinion has shifted away from policies that deprioritize and, in many cases, outright ignore the crucial role of mental health and substance abuse treatment in favor of policies that center on accountability, transparency, and long-term outcomes.

Housing-first policies do little to help program participants transition to independent and flourishing lives. To make matters worse, the qualifications for housing disincentivize mental health stability, sobriety, and financial well-being. And the housing-first approach isn’t just ineffective — it’s expensive.

San Francisco has a $1.1 billion budget that is mainly allotted to permanent housing, in addition to federal funding that flows into the city for the same purpose. Like a line from the famous Eagle’s song, results have been disastrous and even deadly — trapping people in their own devices.

An investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle found that despite the program’s high price tag, individuals were living in squalor, with toxic mold, dilapidated ceilings, and rampant crime. Sadly, 166 people overdosed in these hotels between 2020 and 2021.

Housing operators who turned a blind eye to dangerous drug use and crime in their housing units never faced any accountability for these failures. Though program proponents claim that “wrap-around services” are a central tenant of their policies, all participation in those services is optional. And there is little transparency into how widely available those services really are. Studies have found that Housing First programs do nothing to reduce criminal activity among homeless people.

These cracks in the system have stretched across the country. St. Louis is not immune.

Making services and treatment optional for tenants struggling with substance abuse and mental illness is woefully ineffective and carries fatal consequences. A 2021 study by the Urban Institute found that 12% of Denver permanent supportive housing program participants died over three years, compared to 8% in the control group who did not enter the program.

The good news is that there is a better way for cities like St. Louis to address this growing crisis.

Empowering people to transition out of homelessness through short-term shelters and mental health and substance abuse treatment would help them get a stable footing while building a community of support. A meta-analysis of studies comparing the impact of housing-first programs and recovery programs on substance abuse found that the latter had much more effective outcomes for those looking to rebuild their lives.

But accountability and recovery can’t stop there.

Those who refuse to take advantage of much-needed services like short-term shelter and treatment services for mental health and substance abuse cannot be allowed to put themselves and others in the community in danger. A vital component of this is removing and cleaning up dangerous tent encampments, as Phoenix has recently done. To do this, policymakers must swiftly address the shortage of temporary shelter space.

The creation of sanctioned camping facilities away from residential and business areas is one immediate solution. Sanctioned camps can be monitored by law enforcement and provide sanitation, clean water, and services, creating a safer environment for homeless individuals than city streets. Denver recently took this approach, serving 242 people in 2021 and helping 47 to transition into more stable housing. Despite crime in Denver increasing by 14% during this time, crime in the sanctioned camp actually decreased.

Policymakers should consider ways to expand short-term shelter options as well.

St. Louis has options and examples of alternatives to housing first that work well in addressing the homelessness crisis. Providing immediate help to individuals on the street is a more compassionate path to sustained independence — and growing research shows the public supports it. Pursuing innovative policies that target the underlying causes of homelessness will help restore communities and the lives of those experiencing homelessness.

Devon Kurtz is the Director of public safety policy at the Cicero Institute, a public policy organization based in Austin, Texas.

Devon Kurtz is the director of public safety policy at the Cicero Institute, a public policy organization based in Austin, Texas.

Catch the latest in Opinion

Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!

The post Fixing homelessness isn’t so simple as offering a home appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

By Joy Wiltermuth

The AI boom is probably not sufficient to restore to health San Francisco’s reeling office market

Converting San Francisco’s old downtown office buildings into housing won’t be an easy task, with high costs, clunky floorplates and existing tenants in buildings only a few of the obstacles developers need to overcome.

Desolate buildings still need to be in places where people want to live.

“Hope is not a strategy,” said Nick Romito, co-founder and CEO of VTS, a leasing and asset-management data company. “The hope that if you convert it, they will come –well, a lot depends on where that building is.”

While New York City’s downtown financial district is home to a number of successful office-to-residential conversions, it also takes a vibrant neighborhood, with bustling cafés, grocery stores and more.

“That is not the same for San Francisco,” Romito said. “The infrastructure and the cost of converting a building — that’s part of it,” he said. “But I’d be more concerned about, even if you can convert it, who wants to live there?”

In the game

Romito speaks with the confidence of a New Yorker about the challenges San Francisco faces. He also has skin in the game, with offices at the Embarcadero Center, one of the West Coast’s largest mixed-use properties, which connects the city’s financial district with San Francisco Bay.

A decade ago VTS got off the ground, offering a service Romito characterizes as the Salesforce (CRM) of the office-leasing industry. It was helped along by his Rolodex of top landlords. Romito previously was a broker in New York City’s notoriously feast-or-famine office sector, while in a previous role he oversaw a portfolio of millions of square feet of office space.

The turmoil in the office properties means many former clients now use his data to help make sense of the coming carnage, while landlords face sharply higher borrowing costs since the Federal Reserve began to rapidly raise target lending rates, a mountain of debt coming due and other tough choices.

See:The $1 trillion ‘wall of worry’ for commercial real estate that spirals through 2027

“What’s cheaper?” Romito said. “Is it cheaper to add amenities in maybe a zombie building, add a floor or two, to create a better experience? Or is it cheaper to knock the entire building down, rebuild something else, and pray to God you lease it?”

Cost of the land

San Francisco isn’t a big city by global standards — it ranks just No. 17 in the U.S. by population — but its recent woes are notorious, from a recent population drain to a local fentanyl crisis to oft-voiced concerns about public safety. Breathing new life into old office buildings sounds like an enticing fix for a shelter problem that has been building to a crescendo, after decades of new housing initiatives being voted down.

Like other major California cities, the tide of homelessness in San Francisco increasingly includes people who are elderly. The fentanyl crisis ravaging the U.S. makes matters on the ground in San Francisco still worse.

As Mayor London Breed in June told Bloomberg in a sit-down interview, “The issues around opioids have done something to our city, and to other major cities, like something that I’ve never seen before.”

She now wants action to combat the “doom and gloom everyone is talking about.” As part of that push, Breed called out the tech community to not only “make money from San Francisco,” but to stick around and invest in solutions to its struggles.

Warren Wachsberger, CEO of Aecom Capital, a subsidiary of Aecom (ACM), said revamping old office buildings isn’t that simple. “Less than 1% of all apartment units underway, being built nationally, are office-to-residential conversions, despite everybody’s love affair with them,” Wachsberger said, speaking from Los Angeles.

Many buildings probably won’t work,” Wachsberger said, observing that thick, concrete office floorplates often need to be drilled through and plumbing and heating systems overhauled, with local building codes adding to the headache.

“It’s a lot easier and cheaper to demolish it and start over from scratch,” he said. “That means buying buildings essentially at the cost of land.”

Wachsberger said hopes for an expansion of an office-to-residential conversion effort in Los Angeles in the 2000s likely hinge on incentives for developers and the buildings being in places where people wanted to work, eat, live and shop. “Until that’s able to come back, it’s difficult to create the vibrancy that was there prepandemic,” he said.

AI and a new direction

San Francisco’s downtown core remains hollowed out, even as the city makes a noticeable push for cleaner and safer streets in the wake of the pandemic. The goal is to draw more office workers back to old commuting patterns, enticing them to buy a morning coffee, a sandwich or after-work drink.

See:Elon Musk’s X — the former Twitter — removes illegal sign from roof of its San Francisco headquarters

But its office vacancy rate remains high at 27.1% through the second quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield (CWK). The real-estate firm expects San Francisco vacancies to tick higher through the rest of this year, as some 4 million square feet of leases expire.

As part of its turnaround effort, the city has been getting tougher on open-air drug use in recent months. Over the longer term, it plans to cut homelessness by half in the next five years, revamp downtown zoning and eventually convert unloved office buildings to other uses, including housing.

There also has been a lot of buzz this year around artificial-intelligence technologies, which has been a boon to big companies like Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META), Nvidia (NVDA) and Tesla (TSLA), while also sparking a broader stock-market rally.

See: VC spending is in a tailspin, and AI can’t reverse the trend — yet

Gabriella Sierra’s team of researchers at Cushman & Wakefield in San Francisco said in a second-quarter outlook that AI’s anticipated expanding presence might partially revive the tech industry’s footprint in the city.

But AI isn’t likely a cure-all for the city’s financial woes, particularly with San Francisco projecting its budget shortfall to widen to $1.3 billion by fiscal year 2027–28.

Romito said that despite a “bit of a renaissance” in office-leasing demand in the past quarter by businesses with an AI focus and venture-capital funding, it isn’t likely “enough to carry a market.”

Stocks closed higher on Monday, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index scoring the strongest seven months to start a year in decades. The Dow Jones Industrial Average’s rally has been more modest; it’s up 7.3% on the year so far, according to FactSet.

-Joy Wiltermuth

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

07-31-23 1811ET

Copyright (c) 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

The post San Francisco’s push to show workplace buildings into houses hinges on this easy concept appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk may want to send “tweet” back to the birds, but the ubiquitous term for posting on the site he now calls X is here to stay — at least for now.

For one, the word is still plastered all over the site formerly known as Twitter. Write a post, you still need to press a blue button that says “tweet” to publish it. To repost it, you still tap “retweet.”

With “tweets,” Twitter accomplished in just a few years something few companies have done in a lifetime: It became a verb and implanted itself into the lexicon of America and the world. Upending that takes more than a top-down declaration, even if it is from the owner of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the world’s richest men.

A worker removes a character from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building July 24 in San Francisco.

Godofredo A. Vásquez, Associated Press

“Language has always come from the people that use it on a day-to-day basis. And it can’t be controlled, it can’t be created, it can’t be morphed. You don’t get to decide it,” said Nick Bilton, the author of “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” about Twitter’s origins.

People are also reading…

Twitter didn’t start out as Twitter. It was “twttr” — without vowels, which was the trend in 2006 when the platform launched and SMS texting was wildly popular. The iPhone only came out in 2007.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams “went one day and purchased the vowels, two vowels for essentially $7,500 each,” when he bought the URL for twitter.com from a bird enthusiast, Bilton said.

At the beginning, people didn’t “tweet” — it was “I’m going to twitter this,” Bilton recalled. But “twittered” doesn’t roll off the tongue and “tweet” soon took over, first in the Twitter office, then San Francisco, then everywhere.

We’ve been tweeting for well over a decade. World leaders, celebrities and athletes, dissidents in repressive regimes, propaganda trolls, sex workers and religious icons, meme queens and actual queens. Former President Donald Trump’s incendiary use of the bird app quickly punted “tweet” into near-constant headlines during his presidency. People who never signed up for Twitter knew what the word meant.

For now, we still tweet, retweet and quote tweet, and sometimes — perhaps not often enough — delete tweets. News sites embed tweets in their stories and TV programs scroll them. No other social network has a word for posting that’s entered the vernacular like “tweet” — though Google did the same for “googling.”

An index card shows the entry “tweet” Aug. 24, 2011, at Merriam-Webster headquarters in Springfield, Mass.  

Charles Krupa, Associated Press

The Oxford English Dictionary added “tweet” in 2011. Merriam-Webster followed in 2013. The Associated Press Stylebook entered it in 2010.

“Getting into the dictionary is an indication that people are already using it,” said Jack Lynch, a Rutgers University English professor who studies the history of language.  

As Twitter grew into a global communications platform and struggled with misinformation, trolls and hate speech, its friendly brand image remained. The blue bird icon evokes a smile, like the Amazon up-turned-arrow smile — in contrast to the X that Musk has imposed.

Martin Grasser was two years out of art school when Twitter hired him for the logo redesign in 2011. His wasn’t the first bird logo for Twitter, but it would be the most enduring.

“They knew they wanted a bird. So we weren’t starting completely over, but they wanted it to be on par with Apple and Nike. That was really the brief,” he said.

Twitter launched Grasser’s design in May 2012; the company went public on Wall Street later that year.

It was Noah Glass, another co-founder who never quite got the credit he deserved for his role in hatching Twitter, who had the winning idea.

Elon Musk’s Twitter page on July 24 shows the new X logo that he introduced a day before.  

HONS

Glass, Bilton said, “had been thinking about, like, heartbeats and emotions. He was going through a divorce and he literally went through the dictionary word by word until he came across the word twitter. And he just knew instantly that was it.”

“He was one of the four founders who had the emotional intelligence to be able to understand that this was about connecting with humans,” Bilton said. “It was inviting, it was emotional. It was about connecting with humans and your friends and your loved ones.”

Musk began his quest erasing Twitter’s corporate culture and image in favor of his own vision as soon as he took over the company in October 2022. He lost three-quarters of the company’s staff through firings, layoffs and voluntary departures, auctioned off furniture and décor, and upended policies on hate speech and misinformation. The rebranding to X was no surprise.

Twitter’s rebranding is rooted in ambition that Musk began to pursue nearly a quarter century ago after he sold his first startup, Zip2, to Compaq Computer. He set out to create a one-stop digital shop for finance called X.com — an “everything” service that would provide bank accounts, process payments, make loans and handle investments.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., introduces the Model X car Sept. 29, 2015, at the company’s headquarters in Fremont, Calif.  

Marcio Jose Sanchez, Associated Press

He has not given up on the dream. Twitter is now X, falling in line with Musk’s other X-named brands, SpaceX and Tesla’s Model X. Not to mention his young son, whom he calls “X.”

His goal for X is to turn it into an “everything” app — for video, photos, messaging, payments and other services, although he has given few details. For now, X.com is still, essentially Twitter.com, even as the blue bird and other playful tidbits start to disappear.

“There used to be a saying inside Twitter that Twitter was the company that couldn’t kill itself. I think that still rings true, whether it’s called Twitter or X,” Bilton said.

“I think that it’s kind of become a fabric of society. And even Elon Musk may not be able to break it.”

Elon Musk and Twitter: A timeline

January 31: Musk begins building up his Twitter stake

Musk starts quietly buying up Twitter shares, building his stake in the company. But it would be months before he disclosed this fact to the public.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

March 14: Musk’s Twitter stake tops 5%

Musk’s stake in Twitter tops 5%, but that fact is not disclosed until the following month. Musk was obligated to disclose his stake within 10 days of crossing the 5% threshold, but waited 21 days to do so. During that time, he continued building up his stake.

Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

March 24: Asking whether Twitter should change

The billionaire begins to make pointed statements about the platform from his account. “Twitter algorithm should be open source,” he wrote, with a poll for users to vote “yes” or “no.”

The following day, Musk tweets out another poll to his followers: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”

Christian Marquardt/Getty Images

March 26: Musk reaches out to Jack Dorsey

Musk reaches out to Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey to “discuss the future direction of social media,” according to a company filing later put out by the company. The two tech founders are known to have a bit of a billionaire bromance on and off Twitter.

AP Photo/Richard Drew, File

April 3: Twitter leadership meets to discuss Musk

Twitter’s board and some of its leadership team meet with representatives from Wilson Sonsini, a law firm, and J.P. Morgan to discuss the possibility of Musk joining the company’s board, according a later securities filing. Dorsey is said to have told the board that “he and Mr. Musk were friends,” according to the filing.

In the meeting, the Twitter board discussed wanting Musk to agree to “‘standstill’ provisions”,” according to the filing. This would effectively “limit his public statements regarding Twitter, including the making of unsolicited public proposals to acquire Twitter (but not private proposals) without the prior consent of the Twitter Board.”

AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File

April 4: Surprise! Musk becomes Twitter’s largest shareholder

Musk is revealed to be Twitter’s largest individual shareholder, with a more than 9% stake in the company.

News of the purchase sends shares of the social media company soaring more than 20% in early trading and kicks off a wave of speculation about how Musk might push for changes on the platform.

AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu, File

April 5: Musk agrees to join the board

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announces Musk will join Twitter’s board of directors. “Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,” Agrawal says in a post on Twitter.

As part of the appointment, Musk agrees not to acquire more than 14.9% of the company’s shares while he remains on the board. His term on the board is set to go through 2024, according to a regulatory filing.

AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File

April 10: Just kidding. Musk ditches the board

Agrawal announces that Musk has decided not to join the board after all. “I believe this is for the best,” Agrawal writes in a letter to the Twitter team.

The reversal opens the door for Musk to pursue a greater stake in the company — and frees him to tweet his many thoughts about the company.

AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File

April 14: Musk offers to buy Twitter and ‘unlock’ its potential

Musk stuns the industry by making an offer to acquire all the shares in Twitter he does not own at a valuation of $41.4 billion. The cash offer represents a 38% premium over the company’s closing price on April 1, the last trading day before Musk disclosed that he had become the company’s biggest shareholder.

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company,” Musk writes in his offer letter. “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

April 15: The poison pill

Twitter’s board of directors adopts a “poison pill” provision, a limited-term shareholder rights plan that potentially makes it harder for Musk to acquire the company.

AP Photo/Jed Jacobsohn

April 21: Musk lines up $46.5 billion in financing

Musk lines up $46.5 billion in financing for the deal, including two debt commitment letters from Morgan Stanley and other unnamed financial institutions and one equity commitment letter from himself, according to a regulatory filing.

The billionaire also reveals that he has not received a formal response from Twitter a week after his acquisition offer. He said he is “seeking to negotiate” a definite acquisition agreement and “is prepared to begin such negotiations immediately” — an apparent reversal from his statement in his acquisition offer letter that it would be his “best and final” offer.

Although he is the richest person in the world, much of Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, and some followers of the company speculate that it could be challenging for Musk to raise debt against the historically volatile stock.

AP Photo/Richard Drew

April 25: Twitter agrees to sell itself to Elon Musk

Twitter announces that it has agreed to sell itself to Musk in a deal valued at around $44 billion. At a conference later in the day, Musk describes his offer to buy Twitter in characteristically sweeping terms as being about “the future of civilization,” not just making money.

At an all-hands meeting that afternoon, Twitter employees raise questions about everything from what the deal would mean for their compensation to whether former US President Donald Trump would be let back on the platform.

AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File

April 29: Musk cashes out billions in Tesla stock

Filings reveal Musk sold $8.5 billion of his Tesla stock in the three days after Twitter board agreed to the sale for an average of $883.09 per share. The filings did not disclose the reason for the sale, but Musk appeared to be raising funds to buy Twitter.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

May 4: With a little help from his billionaire friends

Musk raises another $7 billion in financing for the deal. The new investors include Oracle founder Larry Ellison, cryptocurrency platform Binance and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, according to a filing.

AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

May 10: Musk says he would reinstate Trump’s account

Musk confirms what many have assumed for weeks: he would reverse Twitter’s Trump ban if his deal to buy the company is completed.

“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump, I think that was a mistake,” Musk said. “I would reverse the perma-ban. … Banning Trump from Twitter didn’t end Trump’s voice, it will amplify it among the right and this is why it’s morally wrong and flat out stupid.”

Alex Brandon/AP

May 6: Musk’s lofty goals for Twitter, revealed

Musk aims to increase Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028, up from $5 billion last year, according to a New York Times report, citing Musk’s pitch deck presented to investors. To achieve that lofty goal, Musk intends to bolster Twitter’s subscription revenue and build up a payments business while decreasing the company’s reliance on advertising sales, according to the report.

AP Photo/John Raoux, File

May 12: A partial hiring freeze and executive departures

Twitter confirms to CNN Business that the platform is pausing most hiring and backfills, except for “business critical” roles, and pulling back on other non-labor costs ahead of the acquisition. In addition, Twitter says general manager of consumer, Kayvon Beykpour, and revenue product lead, Bruce Falck, are leaving the company.

AP Photo/Gregory Bull

May 13: Twitter deal ‘temporarily on hold’

Musk tweets that the deal is on hold, linking to a Reuters report from nearly two weeks earlier, about Twitter’s most recent disclosure about its amount of spam and fake accounts. The figure cited in the report, however, is in line with prior quarterly disclosures.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.

Shares of the social media site plummet after Musk’s announcement, dropping more than 10% at market open. Two hours after announcing the hold, Musk says he remains set on purchasing Twitter. “Still committed to acquisition,” he wrote.

Later in the day, Musk says his team is testing Twitter’s numbers and “picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.”

AP Photo/Gregory Bull

May 14: Oops. NDA problems?

Musk tweets out that Twitter’s legal team accused him of breaking a nondisclosure agreement when the billionaire revealed the platform’s sample size for automated user checks is allegedly just 100 users.

“Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100! This actually happened,” wrote Musk.

Hannibal Hanschke/Pool Photo via AP, File

May 16: Poop emoji

The standoff over bot accounts continues as Musk exchanges a series of tweets with Agrawal over the issue. After Agrawal carefully explains how Twitter attempts to combat and measure spam accounts, Musk responds with a poop emoji.

Musk follows up with a somewhat more thoughtful question. “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” Musk asked. “This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter,” he added.

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

May 17: Musk says Twitter deal ‘cannot move forward.’ Twitter disagrees

Musk announces that his acquisition of Twitter “cannot move forward” until he sees more information about the prevalence of spam accounts, claiming that the social media platform falsified numbers in filings. Without citing a source, he claims in a tweet that Twitter is “20% fake/spam accounts” and suggests Twitter’s previous filings with the SEC were misleading.

Later in the day, Musk posts a poll to his Twitter followers: “Twitter claims that >95% of daily active users are real, unique humans. Does anyone have that experience?” before calling on the SEC to evaluate the platform’s numbers. “Hello @SECGov, anyone home?” Musk tweets, in an apparent attempt to get the regulator to look into the matter.

In a statement, Twitter says it remains “committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable.” Later, the company says it intends to “enforce the merger agreement.”

AP Photo/Martin Meissner

Be the first to know

Get local news delivered to your inbox!

The post Elon Musk desires to show tweets into ‘X’s’ — however altering language not fairly so easy appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk may want to send “tweet” back to the birds, but the ubiquitous term for posting on the site he now calls X is here to stay — at least for now.

For one, the word is still plastered all over the site formerly known as Twitter. Write a post, you still need to press a blue button that says “tweet” to publish it. To repost it, you still tap “retweet.”

But it’s more than that.

With “tweets,” Upending that takes more than a top-down declaration, even if it is from the owner of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the world’s richest men.

“Language has always come from the people that use it on a day-to-day basis. And it can’t be controlled, it can’t created, it can’t be morphed. You don’t get to decide it,” said Nick Bilton, the author of “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” about Twitter’s origins.

Twitter didn’t start out as Twitter. It was “twttr” — without vowels, which was the trend in 2006 when the platform launched and SMS texting was wildly popular. The iPhone only came out in 2007.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams “went one day and purchased the vowels, two vowels for essentially $7,500 each,” when he bought the URL for twitter.com from a bird enthusiast, Bilton said.

At the beginning, people didn’t “tweet” — it was “I’m going to twitter this,” Bilton recalled. But “twittered” doesn’t roll off the tongue and “tweet” soon took over, first in the Twitter office, then San Francisco, then everywhere.

We’ve been propaganda trolls, sex workers and religious icons, meme queens and actual queens. Former president Donald Trump’s incendiary use of the bird app quickly punted “tweet” into near-constant headlines during his presidency. People who never signed up for Twitter knew what the word meant.

For now, we still tweet, retweet and quote tweet, and sometimes — perhaps not often enough — delete tweets. News sites embed tweets in their stories and TV programs scroll them. No other social network has a word for posting that’s entered the vernacular like “tweet” — though Google did the same for “googling.”

The Oxford English Dictionary added “tweet” in 2011. Merriam-Webster followed in 2013. The Associated Press Stylebook entered it in 2010.

“Getting into the dictionary is an indication that people are already using it,” said Jack Lynch, a Rutgers University English professor who studies the history of language. “Dictionaries are usually pretty tentative or cautious about letting new words in, especially for new phenomena, because they don’t want things to be just a flash in the pan.”

As Twitter grew into a global communications platform and struggled with misinformation, trolls and hate speech, its friendly brand image remained. The blue bird icon evokes a smile, like the Amazon up-turned-arrow smile — in contrast to the X that Musk has imposed.

Martin Grasser was two years out of art school when Twitter hired him for the logo redesign in 2011. His wasn’t the first bird logo for Twitter, but it would be the most enduring.

“They knew they wanted a bird. So we weren’t starting completely over, but they wanted it to be on par with Apple and Nike. That was really the brief,” he said.

Twitter launched Grasser’s design in May 2012; the company went public on Wall Street later that year.

One early in-house design shown to Grasser looked like “a flying goose with a tail. It looked kind of like a dragon. It was crazy,” he said. Jack Dorsey, another co-founder (and twice-CEO) wanted something simpler.

The bird represented a vision of Twitter as a friendly place “where everyone can weigh in and chat,” Grasser said.

“The round form evokes a sense of optimism, the bird even being sort of turned upward, as corny as that sounds, I think is different than a bird flying down or flat,” he said. “We wanted to give it this idea of like soaring.″

The word “Twitter” itself is playful, as is “tweet.” This was no accident, Bilton said.

Other names that floated as the platform started out included “Status” and “Friend Stalker.”

It was Noah Glass, another co-founder who never quite got the credit he deserved for his role in hatching Twitter, who had the winning idea.

Glass, Bilton said, “had been thinking about like heartbeats and emotions. He was going through a divorce and he literally went through the dictionary word by word until he came across the word twitter. And he just knew instantly that was it.”

“He was one of the four founders who had the emotional intelligence to be able to understand that this was about connecting with humans,” Bilton said. “It was inviting, it was emotional. It was about connecting with humans and your friends and your loved ones.”

Musk began his quest erasing Twitter’s corporate culture and image in favor of his own vision as soon as he took over the company in October 2022. He lost three-quarters of the company’s staff through firings, layoffs and voluntary departures, auctioned off furniture and décor, and upended policies on hate speech and misinformation. The rebranding to X was no surprise.

Twitter’s rebranding is rooted in ambition that Musk began to pursue nearly a quarter century ago after he sold his first startup, Zip2, to Compaq Computer. He set out to create a one-stop digital shop for finance called X.com — an “everything” service that would provide bank accounts, process payments, make loans and handle investments.

He has not given up on the dream. Twitter is now X, falling in line with Musk’s other X-named brands, SpaceX and Tesla’s Model X. Not to mention his young son, whom he calls “X.”

His goal for X is to turn it into an “everything” app — for video, photos, messaging, payments and other services, although he has given few details. For now, X.com is still, essentially Twitter.com, even as the blue bird and other playful tidbits start to disappear.

“There used to be a saying inside Twitter that Twitter was the company that couldn’t kill itself. I think that still rings true, whether it’s called Twitter or X,” Bilton said.

“I think that it’s kind of become a fabric of society. And even Elon Musk may not be able to break it.”

—

AP Technology Writers Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, and Michael Liedtke contributed to this story.

Follow @ktar923

The post Elon Musk needs to show tweets into ‘X’s’. However altering language just isn’t fairly so easy appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Home Sweet Home Chicago, which airs Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on WGN (AM), is sponsored by David Hochberg, MegaPros, JC Restoration, Inc., Builder Supply Outlet, Dykstra Home Services, ComEd, Law Offices of David R. Schlueter, Rose Pest Solutions, Amy Kite, Perma-Seal, Lindemann Chimney Co., Robert R. Andreas & Sons, Inc., Mr. Floor, Lindholm Roofing, Donna Sattler, Fidelity National Title, Executive Green Carpet Cleaning , Rae Kaplan, Jill Van Riet, Next Door and Window, Peerless Fence Company, Joe Cotton Ford, Miracle Method, RJ Graham Plumbing, JC Licht, Opem Tax Advocates, Silverthorne Home Builders, Modern Mill Solar, BMO Harris Bank and Access Elevator.

– Click here to learn more about David Hochberg and to meet our sponsors.

– See videos from the show’s expert guests.

– Click here to visit Team Hochberg’s website and leave a question for David or one of the experts at Home Sweet Home Chicago.

– Illinois Association of County Veterans Assistance Commissions Directory.

The post Proprietor and President of R.J. Graham Plumbing | ‘On older homes a easy restore, that may be moderately priced, is now a bit bit extra pricey due to the potential hazards’ | WGN Radio 720 appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.