• Matias Augusto Travizano, 45, of Argentina died while descending Mount Shasta during rough conditions last Friday, September 12. Travizano and a companion had gone off course and were stranded on the tip of a glacier when he hit his head and slid 2,000 feet to his death. [SFGate]
• SF’s first televised Lowrider Parade and the "KING of the STREETS” Hopping Competition, which will be co-hosted by local legend Chuy Gomez, is taking place Saturday in the Mission in Celebration of Latino Heritage Month. [Secret San Francisco]
• Four people were shot in the East Bay town of Antioch around 10:20 pm Thursday in the area of "D" and West 19th Streets; two died at the scene, and two others were taken to local hospitals. [KPIX]
• A large, non-venomous ball python, which experts believe to be someone’s pet, is currently on the loose in the South Bay. [NBC Bay Area]

National:

• The air traffic control towers at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field lost all radar and phone communications Friday afternoon due to an outage at the local phone company. Six hundred fourty-five flights at DFW were delayed and 183 cancelled, and Love Field had 165 delays, as of 4:30 pm CT. [CNN]
• Trump signed a proclamation Friday requiring an annual fee of $100,000 for H-1B visa applications. He also announced plans to launch his new “Trump Gold Card,” which grants US citizenship with a $1 million processing fee, as well as the Platinum for $2 million. [CBS Washington DC]
• In a recent Pew Research poll, "How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society," 53% of the respondents said they are concerned about AI technology and they want more government protections safeguarding how it’s used in their daily lives. [KRON4]
• A California federal judge representing 21 states and Washington DC won a temporary restraining order Thursday barring the US Department of Agriculture from collecting data on US residents who applied for SNAP. [Associated Press]

Video of the Day:

The year is 1998, and the goths are all gathered at an SF club called The Catacombs.

Ten days after San Francisco Uber users received emails welcoming them to uberPOOL, a recently-launched service from the transportation service intended to allow "Uber riders to share trips with another rider along their route and reduce the cost of Uber by up to 40%," the California Public Utilities Commission has told the company that their new offering is a violation of state law.

According to Forbes, the problem lies in how California identifies vehicles for hire:

If a company operates as a “passenger stage corporation” or PSC, it can charge people individually for a shared vehicle. This is how SuperShuttle can drive around to multiple neighborhoods, pick people up and drop them all at the airport without running afoul of the law. A “charter-party carrier” or TCP as California calls it, can’t do that. It can only rent out a vehicle by time or distance. Limos and charter buses fall into this category.

Companies like Uber are actually Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), but those companies still follow the regulations laid out for TCPs, including one that states that “[N]o charter-party carrier of passengers shall … demand or receive compensation, for the transportation offered … on an individual-fare basis,” Forbes reports.

Therefore, the PUC told Uber, everyone needs to hop out of the uberPOOL. (Ugh, sorry.)

According to Cnet, Sidecar, which has been beta-testing a "Shared Rides" option, got a PUC nastygram as well. There's no news yet on if Lyft, which launched its Lyft Line carpooling option in August, has been contacted by the regulatory agency.

An SF Business Times report from September 1 says that the uberPOOL service has a remarkably enthusiastic response even in the pre-launch period, with over 100,000 Bay Area users clamoring to try the offering. As of August, 13,000 SF Sidecar users had tried their Shared Rides option, the company told Cnet.

According to Forbes, the PUC told Uber that “The Commission lacks the flexibility to allow a transportation service that is contrary to the statute… If Uber believes that § 5401 is outdated, it may petition the Legislature for a modification. Unless and until the Legislature modifies §5401, the Commission must enforce state law.”

"Our biggest reservation about agreeing to be regulated by the CPUC was that it would slow down our ability to continue to innovate," a Sidecar spokesperson told Cnet. The letter from the PUC "demonstrates our fears were founded."

So what's next for these companies' carpooling offerings? Will they just keep on running their services as a subtle middle finger to the PUC? Will they take the PUC's advice and lobby to change the law? Will they have to go up against Super Shuttle, which Forbes speculates might have tattled on their car service competition?

Your guess is as good as ours — though SFist contacted spokespeople from both agencies, the only response we've received is a canned statement from Uber spokesperson Natalia Montalvo, which read:

“We welcome the opportunity to share with the CPUC the significant benefits of uberPOOL and how it really works so that we can continue to bring its unmatched convenience and affordability to communities and traffic jams across the Golden State.”

Needless to say, this hardly answers the questions we were asking above (don't worry, I wrote back, asking them again). But with Obama's old campaign manager now at Uber to reportedly wage bloody and brutal war against the company's multitude of regulatory disputes, we suspect that this is going to get pretty interesting pretty fast.

[Forbes]
[Cnet]

As you walk around and see stores decorated for Christmas before Halloween, it’s hard not to think that consumerism has gone out of control in this country. Unlike other problems, there’s a relatively simple solution to this. Bill Talen, aka the Reverend Billy simply says: “Stop Shopping”. Part performance artist and part social activist, the Reverend Billy and his gospel choir tour the US performing exorcisms on Walmart’s corporate campus and liberating shoppers at the Mall of America. “What Would Jesus Buy?” captures last year’s stop shopping tour. In addition to being entertaining, it makes you think about consumption and production—both good topics this time of year. The Reverend Billy answered a few questions for us-- think of them as both a movie preview and some basic indoctrination in the gospel of stop shopping.

"What Would Jesus Buy?" Is currently playing at the Lumiere Theatre in San Francisco, Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, and opens this Friday at the Camera 12 in San Jose.

What are some easy ways for people to shop less?
There are four preliminary steps that are possible when facing an actual product on a shelf. 1) Pausing in your grab at the product and then feeling the initial tremors of the-sex-of-no-products. 2) Stepping back from the product and feeling the wanton eyes of the product following you as you try to boldly file for divorce 3) Turning your back on the product and entering the multi-channel universe of what-the-product-sees and what you yourself may see, for instance, a thousand other products clawing for your attention and behind them a parking lot traffic jam and 4) The confusing loss of patriotic affirmation, the sound of being scolded by George Bush, when you declare your personal freedom from shopping and embark on a successful escape past the cash register, through the car-scape and out into a new world beyond, which could feel disorientingly authentic – too much TRACTION OF THE REAL - for a while. You might be on a personal journey with pockets of tough boredom, post-addictive longings, the return of memories and dreams you thought were gone forever. And then, of course, here come the new people and all the surprises that come when words gets out that you have freed yourself from Consumerism. Oh, Life After Shopping becomes, finally, “easy.” It’s a joy.

How is the Bay Area's relative level of consumerism?
The Bay Area drowns itself in cars and trucks just like cities that seem less sophisticated. iThises and iThats are stuck in the heads of SFites like everywhere else, with computers and TV’s and other media platforms sucking the life out of neighborhoods, in the manner of dead cities and suburban lakes of Monocultural Hellfire. San Francisco must resist gentrification and must do it on purpose. Gavin Newsom must declare the any person who dares to resemble a 28 year old stockbroker and likes unheard-of European beers must declare his or her identity at the border. Such a person must sign an agreement to avoid posing on balconies with white sails tilting below, on punishment of a thousand hours of community service in a bar in Gallup, New Mexico. Such a person must report to parole official and get on his knees before the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. San Francisco must be Dioneysian, rather than Apollonian. Zoning regulations must reject chain stores and protect public spaces of confusion and funk.

After screwing up mandated drug tests and failing to report the severity of the oil spill in a timely fashion, as of this morning Coast Guard Captain William Uberti is out. And an experienced specialist in oil SNAFUs, Capt. Paul Gugg, is in.

According to the Chronicle, Gugg, 49, has "has crafted spill regulations and response plans in Washington, D.C., and helped design emergency tactics after the catastrophic 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska."

Coast Guard District, Rear Admiral Craig Bone (hee hee!) made the decision to replace Uberti by "considering the magnitude of this response operation, the level of public interest, and problems I have identified related to the initial spill response communications and coordination."

Oh is it a voting day or something? It totally sneaked up on us! It still feels like Monday today. Actually it also feels like October. Anyway, you should probably vote yes on A and no on H, because that's what everyone else is doing. Prop A will protect The Mt Soledad National War Memorial and do something to the air force? and will transform some colleges. Also, Aristotle endorsed it it.

Proposition H will make housing affordable and will help people complain more (always a good thing), and will ban achohol, and will also make Ron Paul president.

Ha ha ha, just kidding! Actually Prop A makes Muni work better, by a series of boring changes that have to do with the general fund and labor laws and environmental purchasing regulations, . But it's good, even though it's dull. Prop H is just bad news; they're trying to make it easier to park your car by building more spaces, but it'll be just like if you favorite neighborhood bar builds an addition: it'll just get more crowded. Boooooo!

Seriously, though, please do vote for Tameka Boen. You're in the Boen Zone!

It's the latest in the Tsk Tsk Supervisorial codes of conduct battle front!

You've got sex, you've got drugs, all you need now is some rock and roll: Supervisor Chris Daly went and introduced the code of conduct regulations he's been waving around ever since his fellow supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier said she was going to put in some rules about (his) offensive language.

Daly's code would prohibit sexual relationships between managers and subordinates at City Hall, prohibit attendance at meetings while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and require meeting agendas to include attendance records of the member supervisors. Daly says this will decrease the City's liability exposure, and also says that he's seen certain supervisors at meetings buzzed on something or other, though he declined to say who they were.

Daly tried to get three other supes to sign off on this so he could put it on the November ballot, but failed -- so his proposal will go up before the Rules Committee at the same time as Michela Alioto-Pier's. If we had to guess, we'd say both of 'em are going to fail. And then there's going to be a huge blowout vulgarity-laden meth orgy at City Hall! Yay!

It's happening Monday, July 2, at SPUR's 312 Sutter Street headquarters from 12:30 to 1:30 pm. Valet parking will be provided. Ha ha ha, just kidding!

Here's some things that SPUR, which generally advocates for intelligent, green, sustainable planning, has to say about the proposal:

... making it impossible to change parking regulations as part of a neighborhood planning effort ... amends parking requirements to increase the amount of parking required and permitted in new projects (especially downtown) ... regardless of impact to transit stops or any street trees ... limit the ability of the Planning Commission to impose urban design and affordability requirements ...

Yeesh. You can read the entire 60-page proposal on SPUR's site, or if you hate PDFs, on our Flickr stream. (Sorry the pages are all out of order -- we can't figure out how to reorder images in the Flickr uploadr.)

The agency wants to use Electric Multiple Unit (or EMU) trains. The trains work by having each car generate it's own power. Besides the above-mentioned benefits, these trains are easier to maintain and are lighter on the tracks, thus making the tracks easier to maintain. They're also faster.

Sounds great, right? Well, there's one problem, that being federal regulations stipulating that trains have to be a certain weight to hold up in case of train crashes. Oh, and they have a price tag of $3 billion each.

One option is trying to work with state and federal authorities to come up with some sort of solution. Another option is keeping the train cars they way they are but making the locomotive electric and not diesel.

Of note is the resignation of the interim Taxi Commissioner and BFF of Heidi, Tristan Bettencourt. Tristan resigned after stories of past transgressions with the law were made public. In fact, Tristan seems to be the whole reason we are where we are in all of this.

For whatever reason, somebody out there really didn’t like Tristan. Really, really, really, really didn't like him. According to all we've gathered in our exhaustive five (no, wait, six!) minute research of this whole meshigas, somebody (allegedly Yellow Cab) hired a private dick to look into Tristan's past. Which they did, finding all sorts of nasty rumors and accusations and lord, don't ever screw anyone on eBay and then go into Government. With dirt dug, a dossier was developed and distributed. Media outlets were sent the info (including us), message boards were spammed, and web sites set up.

So the question that's begged to be asked is why all the hating on Tristan and what does this have to do with Heidi? Well, some say that the enmity between Heidi and her fellow Commissioners all stemmed from her hiring of Tristan. See while Tristan was at one point a cab driver, his main claim to fame was being BFF and ex-roommate of Heidi (we've read differing accounts of their relationship-- some say they were BF/GF while others just say they were friends). So all this was because they thought Tristan was some lackey and resented the lackey getting a position over them.

Others, however, say that it's mainly because Heidi Machen was gaining some rather big and powerful enemies for her wacky assertions that actual rules and regulations be followed. So Heidi's opponents, mainly the established taxi powers (the Taxi Industrial Complex?) struck back. But instead of going after Heidi, who from all accounts is a hard working, midlevel bureaucrat, they went after Tristan to embarass her and her boss, that being Gavin.

See, it's all about medallions-- driver gold, taxi tea. Heidi wanted to change how they were handed out, or at least make sure the rules were followed in handing them out, and certain people (like Yellow Cab) didn't like it because it would mean either a loss of medallions or loss of control of medallions or losing money they’d get in holding onto them. So going after Tristan was the easiest way of going after Heidi.

What does this mean to you? Not much, actually, other than it'll still be almost impossible to get a cab in this city. But now maybe it'll be a little less than impossible.

Our story began last week when a mens softball team headed off to the Connecticut Yankee for some post-game celebratory drinks. As is softball players' wont as the Yankee is known as a sports bar and a good home for wayward New Englanders. So the group began to order and when the last person, a person who was most definitely wearing their baseball cap backwards, ordered, the bartender told him that they wouldn't serve him unless he turned his cap around. When the guy protested, the bartender announced to all of the backwards baseball cap wearers in the group that none of them would be served again unless they all turned their caps around. Some stayed (hey, they already paid for their drinks), some left in protest.

Afterwards, e-mails went a-flying as word was spread throughout the league about the Yankee's new baseball cap policy. An e-mail was sent to Ms. Garchik who called the Yankee to find out what the deal was. She was told, and we quote: "We're tired of stupid people coming in here with stupid hats...you need to be serious about your baseball and be serious about your hat.''

We here in San Francisco pride ourselves in our tolerance and our hatred of any sort of prejudice. And what we have here is a prejudice most foul-- the owners of the bar are clearly anti-backward-baseball-capites. If this doesn't call for some sort of San Francisco style protest, we don't know what would. Will some frat-dude Rosa Parks brave the bar and refuse to turn around their hat? Will a bunch of Yuppies get together and stage a sit in where they all wear their caps backwards in solidarity and sing "We Shall Overcome" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame?" Where is Chris Daly when you need him? He's probably worn a baseball cap backwards a few times. And you can't tell me Gavin has never strayed from having his cap forward looking.

Oh, well, we kid, but this is like one of the stupidest things ever.

Anyways, more e-mails are circulating and a boycott is being called for. As is a challenge to the Yankee to play a game of softball to show who the serious baseball people are and who aren't. Others wonder why the Yankee doesn't say anything about the motorcycle gang that makes the bar it's home. Are the bar owners too scared to do something or do they just wear their caps to bar regulations?

Either way, developing....

First up is Oakland which is thinking about taxing certain merchants a few extra bucks to help clean up the messes left by customers, something that is apparently becoming a problem. The legislation is primarily aimed at fast-food joints and conveyance stores, especially near schools, as that's where most of the mess is. Which raises the question what is wrong with the kids today? Can't they pick up after themselves or are they to fat these days to bend over and pick something up? Why, when we were kids, we'd walk three miles in the snow to pick up our KFC boxes. Merchants, of course, do not like the new legislation and think it could hurt business. That sound you hear is the sound of the world's smallest violin playing a sad symphony for McDonalds.

Then there's Contra Costa County which is thinking about restricting the amount of fast-food chains in the county, especially near schools. The measure, which was passed by the county Board of Supervisors, doesn’t specifically make clear how it will be done, it just says something must be done. Besides limiting the amount of restaurants in the area, the measure calls for more education and other things to help promote a more "healthy lifestyle." In response, flaks for the fast-food industry basically said, "dream on, white boy" and pointed out that in the end, it's all just a matter of people actively choosing not to eat a Big Mac.

Mmmm....Big Mac....

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if the same goes for intellectual property theft and encroaching on other people's business, then a lot of people should be feeling very flattered this week.

Pixar should be flattered by the attention they're getting from former owner George Lucas, who opened a computer animation studio in Singapore on Thursday. Rob Coleman, the new studio's animation and development director, name-dropped Pixar while describing the studio, saying that Lucasfilms' efforts will be different because they focus on combining CGI with live-action characters. The studio is intended to allow Lucas to avoid union labor regulations in the United States bring an Asian aesthetic and sensibility to the franchise with two new television series.

While we in the Tech Labs are disappointed that the shows aren't being directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, who did such a great job with the "Clone Wars" series that it actually fooled us into believing we still liked Star Wars, we remain cautiously optimistic. That series at least showed that Lucasfilm was willing to try new things with the characters and the franchise. (Such as teaching the kids about science in Boston).