Annie Tsai

This column was first published at smdailyjournal.com on 3/14/2024.

What a week. I was going to write about how much fun I’ve been having automating literally everything with openAI and how easy it is to play with Perplexity, but apparently a dog attended the Oscars and Jimmy Kimmel went hard praising Messi in his pup tux and then all of social media exploded when John Cena decided to adorn the Oscars stage with his birthday suit, so obviously the people have spoken. 

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Speaking of the people speaking, this past Sunday we had the great pleasure of turning our clocks forward to what turned into a hellscape of weekend toddler parenting (as it usually does). The one hour time change is far worse than going to the east coast or Asia. 

I seem to recall way back in 2018 when the people of the great state of California voted to end daylight savings. Do you remember that? Is it long lost in your pre-covid file cabinet? Why, you ask, are we still turning the clocks and unnaturally forcing our brains to jarringly reorient ourselves twice a year? 

Proposition 7, which 59.75% of Californians voted in favor of, only “allowed” our state legislature to change the practice and choose one or the other – staying on daylight savings forever or staying on standard time forever. With a two-thirds vote in the State Assembly and Senate, Californians can enjoy standard time forever. If the state legislature votes to stay in daylight savings time forever, Congress would need to also pass the vote. 

This seems to be the vote of the century, as in it could take the remainder of this century for people to agree on whether or not the state should remain in standard time or daylight savings time. Personally? They don’t call it “standard for nothing”. Yes, parts of the year will have darker mornings. But… messing with nature means someone pays. And in this case, our brains pay every single time we mess with the sun’s dance card. 

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Let’s boomerang back to AI for a minute – Kate Britt (R-Alabama) gave the GOP rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union from what was advertised as her kitchen. But let’s be honest, that background was worse than Kim Kardashian’s photoshopped Instagram posts. Please, please, please, if you are going to use Dall-E or Photoshop or Canva or whatever to make fake Zoom backgrounds, make everything to scale and make the color palettes match. Your message will be entirely lost in the fact that the island base color is three shades off from the wall cabinets, and there’s a funny fuzzy thing floating in the middle of what is supposed to be a window. Oh, Kate. Tisk tisk. 

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Last but very not least – earlier this week in one of the Facebook groups I lurk in, one of the members posted about some curiosities with our tap water as of late. Their skin was dry. The water smelled of chlorine. What was happening? 

Apparently, every year around this time, our water source mix changes for a few months to incorporate the much harder Alameda and Peninsula watershed supplies to support maintenance that takes place on Hetch Hetchy water lines. Did you know that all that super fresh tasting Hetch Hetchy water gets piped 160 miles so us folks on the peninsula can enjoy it? 

Longer term, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (which supplies our water from Hetch Hetchy) has a massive and ambitious plan called the Alternative Water Supply Plan which wants to by (target) 2039 have live as they describe in the project description, “Treated wastewater effluent from the City of San Mateo and Silicon Valley Clean Water… treated to drinking water standards at a new advanced water treatment plant. A new conveyance pipeline and pump stations would deliver purified water to Crystal Springs Reservoir where it would blend with other RWS supplies. Water can be available in all years, including in dry years.” 

Yes, sewage is purified into drinking water. As states continue to face the impacts of decreasing water supply and the impacts of climate change, California follows Colorado, Ohio, New Mexico, and South Carolina in implementing “direct to potable” programs, and Florida and Arizona are actively taking steps towards implementing similar programs. The Amazon is experiencing horrific El Nino driven droughts and wildfires, and we are solving water supply shortages by purifying sewage into drinking water. Maybe instead of trying to colonize Mars, we should invest more in getting our own house in order.