The dangers are well documented. Gas-fired water heaters — even the more efficient, tankless kind — regularly puff out clouds of methane, a greenhouse gas that, in the short term, traps at least 100 times more atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide (per unit). Every minute that it’s in your house, even when it’s turned off, your gas stove may be flatulating dangerous pollutants and climate-warming gases into your kitchen.

About 13% of cases of childhood asthma in the United States may be attributable to gas cooktops, a recent study found — a population-level effect similar to that of exposure to secondhand smoke.

So what’s a homeowner to do? If you spend time around environmentalists or energy experts, you’ll hear a simple answer: Electrify! Most gas appliances can now be replaced with healthier and more efficient alternatives powered by electricity — heat pumps instead of gas-fired furnaces, for instance, or induction stoves instead of gas burners. Electrification is also crucial to the world’s plan for mitigating climate change: We’ll clean up how we generate electricity (wind, solar) while electrifying everything we can (cars, factories, shopping malls, houses), the thinking goes. Add government incentives and stir.

In some sectors, like automobiles, electrification is catching on. At home, though? Despite growing recognition of the dangers of gas-powered appliances, electrifying our abodes is going to be much slower, more expensive and more complicated than electrifying other parts of our lives. There is also a growing political freakout — on Twitter and Fox News, right-wingers are swearing allegiance to gas stoves as if they were AR-15s.

But whatever your politics, I’m not sure gas stoves are a hill to die on. Some electric advances make clear sense — in a lot of places, getting rooftop solar panels is a no-brainer. But an induction stove? An electric water heater? It’s hard to say; experts I talked to said that whether people should adopt these climate-aiding systems depends on a lot of factors. Houses are like people; they’re all ailing in different ways, and some of them may be just too set in their ways to be rehabilitated.

Take cooking. Researchers have been documenting the dangers of natural gas-burning stoves for decades. Once, chefs and foodies justified gas for its superior culinary performance, but then came induction stoves, which use electricity to produce a magnetic current that heats certain types of cookware. Induction cooktops can heat up and cool down more quickly than gas; many home cooks and even professional chefs rave about them.

State and local governments have started to phase out natural gas hookups in new buildings, and the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act provides billions in new incentives for people to electrify their home appliances.

Does that mean you should go electric? I don’t know — I can’t even figure out if I should get an induction stove.

In homes that already have electric cooktops, switching to induction may be relatively easy. But in my home, as in millions of others piped for gas cooking, getting an induction range would require extensive electrical work and the capping of my existing gas line. Induction stoves also tend to cost slightly more than comparable gas stoves (but new tax credits could change that). Also, you don’t have to entirely replace your stove to mitigate the health dangers of cooking with gas — upgrading and always turning on your ventilation hood, if you have one, is a very good idea.

It’s no surprise, then, that induction stoves have struggled to take off; according to a survey by Consumer Reports, only about 3% of American households have them.

Instead of getting an induction stove, then, it might make a lot more sense for you to spend your money on a heat pump, an underappreciated and kind of magical electric device that can replace both a gas-powered furnace and an air conditioner. But there may be an even simpler and cheaper thing to do first: Weather seal your house. Ed May, a partner at an environmental consulting practice, told me that a lot of the ways to improve your home’s environmental impact are just “really not that exciting at all,” including “lots and lots of insulation.”

So, sure, your gas-powered stove may be out to get you. But it’s the furnace that may be a bigger menace. And don’t forget to insulate.

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

Even though a great deal is being done to address the problem — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest budget outlines billions of dollars in spending on interim housing, mental health care and other assistance — none of it seems enough to make a dent: There are now about 174,000 people in the state without a place to live, according to a recent analysis by CalMatters, and the number is rising at an alarming rate.

Homelessness as a political issue has also grown charged to the point of seeming intractability. Fox News frequently showcases the dangerous, tent-strewn streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco as a visual shorthand for Biden-era American ruin. And even at the local level we’re stuck in the political mire.

It is now beyond obvious that homelessness in California is driven by the state’s precipitous cost of housing, the result of severe, long-term underdevelopment. But even though the grip of NIMBYism has loosened in recent years — there are new laws that limit local communities’ exclusionary policies against building new housing — it remains tremendously difficult to build more places for people to live.

Experts who study and work to alleviate homelessness offered tips on how to help, ranging from the practical to the philosophical and strategic. But their suggestions boiled down to this: You can do something.

How? Here’s some of what I learned:

• Choose a niche. The causes and effects of homelessness are varied, and so are the groups that help the homeless. Some charities focus on addressing people’s immediate needs while others work on long-term political goals. Many are devoted to specific groups — there are charities that provide aid to, among others, young people, veterans, families, single parents with kids, the mentally ill and people in the LGBTQ community.

I plan to give money to Covenant House California, which helps to find shelter and support for young people who are homeless, and to Compass Family Services, a well-regarded charity in San Francisco that helps families in need. Experts suggested that donors choose groups whose missions resonate with them, and to stick with those groups over time; long-term engagement will make your impact more tangible.

• Donate money, goods and time. Organizations that help the homeless also have immense need for goods — things like clothing, soap, toilet paper, toothpaste and diapers — and for volunteers to manage their collection and distribution.

Some practical notes, though: Don’t go out and buy canned goods or other food items for donation to food banks. Operationally, food banks can do much more with donations of money than of food. Also, homeless people need help throughout the year, not just at the holidays, so if you have the means, consider setting up a recurring donation to an organization you support.

• Address the structural causes of homelessness. In the long run, there is only one way to get out of this problem: We’ve got to build more housing. And the best way to help do that is to become engaged with the thorny local politics of development and housing.

I have written often in support of the YIMBY movement, which seeks to oppose restrictive housing rules, and I plan to give to YIMBY Action, an advocacy group that has helped advance many inclusive housing initiatives across the state.

But you can also get engaged politically.

When it comes to building low-income housing, “the people who are against it show up” to city council meetings and other forums where local housing decisions are made, said Margot Kushel, who directs the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco. “If you are someone who actually says, ‘Yeah, we should build more housing for people who are low income,’” it’s not enough to just not object — you have to show up, too, she said.

Finally, there’s one more very simple thing you can do to help: Recognize homeless people’s humanity.

To experience homelessness is to suffer not just deprivation but also dehumanization. Homeless people “talk a lot about feeling invisible or unrecognized — just completely abandoned or left behind,” Kushel said. And so even if you don’t have the means to address people’s need for housing and food, you can at least acknowledge their existence and extend to them the kindness you would any other person.

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

The latest chips — the sort that power supercomputers and high-end smartphones — are densely packed with transistors so small they’re measured in nanometers. Perhaps the only things more ingenious than the chips themselves are the machines that are used to build them. These devices are capable of working on almost unimaginably tiny scales, a fraction of the size of most viruses. Some of the chip-building machines take years to build and cost hundreds of millions of dollars each; Dutch company ASML, which makes the world’s only lithography machines capable of inscribing designs for the fastest chips, has produced just 140 such devices over the past decade.

Which brings us to another amazing detail about microchips: They are a triumph not just of technology but also of global trade and cooperation. In the recently published “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology,” Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts University, describes the geographic sprawl of the semiconductor supply chain:

“A typical chip might be designed with blueprints from the Japanese-owned, U.K.-based company called Arm, by a team of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the United States. When a design is complete, it’s sent to a facility in Taiwan, which buys ultrapure silicon wafers and specialized gases from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world’s most precise machinery, which can etch, deposit and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick. These tools are produced primarily by five companies, one Dutch, one Japanese and three Californian, without which advanced chips are basically impossible to make. Then the chip is packaged and tested, often in Southeast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.”

That’s why I have been so impressed with the aggressive and creative way the Biden administration has gone about curtailing China’s alarming, decades long effort to build a domestic semiconductor industry that’s independent from the rest of the world. This month, the Commerce Department announced a set of restrictions that prevent China from getting much of what it needs to establish a commanding position in the chip business. The government said the rules were meant to block “sensitive technologies with military applications” from being acquired by China’s military and security services. With few exceptions, the sanctions prohibit China from buying the best American chips and the machines to build them, and even from hiring Americans to work on them. Analysts I spoke to said the rules will devastate China’s domestic chip industry, potentially setting it back decades.

The rules “are an absolute historical landmark,” said Gregory Allen, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former director of AI strategy at the Department of Defense. In a recent report, Allen writes that Biden’s restrictions “begin a new U.S. policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry — strangling with an intent to kill.” Considering the ways China might use the advanced chips — including in expanding its dystopian, AI-powered surveillance and repression regime — the strangulation is justified.

Semiconductors are one of the few sectors for which China still depends on the rest of the world; the country spends more money importing microchips each year than it does oil. The Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to “indigenize” the industry, but its progress has been slow. And in some of the most advanced areas of the business, Chinese semiconductor manufacturers lag far behind their international competitors.

How can China respond? One way is by evading the rules. The country has long been masterful at getting around sanctions, and microchips are small and potentially easy to smuggle.

Allen also warned that we don’t know how grave a provocation China might consider these rules. He pointed out that in the run-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was America’s refusal to sell oil to Imperial Japan that led the latter to conclude that it was “functionally at war” with the United States. The semiconductor rules are narrower than our oil restrictions on Japan were. “But will China see it that way?” Allen asked. “I kind of doubt it.”

On the other hand, what choice does the United States have?

“These technologies are going to be the foundation of economic strength over the next decades, and there are significant concerns about what the world would look like if China gained the upper hand,” said Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “It wouldn’t be a world that I would want to live in, and I don’t think most Americans or most of our friends and allies would want to live in it either.”

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

At the time, Utah had not yet passed a law barring transgender athletes from participating in school sports under their gender identity. Still, officials received complaints from parents about athletes who didn’t “look feminine enough,” David Spatafore, the legislative representative of the Utah High School Activities Association, recently testified. Officials were only too happy to investigate; in the case of the student who won first place, school administrators tracked down her academic records without informing her or her parents. “The school went back to kindergarten,” Spatafore testified. “And she’d always been a female.”

Phew! Lawmakers elsewhere, though, aren’t taking any chances. In June, the Ohio House passed a bill requiring a doctor to examine schoolchildren’s hormone levels, genetics or “internal and external reproductive anatomy” in the event of a dispute over the gender of an athlete participating in women’s sports. There is currently only one known transgender athlete at the varsity level in all of Ohio high school sports, and she told a reporter recently, “I barely even get to play because I’m not great.” Still, lawmakers called their bill the Save Women’s Sports Act.

This is what a moral panic looks like. Unhinged hysteria sows fear and suspicion by inflating unusual ideas and lifestyles into social and political emergencies.

Eighteen states have recently passed transgender athlete bans, and more are in the wings. Four states have restricted access to gender-affirming care for young people, and more than a dozen are considering restrictions. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered that parents who allow transition-related care for their kids be investigated for child abuse. The state’s only clinic for transgender adolescents was forced to shut down.

This overt fearmongering has become the latest right-wing phenomenon. Transgender issues are a red meat staple on Fox News and among fringe lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-QAnon, who has proposed a federal ban on transition-related care for minors. But anxiety about trans issues is a concern of not just the far right. Stories about how trans people are changing American life — how their sensibilities “capture” medical organizations and other institutions, how they’re pushing for changes in language, how they’ve engendered a fragile intellectual atmosphere where one wrong opinion can get you canceled — have become a mainstay of discussion.

Joe Rogan — who in other contexts talks up his long-term reliance on testosterone replacement therapy — frequently suggests on his podcast that the way transgender people are breaking norms is a sign of “civilizations collapsing.”

To put this in language that Rogan might understand: Dude, come on.

This sort of fixation imputes to trans people an outsize role in American culture and politics. It pretends that they pose a threat to our institutions — whether women’s sports or academic journals or civilization generally — that overstates their place in society beyond all rationality and recognition.

A recent Pew Research survey found that fewer than 0.6% of American adults say they’re transgender, and an additional 1% are nonbinary. According to Pew, more than half of American adults don’t even know a trans person personally. Trans identification among adults is highest among those younger than 25, 3.1% of whom say they are a transgender man or woman. The Williams Institute, a sexual orientation research group at the UCLA School of Law, also found that young people make up a large share of people who identify as trans. There are about 300,000 transgender youths ages 13 to 17 in the United States, accounting for about 18% of the country’s transgender population, Williams researchers said.

But although there is a debate about whether and how young people should undergo transition-related health care therapies, most transitions of young people involve no medical intervention at all.

“For the overwhelming majority of trans youth, what transitioning means is really social transition,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “It usually means changing the name that they go by, changing the pronoun, styling their hair differently and changing how they dress.”

The debate over transgender participation in sports often similarly elides the rarity of the issue. Stories often focus on a handful of athletes, many of them on swimmer Lia Thomas. That’s because there just aren’t that many others. The Utah official testified that only about seven transgender athletes had asked to participate in high school sports statewide last year.

Remember these stats the next time you hear that trans people have a stranglehold on American public opinion. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

But there is another under-the-radar reason for my home state’s slow pace of new home building: We don’t have nearly enough construction workers. Experts estimate that developers in California need to recruit between 100,000 and 200,000 new workers in order to meet the state’s housing goals. Construction work of all kinds is physically demanding and economically volatile. But building houses in California is low-paying, dangerous and often exploitative — payroll fraud, wage theft and the abuse of workers living in the U.S. illegally have been found in the residential construction industry there.

All of which is why I’m so excited about AB 2011, a bill moving through the California Legislature that aims to create millions of new homes — including hundreds of thousands of homes set aside for low-income Californians — by addressing both zoning restrictions and poor working conditions in residential construction.

It’s a very clever idea. Across the state, there are nearly 108,000 acres of livable space in areas now zoned for commercial and office construction. AB 2011 would allow new housing to be created in those areas — places now occupied by underutilized office parks, strip malls, big-box stores and parking lots — in a streamlined process that bypasses the usual local approvals thicket. In return for an easier process and all the new space on which to build, developers would need to adhere to stringent working standards. Among other things, they’d be required to pay construction workers the “prevailing wage” as determined by the state’s director of industrial relations and, on larger developments, require contractors to participate in apprenticeship programs that can lead to union membership and provide health care coverage.

AB 2011, which was written by Buffy Wicks, an Assemblywoman from Oakland, passed the state Assembly in May and now needs approval in the state Senate. But its passage there faces a tough challenge. The bill has split one of California’s most powerful political forces: organized labor. While AB 2011 is backed by the California Conference of Carpenters and some of California’s large service-sector unions — including those representing health care workers, teachers and public employees — many unions in the construction industry are opposed to the bill. The State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, an organization composed of unions for a range of construction jobs — boilermakers, bricklayers, painters, plasterers, roofers and others — says the standards don’t go far enough. The trades council wants to require that a certain number of jobs created by the bill be set aside for graduates of apprenticeship programs, most of whom are union members. Because it doesn’t, the council has called AB 2011 an effort to “exploit a very real crisis on the backs of California’s blue-collar workforce.”

Now the construction unions are playing spoiler, and, like the NIMBYs before them, their opposition is both self-serving and shortsighted. It is true that AB 2011 would not require developers to hire workers who’ve finished apprenticeship programs — but as several experts told me, there are not enough such workers in California to address such a need anyway. Worse, as CalMatters recently found, the shortage of union workers is most acute in rural and low-income areas of the state, where lots of new housing is needed.

“It’s so pure that it’s no longer a standard — it’s a barrier,” said Danny Curtin, the director of the California Conference of Carpenters.

California’s Legislature is run by Democrats who are generally strongly in favor of organized labor. The split among unions on AB 2011 thus creates a quandary for many lawmakers. Should they side with NIMBYs and construction unions who argue that any bill that doesn’t require unionized workers will imperil workers, or with YIMBYs, carpenters and public employees who favor more building with strong employment standards?

I’m with the carpenters and the YIMBYs. AB 2011 is an elegant effort to address a complex crisis. California needs a lot more housing. Strip malls and office parks are ideal places to build it. And guaranteeing livable wages is a way to make construction a much more attractive job that could ultimately be a boon for the labor movement.

The bill is likely to come up for a floor vote in the California Senate sometime in the next week or two. I hope legislators can find the courage to buck the opposition.

“When you go to my district in Oakland, we have growing encampments at every freeway exit — that is absolutely unacceptable,” Wicks told me. “What we are doing is not working. And so while the politics may be tough for some, it is our job to make tough decisions.”

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

Over the past few days, though, I’ve spent more time than is healthy listening to CEOs expound on their businesses during quarterly corporate earnings calls. (What can I say? I’m a sucker for a good time.) And I was surprised by what I heard. The CEOs convinced me that the Biden people — not to mention Jay Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, who also said this week that a recession has probably not yet begun — have a point.

The economy is in a really weird place. There are definitely signs of trouble. Yet at some of the biggest companies in the country — especially in the tech industry — business is hardly all glum. And even at companies that are struggling, the numbers aren’t nearly as bad as investors had feared.

Consider some of the brightest spots: Qualcomm, the chipmaking giant, reported that despite that “challenging macroeconomic environment,” profits grew more than 50% over last year because of strong sales of its processors used in phones and automobiles. Ford reported that hefty sales of its SUVs and crossovers pushed its adjusted earnings before taxes and interest to more than triple from a year ago. Meanwhile Visa, Mastercard and American Express said Americans are still spending as if there’s no tomorrow. “We’re seeing no evidence of a pullback in consumer spending,” Vasant Prabhu, Visa’s chief financial officer, told investors.

Many on Wall Street had been especially worried about results from the behemoths of Big Tech: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet and Meta.

Then on Tuesday, Microsoft and Alphabet released their numbers and turned the narrative around. Alphabet said its revenue grew by 13% over last year — lower than usual for a money-printing machine like Google but not much less than analysts had been expecting and better than many had feared. Ives said Google’s not-too-bad results suggested that the online advertising market was holding up.

Microsoft’s results were also lower than analysts had been expecting, but investors were still thrilled by them, especially the 40% growth in Microsoft’s cloud services business. Because Microsoft’s core business is in providing tech services to large companies, its strong cloud number shed a positive light on the entire economy, Ives said.

On Wednesday, Meta put out what for it are some pretty dismal numbers; among other things, for the first time, the company posted a drop in quarterly revenue from the same period a year ago. But expectations had been very low for Facebook.

After the markets closed Thursday, Amazon and Apple reported their quarterly numbers. Guess what? They’re also mostly crushing it. Amazon said its cloud business grew by 33% over last year. Apple’s CEO told CNBC that the company expects revenue to “accelerate” next quarter.

This year, I argued that despite recent slowdowns, the reign of Big Tech was just beginning. As the economy softened over the course of the year, I began to doubt my bold prediction. But now I’m redoubling. Tech giants, like the rest of the economy, may soon face tougher times. But Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google and even Facebook are weathering difficult times much better than expected. Big Tech isn’t going away anytime soon.

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

This time, it’s bots. Eradicating the scammy, automated accounts that plague Twitter had been one of his ideas for turning the company around: “Defeat the spam bots or die trying!” he had vowed.

Well, new war plan: Retreat! Twitter says bots make up less than 5% of its user base, but what if there are lots more bots than we thought? Couldn’t, say, 20% of Twitter’s users be bots? And maybe it’s even more! What if Twitter has been underreporting its bot count in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission? Hence Elon’s new plot: Unless Twitter can prove who’s bot and who’s not, the deal’s shot.

But wait, wasn’t it Elon’s responsibility to ask for this sort of inside information while negotiating the acquisition — something he specifically did not do, according to Twitter? And didn’t he sign a contract obligating him to a $1 billion fee — and possibly many billions more — in the event the deal breaks down? How is he possibly going to get out of this one?

Who knows? But I bet you’ll tune in tomorrow to find out. Or, more likely, Musk’s antics will be inescapable, and you won’t have a chance to tune out. And maybe that’s just the idea.

Musk’s whole thing is winging it; he seems to act on impulse and emotion, often without apparent logic, consistency or even an obvious goal. Yet, whatever Musk does, there’s one thing you can count on: You’ll hear about it. He’ll show up in headlines, on your lock screen, in your feeds. Talking heads will pontificate about him; newspaper columnists will analyze him; presidents will quip about him.

Musk’s ability to grab the world’s attention may be as important to his empire as any innovation in batteries, solar panels, rocket engines and tunneling machines. Indeed, many of those advances are made possible by the media trick that Musk pulls over and over. First, make a big, sometimes impossible-seeming promise — the bolder, the more haphazardly planned, the more unlikely, the better. Next, find some way to turn the resulting attention into new customers or investors or fanboys. Then rinse and repeat. Sometimes, his big talk pans out, but it rarely seems to matter if the promises never come true. After all, not delivering only ramps up the drama, and with Musk, the drama is the point.

Musk has cast his one-man marketing plan as a way to keep down costs. Unlike just about every other car company, Tesla does not run ads. In 2020, Musk shut down the company’s public relations department. Tesla no longer answers press inquiries. It doesn’t need to; journalists and everyone else can just ask Musk questions on Twitter.

But I doubt that it’s only cost cutting that drives Musk’s constant push for attention. His method plainly keeps working. Consider how Musk promoted the affordable, mass-market electric vehicle that he first promised in his 2006 “Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan.” For one thing, he made the promise in 2006 — years before Tesla had any possible way to build such a vehicle.

No matter; the fans were intrigued and waited. It took eight years before Musk added details: In 2014, he revealed the car would be called the Model 3 and said it would cost about $35,000. Two years later, he finally unveiled prototypes of the vehicle and, crucially, began taking preorders. Hundreds of thousands of people paid $1,000 each to get a place in line for a car Musk said he felt “fairly confident” would be released in 2017. He did make that deadline, but barely. Tesla delivered fewer than 2,000 Model 3s in 2017 and none for the $35,000 low price. The first deliveries were of the top-end, $49,000 version.

Musk has been doing the same ever since. There’s a pickup truck in the works, there’s the big-rig Tesla Semi and, always, there’s the self-driving car that he has been promising will come “next year” every year for about a decade. Will he actually do all these things? Does it matter?

You might notice that Musk’s modus operandi is very much like a certain former president’s. Like Donald Trump, you never quite know when Musk really means what he’s saying or whether he’s just trolling for the attention that he craves as surely as plants need sunlight. Who knows what he wants to do with Twitter? Perhaps not even he knows. That’s why we keep watching.

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

For California’s people, the problem is acute. In part because of a longtime undersupply of new housing, California’s cities are some of America’s least affordable places to live; less than 25% of households can afford to purchase a median-priced single-family home in the state.

Housing for cars, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap — often, it’s free for the taking. A recent study estimated that there are around 15 million parking spots in the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s nearly two spots for every person in the region, and 2.4 spots for every car. The Bay Area devotes about 20% of its incorporated land area to parking and roadways, a statistic that sounded unbelievable to me until I looked up the same number for Los Angeles County. Go up to the Griffith Observatory, near the Hollywood sign, and look out at the vast expanse of the City of Angels. Then realize this: About 41% of everywhere the light touches is space for roads and parking. Los Angeles County devotes about 200 square miles of space — about nine Manhattans — for parking alone.

I wish I could tell you that California’s parking glut is an outlier, but it’s true in many parts of the country. And I wish I could say that all this space was lost inadvertently — that, as Joni Mitchell put it, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

In fact, we paved paradise on purpose. After World War II, cities around the country adopted planning rules that required developers to build new automobile parking spots every time they built new places to live and work. These parking minimums have increased over time. In the 1930s, Los Angeles County required developers to build one parking space per single-family home; today, among other rules, the county requires two parking spaces per home, two per two-bedroom apartment, one spot for every 250 square feet of retail space and one for every 400 square feet of office space.

Transportation experts have been calling attention to the disastrous effects of these rules for more than a decade, and in the past few years, dozens of cities have eliminated or reformed their minimum parking regulations. Now California, the state that in many ways set the standard for America’s car-dependent lifestyle, could be on the verge of reforming parking statewide. One bill moving through the state Legislature would prohibit cities from enforcing most minimum parking requirements near public transit, while a competing bill would give developers greater leeway in avoiding the rules. I hope legislators in my state adopt the former, stricter version of these measures, but even the more lenient one would be a significant improvement on the status quo and would enshrine in our urban code a truth that has too long been ignored: Cities should be built for people, not cars.

There are many obvious arguments against minimum parking rules. Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, whose book “The High Cost of Free Parking” sparked much academic interest in the excesses of parking when it was first published in 2005, points out that the rules raise real estate costs. Parking is expensive. One study found that building-structured on-site parking added nearly $36,000 to the cost of building one unit of low-income housing in California. In some places these costs become truly staggering. The Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has a seating capacity of 2,265 in its main hall, and when it was completed in 2003, it had cost roughly $274 million to build. Its six-story underground parking garage has space for nearly as many cars — 2,188 — and cost an additional $110 million to build. That is, parking represented more than one-quarter of the project’s nearly $400 million total cost.

There are other ways parking wrecks the urban fabric. It creates its own sprawl — the more endless, often empty parking lots between businesses, the less walkable and more car-dependent the city becomes.

The politics in California around housing and transportation are thorny.

Still, with two possible ways to curb the disaster of required parking, California is closer than ever to minimizing one of its worst urban mistakes. I hope lawmakers have the courage to get it across the finish line.

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

Across much of the United States, the rhythms of life have returned to something like their pre-pandemic tempo. Bars and restaurants are packed, there’s a wedding boom, and Memorial Day weekend looks likely to kick off a busy summer travel season.

But remember how giddy we all were for a virus-free summer last year? It was in May 2021 that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that Americans who had been vaccinated could take off their masks and forget about social distancing in most settings. Then, during a successful campaign to vaccinate millions of Americans, the White House began preparing a Fourth of July bash to declare a “summer of freedom” from the virus.

You know how that turned out.

Last summer’s rapid COVID turnabout does illustrate a dynamic that I worry we have yet to internalize: Any peace we’ve reached with the virus may be only a temporary, uneasy one. It seems likely that, at least for the foreseeable future, our lives may continue to be upended by the whims of this wily, unpredictable virus, until we can advance against it.

And it isn’t just our health that’s at stake. I worry that COVID’s very unpredictability could inject volatility into global affairs. It’s been remarkable to watch how the zigs and zags of the pandemic era have confounded not just public health officials and the Biden administration but also the Federal Reserve, the Chinese government, hedge funds and some of the world’s largest businesses.

How can humanity effectively plan for the future if the virus keeps pulling the rug out from under us? From the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve heard about adjusting to a “new normal,” but COVID’s malleability suggests it may not be one new normal we’ll have to get used to. And as long as the virus keeps swerving in unpredictable directions, it may continue to rock our politics, shock our economy and hinder our ability to work collectively to address every other major problem humanity faces, especially global threats like climate change.

The basic problem is that especially since the emergence of the omicron variant, it has become painfully clear that while vaccines prevent severe illness and death, research shows that even vaccinated people can keep getting sick from COVID-19. The elderly, unvaccinated, immunocompromised and others at high risk may continue to face greater danger.

Even though far fewer people are becoming seriously ill from the virus than at its peak, consider the level of disruption to daily life that we may continue to face — the labor shortages brought on by sickness, burnout and overwork, the toll of stress and psychological fatigue on a population that has had little respite from the ever-present danger of disease.

And because the effects of the virus will play out in different ways in different parts of the world, the disruptions could ripple erratically across the globe. China’s troubled zero-tolerance approach to fighting COVID has snarled ports in Europe and the United States and forced some carmakers to suspend production.

Of course, it isn’t just the virus that has undermined global stability. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and extreme weather exacerbated by climate change are also roiling the world’s economy.

But look at just about any economic story these days, and you’ll see the pandemic playing some mischief. Robert Califf, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told a House panel this week that a COVID-19 outbreak caused a delay in the agency’s inspection of the Abbott Nutrition plant implicated in the national shortage of baby formula. Another lapse was “likely due to COVID-19 staffing issues” in the FDA mailroom, Califf wrote.

Eventually the world will adapt to COVID’s tricks. Nasal vaccines that are now in clinical trials may be able to curb transmission of the virus, which could deal a blow to COVID’s many variants. Wider access to therapeutic drugs could make catching COVID less risky and disruptive. And after a few years, perhaps the virus’s waves may settle into a seasonal pattern that we could adapt to living with.

Over the next few years, though, we may be in for a bumpy COVID ride. New variants have proved more contagious. People are burned out on doing much to avoid it. And we have no idea what the next variant may unleash upon a world already thoroughly pummeled by the disease.

Happy summer!

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.

I had reached out to Ramaswamy to discuss his new venture, Strive Asset Management, an investment firm that he says will urge corporations to stay out of politics. Among Strive’s funders, though, is one of the more politically active people in business, Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist who supported Donald Trump and is now funding a slate of Trump-loving congressional candidates.

It turned out I was right: I did not agree with a lot of what Ramaswamy had to say. Not only are our politics radically at odds, we also differ on what “politics” means in modern American capitalism. Yet despite our disagreements, something odd happened. I found myself nodding along with what is perhaps Ramaswamy’s fundamental point: that three gigantic American asset management firms — BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street — control too much of the global economy.

The firms manage funds invested by large institutions such as pension funds and university endowments as well as those for companies and, in some cases, individual investors such as me and perhaps you, too. Their holdings are colossal. BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments. Vanguard has $8 trillion and State Street has $4 trillion. Their combined $22 trillion in managed assets is the equivalent of more than half of the combined value of all shares for companies in the S&P 500 (about $38 trillion). Their power is expected to grow. An analysis published in the Boston University Law Review in 2019 estimated that the Big Three could control as much as 40% of shareholder votes in the S&P 500 within two decades.

Why is this a problem? Ramaswamy argues that the main issue is that the firms are using their heft to push companies in which they hold large investments into adopting liberal political positions — things such as focusing on climate change or improving the diversity of their workforce. I think that’s a canard, as I’ll explain below.

The real danger posed by the three is economic, not political. The American economy is lumbering under monopoly and oligopoly. In many industries, from airlines to internet advertising to health care to banks to mobile phone providers, Americans can do business with just a handful of companies.

BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street have been extraordinarily good for investors — their passive-investing index funds have lowered costs and improved returns for millions of people. But their rise has come at the cost of intense concentration in corporate ownership, potentially supercharging the oligopolistic effects of already oligopolistic industries.

John Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School, has written that the growth of indexation and the Big Three means that in the future, about a dozen people at investment firms will hold power over most American companies. Researchers have argued that this level of concentration will reduce companies’ incentives to compete with one another.

Indeed, there is some evidence that their concentrated ownership is associated with lower wages and employment and is already leading to price increases in some industries, including in airlines, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods. The firms dispute this. In a 2019 paper, Vanguard’s researchers said that when they studied lots of industries across a long period of time, “we do not find conclusive evidence” that common ownership led to higher profits.

In late 2018, a few months before his death, John Bogle, the visionary founder of Vanguard who developed the first index fund for individual investors, published an extraordinary article in The Wall Street Journal assessing the impact of his life’s work. The index fund had revolutionized Wall Street — but what happens, he wondered, “if it becomes too successful for its own good?”

Bogle pointed out that asset management is a business of scale — the more money that BlackRock or Vanguard or State Street manages, the more it can lower its fees for investors. This makes it difficult for new companies to enter the business, meaning that the Big Three’s hold on the market seems likely to persist. “I do not believe that such concentration would serve the national interest,” Bogle wrote.

Coates, of Harvard, argues that policymakers will have to move carefully to manage the dangers of concentration without limiting the benefits to investors of these firms’ low-cost funds. “No doubt getting the balance right will require judgment and experimentation,” he wrote.

But the most pressing issue is for us to recognize the problem. The growing influence of three large fund managers is not likely to diminish. Ramaswamy’s take on the problem is wrong, but he’s right that it’s a problem. How much power do the three companies have to accumulate before we decide it’s too much?

Farhad Manjoo is a New York Times columnist.