Low, Low, Low Riders, by Josh J

It is 7 a.m, 55° and headed to 76°. Details for the next 10 days are here.

Okay, the most useful piece I’ve read in the last 24 hours was one on the NYT website about a way to split rent among roommates that leads to no room envy — possibly useful in the Mission. It’s based on Sperner’s lemma, “a mathematical proposition discovered in 1928 by the German mathematician Emanuel Sperner.”

The connection between Sperner’s lemma and rent division was first published by Dr. Su in a 1999 paper titled “Rental Harmony: Sperner’s Lemma in Fair Division.” He came to the problem while completing his doctorate at Harvard. A friend of his was facing the same predicament I was — moving into a shared apartment with rooms of different sizes and features — and had asked for his advice.

Dr. Su realized that it might be related to another problem he had heard about, in which a group has to divide a theoretical cake when some want frosted flowers or an edge with more frosting.

“The trick is to design a procedure to have everyone act in their own self-interest and have an outcome that’s fair,” he said in an interview. READ THE FULL PIECE HERE.  OR JUST JUMP TO THE INTERACTIVE TO TRY IT WITH YOUR ROOMMATES. 

Ah, nutrients in bugs. We already eat snails, why not crickets in your protein shake, asks Grist. Does anyone remember the place in the Mission that served grasshoppers? I think that was Year 1 of Mission Local.

Okay, that’s enough. Here’s an early morning photo from Travis Jensen. Enjoy the day. I wonder how many workers are skipping out with weather like this.

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder/executive editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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1 Comment

  1. Anyone who has children knows the old trick of getting old child to cut the cake and then let the second child pick which piece he wants.

    The same principle works for more than two children with a little more thought.

    Getting back to splitting rents, I once had the same problem. I owned a 6-bedroom flat and I decided to rent it out by the room rather than via one one single lease. That way I could raise the rent every time an individual roommate moved out.

    Anyway I had about 300 applicants show up and, for each one, I asked them to “bid” on each room. I recorded the information until I’d seen all applicants.

    I then allocated the rooms on the basis of the bids I received, having cut some applicants from the mix if I had an issue with them.

    Not only did every roommate get the room they wanted on the same principle as described here. But the total rent was optimized as well. Everyone won.

    It’s really just common sense.

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