Davisville

To get his Davis business Watermelon Music through the dislocations caused by the pandemic, Jeff Simons took on debt, delayed payments, tried new ideas — and three years in, the numbers weren’t working in his favor.

So in April he opened a GoFundMe account to ask his customers and friends for $104,000 to pay the debt. He didn’t think he’d get anywhere close to that amount. Instead, as word spread quickly that Watermelon needed help, the business experienced a moment like the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. About 900 donors chipped in sums from $6 to $10,000, testifying to Watermelon’s positive presence in Davis and the many people who appreciate the store.

Jeff is our guest on Davisville today to talk about the response, working through the pandemic, changes at Watermelon, music, operating in Davis, and what convinced him to actually send his request for help, not just think about it.

Benjy Egel says he’s been interested in food ever since he was a kid in Davis. “I grew up doing cooking camps through the city of Davis programs, at like Cesar Chavez Elementary,” he said. After cooking during his college years and working as a journalist after graduating, “I just sort of fell into [food writing] professionally by accident.”

Today he is the Sacramento Bee’s food and beverage writer, which includes writing reviews as well as reporting food trends and news in the region. He’s had the job about 5 years so far. Today our subjects include food and restaurants in Greater Sacramento, trends, staffing, the scene in Davis, and how he approaches his job.

The city's plan to cut carbon pollution in Davis to net zero by 2040 relies on electrifying buildings and transportation, plus other visible changes. On today’s program Kerry Daane Loux, the city’s project manager for the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, and City Council member Bapu Vaitla talk about why Davis must change, and what’s ahead.

The council will take up the plan again in April.

“The next steps are very important. We’ve arrived at a hundred actions, 28 priorities, but we know that we need to prioritize within the priorities and say this year, what are the three, four, maybe five actions that we want to become law,” Vaitla says on Davisville. “It doesn’t necessarily need to be mandates, but it does need to be policies that we would place at the top of the list in terms of the climate impact they’re going to have, in terms of the greenhouse-gas reduction impact.

“ … The idea stage is nearing the end of its first phase, but now it’s the implementation stage where all of us need to be involved and give, give of ourselves.”

ChatGPT is a new tech tool that can write — maybe “write” should appear in quotes — by using advanced technology and vast databases of text. So is this ability a good thing, the word equivalent of a calculator? Or does use of ChatGPT reduce the need for people to learn how to think and write coherently?

In today’s Davisville we talk with Andy Jones, a longtime writing instructor and educational technologist, and Margaret Merrill, a senior instructional design consultant, both at the University of California, Davis. They list pluses and minuses of ChatGPT, their encounters with the tool, how they can tell when someone has used ChatGPT to write something, and how they approach this latest evolution in artificial intelligence. Their discussion is fascinating.