mistursinistur

2/3 of households own their own homes

1. "Household" is not the right unit of analysis, since a household is defined as the set of people in an existing home. Some of these include adults who would like to move out, creating a new household not accounted for in your denominator.

2. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American moves approximately 11.7 times throughout their lifetime. In other words, current homeowners generate demand for housing just as non-homeowners do.

FWIW I've seen noticeably better results on (1) and (4) extracting JSON from images via Claude, although (2) and (3) still take effort.

I'm building wooden benches for bus and light rail stops in my neighborhood.

Lots of riders are elderly and find themselves sitting on the curb, feet in the gutter, as they wait for transit. Studies suggest that perceived wait time increases by 30%+ when riders are forced to stand while they wait. There's no cheaper way to shave several minutes off of perceived trip time, for every trip.

Inspired by https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam....

Silly to say without evidence that preventing some people from doing their jobs somehow creates more jobs for other people. H1-B visa holders aren't competing with workers in the retail services industry!

All transit projects in San Francisco are actually combined sewer, power, and water projects with transit branding. Better Market Street's budget incorporates all these components: https://www.sfcta.org/projects/better-market-street

I love using Gitlab SCM, but I'm surprised that Gitlab CI is described as "Lovable" while major bug fixes are gated for months on an uncertain future feature release:

"Job marked as success when job terminate midway in Kubernetes" https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/4119

IMO a production CI bug that falsely reports success merits a high priority patch release but Gitlab doesn't seem to see it that way.

Rent controlled duplexes are already protected by the regulations that were violated here. You can't remove rent-controlled units without a permit!

Obviously some onlookers don't understand current laws and don't understand the proposed legislation. It's important for them to know that their trust in the legislator to do this for them is misplaced.

Like notacoward's post below, this one misses the point. The shaming is not about how good or bad or complex you are.

Some people have determined that Facebook is an organization that's producing some bad results. Socially shaming employees, removing the status they might have hoped to acquire and spiking attrition are tools being deployed to change Facebook's behavior and the behavior of Facebook's competitors.

You might claim that this pressure will never work, or that it will cause Facebook to shut down the "Are You Safe" feature, or gut the charity tools, or avoid developing these kinds of projects in the future. But we should avoid hand-wavy claims that Facebook and the people who work there are just too complicated to influence.

This misses the point of completely. This shaming is not about how good or bad you are.

Some people have determined that Facebook is an organization that's producing bad results. Socially shaming employees, removing the status they might have hoped to acquire and spiking attrition are tools being deployed to change Facebook's behavior and the behavior of Facebook's competitors.

You might claim is that this strategy can't positively affect Facebook's incentives, operations, or effects. But nobody should be distracted by navel-gazing or fancy philosophizing.

This key graf at the end describes why it's a bad demo that may cost taxpayers a lot of money:

"The result is that the tunnel would have negative value to the region. As a transportation service based on how Musk wishes to construct and operate it, it has practically no value. But in the event of upzoning in West Los Angeles, the tunnel would complicate any possibility of rail under Sunset connecting Hollywood with Downtown. Metro may even need to acquire and demolish Musk's tunnel, or else dig under the tunnel, which would complicate intermediate stations in Silver Lake and Echo Park."

Upzoning might seem like an obvious preference for tech companies and sometimes they act on this preference. It's useful to remember, though, that they have countervailing short-term preferences for single-family zoning.

Tech companies themselves have many internal constituencies (managers, line programmers, service workers). Since these companies are extremely not democracies, it's very easy for the preferences of a small valuable constituency (executives and managers) to override the preferences of a larger commoditized constituency (new grad engineers and janitors). Valuable internal constituencies are already compensated enough to buy a single-family home and generally don't want density.

It would be difficult for e.g. Facebook to publicly support upzoning in Menlo Park when half the NIMBYs in the room are relatively valuable mid-level engineering managers at Facebook. So we don't see these tech companies in general putting big resources behind really transformative upzoning projects.

Why does policy need to be "fair" to investors? New government policies move asset values (including real estate values!) in both directions all the time. Investors -- including homeowners -- are not entitled to an investment that always appreciates.

This belief that we cannot do a thing unless that thing benefits wealthy homeowners is harmful.

I bought my first house in Berkeley rented out 2 remaining rooms buy a house in south SF my mom and I bought a 3 unit run-down place in Oakland and fixed it up rental income coming in around 13k / month Looking back, the best thing I did for myself is to refrain from living extravagantly

Surprising! Sounds like the best thing that happened in this story was partnering with other wealthy people to engage in leveraged speculation on Bay Area real estate.

What's the evidence that speculation is driving price increases in California?

Hey, no need to make this about "self-actualization" or "a matrix" (?). The point here (and the moral imperative IMO) is to exert any influence you have over bad actors. Open source contributors have demonstrated that licensing and negative PR can be used to influence tech companies. That's all this article is calling for.

"People in Bakersfield aren't going to take the HSR to LA, at least not in enough numbers to justify connecting Bakersfield"

This is a pretty vague and evidence-free claim!

Note that thousands of people commute from Bakersfield to LA daily: http://www.bakersfield.com/news/residents-go-to-and-drive-gr.... The commute from the central valley to San Jose is also very heavy.

"take all the money you save and give a tax break to folks in Bakersfield"

I'd like to see HSR critics back up their claims with the ridership forecast model and public benefit accounting that you'd need to compute this tax break.

HSR and "more airports" are not substitutes.

Airports don't address the need for capacity on trips shorter than the SF-LA route (e.g. Fresno-SJ or Bakersfield-LA). Rail lines do address this kind of infill transportation.

More airports by themselves don't make it easier to get "to and from the airport" -- for this, you need more highway capacity. Most calls to build more airports tend to ignore this fact and its associated costs. (Rail stations, on the other hand, are distributed along a line and don't induce the kind of traffic congestion at a single point that you'd see with an airport node.)

The real alternative to HSR is a massive expansion of the highway system, including I-5, and more airports. I would like to see critics of HSR propose a plan that addresses both needs.

"Iran - then and now" series are often misleading. They cherry-pick extreme examples from non-representative slices of the population.

We've all seen photos of the stylish, 1970s Iranian 1%, but not of pervasive poverty and disenfranchisement that their brand of progress perpetuated on the other 99%. The Shah's elite may have looked American but this doesn't mean that they presided over progress or gave much thought to human rights.

Optimal readability is attained with 60-70 characters. This is due to human psychology

Actually this claim is disputed: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLeng...

Nope. Any really large government data is not text -- it's mostly in older open binary formats (e.g. weather data in GRIB from NOAA) or expensive proprietary binary formats (e.g. healthcare data in SAS from CMS).