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Family Values posted:Right, SV hates taxes. That's why Santa Clara voted against Prop 30, which increased taxes on high income earners. Oh wait, Santa Clara county actually passed it by a solid margin. Yeah but I bet those evil fucks in San Mateo rejected it, after all that's where the real richies form SV live. Nope, they passed it by double digit margins too. But mah taxes! You're not a very good poster. Tech assholes (particularly the mid-20s white male variety) in the Bay Area are a problem that we are discussing, yes. But they do not constitute a majority of people living in the area (which addresses your straw man). With that said, their outsized wealth exerts a distorted amount of influence on the area, manifested in a variety of ways, such as housing and private shuttles. In broader news, the state is now moving to mandatory water conservation. HuffPo posted:California Water Fines Loom Over Wasteful Residents Amid Historic Drought
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Jul 17, 2014 18:26
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If they want to light a fire, fine anyone with a green lawn. This whole "if water is running into the street" thing is ridiculous. An old lady across the street from me was spraying out her garbage cans with a hose yesterday. Not her indoor trash cans, the cans that you put out for collection. Just hosing them down without a care in the world.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:29
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Kobayashi posted:You're not a very good poster. Tech assholes (particularly the mid-20s white male variety) in the Bay Area are a problem that we are discussing, yes. But they do not constitute a majority of people living in the area (which addresses your straw man). With that said, their outsized wealth exerts a distorted amount of influence on the area, manifested in a variety of ways, such as housing and private shuttles. loving back it up with some numbers, that's all I'm saying. Right now the majority of this thread is anecdotal or 'I read some article' poo poo. As far as I know all the 20-something techies and their lovely startups are up in SF, not SV.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:40
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Family Values posted:loving back it up with some numbers, that's all I'm saying. Right now the majority of this thread is anecdotal or 'I read some article' poo poo. As far as I know all the 20-something techies and their lovely startups are up in SF, not SV. I mean does the article about Rand Paul's supporters in SV not count enough for the incredibly small premise of "rich tech libertarians live in SV"? I'll repost the link and key quotes since apparently you missed it earlier in the thread: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/07/rand-pauls-silicon-valley-charm-offensive.html quote:It's friends like Parker and Zuckerberg who explain why Paul now routinely receives what Fortune called a "hero's welcome" when he comes to Silicon Valley. Next weekend, Paul will get to make his case yet again as the keynote speaker at Reboot, a San Francisco conference put on by a group called Lincoln Labs, which self-defines as "techies and politicos who believe in promoting liberty with technology." He'll likely say a version of what he's said before: that Silicon Valley's innovative potential can be best unlocked in an environment with minimal government intrusion in the forms of surveillance, corporate taxes, and regulation. “I see almost unlimited potential for us in Silicon Valley,” Paul has said, with "us" meaning libertarians. So if Rand Paul thinks Libertarians can do well in SV and if Parker/Zuckerburg both call Rand Paul a friend can we say libertarianism has some power in SV?
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Jul 17, 2014 19:24
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Papercut posted:If they want to light a fire, fine anyone with a green lawn. This whole "if water is running into the street" thing is ridiculous. Yeah, it's pretty stupid. I don't understand why they don't do a tiered billing system like they do for power. I.e. Tier 1 is a reasonable amount that is calculated for a family of ~2-3 for dishes, toilets, showers, drinking, Tier 2 is 3-4. Then gallons spent after that start costing a lot more. It would then encourage people to stay lower and none of this bullshit "20% reduction!" where some people have already reduced all they can. (i.e. PG&E) 
Xaris fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 19:25
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And yet, a number of the horrible suburban cities like Glendora and Rancho Cucamonga are still citing people criminally for brown lawns.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:27
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Leperflesh posted:ridiculously expensive. I agree that the death penalty should be abolished. However, I doubt that abolishing the death penalty will save the governemt any money. Presumably, the punishment would be replaced with LWOP, as it has in the past. I argue that the appeals process would also likely be transferred over, because it would newly be the harshest punishment on the books. Justice would dictate that the accused have proper representation, and the nature of whatever crime would motivate the State to prosecute, and continue to appeal. The same dynamic would emerge.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:41
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Xaris posted:Yeah, it's pretty stupid. Speaking of this, any comments on the plan PG&E put out to merge the bottom two brackets into a 15¢ rate and cut the higher rates to make it "income neutral"?
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Jul 17, 2014 19:42
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Xaris posted:Yeah, it's pretty stupid. I don't know where you live, but my water utility (EBMUD) has a 3 tier water rate. I think the deal with the mandatory restrictions are these are easy to enforce and 100% wasteful ways to use water. If things get bad at a utility level then except to see a lot stricter water rules. I know SFPUC and EBMUD both are going to make this summer without significant mandatory restrictions but next year is up in the air.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:44
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The article notes that 10% of the wasted water is from leaks in municipal water networks, which is really dumb. But what always gets my goat is the point that 75% of all water usage is agricultural. That means even if domestic use is slashed, it still has a relatively minor impact on total water supply. Cut agricultural use by 5% and you have saved the equivalent amount of water as cutting domestic usage by 15%. But I agree with the fines. I go for a walk almost every day, just a walk around my neighborhood to get off my rear end and get a tiny amount of exercise. There's one house I walk past that invariably has their sprinklers going full blast, keeping an incredibly verdant lawn green, and leaving a block-long river down the gutter into the storm drain that must contain hundreds of gallons of water a day. It's all wasted, he could adjust his sprinkler heads to only spray on the lawn and not the sidewalk and his lawn would be just as nice. I don't even really get it because our water is not free, this guy must be spending like a couple hundred bucks a month on water, just to pour most of it right down the drain. He should get a warning of course, fines should be reserved for assholes who won't comply even after they've been instructed to stop wasting so much water. I have a front lawn that is mostly brown, I'm watering it just enough to keep it from dying completely. I water at dusk, to minimize evaporation, and only for about five minutes, and I keep the sprinklers from spraying on the sidewalk or driveway, with no runoff at all, and I only water twice a week at most. Even still I kind of feel like maybe I should just let the whole thing die, even if it looks ugly. This is my favorite part, though: quote:The increased usage noted in the report is attributable to two regions of the state: Southern California coastal communities and the far northeastern slice of the state. It was not immediately clear why consumption had increased in those areas. Yeah no poo poo, southern california coastal communities have shitloads of pools and golf courses and it's been hot lately. Dunno about far northeast, that's not a very populated region but maybe they have a lot of pools too. Skinnymansbeerbelly posted:I agree that the death penalty should be abolished. However, I doubt that abolishing the death penalty will save the governemt any money. Presumably, the punishment would be replaced with LWOP, as it has in the past. I argue that the appeals process would also likely be transferred over, because it would newly be the harshest punishment on the books. Justice would dictate that the accused have proper representation, and the nature of whatever crime would motivate the State to prosecute, and continue to appeal. The same dynamic would emerge. That is essentially a slippery-slope argument. We can say empirically that executions are costing the state millions and millions of dollars. We can eliminate the death penalty and be sure to not spend that money on those executions. The danger that life without parole becomes more expensive is a separate concern that we can also attempt to address (and I would argue, more broadly, that imprisonment itself is something our society should soberly re-address). But the main reason why death penalties are so expensive is because of their special finality; there can be no appeal and exoneration once the execution is performed. The law allows fewer options for appeals, and spends less on public defenders for appellants, for those who are only ("only") sentenced to prison. "It's too expensive" is usually not an effective way to convince people when it comes to arguments about criminal justice, though. I suppose it's because people think of "justice" as something they're not willing to compromise on (even though few systems in our modern society are so thoroughly compromised). It's odd, because "it's too expensive" seems to be an effective platform for conservatives to argue against most other government functions these days. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 19:44
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Leperflesh posted:I have a front lawn that is mostly brown, I'm watering it just enough to keep it from dying completely. I water at dusk, to minimize evaporation, and only for about five minutes, and I keep the sprinklers from spraying on the sidewalk or driveway, with no runoff at all, and I only water twice a week at most. Even still I kind of feel like maybe I should just let the whole thing die, even if it looks ugly. Pull out your lawn and replace it with bark and drought-tolerant plants. If you've got room, put in a raised-bed garden and/or a flowering tree with a small sitting area. Xeriscaping is becoming fairly common here in Oregon, even though we've got fairly abundant water supplies, and in my opinion it looks a lot better than a lawn. Plus there's no lawn-mowing required, and you can set up drip-water systems pretty easily.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:53
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Xaris posted:Yeah, it's pretty stupid. Isn't the residential portion of total water use in California below 20%? I know that urban water use accounts for less than 10% overall in the state. I mean sure, you can make some gains by getting households to conserve, but even if you halve overall residential use you've still got agriculture's huge portion of the water demand to handle. There doesn't really seem to be much addressing agricultural water waste or regulations requiring or even encouraging efficiencies like drip irrigation systems.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:53
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Kaal posted:Pull out your lawn and replace it with bark and drought-tolerant plants. If you've got room, put in a raised-bed garden and/or a flowering tree with a small sitting area. Xeriscaping is becoming fairly common here in Oregon, even though we've got fairly abundant water supplies, and in my opinion it looks a lot better than a lawn. Plus there's no lawn-mowing required, and you can set up drip-water systems pretty easily. Oh, we have plans! We're going to rip that poo poo out and do an all-natives, drought-resistant landscaping, for sure. My county even has a small rebate program that will help subsidize it - we have to jump through several hoops, though, including an initial inspection that shows we have a functioning in-ground sprinkler system watering a live lawn (which is dumb as hell because it means they won't help fund someone who wants to tear out a dead lawn, or a lawn that's watered with hoses or whatever). But, we're refinancing the house this month and it's eating up the money we had planned to use for the landscaping, so we actually have to keep the lawn kind of alive until we can afford to do the landscaping. Natives, though, I can hardly wait. No more invasive non-native species, we'll attract native bees and butterflies and stuff, and it'll be massively less wasteful of water.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:58
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Trabisnikof posted:I mean does the article about Rand Paul's supporters in SV not count enough for the incredibly small premise of "rich tech libertarians live in SV"? I'll repost the link and key quotes since apparently you missed it earlier in the thread: No because who the gently caress cares what he thinks? Of course he's going to say libertarianism is on the rise, that doesn't exactly get borne out by election results does it? He also visited SF and Berkeley a couple months back, can we say libertarianism has some power in SF & Berkeley?
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Jul 17, 2014 20:08
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:I mean sure, you can make some gains by getting households to conserve, but even if you halve overall residential use you've still got agriculture's huge portion of the water demand to handle. There doesn't really seem to be much addressing agricultural water waste or regulations requiring or even encouraging efficiencies like drip irrigation systems. Forum has been covering the drought lately. I can't find exact supporting links (though I'm digging around on the KQED website), but the impression I've gotten is that, like all things California, it's complicated. My take is that agriculture actually has made strides toward efficiency lately (though to what extent and how much further is needed, I can't say) and is letting hundreds of thousands of acres lie fallow, which is causing all kinds of unemployment-related problems.
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Jul 17, 2014 20:08
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Leperflesh posted:Oh, we have plans! Good for you! That all sounds awesome, and I promise that it ends up being easier than dragging out the sprinkler and lawnmower every day/week.
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Jul 17, 2014 20:20
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Family Values posted:No because who the gently caress cares what he thinks? Of course he's going to say libertarianism is on the rise, that doesn't exactly get borne out by election results does it? He also visited SF and Berkeley a couple months back, can we say libertarianism has some power in SF & Berkeley? So you're ignoring the whole "titans of SV who call themselves Rand Paul's friends" part of what I quoted or how the article lists the multitude of ways that libertarianism appeals to a section of SV and instead try to make a false equivalency between places where he gives speeches and a place where he gets a "hero's welcome". Also only you are talking about voters, the rest of us have been talking about the wealthy donors, like Zuckerburg. Unless you're going to argue that Facebook isn't a SV company or something. I don't know why you're fighting such a limited premise so hard. There are many well documented wealthy libertarians in SV and that number has been rising. They are also becoming more politically active. The 6 states nonsense even comes out of SV. Besides, as this thread shows SV is a dumb term because it means whatever you want it to mean. But why don't you accept that there are more wealthy and politically active libertarians who made money off of companies headquartered in the South Bay counties than 10 years ago? Also here, have a few more articles on the topic in case just one about Paul wasn't enough: Here's one about Marc Andreeessen's libertarian tweets - http://www.salon.com/2014/06/06/techs_toxic_political_culture_the_stealth_libertarianism_of_silicon_valley_bigwigs/ Here's a great long-form on how SV's politics have been changing over the decades - http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer Here's a piece in Politico about how Sean Parker is switching from supporting only Ds to supporting Rs too - http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/sean-parker-105852.html Another piece that discusses the liberal/libertarian divide in SV - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/100013313/could-the-republicans-capture-silicon-valley/ I'm not arguing that libertarians are a majority or even a major local political force. I'm arguing that the libertarian donor base in SV is large and growing, and thus far the evidence supports that.
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Jul 17, 2014 20:54
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Trabisnikof posted:I don't know why you're fighting such a limited premise so hard. I see it as yet another instance of SF (and its denizens) seeing itself as a magical land of enlightenment and making GBS threads on the east and south bay. This attitude often being copped hardest by people that have been in the bay area relatively short amount of time.
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Jul 17, 2014 21:01
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Family Values posted:I see it as yet another instance of SF (and its denizens) seeing itself as a magical land of enlightenment and making GBS threads on the east and south bay. This attitude often being copped hardest by people that have been in the bay area relatively short amount of time. I can understand that sentiment, I didn't really draw a comparison to SF but its basically inevitable. If I could find good sources on the broiness of the Marina district I would post those too. But everyone kinda expects that bankers will be conservative or libertarian. But I really think the biggest difference is that only SV is churning out billionaires. That creates money to donate and a dynamic political scene with national implications that then draws attention. In many ways its matters more what SV execs do with their political cash because its new money. The assumption is that tech leaders are all mega liberals (or old school business conservatives) and the rise of libertarianism is a surprise to many. Heck which city is the largest in the SF Bay Area is a surprise to many.
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Jul 17, 2014 21:17
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The thing that scares me the most about the prospect of Zuckerberg becoming a tech libertarian/Republican donor (or at the very least so far, his palling around with Rand Paul and Chris Christie) is his age. We can give it a decade or two before the Kochs and Adelson croak; Zuckerberg is only 30.
Jerry Manderbilt fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 17, 2014 21:25
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If I've been conserving water for the past few months and then we see a mandatory conservation, will they take my previous record into consideration or will they demand more and then fine me because I can't go further because I started early?
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Jul 18, 2014 06:43
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Have you seen my apex seals? I seem to have lost them.
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Aeka 2.0 posted:If I've been conserving water for the past few months and then we see a mandatory conservation, will they take my previous record into consideration or will they demand more and then fine me because I can't go further because I started early? Well, a sensible application of the policy is to take the average water use and tell everyone they have to be under x% of that average. But sensible is sort of optional I guess.
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Jul 18, 2014 06:46
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They'll probably take your use from the same month the previous year. I already get statements from my utilities that compare year-over-year usage to tell me when I'm using more than I used to.
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Jul 18, 2014 07:59
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Yeah it will be X% reduction from the previous year or something like that. People in apartments will have to take X% fewer showers to comply while people in houses will have to stop watering their driveways to comply.
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Jul 18, 2014 14:32
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:On another note, would it be off the mark to say that a lot of people in the not-gonna-be-state of Jefferson who want to secede have been inundated with rhetoric saying that the Bay Area and L.A. mooch off of their Real American™ tax dollars? Their website is all sorts of fantastic. This is from before the Six Californias initiative when they tried to go it alone. They've been trying to succeed since 1941 actually. http://www.jeffersonstate.com Their articles page is great too because half of the articles are on their movement while the other half are random gun control articles. http://www.jeffersonstate.com/articles.html They really love their guns.
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Jul 18, 2014 20:43
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FCKGW posted:Their website is all sorts of fantastic. This is from before the Six Californias initiative when they tried to go it alone. They've been trying to succeed since 1941 actually. Yeah it's mostly a bunch of crazies up there. Pretty much everywhere north of Sacramento up until Eugene (except Ashland) is full of drunk and/or methed-out crazy assholes 
Xaris fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Jul 19, 2014 |
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Jul 19, 2014 06:31
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Except for the parts that are basically Pynchon's Vineland IRL, of course. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Jul 19, 2014 |
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Jul 19, 2014 07:15
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I remember vacationing in Redding once when I was 11 (why, oh why). It was a loving dump, and probably the most populous of the heavily Republican counties up in the far north of the state.
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Jul 19, 2014 15:02
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Xaris posted:Yeah it's mostly a bunch of crazies up there. Pretty much everywhere north of Sacramento up until Eugene (except Ashland) is full of drunk and/or methed-out crazy assholes that's meaningless hyperbole. by all means stay out though.
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Jul 19, 2014 15:04
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A final update on the controller race: John Peréz conceded to Betty Yee two days ago after very few votes trickled into his column. He did note that he thought he would have won had he not been cash constrained on which counties he could recount at the same time. Yee will face Fresno mayor Ashley Swearingen for the state controller in November.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:21
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put this in the OP please tia
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Jul 29, 2014 02:36
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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-31/neel-kashkari-spent-a-week-pretending-to-be-homeless http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/31/neel-kashkari-homeless_n_5638195.html Neel Kashkari, who is running against Governor Jerry Brown, spent a week as a homeless person. Key quote: quote:"I walked for hours and hours in search of a job, giving me a lot of time to think," wrote Kashkari, a former banker and U.S. Treasury official who helped oversee the federal bank bailout during the recession. It's certainly an interesting approach at branding himself as a Republican who cares, but it seems he learned the wrong lessons, or no lessons at all.
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Jul 31, 2014 19:41
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I think I've already went over one of Kashkari's laughable campaign ads from a few months ago, before the June primary, where he was trying to brand himself as a common man who "really understands The People™, I swear!" by being a lumberjack cutting logs labeled "taxes" and "regulations" and "welfare". Isn't the dude worth something to the tune of $5 million, anyway? It's good to see that he manages to come across as completely out of touch even when he's trying to empathize with the filthy plebes. It's like that Republican running for State Senate in my district who tries running with a slogan of "Common Sense Solutions for California" while fearmongering about SCA5 and "quotas for Asian enrollment at UCs edit: Most recent poll shows Brown ahead 57-33 
Jerry Manderbilt fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Jul 31, 2014 |
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Jul 31, 2014 19:51
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Really interesting that Kashkari picked Fresno to pretend to be homeless for a week. The city of Fresno has a nasty history, within the last 5 years or so, of stomping all over the actual homeless people in the city. Fresno Police were destroying encampments (and what little belongings the homeless had in them) last year. In 2012, the city was the target of a class action suit for confiscating and destroying property. In 2009, somebody recorded the police beating the hell out of a homeless man during an arrest (video here). The homeless are regularly cited and arrested for loitering, even though what shelters there are in Fresno kick the homeless out onto the streets during the day - only providing room for them at night. Kashkari certainly couldn't have learned much if his "experience" as a homeless man in Fresno didn't leave him appalled and outraged. These folks certainly need jobs, as he says. But with the way they're treated, they have a lot more to worry about immediately...
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Aug 3, 2014 19:25
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http://www.businessinsider.com/california-drought-may-mean-people-leave-2014-8 Apparently a UN expert thinks the US may have to (forcibly?) remove people from California if our drought continues. That seems... maybe a bit premature to me? I mean one option might be to stop growing rice, and another might be to mandate covered irrigation (currently, open-air irrigation channels are the norm, so we lose enormous amounts of fresh water to evaporation). Maybe we can have fewer golf courses! I bet we could cut back on the swimming pools too.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:05
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Leperflesh posted:http://www.businessinsider.com/california-drought-may-mean-people-leave-2014-8 The actual quote is a bit more caveated. quote:Exceptional drought, the most extreme category, indicates widespread crop and pasture losses and shortages of water in reservoirs, streams and wells. More about migration being a last option because even letting the land fallow might not be enough at some future worsened point.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:19
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Trabisnikof posted:More about migration being a last option because even letting the land fallow might not be enough at some future worsened point. Reminder that urban water use accounts for about 10% of total water demand, which is half of all residential water use in the state. Agricultural water use is the vast, vast majority. I'd agree that agricultural regulation will eventually have the greatest impact.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:49
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Trabisnikof posted:The actual quote is a bit more caveated. California is one of the most populated states in the region. I sure hope they're paying attention to this water problem.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:51
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Reminder that urban water use accounts for about 10% of total water demand, which is half of all residential water use in the state. Exactly. If you read the quote, its talking about after "widespread crop and pasture losses and shortages of water in reservoirs, streams and wells". So migration might be an option after we stop agricultural production. That's the quote.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:53
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Is the state government doing much to address the inefficiency in the methods farmers use to get water for their agriculture?
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Aug 7, 2014 07:35
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