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Thanatosian posted:Speaking of the Bullet Train... Elon Musk of Paypal and Tesla Motors fame thinks he has a better idea. His claim that it's not economically feasible is to compare it to supersonic flight, which he considers feasible. Which it is, concorde was a thing, but nobody's doing it and for good reasons. If your baseline of comparison is a thing nobody's doing, and you're claiming you need to be more economical and/or faster than that, you're not actually measuring your project against a real-world alternative. e. Here's the actual paper, in PDF: http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf Read the abstract to understand just how totally pie-in-the-sky his idea actually is.
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Aug 13, 2013 00:43
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:He does seem to be pumping himself up to get more involved in this project. Even if the thing costs 5 times as much and is half as fast as predicted it'll be faster and cheaper than the garbage train they're currently looking at for that route. Right, but my point is this: he's comparing the hypertube thingy to Concorde, basically, and saying "it's viable if it's faster or cheaper or both compared to supersonic commercial air travel." But the reality is if it costs $1200 per ticket to go from SF to LA in 2 hours, it will fail. The number of customers who were willing to shell out upwards of two grand to fly Concorde from NY to Paris or whatever was tiny, far too little to support a huge rail system; they only operated about six Concorde planes, and not simultaneously, and it was more of a novelty than anything else. For the Hypertube to actually be viable, it has to compete with the pricing of ordinary commercial air travel; that is, $100 to $200. It has to be something normal non-wealthy people can afford. If I'm a regular jackoff and I want to go to LA, and I'm looking at $150 for a 4-hour trip (including time spent at both airports, parking and security and etc.) vs. $1000 for a 1-hour trip, there's no choice at all. So the whitepaper is using a much more lax standard of comparison than it ought to. I don't know if this necessarily means it's not economically viable, but I think it's a major stumbling-block. CrazyLittle posted:
There's also simply the fact that the people who already own in SF have no motivation to make it easier for more people to move in. People love SF as it is and do not want it to become more dense. There's a lot of green space in the city, a lot of pleasant neighborhoods with 2-story row houses and reasonable traffic. There's no special motivation to relax laws and encourage urbanization and increase density by bulldozing victorians to put in apartment blocks. San Francisco does not want to become Manhattan. The fact that the serfs who serve the lattes and run the infrastructure have to endure 1+ hour commutes from the east bay to keep the whole edifice running has not been enough to change this attitude. Can't they live in the Bayview/Hunter's Point slums? Or rent tiny rooms in tiny apartments in the Mission? San Francisco is my home town and I love the city dearly, but NIMBYism is an incredibly powerful brake on development there and people with even fairly good middle-class incomes (like myself) are priced out. I could afford to rent a small 1-bedroom apartment in the city, or I can own a house in Concord. There are no prospects that this is going to change any time in the next few decades. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Aug 13, 2013 |
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Aug 13, 2013 17:18
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woops dubble post
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Aug 13, 2013 17:26
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That's certainly how Prop 13 was sold. Which is... interesting... given a major part of Prop 13 was protecting businesses too. Suddenly you realize it's not a socialist safety support to keep poor grandmas in the houses they've owned for the last 50 years, it's about a huge handout to businesses and wealthy people.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:43
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It is worth noting that rent control in SF only applies to units constructed prior to 1979. So that does make it slightly more attractive to build entirely new buildings in SF for rental purposes: you know you'll be able to keep your units at market rates. It also doesn't apply to 1-unit houses. So if you rent a house, no rent control for you! There's more rules and restrictions too. See: http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html e. Looks like it's houses AND condos that are exempt, but only if you moved after Jan 1, 1996. So maybe there's some people who have been renting the same condo or house for like 20 years who are still under rent control. Also, rent control DOES allow rent increases, just only at a measured amount per year. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 03:10
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Dusseldorf posted:20 percent over 20 years isn't "major population growth". It is for San Francisco:  (Source: wikimedia commons) I could only find a chart that goes to 2005, but 2010 census puts the City's population at 805,235. It's basically been pretty stable since peaking in the post-war boom (which affected the whole bay area, there are tons and tons of houses here that were built during the 1950s). Adding another 160k residents in the next 20 years is going to be very, very significant. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 23:49
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It's also very compact, at about 7 miles by 7 miles. If you drew a 7x7 mile square around the city centers of most of those other cities and measured the density inside, I bet a lot of them would be higher than San Francisco. Basically SF exports its lower-density neighborhoods and suburbs to its neighboring counties, especially San Mateo County and Alameda County.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:26
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Nobody's building high-density housing in Presidio National Park. Well OK, it's not completely a national park, it has a weird status. But the land is held by the national government, so neither the City of San Francisco, nor the State of California, can unilaterally seize it via public domain. As if there was any will at all to do so. I think it would be only slightly less politically difficult than trying to pave over Golden Gate Park. There are lots of undeveloped places in the City with less green-space protection. example: quote:In 2007, Donald Fisher, founder of the Gap clothing stores and former Board member of the Presidio Trust, announced a plan to build a 100,000-square-foot (9,300 m2) museum tentatively named the Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio, to house his art collection. Fisher's plan encountered widespread skepticism and even outright hostility amongst San Francisco preservationists, local residents, the National Park Service, the Presidio Trust, and city officials who saw the Presidio site as 'hallowed ground.'[21] Due to such criticism, Fisher withdrew his plans to build the museum in the Presidio and instead donated the art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before his death in 2009.[22][23] A museum? In our park? No! A travesty! gently caress off, philanthropist! We don't want your free, paid for by you, lovely museum full of art on our public land! Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 17:12
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Alternate view: We don't want to give up a big chunk of public park for free so that some one-percenter can have a fancy display barn for all his possessions. "Look at ALL MY STUFF, you peons! Look at how your city BEGS me to show it to you! Look, and despair that YOU aren't as awesome as I am!" A large percentage of the items on display at the DeYoung and the Legion are on loan from their wealthy owners. It's like, a thing that art collectors do a lot. And the dude was old and dying and wanted to share his artwork with the public, which is something we should encourage. I get that there's some good reasons why we might not want a specific museum in a specific place: Papercut posted:San Francisco doesn't need another huge museum, the permanent collections at their current museums are already pretty lackluster. Donating it to the MoMA or DeYoung Museum makes a lot more sense than paving over open space and knocking down historic buildings. Although the MoMA, DeYoung, and Legion all have far more artwork in storage than they can display at once, and I'd have to really take issue with the idea that the DeYoung (and the Asian Art Museum)'s collection is "lackluster"; but the argument that a rich person was being too snooty what with his deigning to share his artwork instead of keeping it locked up and private and so we don't want his museum is pretty crap. Maybe it doesn't belong in the Presidio. But SF basically turned down an offer to donate a whole museum to the city, and that's kind of loving nuts. Apparently it was too boxy and white? I'm glad the guy still felt generous enough to give his collection to SF's museums after being snubbed, and this is kind of a derail, but it really does underline my point: if a public museum project was a no-go, paving over the Presidio to build high-rise apartments is smoking crack.
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Aug 16, 2013 18:51
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Congress mandated that The Presidio support itself financially by 2013. They managed it way early (2006 I think) but the point is, renovating and renting out the existing structures has allowed the park to be run without costing taxpayers anything, while also preserving the green space.
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Aug 17, 2013 00:20
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There's a whole lot of research and thought that's gone into urban planning and development and the general consensus these days are that cul-de-sac sprawl is extremely bad. The deal is, it slows down traffic. That was thought to be a great idea, because it makes for safer streets, and ensures that the only people driving down your street are the ones who actually live there or are coming to visit; there's zero through-traffic (compared to a grid layout). However; -It's less land-efficient than a grid layout -It's far more expensive to deliver infrastructure and services, including sewer, garbage pickup, power distribution, and especially fresh water -It's virtually impossible to run public transport into these developments, because ridership per block is too low (so you get 1 bus per half hour at best) and the layout slows down bus routes so much that nobody is willing to tolerate them (it takes an hour to get anywhere because has to navigate a ridiculously circuitious route) -Nobody walks anywhere, because there's nowhere to walk to besides your neighbor's house, and it takes too long just to walk to the "exit" of your development to find a main road -Businesses, even small ones like corner stores, cannot thrive because they get no through-traffic and the density of neighborhoods is too low to support them on their own. Compared to a grid layout, twisty cul-de-sac sprawl is a dead zone for business services. This only serves to force more people into their cars for more trips -It takes longer to deliver emergency services. Fire trucks and ambulances take longer to get to a home where an emergency is happening, compared to grid-layout development Basically these developments are horrible for everything except ensuring people who really really want a big back yard with a pool, a sidewalk with absolutely no strangers walking down it, and a perfectly uniform neighborhood with no character or variation to it at all, get what they want. It's amazing to me that this has been well understood for at least 25 years now by urban planners, and yet there are still communities eagerly slapping huge mazes of cul-de-sacs onto hundred-acre tracts of ex-urban semi-desert. Everyone involved in planning and developing those places are in it for the quick buck with no concern whatsoever for the sustainability of the city or its infrastructure.
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Aug 17, 2013 17:34
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Captain Frigate posted:I'm shocked, shocked to hear that the real estate industry has no concern for sustainability, long term planning, or the welfare of the people it serves! A major portion of the blame goes to city planners, too, though. They zone the land and approve the developments and the subdivisions and are effectively on the hook for providing services. Zoning for dollars is why you get cities that consist of nothing but tract suburbs and car dealerships: the housing because the developer makes up-front promises and maybe pays for a road or something, and then the auto dealerships because the city is desperate for revenue and the taxes they can get from car dealerships beats most other kinds of businesses. But it's not sustainable. Bedroom communities have residents that do a lot of their spending out of town. Also all the cities along that particular traffic corridor are all expanding at once, so the freeway gets too congested, commute times rise, and if the cities are unsuccessful in lobbying the state or national government to widen the freeways, property values fall. Widening roads only serves to exacerbate the problem, of course. The more you widen the freeways, the farther out people move, worsening the sprawl. I mean, I don't want to come off as a hypocrite. I bought a house in a semi-suburban development. But my house is about 1200 square feet, and my development is three parallel streets (one does have a couple cul-de-sacs on it) within walking distance of my city's downtown plaza, where we have two farmers' markets a week, one on Thursday nights with live music and thousands of people come out and hang out and eat good food and socialize and stuff. Like, people walk down my street during the day, going to the school or the market or the skate park. There are corner stores. There's an ethnic grocery I can walk to in 15 minutes. Good development is multi-use. You can still have quiet streets if you interleaf them with business streets, use sensible traffic control to keep speeds down (my street has traffic humps and a traffic light at each end), and build houses with double-paned windows and good insulation (which you should be doing anyway). As nice as it'd be to own a 4000 square foot house - and if I could afford one, I'd probably consider it - the tradeoff is unsustainable development that is hugely wasteful of limited resources (water, electricity generation, sewage treatment, and land), creates "communities" full of people with no coherency or sense of a shared stake in their town, and gradually decay over a few decades into run-down shabby shitholes. My best guess is that a lot of that Inland Empire development is going to be really sad in 50 years. Bankrupt cities, poor-quality construction falling apart, water shortages and restrictions leaving everyone with dead lawns and empty pools and peeling paint and with absolutely no local centers of employment, everyone who can afford to will flee for greener pastures leaving behind the crap.
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Aug 18, 2013 02:11
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Native plant gardens are the best! My wife and I went on an open-house self-guided tour this spring, sponsored by a native plant garden organization and a consulting company. Basically fifty or so homes in the local area (east bay) where the owners let you wander around outside their houses checking out their native plant landscaping, some of them have talks, and a couple of reps from the consulting company try and gently sell you on their services (setting up custom landscaped native gardens). Pretty much all of it can be done DIY, though, and they're not shy about giving you the info to do that, too, so it never felt like a hard sell (and you can just not bother chatting with the reps at all, if you want). Native plant gardens are perfect because they are adapted to the local climate so they don't need a lot more water than what comes out of the sky; they attract native species, in particular insects and birds, which is actually good because a lot of those species are scarce and providing habitat helps out with survival. They are actually mostly really pretty (although I'm sure you still have to take care of them), lots of flowers and stuff. And you can still have a chunk of space for your kids to play on; there are native grasses that tolerate being cut short, for example, and ground cover options that can somewhat handle kids stomping around on them. Right now I still have a lawn out front (although I'm trying to seed it with some dutch clover a bit, which is actually good for the grass) but when we have the cash to put towards it we intend to get rid of the lawn and do a native garden ourselves. We don't have kids, though. Our back yard is more of a dead disaster zone, but eventually we'll get to that, too. I hate pouring money on the ground to keep grass alive, especially grass that naturally grows tall and then goes to seed and dies, but I have to do this artificial cutting and watering thing to trick it into staying short and green.
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Aug 20, 2013 02:59
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Native plant gardening isn't really about faithfully re-creating a particular biome. You pick and choose from plants that are native to the area, but you can exclude the ones that are ugly, explosively flammable, or whatever and just go for the ones that you like. It's also usually the case that Plant x is found in a large area of California (or even "Western North America") so you tend to have a larger number of plants to pick from than are, strictly speaking, native to the exact location of your house. It's OK, they work out. So for example, that particular photo of chaparral is scrubland, but chaparral can have trees - manzanita and madrone do quite well in hot dry climates, for example. You can pick some of the clumpy native grasses as accent plants, but you can also pick a ground cover that is nicer for walking around on, even if it's not really a chaparral plant. You don't have to plant creosote or something if you prefer ceonothus, and there's a bunch of ceonothus to pick from. And you don't have to go 100% native. On the tour we went on, gardens were rated on % of native plants, and none were 100%. Most were somewhere between 50% and maybe 80% or so, but often with a fruit tree or rose bush or even a small clover lawn in the mix. Just shifting a third of your property over to drought-resistant native plants can really cut down on the water usage, as well as attracting butterflies or hummingbirds or whatever. e. here's an example of one of the yards we looked at. That grass you see is native, and this family had kids and a big dog. It's a small lawn, no-cut, with terraced beds above it on their sloped property. Lots of trees for shade, etc. Concord isn't IE but it does get hot and dry through the summer here. They had in-ground drip irrigation put in, if I remember right. It was really nice. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Aug 20, 2013 |
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Aug 20, 2013 04:44
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Oh yeah, these guys had a pond. Two ponds actually, linked, with koi. And a huge rose tree, and citrus. But also tons of native plants. It was loving gorgeous. No room for kids to play soccer or anything, mind you, but a really amazing garden. Their pond attracts native frogs.
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Aug 20, 2013 04:49
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:By the way, lest you think I am viewing the city through smog-colored glasses: It certainly does have problems with air quality (that's getting better) and sprawl and traffic but that's pretty much endemic to every Los Angeles exburb east of Pomona and traffic is literally part of living anywhere populated in California. I missed this the first time. I think LA-area traffic is worse than anywhere else in the country. Basing that on having driven there a handful of times. I've never been anywhere else where you can have horrible traffic jams at 2 in the morning, and there's no accident. The Bay Area has freeways that jam up during rush hour, but the rest of the time they're generally fine. The bay bridge toll plaza can get backed up on weekends sometimes too, when they have to turn on the metering lights, but part of that is the construction on the bridge that slows everything down. LA has freeways with like six lanes each direction that are parking lots all the drat time, it's completely insane.
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Aug 20, 2013 16:53
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Pryor on Fire posted:I always thought it was silly that motorcycles get to use the HOV lane too considering how much worse for the environment they are. Motorcycles don't have all the emissions controls cars do, so they put out a lot more NOx, SOx, unburnt carbon, soot, etc. However, they are far, far, far more fuel efficient than cars. So in terms of nasty stuff per passenger per mile, they're quite competitive. They also put a lot less wear on the road, and they tend not to slow down traffic because they can split lanes in some cases (although this is not always very safe for the rider). Also: for 3-passenger minimums, they usually allow 2-passengers in those lanes when the vehicle only has a 2-passenger capacity. Which means I can drive in them with my wife in my chevy s-10 pickup, and people in tiny sports cars with 1 passenger can use the lane as well. Kind of not really what they were going for with carpooling, though? It's weird.
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Aug 21, 2013 20:30
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When I'm in heavy traffic I watch my mirrors a lot, and if I'm in motion I always open up the lane for bikers who are approaching from behind splitting a lane. I get the occasional wave, too. I don't think it's all that dangerous, either. Certainly it's less dangerous than overtaking on the right at speed on an open freeway, where someone might suddenly merge right without checking over-the-shoulder because the traffic is light and they don't see a car in the side mirror. The most dangerous thing (in my estimation) I see motorcyclists do is take a corner at speed excessive for the road surface condition. Debris on the road surface, wet, uneven surface, off-camber, or the need to make a sudden correction, can all cause a loss of traction or a sudden excess of traction (understeer/oversteer? Do they call it that with a bike?) and then a highside or lowside onto the shoulder (if there is one) or median barrier/oncoming traffic (on an 'inside' turn). When I've talked to bikers who have gone down (my stepdad, some of his buddies, guys at the track when my stepdad used to race AFM), most of the off-track accident stories have to do with going down in a corner. Occasionally it's someone backing into them while stopped at a light/intersection/whatever, and occasionally it's someone changing lanes without signaling or cutting into them on a left turn at an intersection. Not that any of that is a scientific survey, mind you, so maybe I'm way off, it's all anecdotal.
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Aug 21, 2013 23:23
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A special election would certainly have cost more than that. But I assume another special election is needed to replace him, so...
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Aug 24, 2013 01:39
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If you work downtown, unless you have free parking from your employer (and you probably don't), a round trip ticket from anywhere on the BART line is still less than you'd pay for gas plus a bridge toll plus parking. Even if you do have free parking, BART is still cheaper for most commuters. Which is why they use it. BART is packed. If it was "too expensive" nobody would ride it. And while there are good arguments about the gentrifying effect of providing commuter rail, it's worth also noting that the city and county of San Francisco has a minimum wage of $10.55 an hour, making it the highest in the nation. The cost of living here is high, but incomes are higher as well. VideoTapir posted:Oh no, tunnels, how prohibitively expensive and total justification for expensive tickets. I mean tunnels are just unheard of in public transportation, it's like something out of science fiction! BART's Transbay Tube was built starting in 1965 and opened in 1974. It cost $180M in 1970, which, adjusted for inflation, is $1.05B in 2012 dollars. Realistically it would cost two or three times that, given the much higher costs of construction these days. The new eastern span of the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge (which is really only half a bridge, since it connects Oakland to Yerba Buena Island) has a pricetag of $6.4B. You could maybe build a new bridge for as little as half that, if you found the right spot and didn't care about aesthetics (a causeway-type bridge is cheaper than a suspension bridge). But the point is, yes, tunnels and bridges are really loving expensive. BART costs more to run than it takes in in fares. poo poo Ain't Cheap. I happen to be in favor of subsidizing public transport and spending taxpayer money on infrastructure, but it strikes me as pretty ridiculous to be all sarcastic and indignant at the very idea of charging a subsidized, below-cost fare for convenient, rapid commuter rail which runs at or near capacity to move 350,000 people a day (on weekdays). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Aug 26, 2013 |
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Aug 26, 2013 05:54
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The City of San Francisco has a population of about 800,000. It's not fair to compare it to Hong Kong or Tokyo or New York's ability to spend on infrastructure. BART is paid for in part by the counties it runs through, of course. But even so, the entire greater SF metropolitan area, including Oakland and San Jose, is about 7.15 million. The population of New York City (just the city, not the surrounding area) is about 8.34M. Tokyo is 13.23M. Just the city. The Greater LA Area is 12.8M.
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Aug 26, 2013 06:35
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VideoTapir posted:The Bay Area is not a unique snowflake, don't make excuses for your political failures. I don't know where this hostility is coming from, but no, it's not my "political failure." BART is what it is; an aging 1970s electric commuter rail system that costs a lot to run and maintain. The US government doesn't subsidize transportation enough. Neither does California. And neither does the Bay Area. This is not unique to the Bay Area. And as I said, the system is running at or near capacity. What would happen to the system if you lowered fares significantly?
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Aug 26, 2013 06:49
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VideoTapir posted:Neither are 1970s electric commuter rail systems that cost a lot to run and maintain. I am giving you reasons for why the system is as it is. You may disagree with some of the reasons, but that doesn't make them "excuses". BART is tremendously successful at accomplishing what it was designed to do. quote:Probably not much. quote:Thanks for giving me another reason to dislike the US system of allowing every other housing or commercial development to establish its own municipal government and tax base; thus ensuring that EVERY government is small enough to drown in a bathtub. BART is mostly managed at the county level, and Bay Area counties are not particularly small, in terms of population. And if your intent is to criticize US public transport, the Bay Area is a poor choice for your poster-child. The stupid thing here is that I probably agree with you in a lot of areas: I think our transportation systems could be a lot better, and I think that the country has had a lovely attitude towards public transit for the last century. It's just bizarre to me to pick out BART for special criticism. Compared to most comparably-sized metropolitan areas in the US, the SF Bay Area has far better public transport. (There are a handful that are unarguably better, and scores that are unarguably worse.) BART cars may be old and due for replacement, and they are dirty (but not as dirty as the Paris underground), but they work, and 350,000 people rely on BART daily to get to and from work. It is an economically viable choice for those people. They spend on BART to save on housing costs. It runs on totally dedicated rail, most of which is elevated or underground. It's an all-electric system, which is far better for the environment than the typical diesel-run commuter rail systems in the US. It connects to two of the three major airports (although the OAK connection requires a shuttle, which is stupid). It's OK. BART isn't amazing but it's not the giant fuckup you're trying to make it out to be, and for people who live around here, $10 or whatever is not an unreasonable fare. Direct your hostility where it is better deserved.
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Aug 26, 2013 08:40
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Actually, I was told that Marin opted in to BART and paid a special tax levy, but the extension was never built. The tax, of course, was not refunded. Not exactly. http://www.marinij.com/ci_15707690 They wanted to run BART across a new lower deck tacked on to the golden gate bridge. That was probably, but not definitely, feasible at the time. But after San Mateo County pulled out, the system was underfunded and BART organizers asked Marin County to withdraw their application. Marin paid for the study, but that's all. We will never know if, had Marin refused to pull out, that extension would have actually gotten built. loving around with the golden gate bridge would have been politically very difficult, and running BART through the marin headlands would have been really expensive too. And a lot of Marin-ites were against BART, out of fear that it would spawn suburban sprawl. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Aug 26, 2013 |
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Aug 26, 2013 18:49
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withak posted:Mainly the problem is that people don't know how to merge (like a zipper, one new car per each old car) and don't know how to drive in stop&go traffic (coast at the average speed of the car front of you and try to never have to touch the brakes). If everyone did this then traffic would be orders of magnitude smoother. Also, when there's an exit everyone is getting off at, some people get over to the right early and wait in line, while others drive to the end of the queue and force their way in, which enrages everyone in the queue so that some people pull out of the queue and drive to the front in anger, and meanwhile the sudden merging forces people to slam on their brakes and send compression waves backwards through the line. And the people who are trying to merge at the head of the line block traffic in another lane, so now people in that lane are suddenly trying to merge left to avoid the stopped line-cutter mergers, and that causes people to hit their brakes or at least slow down, and it just cascades outwards and backwards. Like, for example, the 238 exit from northbound 880, which is always packed in particular because 580 between 238 and berkeley is closed to big rigs, so that's where they all get on and off of 580 heading out to I-5. If computers drove our cars we could double the number on the road easily, and they'd all be able to move at the speed limit. But anyway the real issue is that once a road hits capacity and traffic becomes reliably terrible, people seek alternate routes/modes. If you add lanes, the road actually attracts more traffic. People switch from other routes/modes to that road because it is reliably open. There are exceptions, but usually those exceptions happen because of limitations on development, such as greenspace. I think there are sections of 280 that are only very rarely bad, but it's because there's big areas of protected greenspace along the 280 corridor so people can't move there en-mass, attracted by the open freeway.
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Aug 27, 2013 01:11
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The real take-away from that last chart is that only about 13 to 15 metropolitan areas in the entire country exceed 5% of worker usage of public transportation. That is loving pathetic. It's what I was trying to get at earlier: yeah, BART is not great, but holy poo poo look at the rest of the country. By comparison, it's amazing.
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Aug 27, 2013 04:33
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An issue with solar-in-the-desert is the need to transmit the power to where there is demand. Power transmission is very wasteful which drives up the cost-per-megawatt. Solar is already significantly more expensive per MW than fossil fuel power, so that really doesn't help. Hydro is problematic because building a dam means filling a valley which means total destruction of the ecosystem occupying that valley. It also makes it much harder for fish to travel up stream (you can mitigate somewhat with fish-ladders and such but these are of limited effectiveness) which is part of why california's salmon are not doing well despite decades of protection. Rooftop solar seems to be a big thing these days and I like it for generating power locally (no transmission losses). It's not enough to replace centralized power generation by a long shot, but it helps.
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Aug 27, 2013 19:26
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Grand Prize Winner posted:What's more efficient in terms of energy saved, rooftop solar waterheating or rooftop PV generators? Rooftop solar water-heating is far more efficient. But, it only heats your water, so it's not a replacement for your electricity bills. And during the summer what most people use a ton of electricity on is running the A/C, and when you need hot water it isn't always sunny, so you still have to have a backup means of heating your water. PV solar means you can have batteries storing the sunshine for when you need it. Of course, you can do both, and that'd probably make sense.
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Aug 27, 2013 21:23
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SF light rail on surface streets is also non-turnstiled. You need to have a ticket but nobody is checking when you get on. When I lived there (which is a decade ago now), a cop would check people for tickets every now and then, and since I was riding almost daily, I probably had my ticket (fast pass, actually) checked once or twice a month. They tended to board at a stop where it was a while to the next stop, too, so people couldn't just get off if they saw a cop get on.Trabisnikof posted:Glad to see we're in a post segregation society Others have responded, but they've been addressing overall diversity of a region, by which metric San Francisco is #1. But you seem to be actually talking about segregation of neighborhoods. But the policy of segregation in the South was an enforced one, by law or by de-facto law. Segregation usually refers in particular to racist separation of schools, public facilities, and voting rights. The tendency of neighborhoods in any city to be dominated by a single ethnicity is mostly a matter of choice, and/or economics. Immigrants tend to move to neighborhoods with a predominance of their ethnicity, which is why Chinatown is still full of Chinese people and there's a large population of Afghanis in Fremont. At the same time, people tend to move to (or are stuck in) the neighborhoods that fit their economic means, which is why black people (who are disproportionately poor) tend to congregate in poor neighborhoods (or be left in them, as a neighborhood in decline loses everyone with the economic means to flee). It's reasonable to point out that even in a city as ethnically diverse as San Francisco, the latter effect still holds true. The neighborhoods with the most black people are the poorest ones. Even in extremely-liberal San Francisco, there is still a lot of work to be done in regards to social justice, racist laws (especially sentencing laws), racism by landlords, racism in the criminal justice system, police profiling, gangs, drug culture, and so on and so on. SF is not immune, and although it's a city that has made a lot of progress (compared to most of the rest of the country), it plainly still has a long way to go. So, yes, we are in a post-segregation society. It's not "segregation" that causes a lot Asian folks to move to the Sunset district, nobody is creating an Asian ghetto there and forcing anyone who speaks Tagalog out of their white neighborhoods. But yes, SF is by no means immune from social justice problems, and as an extremely expensive city, the effect is particularly pronounced (Bayview/Hunter's Point and the narrow corridor of the Tenderloin are the shittiest most run-down neighborhoods, and that's where poor people can afford to live, if they haven't already been forced out of the city entirely).
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Aug 30, 2013 00:37
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The top eight hundred feet or so of Mt. Diablo is visible from my living room window. It's been smokey in Concord but it seemed like the smoke died down a lot by yesterday evening. But sunday night I could see an eerie red glow flickering above the mountain and that was hosed up.
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Sep 10, 2013 16:30
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In other California news, there's this: Covered California is the new Obamacare health care plan marketplace for California citizens. I spent a little time looking through it today. Seems that if you qualify, you can get pretty decent individual health insurance from several different providers for very good prices. And if you're poor (like my unemployed brother), it's heavily subsidized. I think given his income (less than 150% of the poverty level) he can probably get a decent "silver" plan for under $60 a month after subsidy, which is fantastic. It is blindingly obvious, looking over the example rates, that this is lowering the cost of health insurance for most people. You can start looking at plans now, they go on sale October, and everyone has to have health insurance starting January 1st.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:46
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The lovely jobs do and will continue to exist, because some types of work are both needed and really crap to do. I put agricultural labor at the top of that list and fast food work well below, but there are plenty of other crappy jobs, too. These jobs pay enough to attract labor. So, on the face of it, they pay "enough". A big problem with the above statement, though, is that the wages of these jobs are so low that the taxpayer has to subsidize the work; directly through food stamps, welfare, tax credits, subsidized housing, subsidized health care, publicly-funded emergency rooms at hospitals, publicly-funded public transportation networks primarily utilized by the poor; and indirectly through the high costs of law enforcement and criminal justice (poverty being a major driver of crime), higher rates of transmitted disease (poverty being a major driver of poor health), and more. (Another problem with the statement is that if there are more workers than jobs, obviously people will fill all the jobs even if they do not pay "enough," because any work is better than no work.) To my mind a major point of raising minimum wages is to shift the actual burden of supporting low-wage workers back towards their employers, and by the transitive property, those employers' customers and/or stockholders. E.g., when you buy a hamburger you should have to pay the cost of supporting the guy making the hamburgers, rather than having a large portion of that cost underwritten by taxpayers. If working a 40 hour week for minimum wage provided enough income to keep someone above the poverty line, the costs to everyone would be far less. There is also an ethical argument to be made about wage-slavery and exploitation of the disadvantaged, but ethical arguments are harder to win. It seems to me that a conservative voter is more likely to be convinced a higher minimum wage is needed if you make an economics argument about the cost to taxpayers.
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Sep 14, 2013 20:47
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I have no idea, and I'm not even sure I know what credit card thing you're referring to. But, I suspect that once these plans shape up and establish themselves for a while, a lot of employers are going to get pressure from their employees - and pass that pressure on to their health care providers - to offer rates that are at least competitive with the zero-subsidy rates offered on the exchange. My hope is that rates overall are pushed down as a result.
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Sep 16, 2013 08:23
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Did you know there are local hamburger restaurants in California! Why would anyone eat at Burger King?! Did you guys know that there are lots of Taco Bells here too? Scandalous!
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Sep 26, 2013 01:23
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Guys, they exist for the same reason that Starbucks exists (and existed right alongside good local cafe's, and drove thousands of them out of business) despite having arguably worse coffee and definitely higher prices; because people crave conformity, predictability, a certain clean upscale-feeling environment, and the food is acceptably good. Even I occasionally go to Chipoltle, when I want what they serve (I like the barbacoa). Even though I can also get an excellent burrito or whatever at any of a dozen other taquerias in my neighborhood. It's not really that difficult a concept to grasp. They're clean, they serve you quickly, you get exactly the thing you are expecting, it tastes exactly the same as it did the last time you got it, and paying two bucks more is trivial to most of their customers.
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Sep 26, 2013 02:31
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Just a reminder that as of today, you can buy health insurance in California under the Affordable Care Act. That is, you can, if the website is up, which it mostly isn't, because of literally millions of people trying to get health insurance immediately. If you don't get insurance through your employer, and you're not on Medicare or MediCal, you are probably required to buy insurance effective January 1st, or you'll pay a fine (on your taxes) of the greater of $95, or 1% of your income. You must sign up by December 15th to do that. Open enrollment ends March 31st, 2014. After that, you can only enroll if you have a qualifying event (like losing your insurance). The reason there's a deadline is so healthy people don't just wait till they're sick and then sign up for insurance when they need it. The website is https://www.coveredca.com/
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Oct 2, 2013 04:01
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Pigasus posted:I haven't heard of a enrollment deadline. Where did you find out about enrolling only during a qualifying event after March 31st? See: https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/open-enrollment-period/ If you want to enroll using the Marketplace, you have to do it during open enrollment. You can always buy private health care insurance elsewhere at any time, but the Marketplace is where you're using the power of collective negotiating power to get better rates, and also subsidy from the government if you qualify for that.
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Oct 2, 2013 04:39
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agarjogger posted:How in particular is the Marketplace exerting collective bargaining power? The State of California has negotiated rates with a variety of insurers to provide specific plans. The State's bargaining power comes from the (presumably) several million Californians who will enroll using those plans. The State does not have to list every plan that insurers offer; it only has to offer a selection in each county, and it will pick the plans that are the best deal. In this way, insurers are heavily incentivized to offer good bargains, in order to get all those enrollees (a huge number of whom will be young and healthy, which is what they want). If you go to buy an individual insurance plan directly from an insurer, you have no way of exerting such bargaining power. Typically they will charge you much higher rates than an employer would pay on your behalf for the same plan; more commonly, they offer stripped-down plans that are sometimes deceptive (lifetime maximum payment caps, annual caps, annual minimum copayments, lots of procedures that are listed as voluntary, limited numbers of doctors who accept the plan, and so on). It can also be essentially impossible for an individual to compare different out-of-pocket plans, because each insurer uses their own nonstandardized way of presenting coverage information, and non-overlapping doctor/facility options. One of the mandates of the Marketplace is to provide standardized, side-by-side comparison of all of the plans available to you for your county. So you can see exactly what you're getting for your money, and exactly what you'd get for more or less money. Obamacare also included a variety of requirements to eliminate abusive insurance practices; for example, lifetime maximums, hidden fees, the ability to drop you if you get seriously ill, and most importantly, the ability to refuse you coverage due to "pre-existing conditions." Of course the biggest 500-pound gorilla in the marketplace is Medicare itself; that's why Medicare always gets the best rates from hospitals and doctors. Often procedures that would cost you thousands of dollars out of pocket only cost Medicare a couple hundred dollars. This is why other countries have the experience of single-payer being a fantastic way to reduce overall health care costs (at the cost, of course, of the profit margins for insurers, although not as much as you might think, since universal health care means healthy people are insured, which spreads costs; and also because if everyone has insurance, the power of preventative care keeps overall costs lower anyway). And if you don't like Medicare, there's another federal single-payer health care plan; the one military veterans get. We never talk about that because republicans enjoy strong support from the military and wouldn't want to alienate soldiers by suggesting that universal health care (for soldiers) is Bad, the way they argue that universal health care (for civilians) is Bad. Oh, and Congress also has single-payer health care coverage, but that's also not Socialism because of reasons. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Oct 2, 2013 |
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Oct 2, 2013 04:55
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No, the crappy states' governors hosed them in the rear end, because they are losing out on a huge amount of federal funding. Basically the mandate that, in expanding medicare, each state has to shoulder 10% of the increased coverage cost starting in 2020, allowed governors to claim that Obamacare would bankrupt them. But by opting out they are rejecting $8.4B in federal funding. And in many or all of those states, citizens who would have qualified for Medicare under ACA (people making up to 133% of the poverty level) may not qualify if they're making more than the lower ceiling the state happens to use. That's the main thing that Opt Out is referring to, but you asked about the exchanges in particular. Basically, it seems having fewer options set up by the federal government probably means paying more, although maybe nobody knows for sure, in the long run. For example, I found this article that discusses North Carolina, one of the states that opted out of a state-run marketplace. After describing how North Carolina plans arranged by the federal government cost more than the average for state-run marketplaces: quote:States with more competition had lower premiums. In the 36 states where the federal government is running the Marketplace, the average number of insurers was eight. So at least in the short term, the governors of those states have opted to gently caress over their constituents with higher-than-necessary health care costs. The reason seems to be directly related to the amount of competition, that is, how many options each county presents its residents appears to be directly related to how low the average cost of those plans are. But then, maybe those states are saving money by not having to run their own marketplace, which maybe benefits their taxpayers, and maybe most states make most of their tax income on property taxes (especially conservative states with no state income tax or sales tax), so maybe wealthier property-owners are better off and maybe that translates into electoral success for those governors. And maybe insurers are especially interested in not having to compete in such a marketplace, so maybe there's plenty of campaign donations from private insurance companies flowing to politicians who agree to fight against HCA. And maybe it's very convenient indeed for those politicians that poor people in poor red states have been convinced by conservative media that Obamacare is the Devil. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Oct 2, 2013 |
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Oct 2, 2013 06:45
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EnsGDT posted:How do I show my income as a freelance filmmaker on the Covered CA form? Half my jobs are payroll from different companies, and the other half are 1099 invoice jobs. I have no idea. I'm only answering because I think you might have been asking me, but I should be clear: I'm not an expert on ACA, I just spent some time learning about it so that I can force my chronically poor and underinformed CA relatives to get their butts insured finally, and what I've learned about it has made me generally positive towards the program (although I'd vastly prefer a single-payer system, and even more than that I'd prefer a completely nationalized health care system, but uh, I guess 'baby steps.')
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Oct 2, 2013 07:33
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