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Miss-Bomarc posted:And yet there is still a huge proportion of the California population that thinks there are too *few* people in prison. What enables the prisons in California is a double-whammy of those who are on the 'right' of this issue (which includes plenty of California democrats) being all for more people being in prison, and those on the 'left' side being very closely tied to unions, and the prison union (and some related unions) is extremely powerful in California, I'd argue that the prison union needs reformation because I don't think they're looking out for the real benefits of their members, since overcrowding endangers their members, but that's for the members to decide. As it is, they're a real anti-progressive force on prison reform. In general, I am 100% pro-union dude, and I'm entirely for the prison guards having a union, but their political power grows the more members they have and they have more members the more prisons and prisoners there are. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jun 29, 2013 |
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Jun 29, 2013 16:05
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UberJew posted:Whoa whoa whoa, no the CCPOA does not. When the state put everybody on furloughs for three years the CCPOA got off scot-free and didn't even complain in solidarity. When the state laid off shitloads of people they didn't get touched, or raise one word in defense of the other unions. Sorry! I moved out of California four years ago, and didn't know that part. My apologies for getting that wrong. It's good to know that they're a pariah among unions, but unfortunately they still swing a big political club.
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Jun 29, 2013 17:19
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Nonsense posted:Gavin Newsom, is he a PC charlatan as Adam Carolla states? Or is he something else entirely? He's a complete charlatan. I worked for the awesomely named Quintin Mecke when he ran against him (I think he got 5% of the vote or something) for mayor. In order to get a good photo op at a homeless shelter, Gavin had the residents ejected so that he could pretend there was spare capacity in the system. And he hosed his best friend's alcoholic wife. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Jun 30, 2013 |
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Jun 30, 2013 10:10
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Rah! posted:
The Cancun in SF is my favorite cheap-as-hell Mexican spot, and they're never shocked by the 'no rice'. Instead, you often get a brief, curt smile, a small show of respect. I left SF three years ago for NYC. I miss it a lot. And I recently realized I've never lived anywhere that isn't crazy-expensive, and I'm just a working dude. Content: The San Onofre nuclear power plant is going to close, and a lot of pro-nuke people are pointing to it as California regulating something to death. It spells out a lot of the dangers of private nuclear, and is worth looking into if you're into that sort of thing. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/san-onofre-nuclear-plant-in-california-to-close.html Obdicut fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Jun 30, 2013 |
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Jun 30, 2013 10:46
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Pellisworth posted:The LA Metro light rail runs until 2am, and it's only two rails for each line as well. I'm sure given the money and willpower, BART running times could be tweaked to some extent on Friday and Saturday nights. Moving to NYC has been like acquiring a superpower, as far as public transport goes. It's not just that it runs all night, that it's really fast, it's that people are expert at using it. People jump on and off in half a second on the train. It's awesome.
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Jul 2, 2013 18:34
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SirPablo posted:Late to the party but wanted to throw up this map depicting climates across California based on the Koeppen climate classification system. Sorry that it literally looks like throw-up, I pulled the data from some work I did in graduate school and made a map post haste and can't be bothered with intricate color maps (or a key!). You'll get the point anyways, which is the San Joaquin Valley is all arid/semi-arid, similar to the southeast quarter of the state. Thus Bakersfield and Fresno have climates more like wonderful locales such as El Centro, Barstow, Yuma (and Phoenix further east) than points further north in the Sacramento Valley. Yes, there used to be a big loving lake there, but that was due to the big loving mountains (which interestingly are closer to an arctic climate) where lots of rain and snow typically fall. Could you put a key up with that?
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Jul 8, 2013 21:24
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Trabisnikof posted:To say that either Cali-mex is Tex-mex or that Cali-mex is authentic Mexican is silly. Is there authentic Mexican in California? Totally, but that's not Cali-mex either. Hint: if it comes with an entire avocado, its probably Cali-mex. It also really doesn't matter. Just call it 'fusion' cuisine and be done with it. There's plenty of variation on how Mexican food is done inside Mexico, too. I mainly just miss the hell out of it. I've been told by some of my Chinese-Californian friends that you can get better Chinese food in San Francisco than in many parts of China, since the ingredients are more readily available and of better quality. Is this just rah-rah Cali boosterism?
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Jul 16, 2013 15:38
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I'm a big Californian stupidhead who can't post in the right thread.
Obdicut fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Jul 20, 2013 |
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Jul 20, 2013 16:31
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Faker. I worked on Quintin Mecke's mayoral campaign. He got about 5% of the vote I think. He's like thirty times as honest and five times as smart as Newsome. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Jul 22, 2013 |
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Jul 22, 2013 02:11
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gret posted:Care Not Cash was a pretty good idea. It was a good idea, the execution of it was freaking awful beyond belief. Because Newsome.
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Jul 22, 2013 20:28
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predicto posted:Not in San Francisco. Anchor Oyster Bar is my favorite restaurant in the world. By-rite Salty Caramel at Delores Park on a sunny afternoon is glorious. Taqueria Cancun, how I mess the burritos of thee.
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Aug 5, 2013 23:57
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Rah! posted:Yeah, but there is plenty of good stuff in SF, and why wouldn't there be, seeing as it's a place where food is taken seriously and which has a large Chinese population (which is mostly from Hong Kong and Southern China, if anyone's curious). My Taiwan-born, SF Chinatown-raised Chinese friend who has been to Taiwan and Hong Kong many times, and has also lived in San Jose, who constantly tries every drat Chinese restaurant he can find, backs this up, and I can confirm it too, as can tons of other people Just go out to the Avenues, basically. My favorite place, Shanghai Dumpling King, closed, and I was gutted. The Taiwan on Clement is still good, though, as are quite a few other places on Clement. Or were, I haven't been back in a year since the social media boom.
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Aug 6, 2013 11:52
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So I have a great problem to have, which is that my parents own a big house in Presidio Heights in San Francisco. To me, it's just my grandmother's house with great memories, but it's worth buttloads. I'd rather that I and my brothers were able to keep the house. Any chance that housing prices in SF are going to plateau or drop off significantly, especially at the high end? I'd rather it went down in value so that I had any hope of paying the estate taxes on it and then the property taxes on it (I know that maybe there may be some legal shenanigans we can pull on this, but my parents are probably not going to do that). What would it take for Bay Area prices to go down significantly? Just popping the social media tech bubble?
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Aug 13, 2013 16:58
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Thanatosian posted:Soooo... IANAL, but from what I understand, Estate Tax exemption for a married couple is $10 million. Estate tax is on the estate, not on people. Maybe if they both died at the same time or something, but that's unlikely. They are probably going to be Massachusetts residents when this takes place, where one million is the cutoff, they're currently Connecticut residents where it's 2.5 or so. That's the major problem, not the federal stuff, at the moment, though the federal will probably apply too down the line. I and my wife might, in ten years or so, make enough money to pay property taxes on it, but not if the market keeps increasing at this rate. It's an incredibly privileged problem to have, and we've been given a huge benefit by prop 13 already (for my parents), I just love that house. But I'm resigned that we'll probably have to sell it, unless the market flattens out.
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Aug 13, 2013 20:28
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WampaLord posted:"I might have to sell a house and make millions of dollars" is the first worldiest first world problem I've heard in quite some time. Of course it's a first-world problem. The house isn't a 'collection of old things', it's a place packed full of great memories and it's a great space that the family uses a lot for any big gathering, and my parents (when living there) almost always have people staying over so it's not a waste of space. Of course I'm enormously lucky to have this 'problem'. It's just another factor in the rising prices of real estate in SF, and it sucks but it's understandable. Hell, I want even higher estate taxes than we currently have at the federal level, so I'd actually rather I was in a worse position. quote:b-b-b-but why sell when it will be worth TWO millions next year!??!?!? We don't want to not sell it because it'll grow in value, we want to not sell it because we don't want to sell it. We want it to decrease in value.
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Aug 13, 2013 21:14
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Arsenic Lupin posted:You're doomed. It will decrease in value if (A) the software industry in Silicon Valley collapses and (B) the banking industry in SF collapses. That's it. Okay, it'll decrease in value if it's damaged when the Big One hits, but I assume you don't consider that a win. Alright. I'll come to terms with selling it. It's actually probably for the best in a weird way, because there's no chance my brothers would want to live there so my wife and I would get the benefit of it but my brothers really wouldn't. quote:However, if you really want to keep the place, from what I understand (and I again reiterate that I am not a lawyer), putting it into certain kinds of trusts or bringing it under the control of a corporation could lock in that low property tax rate. You would definitely want to talk to a lawyer about that, though; specifically, a California lawyer, preferably one with probate/tax law experience. We all have ethical reservations about tax-dodging, even through legal instruments, so probably not.
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Aug 13, 2013 21:27
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Thanatosian posted:
I don't want this to become 'brainstorm Obdicut's house' or anything, but basically my wife is finishing up an Md/PhD, so she'll eventually be making quite good money but not amazing money, whereas I'm actually going into a profession with lower wages but higher job satisfaction. I don't think there's really a conceivable scenario where we can afford to buy my brothers out plus play the taxes on the estate and then the property taxes every year, except huge strokes of luck. I'm sure I could work out something with my brothers, but even just paying the estate taxes and then paying the property tax every year might be a hell of a thing. So that this isn't just about me, can you explain how Prop 13 inflates home values? I think I get it-- a similar house would have higher taxes on it somewhere else, so it's worth 'more' because it has lower taxes-- but since that value wouldn't transfer to a new owner I don't quite get it.
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Aug 13, 2013 23:06
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withak posted:Current owners are less inclined to sell because they will lose their property tax welfare handout. When owners are less inclined to sell then you have to offer them more money if you want to persuade them. drat, I'm dumb. Thank you, of course that makes perfect sense. So if prop 13 were repealed, and my family suddenly had to start paying the higher taxes, the higher taxes wouldn't actually be as higher because the value of it would drop significantly because of the higher taxes.
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Aug 13, 2013 23:13
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predicto posted:You realize, of course, that Prop 13 carries over to heirs don't you? That is one of the most stupid things about it. Chances are, you and your brothers would pay less property tax on that house than a guy who just bought a studio in the Tenderloin. Ah, that's a different prop, isn't it? Goddamn it, that's so unfair. Anyway, I didn't mean this to problem-solve, I really was honestly interested if prices could conceivably go down. I think that prop 13 repeal would be the only major thing that could cause them to deflate significantly other than natural disasters that'd kind of moot it all.
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Aug 13, 2013 23:31
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withak posted:Yeah, the thing about getting priced out of your house due to property taxes rising is that you are probably also going to be turning a massive profit on the sale of said house. And to be clear, it's not a tragedy in the least. My brothers and I are incredibly lucky to be inheriting anything. And I don't want to try scummy stuff to dodge taxes on it. Is George Lucas's epic trolling of Marin going through? Last I heard there's been a setback. I don't get if he's super-serious or if he's playing some weird hardball game. http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23459968/marin-george-lucas-affordable-housing-project-suffers-setback
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Aug 14, 2013 00:16
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withak posted:Maybe Sonoma County. The US is actually the world's largest geothermal user. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy_in_the_United_States
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Aug 28, 2013 04:11
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incoherent posted:Yeah, its pretty loving awesome. That poo poo goes everywhere. As someone who moved from San Francisco to New York City: The subways/buses here in Manhattan are like a superpower, but outside of Manhattan they're of less utility. http://www.mta.info/nyct/maps/subwaymap.pdf The subway system is kind of in a Catch22, though: Many more people go from Brooklyn or Queens to Manhattan than go between Brooklyn and Queens, and as you can see there's very tenuous subway connections between Brooklyn and Queens--and not much of a connection into Queens anyway, but buses are faster out there because there's much less traffic so that's not as important as it looks. But the existing infrastructure reinforces it's purpose: It makes it harder for Brooklyn or Queens to develop economically compared to Manhattan because they have much smaller markets that can be brought there efficiently by public transport. Brooklyn is succeeding economically by getting people from Manhattan to come out there and people who otherwise would have lived in Manhattan to live there, but this gentrifies it. If there were stronger connections between Brooklyn and Queens, it could be arguably a lot better for those boroughs and would result in communities improving economically without gentrifying. Here's a population density map which shows that while Queens and Brooklyn are less dense than Manhattan, there's still super-dense areas that aren't connected except in a long circuitious route through manhattan.   Sorry, that's a lot about New York for the California thread, but here is the comparison to the Bay Area:   Connections between East Bay and San Francisco are still clearly privileged, but the population dropoff is much more extreme, and the loop around that area is much tighter than in New York. San Francisco public transport is pretty slow and plodding compared to NYC transport a lot of the time, but there's very few places in the Bay Area where you can't plot a pretty direct route to your destination. In NYC, if you start out in Manhattan or are going there, the system is awesome, but if you're out somewhere else in NYC trying to get somewhere else in NYC, it's a lot less useful.
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Sep 1, 2013 13:46
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