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Dusseldorf posted:And even the Legion of Honor has a horrible art collection. It only has a nice view going for it. It isn't the most expansive collection to be sure, but it has a fairly good late medieval through eighteenth century collection especially for a relatively small museum in the Unites States and they often bring in good temporary exhibits. I'd rather go there than the Stanford art museum, which is a genuinely lackluster collection, any day of the week.
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May 17, 2014 18:35
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Papercut posted:The last results I saw for SF didn't look good, since it needs 2/3rds instead of just a simple majority. It's a better measure than the Berkeley version too, since the money would be guaranteed to children's nutrition and health programs. Sucks because it's going to lose with a majority "yes" vote. The San Francisco version was actually defensible unlike Berkeley's "Berkeley vs. Big Soda" campaign that unsurprisingly will not tax the sundry unhealthy beverages that Berkeley voters are more likely to drink and will not do anything to improve the public's health anyway. This town's politics are awful.
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Nov 5, 2014 21:00
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VikingofRock posted:The other big 17 freeway design horror is the fishhook, where 1N and 17S become one. If you are driving along the 1 in the left lane you go around a fairly sharp turn, which suddenly sharpens even more mid turn, and then are dumped out on the 17 with people going at speed, with literally zero merge time. The lanes just very suddenly are the same. It's a wonder there's not an accident there daily. Highway 17 South to Highway 1 South is another nightmare because of the merging, but Highway 1 North to Highway 17 North somehow managed to be acceptable. I wish I had experienced the railroad that ran from Oakland to Santa Cruz before 1940. Just about every example of lane merging around here is a nightmare. Another amusing example is the westbound direction past the toll plaza onto the Bay Bridge, which is a mess of lanes that merge without warning, although somehow less dangerous than people reversing out of the toll both to enter a different toll both.
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Feb 13, 2015 08:14
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Zeitgueist posted:I know, that's why I used that example. The University of California in the twentieth century is noted for such "friendly to protest culture" aspects as enacting a loyalty oath that even a former member of the Freikorps refused to take.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:27
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:Well the state is already throwing money at the problem via desalination plants - the Carlsbad facility is scheduled to begin operation next year: The "proposed" plant in Santa Cruz is never going to happen because nearly every group I can think of opposed it.
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Apr 4, 2015 03:45
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VikingofRock posted:Whoops, nice catch. I didn't mean to mislead people, just forgot a word. I've edited my post. In any case, this is more evidence that the GSRs need to be unionized, and it's a shame that they are legally prohibited from doing so. This isn't really a GSR issue (although it impacts them as well). The change is for anyone with Berkeley SHIP who has dependents, which includes unionized graduate students, GSRs, and presumably some undergraduates as well.
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Aug 3, 2015 07:27
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Cicero posted:Well, except for the fact that it's much safer. It's pretty funny though how many goons think they're invulnerable supermen. Other than the endless armed robberies in South Berkeley.
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Aug 11, 2015 03:49
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VikingofRock posted:I really wish there was a BART line running to Santa Cruz, just so you could take mass transit to SF/Berkeley in less than 3 hours. Plus it would do a ton to ease traffic on the 17 during tourist season. There was a study done around 1990 regarding the possibility of connecting Santa Cruz to Los Gatos via rail. It concluded that the most realistic possibility was light rail as opposed to heavy rail from an engineering perspective. BART - at least the non-eBART or Oakland Airport trains - would, if I am not mistaken, have a lot of engineering problems. In addition to the obvious funding problems, the method of connecting it to anything useful in Santa Clara County would have added a number of problems even in 1990. Still would be nice in theory, though. Basically, Santa Cruz lost out when the railroad tunnels got blown up in the '40s.
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Aug 17, 2015 00:57
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Golly. Why'd they do that? Landslides damaged some of the tunnels, Southern Pacific was already losing money on the route in the 1930s, the repairs were "expensive", and the route would definitely not have been viable after highway 17 opened that same year, so SP decided to dynamite the tunnels. Making good decisions for fifty years in the future is an impossibility, especially when $55,000 (1940) is considered a significant stumbling block. King Hong Kong fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 02:25
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Ohhh, got it. It wasn't spite. It was "If we don't commit $$$ to continuously keeping these tunnels in good repair they're going to collapse anyway, and may cause greater harm than dynamiting." It was definitely a more legitimate - if understandably short sighted - reason than the myth that they were destroyed to hinder a Japanese invasion.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:48
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Zachack posted:Both sides of the gg have choke points, one with convenient parking and tour buses doing half your work, the other easily accessible from below and with a toll plaza leading to a nightmare merge. And I don't know what you think the NPS would do, they aren't cops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Park_Police Not to mention the rangers that are law enforcement rangers.
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Jan 21, 2016 16:12
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b0lt posted:no quotas here, you're just not well rounded enough! "The Asian-American population aged X to Y" is useless information and three of those schools seem to have roughly doubled the percentage of Asians enrolled over the period (and I know that even the percentage increase doesn't show the actual raw increase due to rising enrollment figures).
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Apr 1, 2016 16:44
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raminasi posted:Yeah, I've seen that map, but I was under the impression that it was never more than speculation. I was referring to the fact that it now carries more than twenty times as many people as was originally envisioned. Yeah that map is totally fictional. The 1961 plan was much more restrained than it even with the extensions to Palo Alto and San Rafael.
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May 2, 2016 00:57
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Maybe this means the local bond measure to funnel $70 million to contractors and construction companies in vaguely described terms under the guise of improving library services won't pass but who am I kidding.
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Jun 7, 2016 07:41
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Depending on the local political climate, municipalities and other jurisdictions can often pretty easily pass additional taxes on property (admittedly ad valorem at prop 13 values or by square footage of the lot) to fund sundry matters. That has happened a few times at my residence recently with essentially no opposition. Given the insanity of the housing market there*, it is relatively equitable compromise. *As an aside, new owners basically have to demolish existing structures, build a mammoth house, and commit to short-term rentals or re-sell it to make money, with the result that communities built around long-term renters have been decimated or worse in some areas. So Prop 13 oddly effectively subsidizes long-term rentals here if the original owners don't sell. King Hong Kong fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jul 12, 2017 |
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Jul 12, 2017 02:04
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punk rebel ecks posted:Is there nowhere in California with cheap or even reasonable priced housing? Glorious Modoc County, home of a median home price of $105,000, a population of under 9,000, a small part of a very underrated national monument and a large part of a great national forest, and also no jobs. In other news and in no surprise to anyone, the estimated cost of the bullet train has increased by a cool $13 billion.
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Mar 9, 2018 23:13
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I know it goes against the thread’s received wisdom but I’m fairly skeptical that a repeal of Prop 13 would be a panacea for housing (revenue being a separate question) because the major constraints are rather more local regulations, restrictions, and fees on construction as well as any additional property taxes. Those are largely the consequence of Prop 13 but the impact of repeal would almost certainly be negligible because there is no way any municipality is ever going to give up additional revenue. And, of course, we all know the political climate for new development in the areas most in need of it.
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Apr 8, 2018 23:26
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Is the California Democratic Party still nominally opposed to the awful Top-Two Primary system or have they embraced it because it entrenches the position of its “moderate” candidates?
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May 4, 2018 22:20
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CPColin posted:I think, since we amended it into our constitution, we'd have to do another amendment to replace it with something else, hopefully including some sort of instant-runoff action, so we don't have all this primary + runoff + general bullshit that just wastes everybody's time and money. I think there is also a theoretical basis for getting it deemed unconstitutional given the reasoning in the opinion for Burdick v. Takushi, but getting to that point seems exceedingly challenging.
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May 31, 2018 19:12
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Leperflesh’s California: Everyone with any property who doesn’t make hundreds of thousands of dollars should take out loans or move elsewhere.
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Jun 4, 2018 02:45
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WampaLord posted:They should be grateful that they have that option since nearly half of Americans are struggling to pay for basic necessities. The solution to all our problems and certainly the solution to housing is to further concentrate any conceivable form of wealth in the banks and the mega-rich.
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Jun 4, 2018 05:30
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The comparison between “grandma” (or, really, the vast, vast majority of property owners) and the landed gentry is facile and elides the enormous difference between the two that makes taxation on the former unpalatable, namely that the structure of land ownership and income is entirely different. An estate was valuable because it generated income, something that scaled with the size and use of the land. It isn’t that land isn’t understood to be “wealth” but that people are understandably reluctant to look at things like someone’s residence through your warped lens that leads you tell someone to take out a loan in order to be productive when that land isn’t of the kind that either would or should provide an income: it’s the kind that is intended to be used as a residence. At any rate, I did some research and found some studies suggesting that distorting effects of prop 13 on the housing market (which in the studies I found are as high as an 18% difference in housing prices and a 17% decreased probability in selling) are certainly a contributing factor to housing problems but it should be immediately obvious that as significant as that is, it isn’t anywhere near the primary factor. Even if you did something like repeal prop 13 and reduce sales taxes to compensate grandma living on a fixed income in a progressive way without doing something like increasing the housing supply*, you would increase the probability of selling by 11% (compared to prop 13) but housing prices would only decrease by 1% (again, compared to prop 13). *Even in a hypothetical higher tax scenario, it’s a little difficult to imagine that the interests and regulations that more substantially restrict housing supply would be impacted.
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Jun 4, 2018 17:08
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Cicero posted:The direct impact of prop 13 on the housing market isn't huge, sure, but it's the indirect effects people are talking about. The problem with prop 13 is that it means that landowners are strongly incentivized to keep low-density zoning around and fight the creation of more housing to make their own homes more valuable. Normally, the desire to increase one's property values are at least partially counteracted by the desire to keep one's property taxes low, but prop 13 removes the disincentive, so increased property values are only good. Yeah, I understand that which is part of why I initially wrote (and I guess edited out) that the study was limited. My suggestion isn’t that prop 13 didn’t impact that, which I think most everyone agrees on, but rather that disentangling the two is unlikely at this stage and you’ll be left with one even without the other.
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Jun 4, 2018 17:25
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CPColin posted:I just read the arguments about this one more closely. In the rebuttal to the argument for, some guy with no title and no affiliation says that waiting until after the election is certified for a proposition harshly punishing pedophiles to go into effect could theoretically give them 38 more days to commit crimes. And therefore the proposition is bad. To be fair, this is pretty funny and up there with the guy who ran for governor with a platform of quarantining pedophiles on Catalina Island. E: Although it's a tier below the guy who ran for county board of supervisors here that used to have a youtube video of him singing the theme song to Ducktails but with the lyrics changed to be about chemtrails. King Hong Kong fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 20:47
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Boycotting a place that actually attempts to pay better wages because they happened to donate a fairly minimal sum to Republicans and ignoring the fact that they also donate to (admittedly pro-business) Democratic PACs is, frankly, pretty stupid. On the other hand, the fries are legitimately my favorite fast food fries, so my brain might be broken.
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Sep 2, 2018 20:58
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Celexi posted:I have taken the coast starlight plenty without being late, when it does get late however it isn't as you said just 1 hour late but 12. With maybe one exception, every trip (about a dozen) I’ve made on the Coast Starlight has been 30 minutes to 2 hours late. I finally gave up and started flying more even though that has its own inconveniences. But that had more to do with the inability to sleep overnight outside of a roomette, which is usually a little overpriced for the segment I want. King Hong Kong fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Nov 22, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 15:46
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Sydin posted:The board process sounds dumb as gently caress and it was pretty ignorant to not include any historians - even if for nothing else but fact checking - but It’s clearly not so much about the specific names, it’s about criticizing a process. She claims dialogue is important but immediately shuts down any substantive dialogue because it was never about dialogue. Pointing out the laughable ends is a natural way of highlighting how the committee got its facts wrong and its process wrong. But the thing that gets me is how the committee refused to take history as a process and way of thinking seriously. The way the committee member talked about history is so far removed from what the practice of history is that it is just depressing that these people are connected to education at all.
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Feb 8, 2021 07:14
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Being able to read cursive is a useful skill. There are undoubtedly more useful as well as beneficial things to devote time to than teaching how to write it in 3rd grade.
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Oct 20, 2023 03:39
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