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"California has so much demand (because it's pretty) that you'll probably never have to make bad loan decisions, because there's a wealthy person looking to buy for every home that goes on sale. " Hahahahaha. Welcome to every real estate boom/bust ever. In fact, it turned out, come the crash, that "wealthy" people didn't actually want to live in Richmond or Alameda, they were just priced out of the places they wanted to live. In a boom market, things that are less desirable or undesirable rise in price just like the jewels. When the only way to get a jewel is to pre-bid with an all-cash order and no inspections *before* the house gets on the market, auction fever sets in on everything. There's a simple way to cut the Gordian knot of "but old peoples". Kill Prop 13, freeze property taxes when the owner hits 65. Solves that owner's problems, makes the elderly less inclined to come out in force because I've got mine, and expands the tax base.
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May 29, 2014 17:24
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The Aardvark posted:I wonder how long that six-way split would last if it ever passes. Considering that it cuts off the Central Valley from all its water sources, I'm guessing not long.
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May 29, 2014 17:59
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natetimm posted:It isn't JUST grannies who benefit, it's the notion that you get to pass the property to your family at the same tax rate instead of having the state step in and rake you over the coals because a bunch of speculators ran up the market. The reason 70% of Californians like prop 13 is because it allows them to leave the legacy of affordable housing to their descendants instead of being confiscated for "betterment of all" and the benefit of the supposedly free market. So, basically, taxes are bad. Got it. Things like bridges and schools and firemen should be a la carte, to be paid for individually when needed. You have just switched from "Prop 13 is good because GRANNIES MIGHT SUFFER" to "Prop 13 is good because it moves houses out of the progressive tax system forever." Police protection for Granny's house has gone up in cost since she bought it. Road costs for Granny's house have gone up in cost since she bought it. You're saying that Granny's heirs shouldn't pay for those increases in cost (which were a hell of a lot more 2% per year since 1975) because what, exactly? Taxes are not just abstract bad things that make people suffer. Taxes actually pay for shared benefits and services. Granny's house is worth more than it was in 1975 because, in part, of the continuing maintenance money paid on town and county services. If town service costs had been capped at a compounded 2% per year, Granny's home would be in a slum.
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May 29, 2014 19:29
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The official rebuttals to some of the state propositions were literally "I always write rebuttals for propositions because somebody needs to." That guy devoted half of one of his rebuttals (for the veteran's housing bill, I think) to carpool lanes meaning that California highways are inevitably doomed to become toll roads. 
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Jun 4, 2014 00:55
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FMguru posted:Even in rocket-fuel-powered Silicon Valley, you see a lot of empty storefronts and strip malls. Empty strip malls are different from empty storefronts. Strip malls are notorious for being same-y (the cell phone store, the grocery store, the Starbucks, and so on) while storefronts are more likely to have violin repair stores, electric razor repair stores -- I think that one must be some kind of front, but it's right there in San Mateo -- German delis, and so on. On some parts of the Peninsula, admittedly not all, downtowns are booming. Check out Redwood City, San Mateo, San Carlos, and of course the Menlo Park/Palo Alto/Mountain View aristocracy. In the mid-Peninsula, where I live, older and thus affordable retail space doesn't stay empty long. Redwood City has managed to turn its downtown around in the ten years I've lived here.
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Nov 6, 2014 17:05
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GrandpaPants posted:It sounds like the Bay Area is trying to be Manhattan without the public transportation infrastructure and affordable surrounding suburbs.
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Nov 17, 2014 18:18
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Runaktla posted:I would probably oppose new buildings if I was living in SF. Clutter/overpopulation blows. If that means population centers become more spread out then awesome. Enjoy your life in Houston.
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Nov 18, 2014 03:13
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Bip Roberts posted:Ironically Houston's problem is that you can't stop anyone from building anything and there are no geographical restrictions keeping the metro area from enveloping all of south Texas. That would have been my point, yes.
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Nov 18, 2014 17:59
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redreader posted:But why the gently caress are they even homeless? They need to be cared for! Amen. The specific issue in California boils down to this time sequence. 1. In the 1960s and 1970s there are multiple exposes as to exactly what hellholes "insane asylums" are, how little treatment goes on, and how much abuse. Research says that what mentally ill people need is small-group care, not large-scale asylums. 2. In 1967, in response to these abuses, California passes the Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act, which makes it very, VERY difficult to hospitalize mentally ill people against their will. Meant well, didn't work out well. 3. Lots of for-profit "board-and-care homes" open in the community to care for mentally-ill people. They provide generally bad care because for-profit. People who live near them deeply resent having mentally ill people wandering the streets for lack of occupation. 4. Everybody gets used to there being mentally ill people wandering around the streets; mentally ill people are solidified as "them" rather than "people like us who need help". 5. California cuts and cuts and cuts its state mental-health care budget, meaning that even when mentally ill people want treatment, they can't get it. 6. Homelessness is entrenched as a permanent "no, of course we can't do anything about that" problem. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/map-states-cut-treatment-for-mentally-ill for documentation of the mental-health cuts in California just from the period 2009-2012. http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/ e: Re weather, it's not so much that it rained (yea rain!) as that it rained a whole fuckton in a period of two days. When we get more rain in two days than we've seen in a two-day period since 2008, and when we've been in a drought for three (is it?) years, a whole bunch of infrastructure is severely tested. Why look, that sewer line that's been dry since 2012 just took on three times its capacity. Will it explode? Watch this space! Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 18:57
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Papercut posted:People call San Francisco "SF" all the time.
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Dec 4, 2014 20:34
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Rah! posted:What the hell is this stupid "La Lengua" poo poo though? I've been living in SF my entire life, and always knew that area as part of the mission district or part of Bernal Heights, depending on who you asked...and then one day a few years ago, google maps started calling that area "La Lengua", and now a ton of people call it that. I blame hipsters and/or techies, of course. It's like Godwin's law for annoying things in a gentrifying city. I bet some google employee thought that renaming their part of the neighborhood to "the tongue" in Spanish, would be totally cool and unique and authentic, and seeing as 75% of SF residents aren't from here, people just accept it. And now a local merchants group is rolling with that new name, because it makes them stand out from the rest of the area, and might lead to more business. Blame this dude.
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Dec 5, 2014 03:29
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Get off my lawn.
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Leperflesh posted:I only buy free range eggs anyway. They cost like twice as much, but that's still like less than four bucks for twelve eggs that last me and my wife for at least a couple weeks. There is no legal definition of any of the terms, and "free-range" can literally mean that there's one door in the barn, good luck getting to it.  http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/confinement_farm/facts/guide_egg_labels.html (I stick to "cage-free" or "free-range".)
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Dec 30, 2014 21:17
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Minarchist posted:Kitties need clean boxes and our plumbing doesn't like clumping litter. Gross organic trash shouldn't need to be perma-sealed in some random Vons bag until AD 87000
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Jan 4, 2015 01:44
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I agree on there being really wasteful agricultural uses of water, and I agree about the biggest impact being in the Central Valley. However, the drought is a state-wide issue, and it affects a lot of places that aren't downstream of the Central Valley. I'm in the Bay Area, and my water is coming down from the Sierras. Reforming agriculture in the Central Valley will do nothing to make water more available on the San Francisco peninsula; we have to conserve at the civilian and industrial level, because that's where our water is going. I keep remembering the Berkeley slogans of the 1970s-1980s: In this land of sun and fun/We don't flush for Number One. Our house had low-flow toilets when we moved in. I'm contemplating installing those toilets that have two flush levels, one for pee and one for larger substances. I also want to think about some sort of grey-water system long-term. I am a passionate gardener, and I want to keep my roses alive with a clear conscience. They're already on a drip system.
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Mar 23, 2015 22:24
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Oh, shoot me now. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/us/california-imposes-first-ever-water-restrictions-to-deal-with-drought.html New York Times posted:Within hours of Mr. Brown’s announcement, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who is the House majority leader, announced plans to renew efforts in Congress to pass legislation requiring the building of two huge water facilities in the state. The efforts had been blocked by Democrats concerned that the water projects would harm the environment and damage endangered species of fish. I'm from one of the most prolific water-wasters in the state, and God knows we can't be bothered to do anything about it.
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Apr 3, 2015 17:30
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FRINGE posted:Total tangent, but no matter what else happens theres always that word "Feinstein" in any story about how CA is going to poo poo. Who the gently caress votes for that villainous troll anymore? Parts of California are already running out of residential water, because they depend on depleted aquifers. It's a big ol' state, and almost anything is happening somewhere. I'm seriously contemplating a very simple laundry-to-yard greywater system, because my lot runs straight downhill and I already have fruit trees in a direct line from the laundry machine. The major catch is whether I can trust the rest of the household to turn the diverter valve when they use plant-unhealthy laundry products.
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Apr 4, 2015 19:20
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I'm really bummed it was Boxer rather than Feinstein who retired.
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Apr 5, 2015 01:09
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Keyser S0ze posted:There are decent downtown pockets in most of the South Bay places, unlike most of the East Bay (except Oakland/Berkeley). ProperGanderPusher posted:Let me add a few to this: I live in the middle of the peninsula, and a lot of those towns have great downtowns depending on what you consider great. Palo Alto has degraded a lot in the ten years I've lived in the Bay Area: the small funky stores have been pushed out by high rents, and downtown is now mostly restaurants and chain stores. It is still fun to walk around in. Menlo Park has a great downtown for shopping, but it's definitely slanted toward 50something upper-middle-class people; the Sunday farmer's market is year-round and excellent. Redwood City has turned its downtown around and is now full of things to do; it has a much younger vibe than any of the other places around here, including a spectacular movie-theater complex in the downtown. It also has a thriving commercial district. San Carlos has a very pretty downtown and is very walkable/bikable; the downtown is very much slanted to upper-middle-class thirtysomethings with kids. The downtown has some fun 1920s and 1930s buildings. The restaurant scene is spectacular; there are too many expensive Italian places, but there's also Burmese, Moroccan, barbecue, izakawa Japanese, a couple of beer/wine pubs, and the usual conglomeration of Thai, Middle Eastern, and Chinese. I've lived in the suburbs of a Southern state and a New England state, and the Bay Area suburbs are far, far more full of interesting things to see, do, and buy than are the post-50s heavily-zoned suburbs I've lived in elsewhere. Furthermore, if you pick your suburb and your location carefully, CalTrain, with all its faults, will get you up to the city and down to San Jose.
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Apr 7, 2015 19:41
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I honestly don't understand why somebody who, after massive money investments, failed to win statewide office TWICE thinks she's remotely likely to primary into the Presidency.
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Apr 7, 2015 20:02
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-Troika- posted:Why should farmers in the MIdwest have to change how they do things just because California is full of retards trying to grow oranges in a desert?
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Apr 18, 2015 19:37
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silence_kit posted:I love how some posters in this thread who don't understand agriculture very well think that farmers are mouth-breathing morons. ??? I grew up in a farm state, Indiana, I woke up to the fricking pork futures, and I have a pretty drat good idea what you can and can't grow in that part of the Midwest.
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Apr 18, 2015 19:56
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I just got my mandatory reduction notice. It goes by street addresses: odd addresses (and none) may water Monday and Thursday; evens water Tuesday and Friday. I'm going to have to reprogram my sprinkler system to deep-water on Thursday to compensate for the three-day weekend. Before I got the notice I'd set the sprinkler to a three-day rotation so that the day watered rotated, but the spacing was consistent and still less than three times a week. The mailing also told me that I could find my particular household's water quota using a website that requires my account number. I wish they'd provided a different access mode. e: For the record, the lawn is already dead, and most of the remaining garden is on drips.
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Jun 2, 2015 19:31
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From the LA Times story:quote:Despite the 1977 precedent [in which some senior rights holders got no water], it is likely that Friday’s order will spark appeals to the board as well as legal challenges.
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Jun 13, 2015 01:48
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Sydin posted:gently caress fines, people like that aren't intimidated by fines, no matter how high they get. I'm sure every one of those assholes in the quoted article would happily pay thousands of dollars of fines a month to continue guzzling water, all the while getting the bonus of being able to bitch about how unfair the world is to rich people. If you really want these people to conserve then give them an allotment and, when they pass it, shut their loving water off. Flow restrictors, which physically reduce the available water to a pre-calculated allocation for the number of residents, are stage 2 of the plan, and have been announced. After you get a flow restrictor, you probably can't run a tap and the washing machine at the same time, far less irrigate anything.
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Jun 16, 2015 19:25
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Trabisnikof posted:Where has announced whole-house flow restrictors? Places have announced flow restrictor requirements for faucet or showers, but I haven't seen whole-home announcements yet and a quick googling turned up nothing. I've seen it in multiple news articles: here's one. https://thecoastnews.com/blog/2015/06/rancho-santa-fe-faces-harsher-water-cutbacks/ For more, go to Google News and search "flow restrictors". quote:Jessica Parks, management analyst and public information officer of the Santa Fe Irrigation District, they imposed mandatory allocations with severe cost penalties for exceeding those allocations.
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Jun 16, 2015 20:22
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Trabisnikof posted:Oh ok, that applies to flagrant violators, I was thinking more along the lines of something that would be mandated for entire water districts.
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Jun 16, 2015 20:38
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One thing I've noticed about the throw-money-at-the-problem people is that they're never quoted saying "Look, I put in a greywater system and efficient sprinklers, what do you want?" or anything like that. A mansion's greywater system wouldn't irrigate a mansion's grounds, but it would help. These people aren't investing in reducing their water use while maintaining their lawns; they're just demanding that their water use go unchanged, and investing in that.
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Jun 17, 2015 17:21
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Craptacular! posted:The most amazing quote:
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Jun 17, 2015 17:28
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I'm going to defend this one. Solar panels reduce the overall amount of energy generation, and reducing bills by the amount that the solar panels are putting into the system makes sense. However, generation costs are not the only costs of running the electrical system you depend on, the one you're putting energy into even if you aren't drawing it back. The ongoing costs of maintaining a state-wide electrical network (which affect everybody who hasn't completely gone off-grid), include maintaining the lines, maintaining the grid at an even and stable state so that it doesn't wreck the other grid it hooks into, and providing the correct amount of power at all places and at both day and night. Sorry to avoid using the correct terms; I have a headache and can't remember them. tl;dr: You are consuming the resources of the grid even if your monthly bill is zero. It's a shared cost, like the cost of having police and the cost of having state parks. Whether $10 a month is a fair apportioning of those costs -- given that it's PG&E, it's certainly not -- is a different matter.
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Jul 5, 2015 19:00
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withak posted:If the cost of keeping everyone hooked up to the grid is somehow being split out from the cost of producing the electricity then everyone's rates should go down, even if their total power bill doesn't. That's an excellent point.
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Jul 5, 2015 20:10
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Trabisnikof posted:So, do you think CPUC is entirely captured by the utilities or what? This is a matter of record; there are mails to prove it. http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/jan/10/regulators-hobnobbing-with-utilities-questioned/
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Jul 5, 2015 20:57
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Trabisnikof posted:So 1 member who's term ended in December? Not that bad to be honest and still far from regulatory capture. I take it you missed this sentence? "After those emails were disclosed, PG&E fired three executives. " This is by no means the only case in the last year, it's just the one I can find quickest. There is also evidence about other officials right after the San Bruno explosion. http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27436909/san-bruno-disaster-pg-e-wields-pervasive-influence On at least one occasion, the emails show, PG&E executives tipped off PUC officials about an important regulatory filing that the public company was planning to make with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing was about the company's general rate case proposal for raising monthly gas and electric bills for residential and business customers. "Timothy -- FYI. I will be sending you our (SEC filing) in advance of our formal filing," Cherry said in a November 2012 email to Timothy Simon, a PUC commissioner at that time.
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Jul 5, 2015 21:23
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Klaus88 posted:I have a vague hope that you won't get my rear filled with holes by some angry Vietnamese rice farmed armed with the finest in soviet surplus in Grey hunter's lets play. "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" is very good, if a bit dated.
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Jul 5, 2015 22:14
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Thanks to the ridiculously broad definition of "baby boomers", there are mere youths of 51 who qualify as such. That whole tail-end-of-a-generation thing means that people who were barely teenagers when the whole 60s thing ended are still being lumped together with the hippies and the Goldwater voters and whatnot. As somebody once said, "I didn't go to San Francisco for the Summer of Love because I wasn't allowed to cross the street yet." Meanwhile, I am not happy to learn that assholes with drones are keeping firefighters from being able to fly helicopters into the North Fire, the one that crosses I-15. I have no idea how anybody's going to be able to regulate private drones, but they're a menace in many other ways, notably invasions of privacy.
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Jul 18, 2015 19:30
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Space-Bird posted:I've heard it argued that they only become a fire hazard if thinned enough to not retain moisture. I think the phrase 'native plants' sounds good on paper, but most native plants out here have basically evolved to burn up. I'm not sure re-introducing them would be a safer solution. Cities, humans, etc..are all non-native too, if there is a better option than eucalyptis I'm all for it though. It feels like the conversation never gets this far though, because people are talking about free-radicals and mind altering DNA or like, return-to-nature fantasies.
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Jul 22, 2015 21:48
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Noggin Monkey posted:While the coastal sage scrub natives are often fuel because of the oils that protect them from drought, there are lots of natives that don't have those properties. Tree of Life Nursery is a great resource for people interested in native plants, although their focus is much more oriented to SoCal. Up in the Bay Area, Yerba Buena Nursery is a great resource for native plants.
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Jul 23, 2015 07:14
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Slobjob Zizek posted:I think this is just an absurd viewpoint, but this isn't a thread for that debate. Cheers!
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Jul 24, 2015 18:22
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I'm still trying to figure out why Carly Fiorina thinks losing two statewide elections qualifies her to be President.
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Jul 27, 2015 01:34
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FCKGW posted:A story about an old white woman who is disheartened that minorities are moving into her city and now she needs to drive an extra 3 miles to a Pavillions grocery store This reminds me of my Texan grandmother, who complained that Mexicans were filling up her city. The Southern Baptist church she attended had the demographic choice of welcoming Mexicans or withering on the vine. Guess which they chose?
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Jul 27, 2015 20:45
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California reduced water usage by 27% in June. Woot.quote:LOS ANGELES — Water use in California dropped by more than 27 percent in June, surpassing the 25 percent statewide cutback ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown in what officials called an encouraging development as this state struggles through one of its worst droughts in history.
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Aug 1, 2015 18:29
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