xvedejas

43 ms·

511.
by xvedejas 7y ago
In case the author sees this, a correction: the ziggurat is 105 meters on a side, not 105 square meters. This makes the ziggurat's base more accurately around 10 thousand square meters.
512.
by xvedejas 7y ago
It's really not so simple as moderate vs progressive. For instance, Bernie Sanders does not support levying a carbon tax. I doubt he would seriously support any climate change effort that isn't ultimately part of a jobs / lab
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by xvedejas 7y ago
My friends host a RocketChat instance with maybe 20 or 30 active users. It's invite-only though, so I can't really recommend it in particular online. But these places exist, and you could consider spawning one and growing it to yo
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by xvedejas 7y ago
No, this would be a double-tax. We should tax carbon as it is emitted. Anything else is prediction and is a much harder, unnecessary problem.
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by xvedejas 7y ago
My comment still applies. Most wealth is invested. Investing is a good thing; it allows long-term thinking. Taxing investment, like taxing income, has a negative effect.
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by xvedejas 7y ago
But why raise income or wealth taxes when you can raise land value taxes or carbon/pollution taxes instead? My income does not harm anyone else, nor does being wealthy. But my hoarding of land does exclude land from others. My release
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by xvedejas 7y ago
There doesn't need to be more transit for it to be true that shorter commutes mean fewer cars on the road, even for the same rate of car ownership / transit ridership.
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by xvedejas 7y ago
This is illegal in San Francisco -- a second kitchen necessarily makes a second unit, so you'd better have the right zoning/permits.
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by xvedejas 7y ago
You do have to give up on kitchen space. Expect to be disappointed. Pretty much anywhere with single-family zoning, it's going to be illegal to have multiple kitchens. What exactly defines a kitchen varies, but typically always forbids
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by xvedejas 7y ago
I'm surprised that George R R Martin doesn't show up for Santa Fe. Surely he's more-googled / wikipediaed than Murray Gell-Mann?
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by xvedejas 7y ago
BART gates are entry and exit, but require card entry on both entry and exit (there are separate emergency exits which set off alarms). So it's not possible to trick them to open, though their current configuration does make it easy to
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by xvedejas 7y ago
Move to a city where coyotes live? I live in a city near a large park and have never seen a rat, but I do hear coyotes fairly often. I think these are related.
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by xvedejas 7y ago
In the US I have never had to deposit any money to use a cart. I'm not sure how that would even work, is it some automated machine that spits out a cart?
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by xvedejas 7y ago
This is a lower rate than elsewhere in the US.
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by xvedejas 7y ago
Obesity rates in the US are at about 30%, which I don't think counts as "most". https://www.stateofobesity.org/adult-obesity/
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by xvedejas 7y ago
To expand further why I think you haven't made a good argument: if high vacancy rates are the problem, and the Bay Area has especially low vacancy rates, why is the Bay Area the least affordable region in the US? High vacancy rates are
527.
by xvedejas 7y ago
No, the data does not suggest otherwise. I won't be surprised if Vancouver is very different from San Francisco, which has extremely low vacancy rates. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacanc
528.
by xvedejas 7y ago
The thing is, my observation is true about the broader housing market in the Bay Area. Most homes are not homes owned by individuals with multiple homes. And at worst, they're homes on the rental market, and so still help to meet housi
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by xvedejas 7y ago
It's largely illegal to build units that are sufficiently small to be affordable. Zoning requirements in most places have square foot minimums and amenity requirements (such as parking). That said, even "luxury apartments" gi
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by xvedejas 7y ago
I don't think multiple-home-ownership is the driver of the housing crisis. In my neighborhood in San Francisco, most homes are either owner-occupied or being rented out by the owner that owns one other house. So are you suggesting that
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by xvedejas 7y ago
Upzoning helps the homeowners who are upzoned, though I don't know how many of them realize it. Land can be sold at much higher values to developers if it's upzoned, and so its market rate is generally higher. It's those home
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by xvedejas 7y ago
I think induced demand is real, but it's a second-order effect. So while building one unit might attract an additional 0.1 people to an area (for example), it's not going to attract more people than it houses. So building more hou
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by xvedejas 7y ago
It's not really all-or-nothing though; even relieving rent a little bit in these places would represent relief for a large number of people. And upzoning has other benefits. People who own small SFHs and have family struggling to make
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by xvedejas 7y ago
Why should you have to pay taxes for either? Why is renting a car something that should have extra penalties over owning one? As someone who doesn't own a car anymore (as a lifestyle choice) I'm now noticing many hidden things in
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by xvedejas 7y ago
There are many counter-intuitive effects in traffic engineering. Widening lanes has often been done in the name of safety, but the effect is that drivers feel safer driving faster, and the rates of deadly crashes rise. This suggests to me t
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by xvedejas 7y ago
Despite rent-seeking being undesirable for purposes of equality, more people rent-seeking over more houses does mean more competition in the rental market, and you'd expect rental prices to go down as a result. If you want to eliminate
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by xvedejas 8y ago
If you don't do any land seizures, shouldn't the result of upzoning be more mixed levels of density, according to who sells to developers and who doesn't? I don't see any scenario where SF gets "demolished" wit
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by xvedejas 8y ago
I have seen it argued in gentrifying neighborhoods that we should reject all projects which make those neighborhoods nicer to live in, to discourage new residents. This is a pretty direct way of reducing demand: making your neighborhood shi
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by xvedejas 8y ago
It's the optimization strategy. Optimizers for neural nets are designed to perform well for non-linear problems, which comes at the expense of not providing exact solutions for linear regressions. A general exact solution is not poss
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by xvedejas 8y ago
You misunderstand my argument entirely. The problem isn't that society loses because you don't let someone pay rent in your home. Society loses because you don't let someone else live in your home for free, but you do let you

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