You might regret that opinion one day. Local govt is quite literally small govt that you can participate in with a chance of actually having a say. It's all very well having a mad man at the helm of the good ship USofA. You may love or hate him but you can be sure he does not give a shit about your neck of the woods.
I gather that "Bumfuck XX" is the approved term for a region within XX state that is a bit out of the way and I heartily approve of that.
If you live in Bumfuck AQ (for example) you might have local issues that you might think are better served with a local rather than state or federal approach.
Some of your states are quite large. For example TX is nearly three times the land area of the UK which manages to cram three separate nations within its islands, one of which is minority shared with Ireland and the rest is even more complicated!
If you are happy with big govt then all is fine. That is what you'll get if you try to remove the old ... glue. Those old sub divisions are communities ie groups of people who are effectively the civic or regional version of families.
I suggest you strive to keep those webs of community together rather than try to tear them apart in the name of administrative efficiency or you will discover what bumfucked really means.
I agree completely and empathetically and vehemently with the idea behind the message.
The slop & aggressively poor argumentation, the kind that I think would have caused me to fail it if I tried it in speech & debate in middle school, leaves me feeling empty.
They keep saying $400M, $400M, $400M, $400M, and the only cost they came up with is $20M. It makes me uncomfortable to support the overall cause if this is how it'll be played, because, setting aside morality of tactics, it's not playing to win. Anyone who is at the margins will see it plainly and be given a reason not to listen.
Atherton resident Marc Andreessen Apr 18th 2020: "It's Time To Build" "We can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities"[0]
Andreessen family 2 years later: "IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development! I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton... They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values"[1]
I am rarely in Atherton and have no connections to it.
However, I really appreciate both dense city centers and nicely organized single family home towns and neighborhoods.
So it makes perfect sense to me that one would advocate for the network effects of upzoning and building in dense, transit and service connected job centers ... and simultaneously be against breaking up an existing equilibrium in a smaller town.
Urban and sub-urban sprawl is an aesthetic and environmental disaster and it disappoints me that what was once a progressive imperative (working against sprawl) was jettisoned the moment it ran counter to economic self interest.
No. It says the direct payments created other funding gaps that caused further delays that added costs, but provides no information about what those were, much less any evidence that they are due only to this lawsuit.
Train electrification would at minimum reduce pollution from diesel trains, and in the case of Caltrain, improve train services and reduce the number of cars on the road.
It is peak irony that a piece of environmental regulation is being used here to delay the upgrade works. On brand for California, of course.
Caltrain already electrified this track and got rid of nearly all its diesel trains; those are only used from San Jose to Gilroy which is not electrified (and not anywhere near Atherton).
Were the environmental regulations actually intended as roadblocks and the environmentalists were useful idiots, or did the regulations start out useful and get hijacked, or were they always bad but it was an unintended consequence?
Like is the reason why free X is better is just because whenever rules are made, the maker of rules can be corrupted to make rules for corrupters? And corrupters always exist, so minimizing the rules attack surface is a good strategy. And corrupters try to broaden the attack surface by having more rules and rule generation mechanisms in place.
I need to point out: the better acceleration from electric trains means you can run trains at tighter schedules, too. They're smoother, quieter; basically every aspect is an upgrade for users, including the environmental aspect. It's not just about money/emissions
I'm going to ask the same questions I asked the lobsters community.
Define "AI generated".
Whole article generation? LLM draft with human finish? Human draft with LLM finish? Is proof reading OK? Or is it permanently tainted the second an LLM touches it?
I came across Henry Fudge recently, who is a former wealth manager, economist and I think startup investor. He did a video on the cost blowouts of the UK's HS2 [1] where, apparently, £5.3B was spent on a tunnel to take the train underground through a wealthy commuter town north of London called Amersham. It's not quite as wealthy as Atherton but still. There was no engineering reason for the tunnel. The money was spent by British taxpayers to protect the views of some of the wealthiest people in the UK.
What's interesting is that many who defend our current mode of production (capitalism) either don't know or have forgotten that Adam Smith (of The Wealth of Nations fame obviously) had a very negative view of landlords, calling them essentially parasitic. I mean this is where the term "rent-seeking" comes from. Landlords and landowners essentially extracted value from the economy for no productive economic output. In other words, they were parasites.
Fudge has written papers on what he calls the "Housing Theory of Everything" [2] and calls the property market a "rentier black hole". When property becomes the best-performing asset, it redirects all capital that might otherwise go to producing things and (in his opinion) this is what really hollowed out British industry. He also argues for a land value tax, similar to what France has (IFI).
I find this interesting because it's an area where capitalism theory and socialist theory agree yet protecting house values has somehow become the entire focus of our economy. Even the term, the "tragedy of the commons" was a 1968 invention [3] and this still dominates discourse even though it was disproven with empircal evidence, work which garnered the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [4].
So land accumulation is both capitalist and socialist so how did we get here? I guess the landowners. So when people defend the likes of Atherton doing this, it's not based on any ideology at all. Oh and the poster-children for rent-seeking still have to be the Resnicks [5].
CEQA was a well-intentioned law. But as we've seen it's been effectively weaponized by the billionaires, the propaganda has been created NIMBYs and we now have an economy that most rewards land-hoarding with no economic output. And that's the real reason this happens and will keep happening.
What is the name for the literary device that LLMs use where it explains something and then follows with a "pithy" "gotcha" sentence?
> > Atherton didn't have to win. A CEQA lawsuit doesn't need a strong legal theory to do damage — it just needs to introduce enough risk that funders freeze and clocks keep running. The delay is the weapon.
In my opinion, this construct is massively overused by LLMs and is extremely jarring to read. The pithy followup "The delay is the weapon." feels like Year 8 Debate Club and is very melodramatic and cringy.
It must be possible to steer the LLM away from this?
«The good news is that California's legislature noticed. In 2024, prompted directly by this fiasco, California passed AB 2503, exempting rail electrification on existing right-of-way from the CEQA reviews that Atherton exploited. One veto point, closed.»
Maybe California is not as hopeless as it may look.
Meanwhile, even worse is the effort to fight wind turbines - an extremely-well-organized network set up by the fossil fuel industry that uses local residents to astroturf for them. They provide talking points, lawn signs, graphics, guidance on social media posts, the works.
Atherton has a *beautiful* public library adjacent to a defunct Caltrain station. It's great for kids and has a really nice cafe, ideal for VC meetings and networking.
33 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.8 ms ] threadI gather that "Bumfuck XX" is the approved term for a region within XX state that is a bit out of the way and I heartily approve of that.
If you live in Bumfuck AQ (for example) you might have local issues that you might think are better served with a local rather than state or federal approach.
Some of your states are quite large. For example TX is nearly three times the land area of the UK which manages to cram three separate nations within its islands, one of which is minority shared with Ireland and the rest is even more complicated!
If you are happy with big govt then all is fine. That is what you'll get if you try to remove the old ... glue. Those old sub divisions are communities ie groups of people who are effectively the civic or regional version of families.
I suggest you strive to keep those webs of community together rather than try to tear them apart in the name of administrative efficiency or you will discover what bumfucked really means.
The slop & aggressively poor argumentation, the kind that I think would have caused me to fail it if I tried it in speech & debate in middle school, leaves me feeling empty.
They keep saying $400M, $400M, $400M, $400M, and the only cost they came up with is $20M. It makes me uncomfortable to support the overall cause if this is how it'll be played, because, setting aside morality of tactics, it's not playing to win. Anyone who is at the margins will see it plainly and be given a reason not to listen.
Andreessen family 2 years later: "IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development! I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton... They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values"[1]
[0] https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
[1] https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...
However, I really appreciate both dense city centers and nicely organized single family home towns and neighborhoods.
So it makes perfect sense to me that one would advocate for the network effects of upzoning and building in dense, transit and service connected job centers ... and simultaneously be against breaking up an existing equilibrium in a smaller town.
Urban and sub-urban sprawl is an aesthetic and environmental disaster and it disappoints me that what was once a progressive imperative (working against sprawl) was jettisoned the moment it ran counter to economic self interest.
Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?
It is peak irony that a piece of environmental regulation is being used here to delay the upgrade works. On brand for California, of course.
Like is the reason why free X is better is just because whenever rules are made, the maker of rules can be corrupted to make rules for corrupters? And corrupters always exist, so minimizing the rules attack surface is a good strategy. And corrupters try to broaden the attack surface by having more rules and rule generation mechanisms in place.
Define "AI generated".
Whole article generation? LLM draft with human finish? Human draft with LLM finish? Is proof reading OK? Or is it permanently tainted the second an LLM touches it?
What's interesting is that many who defend our current mode of production (capitalism) either don't know or have forgotten that Adam Smith (of The Wealth of Nations fame obviously) had a very negative view of landlords, calling them essentially parasitic. I mean this is where the term "rent-seeking" comes from. Landlords and landowners essentially extracted value from the economy for no productive economic output. In other words, they were parasites.
Fudge has written papers on what he calls the "Housing Theory of Everything" [2] and calls the property market a "rentier black hole". When property becomes the best-performing asset, it redirects all capital that might otherwise go to producing things and (in his opinion) this is what really hollowed out British industry. He also argues for a land value tax, similar to what France has (IFI).
I find this interesting because it's an area where capitalism theory and socialist theory agree yet protecting house values has somehow become the entire focus of our economy. Even the term, the "tragedy of the commons" was a 1968 invention [3] and this still dominates discourse even though it was disproven with empircal evidence, work which garnered the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [4].
So land accumulation is both capitalist and socialist so how did we get here? I guess the landowners. So when people defend the likes of Atherton doing this, it's not based on any ideology at all. Oh and the poster-children for rent-seeking still have to be the Resnicks [5].
CEQA was a well-intentioned law. But as we've seen it's been effectively weaponized by the billionaires, the propaganda has been created NIMBYs and we now have an economy that most rewards land-hoarding with no economic output. And that's the real reason this happens and will keep happening.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76460341810...
[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory...
[3]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...
[4]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
[5]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
> > Atherton didn't have to win. A CEQA lawsuit doesn't need a strong legal theory to do damage — it just needs to introduce enough risk that funders freeze and clocks keep running. The delay is the weapon.
In my opinion, this construct is massively overused by LLMs and is extremely jarring to read. The pithy followup "The delay is the weapon." feels like Year 8 Debate Club and is very melodramatic and cringy.
It must be possible to steer the LLM away from this?
Maybe California is not as hopeless as it may look.
https://climateadvocacylab.org/resource/against-wind-map-ant...
One of their victims was Cape Wind. The project would have made the cape and islands almost 75% carbon-free power for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
They've been desperately trying to kill off Vineyard Wind, too. And they have killed off many individual turbine projects.