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Sydin posted:Prop 1: Improving water infrastructure, increasing funds for water recycling, incentives for eco-friendly business. Pretty much everybody is in favor of it except a bunch of environmental groups who are convinced the fund is earmarked to build dams. The fund is not earmarked to build dams. So yes. There's some good watershed restoration and other eco-friendly stuff in Prop 1, but $2.7 billion of the $7 billion is earmarked for "water storage projects, dams and reservoirs", which seems pretty ridiculous considering our reservoirs are practically empty and we already built dams in most of the sensible locations half a decade ago.
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Oct 30, 2014 21:07
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Leperflesh posted:Water storage includes underground, e.g. aquifer replenishment. And, many of our dams and reservoirs are a hundred years old and need maintenance or reconstruction. And, it leaves it up to the legislature to direct that funding where needed, so any entirely new project would still have to pass environmental impact studies, etc. This is true, and no doubt some of the money will go toward much needed maintenance of our aging dams and water infrastructure (our levees are a ticking time bomb), but realistically I don't think we're going to spend $2.7 billion on groundwater recharge and ongoing maintenance. I'll be very surprised if Prop 1 passes and we don't see any new dams built in the next 10 years. Tacier fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Oct 31, 2014 |
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Oct 31, 2014 23:37
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Sydin posted:I'm not going to post the full text of the Prop (you can read it here, rules regarding the $2.7 billion in question on Page 10) but basically there are a ton of environmental protections on the money, so nobody is throwing up a new dam without clearing some serious hurdles. The projects proposed for the money are also ranked via public benefit metrics created by the Department of Water, and ecological impact metrics created by the Department of Fish and Wildlife. I'm not saying it's impossible some of it will go to funding new dams, but it's not like the Prop is giving carte blanche to throw them up at taxpayer expense. Thanks for the link. It looks like there's more accountability than I thought regarding how that that $2.7 billion is spent. I'm less concerned about the environmental issues and mainly opposed to the principle of new publicly funded dams which disproportionately benefit big ag, but I'm probably leaning towards Yes on Prop 1 now. The stuff I don't like about it is increasingly overshadowed by the stuff I do. What the hell happened to Prop. 45 since June? Was it scare tactics about the one politician who will single-handedly decide your treatment options while laughing maniacally?
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Nov 1, 2014 01:00
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Cicero posted:Overwhelming majority of economists agree that rent control reduces the quantity and quality of housing; having less housing supply means that market rates will be higher. It's mostly intended to benefit the poor, but in practice it doesn't do them too much good because it's not targeted very well. It favors "natives" over transplants or immigrants, and doesn't help anyone who has to move because, say, their family is now bigger, because it's only beneficial if you get in early and then stay put. IIRC it's also common to end up with people exploiting the system through sublets, and that can be hard to deal with properly. Opposition to rent control has long been a shibboleth within econ departments nationwide, and certainly rent control has its problems. As you correctly mention, it's not great at targeting low income folks who need it most and puts newcomers to an area at a disadvantage. However, a lot of the supposed problems with rent control are actually problems with the ways people can circumvent it out of avarice (converting your newly rent controlled units to condos, for instance) and not rent control itself. This is a pretty good article making the case that rent control, implemented correctly, is good and a lot of the standard arguments against it are misguided.
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Sep 27, 2018 20:06
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Oneiros posted:Hint: The solution is publicly funded and owned housing, not continuing decades of futile attempts to hammer a horrifically broken mess of public policy and market incentives into a functioning housing market. Amen. Even with big incentives and inclusionary zoning it seems unlikely that the market is ever going to build enough low income and supportive housing units to put a dent in this crisis.
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Sep 28, 2018 07:28
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Aeka 2.0 posted:Any links to a good rundown on candidates? I'm currently stuck on Hernandez and Kounalakis. My gut says stay away from Kounalakis because of the real estate dad thing. The hosts of “LA Podcast”, a weekly Los Angeles local politics podcast, put together an entertaining voter guide with a run down of all the candidates. It’s pretty spot on. Tacier fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Nov 3, 2018 |
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Nov 3, 2018 19:27
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With how hard the ambulance prop and the gas tax repeal bombed, I sometimes wonder if the most important thing is the name of the proposition and how the summary attached makes it sound. Talking to voters today I’m realizing how many of them just make up their minds at the polls.
Tacier fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Nov 7, 2018 |
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Nov 7, 2018 07:19
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I had no idea there were no arguments against 11 on the voter guide. That's insane when you understand that 90% of people will interpret that as "nobody disagrees with this and it's obviously a good idea if there isn't anyone against it". If I walked into the polls having done no research, that's absolutely the conclusion I'd draw. Does anyone know if a prop with no argument listed for one of the outcomes ever had that outcome chosen?
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Nov 8, 2018 01:30
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My backyard is on fire again. 10,000 acres and growing fast. Tens of thousands evacuated in Butte County and the sun hasn't come out yet from behind the thick blanket of smoke. We also just re-elected Doug LaMalfa, a climate change denier, to represent District 1, which covers most of Northern California. Sometimes I feel like the entire North State is going to have to burn down before people conclude we should actually do something about this global warming thing.
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Nov 8, 2018 23:35
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I'm following live streamed reporting from someone listening to emergency radio channels and he's making it sound like the majority of the town of Paradise (30,000+ people) has been damaged or destroyed by the Camp Fire. The town is situated on a ridge with few exits and one of the main ones has been completely blocked by fallen trees and burning cars. Hwy 99 is closed too. The unbelievable speed of its spread into populated areas reminds me of the Carr Fire, but much closer to home. Here's a nice video of what it's like up there right now. Tons of people I know grew up there and I do a lot of work for the town professionally. I hope it's not as bad as it sounds. No way to know until morning.
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Nov 9, 2018 02:51
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Welp, that fire I’ve been posting about comfortably from 10 miles away is now knocking on my door in Chico. Pretty unreal how fast it’s moving. First time I’ve seen evacuation orders here in a while. Watching the approaching flames at night is legitimately unnerving. Amazing that an entire medium sized town that existed this morning no longer exists.
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Nov 9, 2018 09:32
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LeoMarr posted:hosed up to see the people walking around with no masks on the air index here is gonna be like 210 whicu is very hazardous. Tons of homeless with no masks, really hosed up. AQI is nearly 300 where I am and I'm feeling pretty drat stupid for not owning a proper mask already. We've got a sizable homeless population and I don't know what they're going to do. It isn't safe to be outside right now.
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Nov 10, 2018 07:57
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My bad, I just checked and the AQI is actually between 600 and 700 right now. There must come a point where you can no longer turn people away from shelters that are at capacity the same way you can't lock a freezing person out in a blizzard. Edit: I'm in Chico, if anyone was wondering. Tacier fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Nov 10, 2018 |
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Nov 10, 2018 08:32
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Cup Runneth Over posted:This is the Democrats' fault because they're contesting those elections Literally what people are saying unironically in the comments section of Fox News.
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Nov 10, 2018 22:35
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Cup Runneth Over posted:I hope PG&E declares bankruptcy and the state buys all their assets and takes over PG&E won’t go down without a fight, but they absolutely deserve it and have been siphoning money from Northern California residents for a long time by illegally co-opting San Francisco’s publicly funded Hetch Hetchy power infrastructure and selling the city’s own energy back to them at inflated rates. More info for those interested in how evil they are: http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Hetch_Hetchy_Story,_Part_II:_PG%26E_and_the_Raker_Act
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Nov 11, 2018 02:23
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The Southern California fires are in chaparral covered areas that have routinely burned for hundreds of years and will continue to do so regardless of what we do there. The Camp fire's blistering charge from the Feather River, where it started, to the town of Paradise went through an area which had already completely burned in 2008 from the Butte Lightning Complex. So naturally everything Trump said is dead wrong. We're never going to be able to eliminate the fuel load once these fires get going, and while there's probably some merit to clearing underbrush and creating defensible space around power lines (and municipalizing PG&E asap), we mainly need to reexamine how we think about building in the wildland-urban interface. It's a fine line here between victim blaming and acknowledging that maybe these areas weren't great places to build in the first place. And if we decide it's actually a bad idea to build in these places, how do we actually disincentive it via policy? These are hard questions that CA is going to have to grapple with in the coming years.
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Nov 12, 2018 21:08
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Buttcoin purse posted:I assume that insurance companies will do their bit by charging higher premiums to people in towns that have a history of burning to the ground? Or does it not work that way - is there some perverse incentive where it's beneficial to have your house keep burning down? Is there a National Fire Insurance Program? The State of California does offer fire insurance for high risk homes that aren't able to find insurance elsewhere through something called the FAIR plan. I don't know a lot about the program, but it doesn't seem like CA should be in the business of offering insurance to areas deemed too risky by private insurers just to make sure people aren't left with no insurance options. At very least, CA should stop offering it for any new homes built and make sure new home buyers in these areas understand that private insurers may back out of their fire coverage at any point.
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Nov 13, 2018 04:15
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predicto posted:They spent 200 million dollars on vegetation management last year. It doesn’t matter. They could spend five times that much, and massive fires would still happen. There are over 55 million trees adjacent to a PGE power line. It only takes one to fall, and the entire state is made of kindling now. They’re incentivized to direct money toward profits that could be spent on maintenance. You’re right that there’s no magic number of dollars that will stop all the fires, but the incentives are still all wrong.
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Nov 17, 2018 10:04
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Kobayashi posted:What is the state version of nationalization and is that actually a thing? I imagine you’d just call it municipalization, but maybe there’s a better word. And some people tried to get it on the ballot in CA in 2016.
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Nov 17, 2018 22:34
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Failure to prevent a spark during activities that don't traditionally cause sparks isn't carelessness. Now if you're in the middle of your tinderbox backyard going to town on a chunk of metal with an angle grinder, that might be a different story.
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Jun 7, 2019 18:51
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The city where I live in NorCal had its population increase by 20% over the last year (100k to 120k), so there’s basically no hope left for me to find affordable real estate anymore. Housing pressure created by fire refugees is only going to get worse as huge blazes become more frequent and we continue building in the wildland-urban interface.
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Jul 10, 2019 21:05
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Peacoffee posted:https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article234277777.html This one’s not looking too bad fortunately. It’d be nice if we got a full season of respite from devastating fires after the last couple of years.
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Aug 24, 2019 05:19
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PG&E worked too hard stealing San Francisco’s municipal power infrastructure in the first place to let them have it now. More info if you aren’t familiar with the history: http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Hetch_Hetchy_Story,_Part_II:_PG%26E_and_the_Raker_Act
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Sep 10, 2019 05:04
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Zachack posted:Sacramento feels pretty good if you just drove up the 5 or the 99 and still have memories of Bakersfield, Fresno, or Stockton. This is the truth. It’s got an excellent and convenient airport as well. Unfortunately, as has been noted, it will be washed away when our deteriorating levees inevitably fail.
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Sep 13, 2019 21:15
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I’m holding on to a sliver of hope that the widespread rain in NorCal marks the end of the fire season and CA actually got a year of respite from the annual smoke and horror.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:24
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The Glumslinger posted:What should it look like? Presumably like a hook that doesn't have a huge rectangular gouge cut nearly all the way through it.
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Dec 7, 2019 02:12
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That’s wild that UCSC is considered a rural campus. Wages not reflecting cost of living seems to be a countywide problem though. Every job I’ve seen there in my field pays 15k less than other places with a comparable cost of living like Santa Barbara.
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Dec 11, 2019 06:51
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etalian posted:lmao Let’s not understate it, even inadvertently—PG&E killed over 100 people in 18/19. If they’re allowed to emerge from this intact, chances are they’ll kill many more.
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Dec 21, 2019 03:20
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Celexi posted:I was in paradise not long ago, and a year later it still smells like burn, the whole area being a ghost town, the whole trip up was so depressing that I was there the 5 minutes I needed to be to do something and bolted off. I work closely with Paradise, assisting with certain aspects of their rebuilding effort. People are slowly trickling back, but much of the town still looks like a scene from Fallout a year after the Camp Fire. There are opportunities in rebuilding, but it’ll be decades before it even begins to resemble a thriving community again.
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Dec 21, 2019 10:26
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Arsenic Lupin posted:What's being done to increase the number of exit routes? Is that even possible? There are four main exit routes from Paradise and under every circumstance that isn’t an all-consuming conflagration ripping through the entire town without warning, that’s sufficient. It costs tens of millions of dollars to add additional lanes and they’d be going unused 99.99% of the time, so it’s a hard sell. They’re undergrounding utilities along the main corridors to reduce the risk of road obstructions, but there’s only so much you can do from an evacuation perspective to prepare for an event like the Camp Fire where the entire town needs to escape at the same time.
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Dec 21, 2019 21:30
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Craptacular! posted:For Sonoma specifically, keep in mind a significant amount of the largest city burned down and that decreases stock, reducing vacancy and making homelessness even worse. The local paper is full of how the residents who lost their homes keep getting screwed by contractors, while a mixed use project near my old home has been effectively cancelled because the developer feels the fires have increased the cost of materials and made a labor shortage. It’s hard to develop anything new when all hands are rebuilding what was already lost (and sometimes with lovely results.) Huge fires like this are going to continue to put tremendous pressure on the housing market in a very localized way. The Camp Fire destroyed 11% of my county's housing stock in one day and there are a lot of other vulnerable foothill towns like Placerville and Grass Valley that could be next. When you look at the diaspora patterns you see that most people don't have the means or inclination to move very far from home, so when GV goes up in flames Yuba City and Auburn will suddenly have several thousand new residents and nowhere to put them.
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Jan 17, 2020 21:31
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Sundae posted:Sane Californians have almost no viable path to repealing that monstrosity of an amendment. The damned thing even got upheld 8-1 by SCOTUS in 1992, with them expressly commenting on the fact that it was probably a lovely idea and was unlikely to ever have the opportunity to be repealed by any ordinary democratic process. Prop 13 will be here a loooong time. I think we’ve got a shot at removing the tax break for commercial properties, but yeah residential is a lost cause for now. It’s okay though. We’ll just ask our K-12 teachers to go a bit more out of pocket for classroom supplies.
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Jan 21, 2020 06:47
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Ardeem posted:Isn't that area mostly landfill? Can it support heavier buildings? I’ve seen maps that indicate that area is more susceptible to liquifaction than some other parts of SF, but it isn’t because it’s built on landfill.
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Jan 31, 2020 09:18
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How does an investor owned utility eliminate the perverse incentives that caused PG&E to prioritize profit over things like line maintenance?
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Feb 1, 2020 20:10
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Hell yeah. Glad Bernie is tapping into the PG&E hate that permeates CA.
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Feb 14, 2020 19:49
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My favorite part: "The ways you get Congress to work for you is the ways you deal with your family," Bloomberg said. "You bribe them. You say to your kid, you say to your kid to 'clean your room or you don't get your allowance.'
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Feb 25, 2020 01:04
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Roland Jones posted:https://twitter.com/dataandpolitics/status/1238199861876379648 Is the Rona really uniquely bad here in CA or is this just more Trump sticking it to California?
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Mar 12, 2020 23:35
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Cup Runneth Over posted:I'm told some CSUs are abruptly shutting down campuses with little to no warning to the lecturers. Just "hey your class is online now," no plan, no previous discussion. Confirmed that the CSU where I work is shutting down in-person classes until mid-April. I highly doubt class will be back in session at all this semester.
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Mar 14, 2020 05:24
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Still Dismal posted:Ambitious politicians doing their job well so that they can advance their career goals is literally the entire idea behind this whole democracy thing, there's not really anything sinister about it. I’m not sure self-serving career advancement of the ruling class is the ultimate expression of a healthy democracy.
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Apr 12, 2020 09:16
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Kenning posted:This is a very big deal, and will have devastating effects on the availability of groceries throughout northern California. I was wondering about this. Seems like this hub serves pretty much all of NorCal, so I can probably kiss my fresh produce goodbye for a while.
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Apr 18, 2020 09:00
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