My friends in the geological sciences have told me there will be a big earthquake, but it will be capped at around magnitude 8.0; the faults here are not capable of a 9.0. Buildings in SF have been constructed or retrofit for modern earthquake safety by law.
An 8.0 would still cause massive devastation. Even if structures mostly survive there is the threat of fire and tsunami. This antenna tower looks like it is likely to survive though.
Well, I desired and moved to SF exactly because it's the closest thing to a dense urban jungle that I could find in California. I even dream of moving to a denser part of the city one day, once I can reasonably afford it, but those parts are so in demand to be pricier.
sidentoe: If you wanna live out a super dense dream/experience on the cheap, go spend 6 months in Seoul, I lived in Manhattan for 10+ years and still found Seoul pretty intense.
Can this family of drugs even give a psychedelic experience at higher doses? They are acting on 5-HT1B and 5-HT1D, not the 5-HT2A receptors that psychedelics act on.
I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.
Density yes, but more importantly 1) speed vs traveling by car, 2) starting and stopping in places people want to travel between, 3) safety, 4) real estate prices/regulation.
Density goes to number 1 (more traffic = better reason to use the subway) and 2 (more likely to be able to serve people’s desired trip)
5) Weather. If it's under -20 C or over 40 C, walking five blocks is unpleasant for anyone and dangerous for some. Especially if the walk is unsheltered, which it typically is.
The subway is the big expensive investment. In theory, businesses and housing etc would develop around the stations. Like how suburbs develop around train stations.
In theory. The commuter rail I sometimes take follows an old rail right of way. Some of the stations are in fairly developed areas. But some of those, like Concord, presumably predate even the original rail. And a lot of the towns are pretty spread out. You can't walk to much until you get to the last two stops in the city proper.
I imagine that at least one factor there is that building up is prohibited by zoning—a super brief glance at Concord's zoning map & code it looks like the only kind of residential buildings you can build anywhere without special permission are single-family.
Now there are surely people living there who would argue that this zoning has protected the shape and nature of the town they that they prefer, but the flip side of that coin is that, at $1.4m, a median home in Concord costs more than 3x that of the country overall.
There's probably some truth in that. On the other hand, Concord is a pretty far-flung suburb; you're probably over 30 minutes to get to Cambridge without heavy traffic. I believe the prison out there is closed now but don't know what the plans are for the land.
Sure, I wouldn't imagine it'd turn into a cluster of skyscrapers if the restrictions were not there, but I would imagine there might be some small apartment buildings near the train station. New Jersey has had some impressive housing changes happen by opening areas near transit to development in not-dissimilar environments.
Apparently, the governor is interested in using it for housing development but I'm sure that will be tied up in the courts for years--especially with it being Concord.
Well, if I’m going into the city 9 to 5ish I’ll usually take commuter rail because it’s less painful even if it takes as long as driving. But I do need to drive to and park at the nearby commuter rail station.
And then landowners who were “smart” enough to own land where this ends up going in get to reap all the financial upside, instead of the public which actually invested in that infrastructure.
Just imagine if the public could capture the (financial) upside it produces, then it could apply that money to do the same thing down the road, then do the same thing again down the road further.
In some countries the transit companies (public or private) also become the landowners of the adjacent areas - this would be the "rail plus property" model.
In fact, the rail plus property model allows the rail operate to better capture their added value, so it applies even in "private" scenarios. The most famous example would be Tokyo.
The goal shouldn't be for the public to be able to reap direct financial benefits from the induced activity around transit hubs, the goal should be to firstly to incentivize and maintain affordable, high quality, sustainable transit, secondly to provide more and better economic opportunities.
Same in Switzerland, with the added quirk/bonus that shops in train stations are allowed to open on Sundays, when shops outside of train stations usually can't open due to employment laws. This wasn't originally meant as a way to increase attractiveness of businesses in train stations and other public transit places, rather as a way to make sure that people travelling have services available while on their way. But nowadays it's definitely a big reason for people to come specifically shop in train stations on the weekend.
I don’t see how that is a version of what llamaimperative posts.
If anything, TIF increases rewards for landowners who do nothing or otherwise underutilize land. Taxing the product of work to make a piece of land beneficial for society is amazingly backwards.
The proper direction to go in is marginal land value tax rates, with increasing penalties the longer a spaces remains unused.
That just encourages corporate ownership of property (unless you mitigate that), but overall I don’t know why we’d disincentivize moving closer to a new workplace or into a smaller home once it will do for you.
Outside the US, there are many examples (Japan and China both do this).
In the US, I don't know specific examples, but you can definitely use a combination of policies (building public transit, zoning laws to encourage high density, making parts of the city more pedestrian-friendly - and generally less car-friendly) to encourage high density.
There’s photos of subway stops in random fields in china that sometimes get laughs but in actuality china is just smart enough to build the subway and THEN the buildings.
Meanwhile Japanese rail companies own land where they build rail and can make more money on the land than on the trains
If my company has decided to replace me with someone cheaper, and they can't get an H1B, then they'll go for someone overseas, right? At least for tech jobs, it seems likely. With the H1Bs, income taxes are paid in the US, and the consumer base grows too. I'd hate to lose my job but why shouldn't I still prefer removing the H1B cap?
When they replace you with an H1B, then wages in America go down. I don't want that for my fellow Americans. When they outsource and the worker stays overseas, there's a lot of issues that crop up, and the company can learn to live with the time lag, potential quality or security issues, etc., or they can hire a local worker. As a citizen, my goal is to maximize my standard of living and the SOL for my fellow Americans. If that means a company has to spend more, I'm fine with that. Living is for human beings, not companies. Corporations exist to enrich people, not the other way around. Corporations have no rights we don't give them, and we can take them away at any time.
Is this maybe short-sighted? Wages for one particular role go down when the labor pool is larger, for sure. But how many new companies could exist given cheaper skilled labor, working on new products? I feel like growing the economy like this would, in the long run, be better for all workers' standard of living. This is an observation I've heard about free trade in general, not just for labor, that free trade benefits everyone but nobody in particular, and so is doomed to be unpopular.
It's possible to die of "protein poisoning" but you really have to be in a survival situation with no sources of fat. Hunters and trappers are known to have died this way when only lean meat was available in far northern winters. Maybe this is where the idea came from.
I'd like to see California consider reducing the total mileage of roads and focus on having a smaller amount of higher quality paved surfaces. My neighborhood street does not need to be 60ft wide, and our freeways do not need more lanes.
I imagine that all states would have more trouble managing more roads than they currently do, and less trouble managing fewer roads than they currently do.
Start with the fire department. They are the ones demanding 60 ft wide residential streets so that their trucks can turn around without having to drive a few blocks out of the way.
