Scotia, California is owned by a New York investment firm | Hacker News Reader

Scotia, California is owned by a New York investment firm

newyorker.com

83 pointsPaulHoule77 comments

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Scotia, CA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotia,_California

It is a “company town”, but it is not incorporated.

You can also find a company town near you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_towns_in_the_U...

I was hoping there would be one in Georgia, but we're one of the 8 states without one.

These are fascinating.

Of course Walt Disney owns the most famous instance of these.

The Walt Disney Company does. I realize the shorthand is valid, but it just reads like Walt is still alive. I guess I’m being pedantic for my own sake…

Being even more pedantic, he maybe still is, by some definition.

You're going to have to explain that one. My first guess is you mean his legacy but a man's legacy is not the same as his life.

There's a popular rumor that he froze his head in anticipation of being revived in the future

Ah. Let's generously say that did happen and it works out for him at some indeterminate point in the future.

Would you then consider the frozen and completely inactive head disconnected from a living body vital for sustaining the living processes of the head of Walt Disney still living in the present? If this thread is to be completely pedantic, we have to go all the way here.

Not living. But liveable. Not alive but not dead. Sort of pre- death, but post- life. How about: statically being

Dead until proven otherwise

I don’t think this question can be properly answered without asking someone thus revivified.

So is it like naming rights for discoveries then? The first guy to get pulled out of the freezer gets to decide if he was alive or dead during his tenure as a popsicle?

IMO all we need is one successful reanimation and suddenly those popsicles will be presumptively "alive" in a legal sense.

But in a philosophical sense, yeah, every voice will count but the first voice will count most, until it's overtaken by a more eloquent one.

Assuming they can even communicate.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die." –A. Alhazred

There's a poetic justice to the fact that allegedly Disney's head is frozen in a suspended state, while his namesake company is essentially focused at this point only on re-animating intellectual property from the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s where many of the original talent involved (not to mention the original cultural context) has moved on.

In the UK a lot of work remains in copyright for the life of the creator (plus 70 years)

If the creator never dies, then the work doesn't go into public domain.

I could see that as a Disney strategy.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/suspended-animation/

I’d add Sinclair, WY to that list. I stumbled upon it while driving cross country. It’s kinda surreal.

It's Wikipedia. Go ahead and add it. :)

The Sinclair facility I saw at night full of hundreds of white lights was beautiful in an odd way, like a kind of Christmas tree.

I was surprised from the list to learn that Gary, Indiana was originally owned by U.S. Steel.

And now US Steel is owned by Japan!

That's just incorrect information. There is a bid, which needs to go through a variety of functions to succeed. Also, it's not a bid by Japan. It's a bid by Nippon Steel. Just clearing up the hogwash here.

Named after US Steel found Elbert Gary, back when "Gary" was almost exclusively a surname. Later, a burgeoning young actor named Frank Cooper needed to change his professional name to avoid a conflict with other Frank Coopers in the industry, and his agent suggested the name of her hometown, to give him some blue collar cred. "Gary Cooper" became a household name and people have been naming their children "Gary" ever since.

Interesting to know there is a company town named Hazardville.

There's a lot to be said for building little villages all over the north state to support the amount of forestry that needs doing these days, which is quite a bit. The state says it wants to do preventative cutting and burning on a million acres per year but so far has been doing something between .1% and 1% of that goal. There's no money in it, so the state would just have to pour in the funds. But that's no different to the way everything else is paid for in that part of the state.

If they want to cut parts of the forest now and then as part of lifecycle management why not allow logging for profit?

Clearing out fuel/undergrowth is a very different activity than logging trees. No money in the former.

I think if they’re burning it though they could allow logging it (maybe with the stipulation that you also remove undergrowth?), it’s not like fire leaves the trees alone.

But someone else pointed out that apparently logging up there is much more difficult than getting easy trees in the less remote, flatter southeast, so it’s probably still not an exciting reason why this logging isn’t happening.

They offer the entire state for cutting every year at auction. Nobody wants to bother, because cutting trees on a mountain can't compete economically with forests in the southeast, that are basically farms.

Scotia is in the coastal redwoods, these trees are largely immune to forest fires(don't confuse them with giant sequoia)

Interesting, this is where my Dad was born. His Dad was in logging and he followed suit. Times change things ... people adapt.

Trying to imagine the freedom one feels when working in a corporate that owns the town one lives in.

Schools, clinics, police, and other community aspects are all controlled by the same entity.

This is not communism per se, but perhaps even worse in some aspects.

Feels like a ginat kibbutz (1) to me. And all was done in the name of capitalism and the free world.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

It gives you a whole new dimension of pain if you are laid off.

It's the opposite of communism. Under communism, the workers own the means of production and all the other assets (at least, that's the theory; reality doesn't quite work out that way!). In a company town, a company owns it all; the workers own nothing.

Imagine the power the company has over individuals.

> done in the name of ... the free world.

Where are company towns described as being done 'in the name of' the free world?

Capitalism is the exploitation of men by men. Communism is the exact opposite.

Quite sure there was plenty of exploitation in communist countries.

Would you say it could be described as exploitation of men by men?

GP is a variation of a JKG quote:

<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/05/john-ke...>

I think that’s supposed to be the joke.

In the cold war environment the term "free world" was linked inextricably to capitalism. This had great benefits to US living standards in the first few decades (as the US could utilise global resources more than other countries, just taking them with trinkets rather than guns like in colonial time), but as other countries caught up US standards of living started to plateau, and power concentrated on smaller and smaller parts, this time cannibalising US citizens still maintaining it was the "free world"

Company towns had their problems, paying workers in company scrip for example to buy necessities at the company store (a practice which has been outlawed) among other things, but conceptually they were more like planned developments intended to house enough workers and support staff to engage in whatever land-based enterprise the company was engaged in, where previously there wasn’t a town to house them all before.

They’re a bit outmoded now, since with the advent of modern transportation technology it’s usually possible to get enough people to live in or work from some nearby community that you don’t need to build a whole bloody town yourself. Also logging and mining aren’t quite the growth industries they used to be in the US.

Speaking of kibbutz’s though, if you want a rabbit hole to fall into, there’s all kinds of intentional communities out there. Probably most famously Amish communities, but there’s all kinds.

They want to return to a sort of corporate scrip; Central Bank Digital Currency on a national level.

Fascism (1), actually.

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qdY_IMZH2Ko&t=320

It never was a town. None of the lots were platted, subdivided, taxed individually, etc.

Knowing Better put together a pretty good vid on the history of Comapny Towns in the US:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rzFyBdKLvU

They put a lot of money into a town that might sink or flood into a swamp.

I feel like this describes a high number of US towns and cities.

Much of the state of Florida, tbh.

I remember when my buddy did this deal. Ended up the mayor at least on paper for a few days during the transition period.

How democratic is this in practice? Seems.... iffy.

"JONATHAN LANSNER January 5, 2024 at 9:10 a.m. California housing costs ran 60% above the US norm in 2022, by this math"

.. I sense a pattern

California housing costs are a direct result of major California cities doing absolutely everything in their power to avoid building enough housing.

And also the fact that California is a very desirable place to live.

Sure but the residential parts of California, even in the nicer towns along the coast, don't really look very different from anywhere else in the US; lots of parking lots, plenty of underutilized space.

I mean, California is larger than some countries. There is plenty of space but we all know that that space isn't equally valued.

It's not just enough to be in an area with decent weather, you gotta be close to the hotspot hubs of SF/SD/LA. And that's where "shortages" start to come. Pareto principle at work.

Also coastland is a minority of land in CA. Go out to the east in So Cal and it's all burning hot desert, with infertile land. Go north towards central CA and it's 90% farmland more than anything (CA does produce a ton of food for the country). There's less land to work with even if you wanted to build out.

Its true, but the land that is available, like I said, is still being underutilized. Look a Japan, which is in a very similar situation near the major metropolitan areas: very little land where people can actually settle, and yet housing is relatively affordable for most. Its not an accident, they're just better at managing urban density--and Tokyo especially has the benefit of a fantastically complex and well managed metro system, but not all the cities do, and they're still fine.

Greater-Tokyo has a population density about 15 times more than Greater-LA. If LA had Tokyo density you could fit pretty much the entire US population in it.

See, we don't even need land use to be that efficient!

Tokyo also fits you into apartments like sardines. You don't really have a "home" so much as a bathroom and bedroom you rent out long term to crash after 12 hour work days. And Tokyo still isn't cheap to live in despite that. Way cheaper than LA/SF but not by much.

I think people are so steadfast in the discussion of walkable cities that they forget why suburbs developed. Post WW2 America had a huge economic boom and a lot of soldiers to compensate. The US has tons of land to give out so the Silent Generation was handed swaths of land to to build a home with and raise a family in, and the boomers popped up as a result of such. They then made such rules and regulations to upkeep such a lifestyle.

It's not so much efficiency for a town as it was convinence for the individual. Great way to build up nationalism when you own more land than you know what to do with. Sure it backfired 70 years later, but you can understand why this move to "walkable cities" would feel like trying to take away some goodwill for those who benefitted back then.

To much land is the problem. US land use pattern, zoneing, building codes, parking ordinance, traffic design, transportation design are all incredibly bad.

There is so much amazing coast land, and could be far better used if there was nice walk-able urban places all along the coast and well working public transportation to get there. That would also massively boost land values and commercial taxes.

It might not look different but it feels different - year round weather is great

Coastal SoCal has the best weather in the world. Natural beauty in beaches & parks

LA & SF are world class cultural powerhouses. Silicon Valley is the tech capital of the world

How can it not be expensive ?

Its expensive just because its desirable? Housing doesn't work like a commodity you can ship around the world. Everyone needs a place to live, and having more housing for everyone who wants to live in an area only increases economic productivity. There is still more than enough space, even in the bay area, even near LA, to build housing, its just that the people elected to local offices also happen to be the same people who don't want the value of their houses to decrease. So instead of having to live next to lower-income residents, they get to live next to the homeless, who come in surging, ever-increasing waves. Why is it better for California that all these people who could be housed, educated, fed, are left without a private domicile--it seems better only for those select few who happen to own good property.

> How can it not be expensive ?

By having supply increasing with demand.

It will likely never be as cheap as some place in bum fuck nowhere. But it could still be much cheaper.

Specially if you take into account both living and transportation cost.

You are assuming that demand is not elastic though. If 1,000,000 more houses were built in the desirable parts of CA and filled with new residents, are you completely sure that there wouldn’t still be at least as many people seeking to live there as this year? It would still be just as temperate and any dip in prices would be seized on as a great opportunity to snap up a home, increasing demand. I suspect the equilibrium price of housing would barely change at all.

I am still very pro-development, but I don’t actually think it would get cheaper to live in these places - just because there’s such a plentiful supply of more people to move there.

Yes, demand is high, supply is constrained. In a free market supply would increase to meet demand, but it doesn't, so prices increase. This is econ-101.

was a very desirable place to live !

fourth straight year of net population decline, not over yet

> Most people on the 101 drive right by.

Yup

So this is an ad for the investment firm's properties?

Outback steakhouse? Uh huh. That's Florida ownership (def US) if I recall correctly

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