Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

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.

People in my town, Fort Worth, have been saying the same things for years. People were moving in too fast causing home values to sky rocket, so everyone was saying they need to build houses faster to prevent a property tax explosion. You can only build single family homes so fast, so then came the hundreds and hundreds of multi-family apartment campuses and home values immediately tanked. They got what they wished for. Now we have traffic, electric grid, and school system over crowding because they still can’t build everything else fast enough. Even still people keep moving in, about 65 new residents a day.

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.

In fact the article comes dangerously close to admitting that there is correlation without correlation, it opens with:

> Here is the short version. In 2012, Caltrain budgeted its electrification project — the backbone of the Peninsula's transit future and a prerequisite for high-speed rail to ever reach San Francisco — at roughly $1.5 billion. By 2017 that number had ballooned to $1.9 billion. In between, the Town of Atherton sued.

While I don't agree with what Atherton did here (in general, I did not look at the specifics), you have to be fairly negligent to think you're going to build something in California without a massive legal headache. This is a legislative problem which it sounds like, for this narrow case, the legislature actually solved (shockingly to me). I find it hard to blame the residents of the city for exercising their rights.

Which is obviously a bit sus, because the actual lawsuit froze everything for only around 18 months from Feb 2015 to Sep 2016.

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?

Back about 15-16 years ago, there was an international incubator BlackBox based out of one of the properties in Atherton.

The state should be able to collect damages for frivolous NIMBY lawsuits. I don’t care if they’re ashamed. If they’re fine paying more taxes to behave like idiots, who cares.

What it lacks is the effort it takes for a couple minutes to whittle down the writing to the essential parts and bring out the particular style of the author. Even before this wave of LLM stuff started, I knew that it's editing that makes good writing. LLMs are mostly a single-pass process. Maybe it would be improved by having a couple intermediary high-temp thinking stages. the time tradeoff is worth it if it's producing some blog or speech to be consumed by 100s or 1000s of people even if you are only improving the writing by, say, 5%.

To be honest, I don't mind the diagrams when I'm the one prompting it. Other than the fact that it is a waste of tokens, and full of clickable dialogs that waste more of my tokens.