The Lost Oaks of California Ave
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
A photo I took yesterday while they were taking the last one down:
http://openbs.org/photo/wehavenotrees.jpg
Quote from the notice they sent out:
"The City of Palo Alto Public Works Department ... shall be replacing most of the street trees on Cal Ave ... most of the existing trees are Holly Oaks and many of them are diseased and in poor condition. Their branches cover street lights and grow over building storefronts and roofs requiring frequent tree trimming. They bear and drop large acorn fruits that are tripping hazards for pedestrians.
"The Holly Oaks will be replaced with Red Maples ... smaller seed fruits that are safer for pedestrians ... metal grates will be installed ... which will bring a uniform look to the business district. The existing tree wells in sidewalks are open wells which may be tripping hazards."
Funny thing is there are maples on 15th Ave so I've seen how they are through the year. When the maples start dropping sap on people's cars and all of the restaurants' outdoor furniture is too sticky to sit on I don't know what they'll do. I'll just laugh.
Sweet, with a little more effort they can turn all of California avenue into a strip mall. Uniformity is great in pencil leads and spark plugs, but the fractal beauty of nature is not just a sitcom on Fox. If you want uniformity, there's a few towns due south of LA where they shave the rough, non-uniform hill-sides into perfect 45° slopes to ultra-flat plateaus on which to build uniform tract homes.
This just doesn't seem like something Palo Altans would knowingly do. Well, we'll always have Los Altos: http://www.losaltospost.com/PhotoGallery/photo/fullimages/Fu...
It looks like the bad parts of the meat-packing-plant town in rural Minnesota where I grew up. No, strike that -- it looks much, much worse.
I felt a sense of lost power. Lost depth and age and history. The trees were tall and powerful and wise.
And now they are gone. :( I miss them and I never knew them.
This is just a small number of people trying to force their idea of what will look good onto the larger community. Bringing in things like 'tripping hazard' and 'the seeds are more pedestrian friendly' are just way to try and justify their actions/views against people that are outside of their group. It sounds good and all about wanting the trees to be a uniform height, but I suspect that decision was made partially because they expected there to be public outcry. They just wanted to tear down the trees without giving people a chance to rally against the action. Now people are stuck with the decision whether they like it or not.
I bet if an entrepreneur or real estate developer wanted to cut down oak trees for a building project, they wouldn't get past the first step in the permit process ... but I guess when city wants them gone, they can run it through a "Development" association and play the disease card.
Tells you something about rich geeks being really introverted, and just want to keep on themselves.
"Mixed-use is not appropriate for this site," Palmer said. "It impinges on the little residential neighborhood that's been developed."
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=1080...
Read the descriptions of the projects and see how remarkably tiny they are. Then read the comments. It's quite sad.
Idiots!
:)
Did they outside all beauty and culture to San Francisco? Or did they just not care?
We ended up drinking our coffees in the parking lot. So much for the Silicon Valley bohemian life...
The fact that it's ranked so highly just goes to show the amount of ass kissing going on here.
BTW I know Calif. Ave. too, I used to eat at Chu's every now and then (the little potsticker hole-in-the-wall shop). Is that still there?
Ass kissing? Ugh.
If you don't like a story, flag it. Stop whining or leave.
Also see http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate
Corrected, thanks.
This is a bit disorganized, but I'll try to lay out how the gears are turning in my head:
When you implicitly call out a community or someone very admired in that community (whose also running things for free for a lot of people's enjoyment), it's courageous but it burns some of your future ability-to-speak-out-and-others-will-listen-edness.
If you were to make similar comments frequently, eventually people would just shrug it off instead of burning the mental energy to apply difficult critical thinking.
Now, I was one of those disagreeable kids who used to argue with teachers when they got their math or chemistry wrong, and eventually I stopped doing that and started thinking:
"Do I want to burn some of my speak-out-and-people-will-listen-edness on this particular topic?" Because you only have so much, and you might want to use it on something important later.
Does the tree submission get submitted and voted if it's not Paul Graham or another very admired poster? Probably not. But it's a minor thing to take a banner up against, and it just oh-so-slightly decreases the resources you have by taking up that banner. And maybe it minorly gets on the nerves of a few people, and they don't like it, and so you get oh-so-very-slightly less attention/goodwill in the future.
Or maybe not. Just something to ponder.
That's depressing. That's what education is supposed to be about (rather than blindly accepting incorrect facts).
You have to think about your goal. Is your goal to get the teacher to correct their mistake and move forward? Or is it to boost your ego?
If it's the former, it's probably better to approach them later, in private, and point it out politely. They will correct the problem next session, or send out an email between sessions.
Either that, or be very polite, e.g., "Excuse me, Mr. Smith, but you wrote down <wrong stuff> there. Why isn't it <right stuff>?"
If you say, "Mr. Smith, you're wrong. It should be <right stuff>, not <wrong stuff>" you are strictly speaking correct, but you'll humiliate them. It feels good for your ego -- I'm smarter than the teacher! -- but probably won't advance the class.
This isn't about the "sorry state of education," it's about knowing what people feel when you blurt shit out in class.
Here is the admittedly unusual way in which I look at it: In most cases, the school system (including the teachers) is implicitly claiming that students are better off in school with them than anywhere else. When a ludicrous claim like this is being made and enforced, I don't see why they should be cut so much slack.
The problem, really, is that it's impossible to make a fully qualified statement and still be engaging. As a speaker, you have to skip over some detail somewhere, thus there is always going to be a place to jump in and act an ass.
My comment was an attack on the herd phenomenon, not on PG. It was not meant to offend anyone. If it does offend anyone, well, I really don't care. If it burns some of my future ability-to-speak-out-and-others-will-listen-edness, then I don't care either. Worst case scenario, I can always join with a new username, like IamNotTriinT.
I disagree with your reasoning, though. This neighborhood is (apparently) pretty well known in Ye Olde Silicone Valley(e). That being the case, I'll bet any number of nerd bloggers or private individuals could have written it up and gotten upvotes; perhaps not as many, but that's not a problem unless you dislike the idea of reputations in general.
The other factor to consider is this: that the people upvoting are aware that PG has more clout than the average poster, are aware that this is a slightly less-hackerly story, and are upvoting it because they approve of the additional attention PG can help bring to it.
Or were you just saying "in general"? If so, point me to something PG has put online that is utterly pointless. He has a remarkably good filter for useful content, even within his own essays there are rarely sentences that are extra.
For starters, I didn't say that the story about oaks getting hacked is pointless. Note also that I didn't say that PG puts pointless essays online.
My comment was on what PG comments on HN. If somebody asks PG a question and he briefly replies "yes", the comment gets upvoted beyond what is reasonable, even if it's the question, NOT the answer, that carries the interesting information. Hell, a Y/N answer only carries 1 bit of information...
I was trying to point out that, contrary to popular belief, HN is not immune to herd phenomena. In a way, this might be a good sign. It shows that we're humans. It shows that computers haven't yet passed the Turing test.
I largely agree with you about this post, though I don't mind its being here and I read it with interest despite not living anywhere near Silicon Valley. And I agree that PG gets much more karma than a clone who happened not to be called PG would (which suggests an interesting experiment...), and that that's kinda silly. But don't disparage bits.
Oh, it sure can! For instance, suppose that we're back in 1986. The Microsoft IPO has just taken place. I ask God if Microsoft will ever be a huge success, and God tells me: "yes". There you go, 1 bit of information that would have made me very rich. However, despite the worship, I have doubts that PG has become himself God. Hence, his 1-bit answers are less valuable than God's 1-bit answers ;-)
Of course I agree that a bit from PG is not as reliable as a bit from God (making the obviously-necessary assumptions about God). But that's not a problem about bits. :-)
At any rate, pg is a recursive input to the hn community. Part of this community is pg. Part of this community is you and me, too, but a bigger part is him.
A large part of why I came here in the first place is pg's essays, which span the gamut. I came to think of him as a clear thinker, so I'm going to pay more than usual attention to anything he has to say.
All the people I respect this way can unashamedly and unreservedly admit to respecting other people themselves. When it's mutual, it's called friendship. Sometimes it's called love.
:)
I just wanted to stir things up a bit and stress that dissent can be good. If HN ever becomes a monoculture due to excessive inbreeding and indoctrination, it will become uninteresting because everyone will think the same. There's richness in variety of ideas / opinions.
[1]: For example: http://www.naturewithin.info/Roadside/Tree&Driver_ITE.pd...
Edit: It appears there is no known cure, only preemptive measures.
"Their branches cover street lights and grow over building storefronts and roofs requiring frequent tree trimming. They bear and drop large acorn fruits that are tripping hazards for pedestrians."
make it clear this wasn't the case. If they were infected by some tree plague, it would have been enough to say just that.
So, cutting the trees isn't necessarily a case of corruption. It's at least as likely that CAADA is run by people whose taste really is that poor.
As far as the trees being diseased, all city trees are unhealthy in one way or another. That is because their leaves absorb all kinds of exhaust byproducts, most of their roots are below concrete where they cannot get water or nutrients, and a hundred other reasons. Cities are just not healthy places for trees.
But that does not mean that we should not have trees in cities. Trees make us feel better, clear up the air for us and make us happier in general. What if a tree is not healthy -- it is not actually suffering and cannot pass the disease to humans. As long as it looks good and it is green, it is serving its purpose. I guarantee you that the new maples they put in will become diseased pretty soon.
So, good idea to call attention to this Paul, but someone should have thought of it earlier.
You'd think that, as a trade-off, American cities would be usable for motorists. But traffic congestion is such a big problem that it's impossible to build a city to satisfy even that requirement.
It's no wonder that the State of California is bankrupt.
While the state of California is piling on _billions_ of dollars in debt to pay for unionized wellfare programs, raising tax rates across the board on its citizens, cutting essential city and state services, closing state parks, issuing "IOU's" to people in-lieu of tax refunds, and seeing its general obligation bonds downgraded below "junk" status, it apparently is still OK to spend taxpayer money cutting down perfectly healthy trees to make sure that all of the trees on a street are the same height.
This in a state that has more Honda Prius' per-capita than any other state in the union.
Isn't being "green" wonderful?
I'm sure there's an entire office of twinkie-munching government bureaucrats that could be fired to compensate the California tax-payer for this gross misappropriation of his hard-earned tax dollars.
Governments (which is to say, politicians with short lifespans in their job) use up resources in a rush to accomplish short term, idiotic goals.
You can look at the environmental records of capitalist countries versus centrally managed totalitarian states.
...or you can look at golf courses (which don't "cut down all the trees to keep things tidy") and compare them to the government of Palo Alto.
If dear leader wanted a artificial lake, with lots of trees, next to his villa, he would get it. If he thought lots of lemon trees, and olive trees were awesome, bared hills will be transformed to accommodate all these trees.
And it was during the transition to democracy, (and even today), that a whole of these things started getting destroyed.
We are talking about commmon areas. As for private property, I can safely say that most europeans love trees.
As another anectode, there are some streets in SF where trees are completely missing. And it usually corresponds with the density of asian population. It seems that there is something about a tree, in front of the house/door that hinders the chi flow, or something.
But go to Clement st. and there are trees where the more euro shops are, and just a few blocks down, there is little trees where the asian stores are.
Some things can be cultural also.
> Private owners respect and conserve their resources
> politicians [...] use up resources in a rush
> to accomplish short term, idiotic goals.
I think you missed the point. If the property in question were privately owned, then the goals concerning the property would be the owners' goals, not the politicians' goals. To the extent that the politicians' goals control property, the property isn't privately owned (except for the corner case of property the politicians privately own).
1. Politicians don't always mismanage publicly owned resources
2. When they do, it is often on behalf of a private interest, e.g. a real estate developer contributing to their next campaign
Many things get in the way of this simple statement being true.
While this act was clearly one of government bureaucracy run amok, to suggest that the same thing doesn't happen on private land is patently absurd.
Sorry you cannot make such blanket statements, some times governments do terrible things for the environment and sometimes businesses do the same. People that care about the environment should be vigilant and hold both governments and businesses accountable.
The excuse then was creating more space for vehicles and improving traffic flow.
The trees are gone; the traffic jams haven't. Very sad.
There was a lot of opposition, though, and eventually they backed down.
The bigger picture behind this concept is urban planning, which is a huge issue to be fixed in the U.S. (if you want sustainable development).
At least, most developments and streetscaping projects around here don't go down with at least a (public) city council vote.
I'm not sure what my point is... maybe just that I'm curious what the local media coverage of this is/was?
What needs to happen to save the state and country is the exact opposite of this travesty-entrepreneurs should replace the real deadwood, government on every level.
I'd miss them if they were gone too.
(This is dating me--haven't been back there for 20 years.)