jakelarkin

Reporters keep trying to find profiles of the housing crisis but this seems disingenuous. A lot of what this woman is doing is a choice; waking up hours before the train, huge house in Stockton vs condo/apartment closer. She makes $80k/year meaning post-tax $4600/month. She could easily afford a nice 1 or 2 bedroom in Pittsburg or Pleasanton for ~$2k a month, and her door-to-door commute would be well under 80 minutes.

This is a major major part of problem and one of the simpler legislative solutions. The extreme example is Cupertino and Palo Alto which have approved 10000s of office desks but resist building any meaningful housing whatsoever. Peninsula towns also need incentives/mandates to upzone around Caltrain. SF also does a huge desks to beds imbalance in approvals.

- autonomous vehicle could be transporting someone not qualified to drive.

- hard to draft paying & passive customers in to accident mitigation or resolution role.

my unpopular personal opinion (strictly as a casual observer): self-driving will only be commercially viable as an augmented safety technology in single-owner vehicles (collision avoidance, lane keeping etc.) for ~20 years before we come close to reaching full-autonomy.

What we have currently; maybe four or five 9s of reliability in perfect conditions is not nearly good enough for autonomous car sharing. If the car breaks down or is in a collision what is the passenger going to do? drive it themselves to the shoulder and get out? How far are we from autonomous systems harmoniously and safely coexisting with the most erratic human drivers/bikers/pedestrians? How far from adverse weather conditions? How will we finance 100 million $80,000 autonomous vehicles.

Automated collision mitigation is already in many new cars and the data on accident rates is just materializing. Toyota preemptively put it's radar/camera based system in ALL of their cars for 2017. Its rumored that the NHTSA will mandate it for all manufacturers in the near future. The gradual progression of these developments is that these systems will add features incrementally and gain economies-of-scale until one day in the far far future driver input will be minimal. Only then will autonomous ride sharing become viable.

your argument seems to be "chemicals are numerous & complicated, therefore all new complex chemicals are okay"

the compounds that've been in strawberries for thousands of years are somewhat known items and lower risk than ones invented yesterday or even 20 years ago in a Dupont/Monsanto laboratory. The issue is that we have a business and political system that is highly incentivized to start adding contrived and novel substances to the environment at a massive scale and speed never before seen in nature. In recent times it's all to easy to introduce excess carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors into most homes or kill off large number worlds of honeybees. The effects merit careful consideration and regulation.

The burden of proof should obviously be reversed! Complex, synthetic chemicals in our water, food, packaging, or furniture should be assumed harmful and disallowed until it there is sufficient evidence that they are safe. Escalating trials basically. This is what we do for pharmaceutical drugs that we ingest or contact, why don't take this approach with other man-made chemicals we are adding to our immediate ecosystem and bodies.

the history of flame retardants is instructive https://ww2.kqed.org/science/2013/11/21/its-official-toxic-f... if industry/government had been required to prove these things safe beforehand we would have never exposed the population them in the first place.

from what I remember, Khosla and his lawyers were real jerks to the county and throughout the trials but I think their biggest problem was he has to pay for a relatively expensive liability insurance policy for public passage on the private access road that runs on his property, the only "easy" access to Martins Beach. The previous owners just sort of let things fly w/o insurance.

If the road was owned by the county and he gated it somehow he wouldn't have a leg to stand on but the problem is more nuanced ... Should he personally have to incur a large cost to maintain a public good b/c of proximity? It does seem arbitrary. A better man might sell the road to the county or come to some other compromise but he's become obsessed with the principle of the matter.

had a friend who was really into vinyl and I agreed to help him move. that was a mistake.

all of the above; plus a janitor or a police officer cost $200k+/year each when you factor in pay, benefits, overtime. So you can imagine they might be a little thinly staffed.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/01/bart-janitor-grossed-2...

I've seen estimates that it costs up to $80k/year in the Bay Area to give a homeless person housing and treat their underlying mental illness, substance addiction and other health issues. So for 8,000 homeless we're taking about $700million per year liability. You can't solve homelessness in the Bay Area by throwing money at the problem. The underlying issue is the cost of housing, health care and law enforcement or how those things are applied - all are deep political issues.

My own running list of root problems that underly the homeless epidemic in California:

- zoning. we have technology to build inexpensive micro-apartments, theres just no cost-effective way to gain approval for tens thousands of them convenient to health care facilities and economic opportunities.

- building codes. to build cheap micro-apartments, they need to be prefabricated. building codes enforce customized busy work for individual plumbers, electricians, inspectors and other contractors on each installation. The systems resists pre-fabrication which would be safer and much cheaper overall.

- local attitudes about state power. police use of force. crimes of poverty aren't often prosecuted. City attorneys/prosecutors are highly disincentivized to tackle quality of life crimes. cost of jury trials.

- high cost and poor state of prisons

- lack of police headcount, expense of police salaries/benefits.

- high cost of health care & related labor. regulatory capture by licensed professionals, hospital companies, drug/equipment companies. cost of healthcare liability insurance.

- lack of regional coordination between low-cost and high-cost areas within the state

- lack of state-wide mental health and drug abuse treatment policy

- lack of money for preventative care and early intervention for new homeless - don't tackle problems till its far too late and more costly / impossible to fix

+1

during my normal commute hours at Civic Center I've seen ...

- used needles strewn about in busy areas

- someone defecate on the station floor in broad daylight

- meth/heroin deals

- a dealer shaking down a high junkie for money owned on the platform

- entire hallways/stairways that were no-go because of strung out transients

- pretty much a third of BART cars have a homeless person sleeping off their high in them.

I feel stressed and not safe during my commute, can't believe I pay $9/day for the privilege of commuting via a cesspool of human misery. Not being on Civic Center or Powell station or being able to take Transit Bus will definitely be a consideration for my next job hunt.

Hypothesis: Aluminum Body and frame cars are still in the minority and require more careful/specialized/costlier repairs.

Had two car-owning friends that did RelayRides (now Turo) during the peak sharing economy a few years ago. Both cars were involved minor collisions within months. Turns out renting in the city to people that don't drive much, might be prone to accidents. Making sure cars weren't parked on street-cleaning side and dealing with tickets also seemed like a huge hassle. Cars have a really high administrative burden compared to homes, especially when things go wrong, which they do at a higher rate.

I've rented cars myself via Turo a couple times in the past few years. Two of the guys were operating their own small rental businesses (5+ cars, parked around on local streets). At a couple hundred bucks profit per vehicle per month, depending on utilization, having a few cars like that seems the only way to make it worth the while. As a part time job of sorts.

In the East-Bay, AAA is making a massive investment in car-sharing with GiG. I wonder if it will work out financially given state of the world with cheap ride-sharing by Uber/Lyft.

not as much ... Bluetec is just an advanced catalytic converter, that reduces NOx. Mercedes has been implicated in the emissions scandals, afaik. Inherently diesel is less refined than gas, so it does not burn as clean.

MID is a nice subsidy but one really can't speak to economic inequality in housing with calling out use of local zoning regulation as cause of artificially low supply. A lot more people would be able to afford a house or at least have cheaper rent if it werent for the shenanigans going on with development/zoning reviews.

nit: self-driving talent doesn't currently earn anything, but rather holds some long-term strategic value

I would summarize this effect as BigCorp HR being much more disciplined/constrained on individual compensation than the M&A department. Naturally, well-positioned and clever employees will capitalize on this.

the 2010-2015 era of generous outcomes for early-stage startups is over. No more easy follow-on rounds or acquisitions. Being VC becomes a lot harder so all these non-institutional personality guys - Sacca, Tim Ferris, Ashton Kutcher, and Russ Hanneman types are going to move on.

wonder why Mike Issac gave that clarification immediately to his twitter-base but didn't put it in the relevant section?

could it be because the article intentionally glosses over complex details in order to pump a specific narrative ... hmm. \s

privatize the profits (oil), socialize the losses (coastline)

This is a p/r piece from the winning pharma company. Would be nice to have a more independent source. There are varying degree of scummy-ness in the patent world. It's possible that Thermalife is like a Intellectual Ventures or a MPEG-LA, particularly if they are somehow affiliated with Stanford. Recognize that some people may consider the later two to be patent trolls, as well.

been seeing Apple Maps marked vans with Lidar units in SF and East Bay for months. Presumably theyre done building the base map.

That argument hinges on whether you view the subset of legacy HTTP semantics as a useful and comprehensive abstraction for web client-server development in 2017. For a 2.0 release, and with Server Push specifically being an addition, they could have been more forward thinking than just the offering ... "hey here's a way to serve static resources slightly faster"

Couple gripes with HTTP2 ...

1) HTTP2 Server Push is a hobbled protocol. It was designed for serving static assets to desktop browsers for pre-caching. Most of the internet traffic now is moving to mobile apps or rich browser clients. Developers would greatly benefit from a true bi-directional API that could be fully leveraged by event-based or reactive frameworks. The community could even build it's own APIs if the browsers just exposed the DataFrame primitives of HTTP2. But they don't.

2) Open-source proxy servers like NGINX, HAProxy and many key IaaS providers like Cloudflare, Google Cloud do not support full duplex HTTP2 connections (one-side only at best, translated to HTTP1 on the backend). This is 1 year after RFC 7540 was officially released and 5 years after SPDY. Why even bother baking considerations for HTTP2 into your application layer when your edge infrastructure won't let you leverage it anyway.

This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install.

Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

'Cellebrite "Pro Series" purchases all appear to include the firm’s Cloud Analyzer tool, which extracts “private-user cloud data” by "utilizing login information extracted from the mobile device.'

Chilling that is can be done without a warrant e.g. arrested protesters or to citizens crossing the US border.

I've read and heard that FDA rules allow generic to get 80% - 125% of the active ingredient into the bloodstream as the original drug. Of course the manufacturing tolerances are much better than that, so makers often put just enough to make the 80%.

the brand new Macbook Pro has last-generation Intel CPUs. I remember when Jobs announced one of the first Intel Macbook Pros with chips that no other manufacturer had even been given the chance to ship yet.

20 years ago automatics were 1) much more expensive 2) had worse gas mileage 3) were slow shifting 4) did not have fast up/down shift controls 5) had sloppy throttle response

thanks to economies of scale and new technology, car makers have bridged the gap on all fronts. So while I personally prefer manuals I can see why most people just get automatics, given the high cost of learning manual.

teaching people to stop-start manual on steep hills is extremely hard and frustrating for all parties. it's hard on the car too.

the intent and spirit of law is that the companies are hiring H1Bs for positions that could otherwise not be filled in sufficient quantity by Americans. Companies and Customers win, and American labor should experience no measurable harm. Not that I would but one could even argue that the way that AppleGoogleFacebookMicrosoft use them to hire students is even okay since they probably cannot fill the volume they need with American STEM grads.

This end-run with the outsourcers is a particularly egregious perversion of the law because they're bringing H1Bs with the intent to fire and replace Americans. There's also an angle of age-ism where they are firing older IT professionals in their 40s, 50s, 60s who have accrued higher pay-grades , and replacing them with less productive but much less costly young foreigners. Only losers are employees who need quality IT help, but who cares about that.

surprised to learn courts threw out the lawsuit against Disney for their similar H1B scandal

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/brinkmann-on-busines...

H1B applier must certify no current American employees harmed by the visa. But that isn't transitive from the outsourcer to Disney. :(