I didn't buy it until I figured out the (very convoluted and possible) way to build on it while ag. Because rezoning is a long, expensive process that can trivially be blocked by a single neighbor that doesn't want to rezone with me. I wanted the parcel because it was in what I considered a desirable location for a reasonable price. In my region, finding property is getting very difficult - and unless you want to go super far away from civilization, you don't have so many options.
Unfortunately, the health district won't issue a permit because of the existence of the "will serve" letter from the city. So this is turning into quite the ordeal to get sorted out. I'm really hoping to keep things out of the courts, but that is a very real possibility. And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY.
I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick with the county and they are charging me based on the size of my parcel rather than the number of hookups I need. My house is actually in the county (but in the city impact zone). So now I'm spending my time combing through legal records, state supreme court case rulings, etc. all relevant to my situation to try to get things resolved. Literally everything is a fight. I even had to push and fight to get a build-right for the parcel - because it is currently zoned ag - which my country requires a max house density of 40 acres per house. I could rezone - but that would require me to get permission of all my neighbors to rezone so that my new residential zoning would be contiguous with existing residential zoning. I've had to fight to get permission to have an arch/rainbow driveway. Then I wanted to have an accessory dwelling, but ag zoning doesn't allow this either - never mind that this is totally allowed for all residential zoning types in the county and nearby city. And on and on. I've spent several hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars trying to jump through all these hoops - and I haven't even started building anything yet!
Regulations require all nuclear reactor containment domes to be able to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger jet. It is literally a requirement - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building. You can also check out this video of experiments investigating the strength of containment-dome-like reinforced concrete: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ
In many places cabinet grade hardwood plywood is cheaper! I could sheath my roof and house with 3/4" cabinet grade maple for the same price as "cheap" ugly OSB.
When they provide an interior that isn't inferior to ICE cars (e.g. physical buttons and readings/dials in front of the driver) - and don't lose half their battery life for me in the winter heating the vehicle - then I'll probably buy an EV.
Again - I wasn't talking about how we evaluate/measure the person/politician. I was talking about how our views of the politician affect our evaluation of the things that take place under their stewardship. And a large fraction of the U.S. disagrees with you on many of those (very subjective) opinions you just expressed. No need to presume that your opinions are the absolute truth that everyone must be enlightened with.
Despite the sarcasm, I think your comment makes a really good point. People have lenses and biases that really make it difficult to objectively evaluate the actions of politicians/administrations independent of their like for the individuals in charge and other unrelated actions said politicians may have done.
This isn't just a matter of richness. It is also a matter of how much parents are willing to invest in their children's education. I know many "poor" parents that invest a great deal in their kids' eduction (time and money) and many "wealthier" parents that invest less. We shouldn't punish those who are willing to give more to their own kids' education. How do you handle this in a "fair" way - can't force people to care about their kids more.
Solving the automated driving problem will require these systems to behave in ways that regular human drivers consider acceptable - at least for a transition period of time where both live on the road together. Sudden hard breaking in situations that humans see absolutely no need for it is an unacceptable behavior for human drivers to have. Just because it's not your fault doesn't mean you can't do things to prevent it. I have prevented many crashes throughout my life due to my mitigations around others' driving mistakes. We should expect self driving cars to do this at least as well as - not worse than - humans.
More egalitarian funding will just make the wealthier classes just put their money and students somewhere else. I live in an area with a lot of private and charter schools. This is the mechanism that the community members have evolved to fund+support their children's education directly the way they want. If you try to make people pay for something they don't want to - they'll just find ways around it and you could even be left with even worse outcomes than before.
Right. I'm not saying the intent of GDPR was to provoke them. But empirically, they are an effect of the GDPR. An undesirable one - that does not fulfill its intent. I'd say we are in agreement here.
For me personally - all these popup banners and modal walls for websites about cookies and stuff just really make the internet a worse place. I suspect that empirically, they don't accomplish what the GDPR intended to - and they make the internet less enjoyable. Thanks GDPR.
Northern Idaho actually has quite a lot of left-leaning politics/culture. Southern idaho is where all the conservatives live (and the vast majority of people generally).
That's a fair point. However, it's a matter of how angry each side gets. There is some critical level of anger that provokes unrest and strong reaction.
No - I recognized what you were saying by your last non-quote bit at the bottom. I was just pointing out that this quote really supports (IMO) the "trump-side" of this whole issue.
Trump is a symptom - not the disease. Often if you just try to treat symptoms the disease gets worse. We have a large fraction of the U.S. population that is disenfranchised/unhappy with things. It is various things. It might be things like gay marriage becoming federally enforced allowed. It might be higher taxes. It might be mainstream media/big-tech political asymmetry. It might be big govt vs not. It might be being priced out of your hometown because of people moving in. I'm not saying any of these things are bad or good - just saying that what are we going to do to actually heal? Voting your people in power and ignoring a very large demographic is not going to heal anything. It will make things worse. We have to engage with each other - not disengage.
This is a great quote and I think is very relevant to what's been happening over the last few weeks. I'm no Trump fan - nor a fan of the actions of people at the capitol. But trump never asked for anyone to be violent or occupy the capitol. But he and related organizations (i.e. parler) are being treated as such. Seems a bit disturbing to me. The arguments used to try to shut up MLK Jr. in the 60s are the same arguments being used to shut up Trump. Heaven knows we don't need to hear more of what he has to say. But I'll defend his right to say it. And nobody needs to rehash "but these are private companies" crap. Their doing this to appease the full-stack blue fed gov't coming in. So, in a way, it kind of is government motivated censorship.
Yeah, but when someone's "preferred" side (even if they didn't really like them) is being steam-rolled like this many of those people are not going to be okay with it - not the least of which is because of the authoritarian/dystopian precedent being set. This could be a path to a 1-party system. China and Russia are good examples of how well 1 party systems turn out. I think anybody who doesn't want a 1 party system should be concerned about all this.
They're going to hear about how big tech is conspiring to censor and take down their man though. This stampede is going to tick off a lot of moderate, "incredibly nice" people that would have otherwise been fine.