thebradbain

Actually every city in California is mandated to present a realistic plan to satisfy their Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) every 10 years if they wish to keep access to state infrastructure funding in addition to local control of city zoning. That is a law from 1970 reaffirmed and strengthened in 1990 and 2019.

Santa Monica has refused to do so for the past 10 years. This year they just had their entire zoning code essentially overturned by the state (again, per that law) until they were back in compliance. In the 3 months they were deemed noncompliant before they got their act together, applications for 4000 units were filed and now must be approved ministerially, which goes a long away to satisfying their 8000 unit shortage as determined by RHNA!

Beverly Hills and Pasadena just had their housing elements (zoning) thrown out for the same reason. San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto will be next unless they get their act together. No city itself is the source of the state's housing crisis. But Santa Monica is one part of it.

AB2656 may have also been killed because it was a victim of compromising too much and the proponents did not see much value in trying to get it across the finish line.

A developer having to (1) wait a year after submitting the approval to then "call into question" the deadline and then (2) wait another 3 months for a decision after that and then (3) sue the city for a court order to proceed

is not a "streamlined" process. In fact it's more or less what the process already is today in some cities. I'd much rather see a better system introduced, rather than that bandaid solution:

"If the completed environmental review is not approved within a year after submission [for some projects which fulfill X criteria], it is assumed compliant." with further safeguards like "a city must start the review process within 90 days and present major findings within another 90 days after that" to avoid the "we just started reviewing it a day before the deadline" delay tactic.

This ruling is frustrating (to say the least) in the short term, but overall I think this ruling going to tremendously backfire in NIMBY's faces. This judge just unintentionally put the state's spotlight on CEQA -- previously, the dearth of housing laws passed this year were careful to navigate within its framework without attempting to change it.

Newsom has demonstrated he takes housing starts seriously (Really! The fact that virtually every commercial lot is now zoned for ministerial housing approval statewide, abolishing parking minimums statewide, passing SB9 to allow 2-4plexes on single family parcels statewide, and passing SB10 to exempt apartments of less than 10 units from CEQA, and directing the housing authority to decertify rich cities' zoning codes that flout RHNA housing obligations like Santa Monica is huge) and I don't expect him to let up.

> State housing laws, she ruled, do not apply to a project until after a city “certifies” the project’s environmental review.

> Although CEQA puts a one-year limit on environmental review, the court held that this deadline is just advisory

If these rulings stand, you can absolutely bet that CA state housing laws in 2023 will now turn their focus toward CEQA. At a minimum, expect that "advisory" deadline to be formalized, shortened, and certification expedited or even exempted if the project falls within certain categories. Bike and bus lanes were just exempted from CEQA this session, and I absolutely imagine housing that is X% affordable will be soon, too.

In fact, really all California has to do is expand SB 330 or their 2019 Builders Remedy Law (which itself gave an existing state law from 1990 teeth) which states that developers are guaranteed ministerial approval regardless of zoning in any municipality determined to have a non-certified housing element to include expedient and ministerial CEQA approval. What would once be considered unthinkable politically a decade ago is now just a legislative hop and a skip away.

Twitter is not too big to fail, and I say that as someone who has used twitter daily since 2011.

I completely agree. Software Engineers are no less prone to “when you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail” as anyone else.

There’s so many things we keep trying to shoehorn tech into that don’t need it— electronic ordering/serving food, planning a small gathering of friends, making a smoothie [1], “smart” fridges/toasters/stoves… these are all adding unnecessary knobs and bobbles to things humanity has gotten by just fine with for ages (the first since the dawn of civilization!)

As a general rule to “will this be tech useful” I think in terms of scale— is this new tech enabling/helping me to do/manage something 10x-100x better than I could with existing tools? Sure, I can organize a single dinner/cocktail party of a couple dozen people via paper invites or text messages and phone calls to caterers, and using tech for that is likely introducing unnecessary overhead, but if I’m a planner organizing many weddings of 100+ for a living then, yeah, obviously a party-planning management software will be of use.

If not, its value is likely not worth the hassle.

[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-s...

That is not fraud at all. By that logic, not giving anything but your absolute 100% blood and sweat to your job (no matter how menial) is fraud.

Well, California mandates at least 3 months *pay for salaried employees in many layoff scenarios. There’s some further complexities, but I imagine most employees at Twitter in SF qualify.

*technically, notice. But companies can opt to pay 3 months pay in lieu of the notice, if they want to cut ties immediately.

I mean, if you're a huge fan of him you'd probably stay.

If you're not, you'd probably stay for the severance package, and do absolutely no work in the meantime. No company or recruiter will be holding the fact you were fired against you if/when you're swept away in the layoffs.

If you genuinely like your job there and don't feel strongly about Musk either way, that's probably the toughest situation, and you should come to terms with the fact that even if you keep your job at Twitter it will likely feel like an entirely different workplace in a couple months.

The Cold War didn’t become a Nuclear War because both powers realized in some capacity that an arms race spurred by this very assumption that the other is creating ever more advanced technology which could threaten one’s power would ultimately just result in each country annihilating the other in the name of self defense/preserving power/stability/“peace”.

Who benefits from those “advances” in technology in that case?

To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place. Sure, nuclear weapons would likely have been theoretically discovered anyways, but did they need to be actually built? Did we need to execute on actually building and using nuclear weapons to understand practical use cases for nuclear energy?

Because I am certain that powers today in an arms race with each other could and would, by this logic, discover and unleash entirely new man-made horrors upon this world that make nuclear weapons look elementary, if this is the path we’re going to go down.

Just because some people choose to study eugenics does not mean we all have to (or should).

that’s like saying “good murder is different than bad murder” — adding an adjective doesn’t actually change what it is, nor the morality around it

Why is Vue off the table?

Where I work uses Vue rather than React, and we're _very_ happy with that choice. There's many reasons why (specifically the Composition API is similar to React Hooks, but in my opinion _much_ better thought out, and so is the fact that the state-management story is much more opinionated/first-party), but rather than start a framework war, I will say that every FE engineer we've hired who preciously worked at a React shop (which is all of them) has gotten the hang of Vue within a week and finds Vue a refreshing breath of fresh air. Me included.

I think React without a doubt has the largest ecosystem. And I also think Vue is more than a valid choice, and definitely not a problem in the hiring sphere.

Even in non-recourse states, walking away from your mortgage will decimate your credit score and preclude you from getting a mortgage on a cheaper property in practice, even if theoretically it pencils out on paper.

I imagine that the OP probably has savings to fall back on (since they stress financial security), and more equity in the home than just the downpayment— not to mention that if they bought it not so recently (5-10 years back), the home value appreciation has likely been insane to still come out well ahead in even an 2008-esque crash, plus they could have refinanced at 2% fixed 30year rates in 2020-2021 drastically lowing their monthly payments even further, depending on how much equity they had.

Also, California just passed a law requiring minimum wage be $22 in some industries/companies of a certain size (and the next step will likely be rolling that out to all industries and companies, as they did with the $15 minimum wage between 2016-2020)

> "attack on detached family home"

Single family homes in high-demand/land-constrained cities often make up >66% of the allowed zoning (see San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc); By definition this is not a good allotment of land and resources in high demand areas (you are fitting 1 family where you could fit 2-4 families with little immediate change in the neighborhood).

No one is saying ban building of single family homes, but the amount of land exclusively zoned for single family homes in high demand areas needs to be rebalanced -- if you want the conveniences of a single family home in an urban city, you should be prepared to pay for it (think Upper East Side brownstones), or move further outside the city. But there is no reason that the vast majority of homes in a city MUST be single family homes.

I say this as someone who owns a single family home in Los Angeles, and supported the conversion directly next door to me of a single family home into what is now a four-plex.

Yet fire and earthquake damage are not generally covered by FEMA in California in most cases (I would expect the Big One, when it happens, to be, but based on the big stink that Trump raised to the applause of certain states, like Florida, about cutting back wildfire prevention/disaster funds to CA in 2019, who knows) and economically that state is much more important than Florida.

And thus California has very-high deductible insurance coverage in areas that are especially susceptible to such disasters, because it IS an inevitable risk that such an event will happen. Florida should do the same, as their "catastrophic disaster" is annual.

Unless they're using more in public services/subsidies than they're contributing in taxes!

Think their university system, for example -- it's almost entirely subsidized by the government, but the generationally wealthy are by and large the biggest users of it, especially at Oxford and Cambridge. Not here to debate the merits of that system -- but the wealthy are objectively using disproportionality more of the services compared to the rest of the country.

Apply that across entire government sectors (healthcare, transit, pensions, real estate) and you have a government that, yes, while the wealthy are nominally paying the most, they're paying less into it than is sustainable for the amount they use it and expect it to function.

There's a whole separate debate about efficiency/"austerity", but "some" is not better than "none" if each of the "some" is a net-negative on the system.

If they're not paying for anything enough to keep things afloat (as their currency, government services, and now pensions are having a hard time doing right now...) it doesn't matter if they're there or not – they're just plundering the ship and crowding the lifeboats.

I was wondering if this was well-known / out in the open or not. I've been reached out to by recruiters with the subject line "Netflix -- Gaming" (I don't know why, I've never worked in gamedev and don't particularly have much interest in it, just personally not a fit for me!) a couple weeks after their larger layoff announcement, which I thought was interesting, to say the least.

However the role was specifically for Los Angeles where I'm based, and it seem their hiring portal still is hiring for LA and not Finland? Would they really have two competing game studios? [1]

https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/218982716

If they’re contracts, they’re not employees and they’re fully in their rights to work for others too. They owe that company no loyalty, and if they’re doing what’s laid out in the contract, there is no expectation for them to do more, either. Nevertheless, I don’t see how this is slacking either way.

> It holds another - margin stock trading requirements, but that path has all but been forsaken

I didn’t know this, could you explain when it’s last been used, if ever? Could they theoretically drastically raise margin requirements for some stocks and lower it for others to encourage sectors to be rebalanced?

Unlike the EU/Russia, though, the US is not geopolitically dependent on China for social media like the former is energy. If the US were embroiled in such a conflict with the China, the US would have no problem

a) Forcing the sale of ByteDance to a US company (remember, they almost did this during peacetime anyways, just because)

or

b) Outright blocking it and ensuring its allies do the same

Sure, either option is a Situation, but I would imagine the US threatening to effectively take over or block what is one of China's premiere/world-known tech companies is a large enough negotiating chip that it gives the US leverage, too, and at the same time ensure China does not interfere too much.

No it’s not. It’s illegal to discriminate based on that consideration. It’s not illegal to take someone’s race, sexuality, or any other protected class into consideration.

When you hire a man, it’s not like you don’t know they’re a man. The issue would be if you ONLY hire men (intentionally or not).

How are you able to make your battery last so long? I have an iPhone 12, and up until 6 months ago the battery was easily making it through the end of the day, but now with the same usage pattern I’m charging by noon.

That’s the only reason I’m excited for the 14

This is why in Los Angeles I've noticed there's so much un-permitted work done without anyone batting an eye. That's also why you have so many un-permitted ADUs in this city complete with plumbing and electrical.

Fence higher than 6 feet? That's technically against the law and you need a special permit, but no one cares and contractors will build without one. We're talking about LA, where concrete walls over 10 feet around homes are common.

Pouring more than 30 square feet of concrete, or replacing a driveway? You need a permit. But guess what, yup, contractors will do that without batting an eye.

Replacing a sink or toilet? Yup, you need a permit. Installing a built-in book shelf that technically takes away square footage? You need a permit. New windows? Permit! New showerhead, that's a permit too – yes, actually. And all of these have fees (some of which are more than the cost of the change), inspections, and will be factored into the tax assessment.

These are requirements for both single family homes and multi-family developments. While LA has no shortage of laws on the books, I'm thankful that at least compared to San Francisco contractors have no hesitation cutting right through it. It might have to do with the fact that unlike SF, LA has the space to keep things out of site from overly-nosy neighbors.

Ok, but that's not what OP is advocating for. At the very least there should be streamlined CEQA processes applicable for certain developments in certain areas. IE -- it is not at all crazy for a 4/8/10-plex townhome-style development to be built on a piece of land in San Francisco that currently contains a single family home, or an undeveloped paved parking lot.

Individual parcels of land that are especially exceptional within such areas can be marked as such (think historical landmark designations, though that process is a whole separate can of worms).

Yet currently San Francisco has some of the kafka-esque building requirements for the most common types of buildings AND 4 private golf courses on what would most certainly be classified as protected wetlands today. So clearly today's CEQA isn't even working by your own scenario.

C# has some of the best first-party documentation of any language I've worked with

It’s illegal in California, where they’re headquartered. In their version of the law, intent matters:

“…You intended to cause that person to reasonably fear for their or their family’s safety.” [1]

Regardless, federally in the US, doxxing can be considered a form of harassment, which is generally illegal.

[1] https://www.aerlawgroup.com/blog/fact-or-fiction-doxing-some...

Why should an individual doing nothing wrong HAVE to change their own behavior simply to stop being harassed? That’s not a solution, that’s going into hiding.

Also, considering people doxxed her address and kept showing up / swatting her, I doubt that would even be a short term solution at all, other than emboldening the harassers.

I looked into KF as this was all breaking last week. I don’t have any links as they’re no longer accessible, so take what I say as you will.

When I went on, on the forum’s official home page put front and center there was a link to a post written by an admin/moderator (which was also pinned by moderators) doxxing some trans woman with her address and last known location and the need to bring her to “justice”, whatever that meant.

Frankly it was appalling and I felt like from that one post alone (there were hundreds of posts) I had seen enough

KF can (and does) say whatever they want. That does not give its users the right to doxx an individual or threaten them or otherwise illegally harass them via extra-judicial measures. It’s that simple.

It’s also in Cloudflare’s very own terms of service that KF agreed to when they signed up