I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps. My homeless camp has is rife with crime, drug over doses, violence and fire. Last month I’ve had a leaf blower stolen, my car window broken, and an explosion due to them throwing a propane tank into a camp fire.
Since they’re tucked into a forest - the city won’t take any action. The city does take action on homeless camps that are more visible. I don’t mean to conflate urban forests with homelessness. However that’s very much the case here in Austin, Tx.
That was my experience when I visited to California when traveling to the USA. I remember a nice town called Santa Cruz, with really nice parks in Google Maps, but once I took a walk in one of them an it was super scary, full of tents and homeless people that seemed either drug users or just bad in their head.
Yes agree, they recently opened up a small forest near me and yes, it’s just full of homeless people and their piles of trash and we can’t walk through it feeling safe anymore.
I’ve not interviewed under a high stakes situation for a very long time. So it’s hard for me to relate directly. I’m sure if I really needed a job, or I was really excited for a position it would be different.
All the interviews I’ve taken in the last 10 years have been with passing interest on my part. And I go into it more as an interview of the company, and much less care about if they think I’m hitting some arbitrary bar. For me its been a pretty freeing approach. If they pass on me, I can respect that I wasn’t a good fit (and the feeling was probably mutual). And like someone else posted in the comments it allows for me to completely disregard stupid questions.
I recognize that it’s a luxury to have that kind of approach. Additionally I think drinking prior to an interview is completely fine.
>All the interviews I’ve taken in the last 10 years have been with passing interest on my part. And I go into it more as an interview of the company, and much less care about if they think I’m hitting some arbitrary bar.
This is honestly how I've treated every interview. I'm mostly concerned about whether the position is a good fit for me. I treat the questions they ask me as if I was chatting with a coworker since I figure that shows them what I'm like to work with.
Trump had 88.9mm followers on twitter.
He has 3.9mm followers on Truth.
Trump will have people listen to him no matter where he’s writing, but one of these platforms is certainly a downgrade in terms of audience than the other.
Brian sounds like the drag on the company, not Bob.
Bob is simply offering a deal that is in his best interests. Brian is the enabler, and I'm surprised HE wasn't fired.
Developers are expensive to recruit and train. If your department keeps losing them, because of the environment, then maybe you need a different environment.
Bob isn't just "offering a deal", he abused his position to try to get an employee fired and is blackmailing the company to force them to stay with BobX.
There’s a lot to unpack here. But Picasso wasn’t a hack. Overrated, sure. But he approached his subject matter and technique with as much focus and detail as any artist that came before him. You aren’t required to appreciate his contribution to the artistic conversation; but calling him a hack is dismissive and purposely neglectful of his substantial impact.
Picasso did what he did, and created what he created because of photography. In a world where capturing likeness, and form was basically free - what do you do with painting? Certainly not attempt to capture likeness and form - perhaps you make an Ernest attempt to capture or project the emotional response of form and subject. Picasso’s facial structure was modeled after African war masks, which were at the time ignored by the art world. And his composition and color and repetition were inspired by the Japanese print makers. A lot of the art from that era was inspired by what was coming out of Japan at that time. The product of Picasso was a mashup of influences, like all impactful art.
The backlash against likeness and form was certain way before Picasso. But the fact that he rode that style to such fame is what made the art world dramatically over correct so drastically.
At the time of the shift away from traditional fine art, there was a big shift in how art was marketed and style itself probably did not have as much influence as people think.
Academy art was very expensive because it took a long time to make (so artists only made a hand full of work), and there were fewer artists at that level because it took so much training to get to the level of a Bouguereau or Sargent. Up until this point the people buying this kind of art were wealthy or powerful enough to afford it.
At the turn of the century, there was an increased demand of art from the new burgeoning middle class, however there simply was not enough supply, and it was all expensive academy art. Because of this, art dealers were incentivized to promote impressionists because they were already academy rejects so they were outsiders with chips on their shoulders, and the work they did was by design easier and quicker to make, so they were able to produce way more art that dealers could sell to the middle class who were less discerning than the traditional art world.
The new mass market ended up being far more profitable for dealers, the demographic so much larger, that it really just drove what kind of art was created and marketed afterwards. Bouguereau died at 80 and made less than a thousand works over his lifetime, Picasso made tens of thousands. Picasso's true genius is in his ability to produce and market his works.
This guy must be James Bond. I’ve had my 2013 MacBook Pro since it came out and I never needed service on it. My 2016 MacBook Pro, no service. 2020 MacBook Pro, no service.
I like that this company is making completely replaceable parts though. The idea of being able to upgrade ram again sounds like a real benefit… it’s embarrassing that sentence even has to be muttered.
I looked into building an adu a few years back, and I can backup most of what you said. At least in California, in an incorporated city.
We worked out that it would cost us $30k in fees, and required spending before we could even dig the footers. Things like a soil test, inspections, variance’s etc.
You can always build an ADU, but it’s a rich mans game. And not really accessible to most people. We calculated our unit to cost roughly $80-90k, and would be almost 2x $/sqft of our home. A remodel made more financial sense, but the above problems still persist.
They don't want people who can't writing a 30k check doing development.
They want the old elderly couple of limited means to move out and make way for some yuppie who will pay big taxes, not slap a bottom dollar ADU up so that they can be cared for by live-in relatives.
Please, in California, that “old elderly couple” pays no property taxes and can spend their life blocking housing for new middle class families (and they do, all the time).
>Please, in California, that “old elderly couple” pays no property taxes
That's why they want them out. To replace them with someone who pays big $$$$. What's so hard to get about this?
They don't want them moving their caregiver into an ADU. They don't want them renting their ADU to supplement a fixed income. They want them gone. Since they can't tax them out they just prevent them from making money on their land value (via zoning) and let the COL do the rest.
>and can spend their life blocking housing for new middle class families (and they do, all the time).
The elderly sometimes do this but they are mostly scapegoats. The primary culprits are the 30-something on up through middle aged crowd who still need to work and need property values to remain high long enough that they can cash out of the ponzi scheme and retire to elsewhere.
It's literally the opposite. Old people are way richer and have the time and money to go through the bureaucracy. Also old people are much better connected to local politicians. Yuppies are who they're trying to repel, that's why they make it so hard. Its much more like a college student or yuppie would move into the ADU.
NIMBYism regarding more housing really only pertains to metropolitan/urban areas. How come the rest of the state can’t build housing consummate to the demand?
I live in a socal suburb and there is plenty of nimbyism. Any new developments take years or get stalled indefinitely as all the nimbys who already own their home show up to complain and block everything at every turn. Because they don't want the traffic to get worse, or they don't want the community to "lose its charm" or whatever else they can think of.
Even if people are saying this, what they actually do is quite different. People in CA moving out are generally moving into other metropolitan areas or smaller cities. They're not living some kind of Stardew Valley fantasy in the fields.
That was the major selling point of the CA high-speed rail when Governor Brown originally put it on the ballot - everyone would live in one of those ever-expanding residential suburbs and then take a quick train ride into a busy urban area.
Employment. Rural areas don't have much to offer in terms of jobs other than backbreaking farm labor, and Internet access is usually way too underbuilt to support full remote work.
NIMBY is everywhere in California. For being such a liberal state it's crazy how local governments are obsessed with stopping new and denser housing from being built
This is the biggest asshole response to real problems that I see Californians say all the time.
Maybe I just know too many assholes – but there has to be a better answer to “people are fleeing California for legitimate reasons” than “good riddance.”
Have you considered that it is not "good riddance", but an observation that as the population declines the housing problem is decreasing until it will go away?
Population growth is a real problem, we are living in an finite system called planet Earth. With 1/4 of the world population everyone would live better - less pollution, 4 times more resources per capita, etc. Imagine California with 10-15 million inhabitants, no homeless people, enough water for everybody.
The problem isn’t total population, its population density. Too much is bad and too little is bad. You could change the total all you want but if everyone decides to live in the same place then you’re stuck with the same problems.
I would say the reverse: low population rural areas are great, and high density cities are great, but suburban mid-density is the absolute worst of all worlds. It creates massive traffic, consumes unbelievable amounts of land with roads and environmentally destructive lawns, is super high-carbon per person with no way to add effective transit or amenities. It leaves people trapped in homes that they can't leave for any daily errand or commute without hopping in a car, which is terrible for people's health, and as we age it leaves us even more stranded because cars are not good for accessibility. Kids can't play outside on their own because of constant fear of cars, and as they grow the need constant taxiing around town to do any sort of activity or get to and from school. Schools themselves become enormous parking lots twice a day as kids are dropped off and picked up in what has to be the most ridiculous form of transit every conceived: massive SUVs weighing tons, spewing brake dust and exhaust into the lungs of the tiny princes and princesses being chauffeured one by one to their schools.
There is no redeeming the car-dependent suburban style of city planning. Commuter rail suburbs are better, rural life is better small towns are better, urban life is better. But our cars are killing us and we need to look beyond them for a sustainable and healthy future. We will not and do not need to eliminate these places, but we do need to allow transformation.
> Population growth is a real problem, we are living in an finite system called planet Earth. With 1/4 of the world population everyone would live better
First half is true, second half ignorant. Your life is better because somewhere out there are half a dozen poor people mining resources and building goods for you, for a tiny fraction of your income.
I am living in that country where poor people mine resources for others to live good, so I know what I am writing about. My family is from a mountain area where timber and cow farms were the only resources they lived on, now we can barely get enough wood for maintain the buildings because the demand is so big that we either limit the consumption or risk massive deforestation. Less people means less demand and more resources per capita.
Nobody is talking about happiness and nobody could agree with everybody on what that means. The word here was "better" and cheap labor in poor countries objectively makes our lives better, because we can afford more goods (both needed and unneeded) with our incomes and expectations regarding working conditions.
I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps. My homeless camp has is rife with crime, drug over doses, violence and fire. Last month I’ve had a leaf blower stolen, my car window broken, and an explosion due to them throwing a propane tank into a camp fire.
Since they’re tucked into a forest - the city won’t take any action. The city does take action on homeless camps that are more visible. I don’t mean to conflate urban forests with homelessness. However that’s very much the case here in Austin, Tx.