Maybe I can use one of these to get in to my organization azure account from my alma mater. The email was deleted right after I graduated, but Microsoft has been trying to bill me (for a reserved IP or something) for close to a decade. Support is useless of course.
I thought about that. But a bank would rather lend in lots of high-confidence, low-duration deals than a small number of high-margin deals. The only people who lose when housing is built are incoment landowners. Because prices go down.
To be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian.
I like the approach of making downtowns walkable and having a bit of parking at the periphery of downtown, along with good public transit. Encourages people to use public transit to get to town in the first place. Downtown residents can use transit or a zipcar or equivalent when the need to get out of town, instead of devoting a ton of space downtown for storing their cars.
Not sure if that approach is really practical, but if it can be made to work it is much nicer.
Well, in Menlo Park they're just flat surface parking lots, not even multi-story structures. The planned development is multi-story housing with parking underneath.
To be fair, I am boycotting the (similar) underground garage over at Springline because they're clearly made only for people in Range Rovers or whatever. They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access from a normal car.
The global capital of technology has absolute horrid infrastructure and is not on the forefront of any municipal technologies.
There's a big disconnect from people building new projects and local governance, and it's growing. When tech companies started even providing buses for their employees, because local government is too fractured and incapable of running needed bus routes, and can not coordinate across county and city borders, local activists were extremely upset that tech workers were not driving their personal cars and instead using environments-saving and traffic-reducing transit.
I would bill by ticket machine too if it was my job to collect money on the parking. I’m guessing that the amount of people who never pay is much higher than zero so it really only makes sense when you have such high throughput that the slowdown is detrimental (such as the Bay bridge).
Super easy unless you have moved recently, then you don't get the bill and end up years later in collections for the original amount plus a million late fees added on.
Nah it arrives electronically to kivra, which is like email except you log in with your social security number and it's only for "official business" like invoices and whatnot.
That sounds great! In the US the phrase you used "mailed to my sthlm address" would never mean anything other than physically sending a paper bill to your house.
Yeah I phrased that wrong. I wanted to emphasize that I don't live in Norway. I found it extra impressive that it worked so seamlessly even with a foreign car. Oh well.
The reasons why the Bay Area is the global capital of technology are absolutely totally unrelated to the quality of infrastructure or the policies of local government there.
It’s mainly due to the state of US technological advancement decades ago when the whole thing got started, the general US-level business-friendly environment, and the presence of an extremely prestigious (especially in science and tech fields) university nearby.
The specific reason is that William Shockley's mother lived in Palo Alto. Stanford gets the credit but in reality it had nothing to do with the decision.
I park on the street for free. (The lot is also free in monetary cost, for the short windows I'd park there, but the hassle is larger than the hassle of finding street parking).
> They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access from a normal car.
Are you sure it's the ticket machines? Around here, the ticket machines have stayed the same, but it's now impossible to use them without stopping the car and getting out, because car manufacturers have decided I need eight inches of empty space between myself and the side of the car.
That eight inches is called "side impact protection" and, while it sucks to not be able to comfortably rest your arm on the window sill, it is pretty important to have in the event of an impact to the side.
I drive a 90s Miata. Trust me, I hate the SUV trend as much as anyone else, and I also recognize that car design from the 90s is not exactly the pinnacle of crash safety.
> To be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian.
What a lot of the new buildings in Austin are doing is putting an attached garage directly behind a 4 + 1 mixed use development - the street-facing facade is the apartments and shops, and the garage is directly behind (and usually attached) to the apartments. You basically never see them.
I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"
The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"
Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either.
> The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
> Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.
But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?
Trying to create an elaborate regulatory regime to decide who is justified to live in a rural area is absurd and a waste of money. Especially considering that most people living in rural areas are either employed in a necessary industry that needs to be rural, or work in professional or service industries either directly supporting said rural industry (e.g. tractor repair) or indirectly supporting it's workforce.
Furthermore, the marginal cost of providing broadband to all those "slightly-less-necessarily-rural" people is minuscule. Skipping every other house doesn't save you much when the majority of the cost is building infra to get broadband to the town/road in the first place.
> But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?
They can be in a small town in the region, which is where the school and liquor store probably already are.
The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.
I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart.
I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.
They're not 'the poor' though. If you own a $20 million of land why is everyone rich and poor in the city paying a dollar to fund your faster internet?
Small family farms are defined as those with annual gross cash farm income (GCFI) of less than $350,000; in 2011, these accounted for 90 percent of all US farms. Because low net farm incomes tend to predominate on such farms, most farm families on small family farms are extremely dependent on off-farm income. Small family farms in which the principal operator was mostly employed off-farm accounted for 42 percent of all farms and 15 percent of total US farm area; median net farm income was $788. Retirement family farms were small farms accounting for 16 percent of all farms and 7 percent of total US farm area; median net farm income was $5,002.
Estimated median total income for farm households increased in 2024 relative to 2023. Median income from farming decreased while median off-farm income increased in 2024 relative to 2023. At the median, household income from farming was -$1,830 in 2024. Given the broad USDA definition of a farm (see glossary), many small farms are not profitable even in the best farm income years. Median off-farm income in 2024 was $86,900, while the median total household income was $102,748.
The 80 year old house on a woodlot that a teacher is living in should be closed so they can buy a more expensive one in town?
This isn't (all) new construction of people deciding to cast off the shackles of urban living and shoveling sidewalks and deciding to move out into the more rural parts of the state... but rather people living in houses that are 50 or more years old that their parents passed on to them.
These are houses that were built in the early to mid part of the previous century that had two wires running - one for power, one for phone.
The idea that because you are not-farmer you should live in a city seems quite prescriptive.
People are living in rural parts of the country not because of the convinces of urban living, but rather because that's where they can afford to buy an old house and even with the additional utility costs (buying propane, septic, well) it is still less expensive than trying to buy a new construction house in the suburbs.
These are the worst. I'm fine with you dumping your own half formed thoughts into an LLM, getting something reasonably structured out, and then rewriting that in your own voice, elaborating, etc.
But the "This is what ChatGPT said..." stuff feels almost like "Well I put it into a calculator and it said X." We can all trivially do that, so it really doesn't add anything to the conversation. And we never see the prompting, so any mistakes made in the prompting approach are hidden.
> Based on recent 2023-2024 data, the average CEO-to-employee pay ratio at major Japanese corporations is roughly 12:1 to 20:1, significantly lower than the 200:1–300:1 ratios seen in the U.S..
In most cases, you can't evade liability for negligence that results in personal injury. You can usually disclaim away liability for other types of damage caused by negligence.
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