domain:cspicenter.com
guajalote
52m ago
Houston, TX is about 25% foreign born and has way cheaper housing than any major city in CA. There's plenty of space in CA to house everyone even if the population doubled or tripled. The problem is regulations that restrict supply.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
26m ago
There are two reasons why I think the description is fair
- First, the "war on the suburbs" rhetoric specifically talks about how "your investment and lifestyle may soon come under attack." This isn't just about exclusionary zoning; it's about anything that could significantly depress housing prices
- Second, Republican organizations have been using "war on the suburbs" are rhetorical demagoguery against almost any policy to increase housing supply: see this as another example.
stav
36m ago
Houston has unlimited land. Where in LA or the Bay Area is there open land to start building? Point to it on a map for me.
stav
37m ago
It’s both. If you have mass immigration and restricted supply then you get massive prices increases. But the Bay Area and LA are full. You can’t build anymore in either except up. Where in LA or the Bay Area is the free space to build these houses to fix the housing crisis? Where is the open land in Fremont or San Jose or San Francisco that can fix the housing crisis there? You have to tear down old buildings and start building massive multi family units.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
23m ago
You have to tear down old buildings and start building massive multi family units
This is putting way too high of a standard. Buildings are demolished and replaced all the time! If you don't allow this, you get nonsense like the "historic laundromat" in San Francisco. Putting all the cases like this together, there's a ridiculous amount of space in San Francisco itself for more housing when so much of the city looks like this.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
32m ago
Didn't we establish that California is losing population? Have a look at housing price growth over the same period.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
36m ago
This is doubly so if the Tyrants form a pact saying they'll vote in favour of the policies of any of their fellow tyrants who was killed for politically motivated reasons (which they have an incentive to form as none of them wants to be assassinated).
Simply kill the tyrants you agree with.
zeke5123a
1m ago
The honest rhetoric is “you don’t want a bunch of poors (largely black) underclass to move into your neighborhood making it crime ridden, destroying the schools, and crushing property values.”
That is different from “my home value decreased a little because there is more inventory because there is more building.”
The first thing is a catastrophe as it kills your investment and lifestyle. The second is a minor nuisance that on balance may be positive to you.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
2m ago
Sejong
Christ, what a bleak pic on Wikipedia. A six lane arterial, two parking lots, and the world's saddest park. I can understand why existing cities become ugly. Why do people do this when designing new cities?
quiet_NaN
4m ago
I think current LLMs are not remotely reliable enough to serve as politicians. Adversarial examples are a thing, after all. If we can not train an LLM to reliably avoid saying bad words, how can we expect it to reliably not vote for bad laws? And anything of truly human level intelligence would get us into alignment territory.
Then there might be a game theoretical cost if your opponents can just run your executive to determine what the reply to a provocation would be. If PresGPT was the head of the US executive, and China got their hands on a copy (one of the backups, or just a replication of the fine-tuning used on GPT5), they could have hard numerical probabilities on what the US response would be if they attacked Taiwan.
The problem with tyrants is that is attracts exactly the wrong people for the job even more than the office of president does. When Rome switched its political system from Republic to Empire, they certainly increased the variance of their leadership a lot.
And precommitting to following the policies of an assassination victim removes the incentives to kill them from the opponents of the policies, but might provide new incentives of supporters to throw them under the bus. I mean, if it is public knowledge that policy X will supported by politician P will pass with some probability p, then all you need to do is make sure that p does not change if they are killed. In practice, there is no such common knowledge, so situations where one side could act on private information will dominate.
And depending on the capabilities of the assassins, changing the mind of the successor on the policy might not be even their end goal. The end goal could be to change the mind of changing the mind of the one who succeeds the fifth murder victim or something.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
5m ago
Second, Republican organizations have been using "war on the suburbs" are rhetorical demagoguery against almost any policy to increase housing supply
You know why? Because it hits home. It takes some people a while and some never catch on, but a lot of people in the suburbs have figured out that the "sprawl" that leftists often decry is their home.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
7m ago
Hopefully the tyrants would be smart enough to not fall for that, I did say only "politically motivated" reasons which wouldn't include if one of them fell down the stairs and died and I'd hope the process which determines whether something like that is what led to the death would also be able to recognise such a situation and in this case, do the reverse (again something all the tyrants would agree to because none of them want to die to their own side either).
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9m ago
The space is above the map. Open up Google maps and plop yourself down to street view just about any residential area of San Francisco: the buildings are three stories tall at the highest with the vast majority being two stories. Plenty of space if you go vertical.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
11m ago
I feel like I probably wouldn't enjoy it because I don't care for soccer, but man this post made me want to check out Football Manager.
stav
15m ago
Well yes but the point is it’s not like Texas where there’s tons of free land. You’re talking about taking places like Berkeley and Fremont and tearing down homes and building really tall residential buildings. That’s the scale of what needs to be done to get housing under control there.
guajalote
17m ago
There is plenty of undeveloped land on the edges of SF and LA. Between SF and Petaluma, for example, there's a ton of empty land. But more importantly "open land" is not a prerequisite for building housing, since you can build vertically. SF would have way more housing if it wasn't preventing people from tearing down "historic laundromats." Housing is affordable even in the densest parts of downtown Houston where there is no "open land" to develop. Conversely, the area of rural Northern California where I grew up has tons of open land, yet housing costs are much higher per square foot than downtown Houston.
Absox
19m ago
New resident of California as of this year; was unexpectedly sent here by my work.
As far as I can tell, the workers live 2-3 to a room in rented houses, which is why many neighborhoods of East Palo Alto have 5-6 cars parked in front of 1000 sq ft (100 sq m) 3br houses.
I was in Asia over the holidays, and the food there is better (at least to my tastes), costs 1/5th as much even without counting taxes, tip, and the bevy of surcharges they add (somehow a prix fixe dinner advertised at $95 a head costs over $270 for 2), and much more conveniently located.
Honestly, I hate it here already and am looking to leave at the first good opportunity. Until then, I'm living well below my means to minimize my exposure to the 9-10% sales tax rates, driving a 20-year old car, maxing out my contributions to tax-advantaged accounts and investments in general, and trying to pay as little in taxes as possible.
A new buyer of said 3 million dollar home would be subject to property taxes in the ballpark of 40k a year. I almost wish we could level the entire area south of I-280 and redevelop it into a megacity with housing for 20 million people according to Chinese urban development practices just to spite the nimbys.
Gaashk
22m ago
Yes, these takes do come across as fairly "boo outgroup." I can see them not being accepted as top level posts. Perhaps you would enjoy Kiwi Farms?
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
25m ago
and indicative of cultural trends towards shock value and dubious tolerance
Yeah, tolerance of intentionally ugly and sub-par art. It’s like the glorification of the idea of edge is all that matters rather than actually trying to draw an audience in to engage with the edge by creating a composition that’s visually appealing; the shock value doesn’t come for free. Here, though… this piece is just going through the motions of offensiveness. It’s just another shitty cosplay and nothing of value would be lost without it.
stav
27m ago
California lost a small percentage of its population, but that doesn’t mean the Bay Area has. A quick google search shows the Bay Area is still gaining in population in 2024. And the population becoming insanely wealthy like the Bay Area has because of tech and wealthy people moving in from all over the world can shift the demand curve to the right even if the population stays the same.
fartVader
32m ago
Gah, I knew I should not have used that phrase. I even paused for a good 10 seconds before choosing that word. All the others were no better (run over, taken over).
Yes, I am indeed implying that these filthy 1st gen Indian immigrants are coming to the bay area, taking tech job, stealing our american women and making good money. (sweats profusely).
I made a demonstrative wojak. You're welcome.
Tenaz
33m ago
An AI leader anything like our current models would just be a figurehead controlled by whoever writes the prompts and other input data. It would be extremely vulnerable to prompt manipulation, hacking, straight-up lying from those in power (who handles the AI, ensures its model hasn't been changed, and reports its output?), etc. Even were it not vulnerable to those things, it would have to get far more powerful to be a capable leader.
What are the benefits? Well it might be more consistent, allowing people to know exactly what their leader's plans are and act accordingly, but that's also a downside. An enemy actor can simulate their opposition and act with near-certainty. Terrorism becomes far more effective.
I'm sorry, but this is just sloppy demagoguery. If you're being priced out because supply is artificially restricted to such brutal extremes as housing in California, you don't blame the other people who are similarly being screwed over, you blame the people causing the artificial restriction! Anyone telling you otherwise is probably manipulating you.
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