> It costs a lot of money to deliver power to rural customers
Utilities (generally) have a universal service obligation.
If someone can cherry-pick just the denser areas with lower distribution costs, of course they could "undercut" the utility with the requirement to serve everyone.
(I'm not saying that PG&E couldn't be better managed. I'm saying that there's a much, much deeper policy issue at stake here.)
The more people that leave the rural areas for the cities makes it less profitable to serve the existing rural folks.
I grew up in the Bay Area, lived in 'rural' Humboldt and Placer counties, and can say I would never move back to the bay no matter how much the technocrats would desire it.
Pretty happy with my ~30k town nowhere near California TBH...
That’s fine that you want to stay put, but GP is suggesting (I think) that others shouldn’t have to subsidize your choice to live in a rural area where power service is (currently) more expensive.
It incentivizes greater development of already-developed land (meaning less infrastructure serving more people) rather than acquisition and low-yield development of new (more rural) land.
This is true in many, many places: as zoning, safety, access, and environmental rules evolve most older buildings become not buildable under current rules.
Our national housing stock is FULL of places with narrow winding stairs, lead paint, full flow toilets and shower heads, untempered glass, single pane windows, uninsulated walls or ceilings, ungrounded outlets, undersized plumbing, sketchy chimneys, springy floors, etc.
I'm surprised the number isn't closer to 80-90%, especially with the recent energy efficiency rules.
This article specifically addresses buildings that are only illegal because of zoning. They aren’t including buildings that are unsafe due to building regulations like firecodes, ADA, etc.
Yeah, but let's be clear though: the problem is bad zoning, not zoning itself. The fact that SF prohibits apartments in 76% of the city, according to the article (which, I'm assuming, excludes places like Golden Gate Park) is an abomination in itself. Literally just allow more apartment buildings, let buildings get built higher, and make a couple other tweaks for higher density housing, and zoning becomes a non-problem.
After that, all you have to deal with are the NIMBYs. Le sigh.
Zoning originally was driven by legitimate fears of tuberculosis and other diseases, and it emerged as an extension of building and safety codes which had developed in response to innumerable deadly tragedies.
Though, some of the more famous court cases that later secured broad zoning powers evinced mixed motivations clearly implicating class tensions.
I once took a Land Use seminar in law school. My professor, as well as numerous authors on the subject, always seemed incredulous and even cynical about professed concerns w/ tuberculosis and similar health concerns. But over the years since I've lost count the number of times I've come across non-legal historical writing directly or indirectly reflecting fears about tuberculosis, the prevalence of miasma theory, etc, so I no longer second guess the earnestness of those early regulations and court cases.
The powerful will always coopt laws and institutions to their advantage. That's almost the definition of power--the capability to do that. It's unavoidable. That dynamic doesn't by itself negate, post hoc, the original legitimacy of those laws and institutions. Of course, earnestness alone doesn't justify them at inception, either.
I'm literally saying it doesn't matter how they came into place. Zoning per se is irrelevant. It's inflexible and out of date zoning that's the problem. You don't have to go full on Houston and eliminate all zoning to solve this particular aspect of the problem.
The renters suffering aren’t actual current renters so much as the would-be renters who can’t actually become renters in the City because there are no units available for them to rent.
> How can someone say with a straight face that it's unjust people who don't live in a jurisdiction have no say in how it's run?
AFAICT, no one said it was unjust that nonresidents don’t vote in city elections. It was raised as a reason the policy was unlikely to be changed at the city level, because the people adversely effected aren’t voters in the city.
What collapse? In all but the most deplorable areas houses will have multiple offers within days of listing, starting even before any marketing effort. In many cases we're talking cash over the asking price. This isn't coming mainly/only from the tech sector. The number of people with FAANG salaries simply isn't sufficient to support the large number of multi-million dollar homes here. A lot of it is absentee (foreign) investors (for example, just under 20% of purchases in San Mateo as recently as 2019).
At best we might see a slight cooling in the rise in already absurd prices for property out here.
I've been reading about the "imminent" collapse of the SF housing bubble for essentially my entire adult life. Even the actual housing bubble implosion in '07 barely put a dent in it.
Current median home price in SF is $1.3M. 60% of that is $780k. You can definitely buy for that in Albany, Richmond, or El Cerrito. The nice neighborhoods in Richmond are basically in the south part of the city, anyway, which cuts down the distance. Unless you're talking about 30 minutes out in hardcore rush hour traffic, these cities will definitely fit the bill.
Daly City fits, since $1M is 77% of $1.3M -- not that I'd particularly like living in Daly City, but it is 23% less than buying in SF.
San Mateo median price is the same as SF, so, obviously, you don't look there for home bargains.
Seriously, just troll Redfin or Realtor.com sometime.
Edit: my bad re: 60%. I should be looking at $520k homes. There are definitely places in worthwhile neighborhoods in that range in Richmond. I've seen them. But, if you revise that number down to 40%, a lot of stuff opens up. So, 20-40% is a better range than 20-60%.
A more extreme example: 1/5 of all housing stock in China are vacant concrete boxes, and people are still complaining about apartment prices reaching to the sky.
Imagine cities both 20 times the size of SF, and being one fifth vacant.
To be fair, housing in China is used as a savings vehicle. They have few, if any, social safety nets available to them, and don't trust the stock market.
Housing in the US doesn't have nearly the same speculative force behind it.
Vacant != on the market. I know a few people living in china, all of whom own more apartments than they can use (in the same neighborhoods no less, so it's not even vacation homes).
They do it because it's the best way to invest their savings, so new apartments are usually spoken for before they're even built and often unoccupied until they're sold again.
Is it legal for private citizens to rent out vacant housing units in China? If so, that doesn't surprise me very much. Every landlord has more housing units than they can use.
Yes it's legal but the people I've talked to don't do it. There's a stigma of renting over buying so the rent/home value ratio is way off compared to the US. Renting out the homes wouldn't really net much profit overall and they don't want to deal with being a landlord anyway, so they let the apartments sit empty.
It won't collapse (over the long term [0]) because the underlying reason is a savings glut. There are dozens of factors that contribute to the savings glut and I don't see any signs of them going away for the next 15 years. Of those dozen factors at least one third would have to go away all at once for there to be a sustained housing crash.
[0] The 2008 recovery happened within 3 quarters...
What bubble? People will never leave San Francisco en masse. The "exodus" during the pandemic will be the greatest outflow of people from the city for the next decade.
San Francisco can build more housing to accommodate a higher population or let its poorest citizens get priced out. Either way people will not stop coming.
You zone for what you want to build, not what is there already. The later wouldn't make any sense.
The arguments generally given are to show that we're preventing building for density, pointing out NIMBYism, etc, but even if we were doing the polar opposite, the same would be true:
If you have a town that's all single family, and zoning rules pass that any and all buildings MUST be 3+ stories, then all the existing houses wouldn't be allowed under current zoning laws. The fact that they're not allowed under current zoning rules is irrelevant. The question is only if the new zoning rules are good for what you want to see or not.
Even if you allowed skyscrapers, most existing houses and buildings would be illegal because of code. The map on this particular page mentions it only looks at zoning, so it's still very valid.
But my point is saying "X amount of homes would be illegal to build" is completely pointless and just meant to rile people up. OF COURSE most buildings are illegal to build today. We don't build like we use to for a variety of reasons. Even if you forget about building code, there's also rules around minimum amount of affordable units that older buildings didn't need to follow. Zoning is a specific one and yes, it's often problematic and regressive. Let's focus on that.
The building code and fire code thing is not true. Building codes are actually very flexible. There are plenty of ways to build a building to look exactly like almost any old building and fully comply with all codes.
Look like old buildings? Sure. But actually be the same? No. Hell, the building I live in is less than 12 years old and the electric panel is no longer to code, the HVAC condensate line is no longer to code, the damn stairs are no longer to code, the freagin dryer vent is no longer to code. They were all to code when they were built.
Same is true of used cars, aircraft, boats and any number of regulated products. Change any tiny reg and all the previous stock "could not be built today". It doesn't mean much. Buildings last decades, centuries, far longer than any zoning board decision.
Aircraft are a different case than the others above. Aircraft are built to a type certificate and once it's issued so long as that type certificate is not revoked, airplanes can (in fact, must) be built today in conformance with that type certificate. Modifications to that type certificate are permitted, but they do not require full conformance with current regulations.
My 1997 airplane was built on a type certificate first issued in 1956 (under CAR-3 regulations) and amended to include my model in 1969. Many regulations changed between 1969 and 1997. Beechcraft could build one today under that type certificate, even though they couldn't get that exact type certificate newly issued today (CAR-3 has been replaced by Part 23 requirements).
Yes but the new aircraft would have to have things like modern electronics, not the pure original spec. The wings could be unchanged but the radio set would be to current standards, incorporating things like adsb transponders that didn't exist in the 50s.
The only avionics change since 1930s that would be required is radio with modern channel spacing, unless you want to fly in controlled airspace, then a transponder would be added (which would incorporate ads-b functionality, whether by integrated or add-on GPS)
Our national housing stock is FULL of places with narrow winding stairs, lead paint, full flow toilets and shower heads, untempered glass, single pane windows, uninsulated walls or ceilings, ungrounded outlets, undersized plumbing, sketchy chimneys, springy floors, etc.
My house from 1890 scored 10 for 10 on your list. I addressed about half of them over the decades, but the other half are just, "It's ok, we'd do it better if we did it over." The additions and any bits "touched" have to meet current code, but the old parts are allowed to be what they are.
I don't feel it detracts from my living experience at all. (I did take care of the "this can kill you" part of the list as well as most of the single pane windows and uninsulated areas.)
A couple of the code mandated changes are definitely negatives, as are a couple of "slightly off" construction problems which required space wasting and slightly dangerous constructs in the house instead of just accepting that the wall at the bottom of the stairs is 2 inches closer than code allows.
One of the first things I do when moving into a new place is remove all the flow restrictors on the faucets and shower heads. And I replace at least some of the LED bulbs with beautiful, soft, full-spectrum incandescent bulbs. Two quick fixes to improve your quality of life.
I can totally understand the flow thing--less flow means longer, more annoying shower.
I've found that the soft white LED bulbs are a tolerable replacement for full spectrum incandescent. I stick with LED because I'm lazy and I don't have to change them as frequently.
However, when the LED bulbs DO go out they do the flickering thing which is maddening. I'd prefer incandescent's total failure to produce light over the flickering fail mode any day of the week.
Some LED bulbs are pretty ok. But man do they have way more failure/annoyance modes. I've got can lights in most of my house, and it's much nicer if you match a room up for color temperature, but also start latency, and dimmer compatibility. With incandescent as long as the wattage was the same/close and the color type was the same, you could mix and match different manufacturers; now if one bulb goes out, I might have to replace the whole room if I don't have any like for like spares, the model may have been updated so I can't get a new bulb like the old one.
Involving SMS in the authentication process raises the bar significantly for script kiddie attacks using password databases. It also forces a larger and more detailed forensic trail for any attack.
> "The only good use cases that come to mind is if there is some particular reason for you to evade the conventional and easier systems of communication and storage."
* Nailed it *
I've long said the killer app for blockchain already exists: international money laundering and untraceable transfers.
This also happens to be the precise use case where folks want to "evade conventional and easier systems".
This claim is often made and it just makes no sense to me.
Let’s say I’m invoicing someone abroad for $100k USD.
Today they send me a wire transfer. It costs about 25 USD (fixed fee, but in this case 0.025% of the transaction, i.e. negligible) and normally completes the same day.
The payment is made in the currency of my invoice, so I’m guaranteed to receive the right amount. (Any currency exchange is the sender’s responsibility. But a lot of companies maintain accounts in various currencies, so they probably have USD at hand.)
How does crypto payment improve anything here? Exchanges just add extra steps. The extreme volatility of Bitcoin means that, by the time an exchange is processing my $100k withdrawal, it might be worth $90k. It’s not a useful currency if it goes up and down 10% in a day.
Wire transfers take multiple business days, at least in the US, at least for me every single time I do one. Individual banks may also put restrictions on your domestic wire transfers. Maybe it's different for you since you're a business, but as an individual, there's a lot of friction in sending money to my friends.
> unregulated
Depending on your perspective, this is either a feature or a bug. In my opinion, a big feature.
> you have to move the money to a real bank to use it
Well yes, that's one of the main hurdles right now caused mainly by lack of adoption. It's not a fundamental problem with the tech; in fact, it's the very kind of problem that would be solved by it going mainstream.
> How does using one of these products let me access the money faster than a wire between the sender’s USD account and mine?
This one is easy: 6 Bitcoin confirmations takes about an hour, and only a few minutes for Ethereum. Much, much faster than wire transfers.
I live in New York now, but previously I lived in Europe and UK. Bank transfers there are instant. If you want to send 20k EUR from Finland to Spain, it can be done immediately, 24/7, with minimal fees. Same in UK for GBP transactions.
So it’s perfectly possible to do this without a cryptocurrency. It takes some political will though. But then again, it also takes political will to prevent cryptocurrency exchanges from being shut down if they truly threatened central banks.
US wire transfers seem to depend entirely on goodwill of banks. I regularly send wires between Wells Fargo and Schwab, and they always complete in a few hours. Yes, it sucks that banks get away with bad service. But routing money through unregulated cryptobanks isn’t a long-term fix because the regulators will come for them.
An African central bank is suspicious of cryptocurrency. How is that somehow evidence that wire transfers are difficult?
I guess if the use case is “I want to send $1M from Iran to an American who will distribute the money to Nigerian accounts”... Then yes, that is presumably easier to execute in crypto. But there are also pretty good reasons why countries want to keep an eye on that kind of flows.
I see you've never lived in an African country. Remittances of any kind, even between neighbouring countries, is slow, painful and depending on which country on the continent you're in may not arrive at all. I haven't lived in Asia, South America or even certain parts of Europe but I imagine you may find similar conditions there as well.
As someone who has had to make international payments in the US$20-50k range semi-frequently, Bitcoin is by far the easiest way to do it.
Your story about it being easy and cheap to do via remittances or whatever is pure fiction. Any traditional mechanism is at least two of slow, expensive, and onerous.
If you don't want to get screwed on FX, you need to use a brokerage intermediary with entities in both currency domains. Direct international wire usually causes problems. So if I'm sending FX, it looks like
US Bank -> Wire -> IBKR -> Wire -> SG Bank (or whatever)
Usually this takes at least 5-9 business days end-to-end. (Wire delay, withdrawal hold, wire delay on the other end.)
A bitcoin transaction takes a few minutes, and if your counterparty doesn't want Bitcoin, there's probably an exchange with an entity in the destination country, so you only need to wait for the second wire delay.
It doesn’t make sense that you don’t want to pay FX rates but would happily accept the payment in Bitcoin whose rates fluctuate much worse.
Some banks charge up to 2% for currency conversion, but surely that’s better than the 10-15% lottery involved in Bitcoin? Unless you want to have a gambling aspect to your invoices.
I am not teetering on the edge of poverty so I would rather increase my volatility a tiny bit and stay EV neutral (or, more realistically, positive, since we’re talking about BTC) than incur a guaranteed substantial EV loss.
My suspicion is that your mental model for comparing volatility and loss is incomplete, given that you didn’t mention anything about the size of the transfer compared to your wealth, or anything else about local risk-aversion/utility convexity.
It is not pure fiction. I also send transactions semi-frequently in those ranges and have never had an issue. Sure, I have not sent them to Africa and that might be where the differences in experiences lie.
I don't work in Africa, but in SE Asia. I have had countless problems getting medium-sized (tens of kUSD) FX transfers to HK,SG,TH,etc. on a reasonable deadline.
There was once I transferred money from Bitcoin to a Bitcoin cash address accidentally. The money was lost forever. It was a weird reason due to being syncing , but yeah you could lose money just like that while most people wouldn’t be able to explain it or understand it.
That has been solved with more user friendly wallets. If you're using a Qt wallet you'd think you knew what you were doing. The Qt wallet actually even tells you not to do anything until it's done syncing so you must have closed that overlay and ignored that warning. User error, that's your fault.
This is a great example of why Bitcoin has failed: you do not build faith in a financial system by reportedly telling people that any mistake will have no way to correct it but they will be mocked for not being perfect.
I do international business payments all the time and most of them cost 0.15 EUR and are easy to both accept and send. More expensive ones (those outside the EU) can cost 3 EUR and have a exchange fee of 0.5%. And as far as I can tell prices are going down. I had to pay 0.3 EUR in 2019. Most transactions take like 2 bank days, but that is no big deal since most invoices are for 14 or 30 days.
To me it is unclear what issue there is to solve unless your country has messed up banks.
Now you are back at the "evading" use case. BTC works better if you want to send six figures to somebody in Iran. That remains a pretty small use case.
This is a great example of "it's not my preferred mode, so it must not be anyone else's."
Dictation is widely used in medical transcription.
Dictation is a killer way to write a first draft quickly, transcribe rough written notes after a meeting, etc. Also, about half of my emails are dictated, and I know I'm not the only one. It takes some time to get used to, but once you're there (like touch typing!), you can't go back.
Related: I have a HP 4000 with duplex, which is an absolute unit (beast) of a small workgroup laser printer. It's 20+yrs old, still going strong and parts are easy to get.
BUT, it's compute bound with modern print jobs, and is missing modern protocols like Bonjour.
What if someone open sourced a legacy printer? I'd love to re-brain this printer.
See about replacing the network card on the printer, or updating its firmware. Newer firmwares frequently support Bonjour, and have various security updates.
Replaceable NIC in printers are pretty great, especially when you can buy them for 1/10th of original cost on the used market.
Put a different server in front of it instead of letting it hang on the network by itself?
I have a relatively modern LaserJet that does IPP (and Bonjour) over WiFi, but it doesn't do 5GHz WiFi, it doesn't do IPv6, so I have it plugged into a server over USB instead, and the server running CUPS exposes it on the network.
I thought about that. The real issue I’m running into is page rendering time: I think the processor on it is only 50 or 80 MHz, and modern software generates some pretty elaborate print files.
I’ve been meaning to explore server-side rendering, but haven’t got that far down my todo list.
Utilities (generally) have a universal service obligation.
If someone can cherry-pick just the denser areas with lower distribution costs, of course they could "undercut" the utility with the requirement to serve everyone.
(I'm not saying that PG&E couldn't be better managed. I'm saying that there's a much, much deeper policy issue at stake here.)