I just voted in favor of California proposition 45, which weakens a huge amount of California environmental review law, specifically in order to prevent it from being weaponized by NIMBYs to block or delay housing developments. Unfortunately it looks like the measure is losing, because housing NIMBYs have a great deal of political power in California. Anyway, I would support similar legislation aimed at allowing data centers to be built for exactly the same reasons.
The homelessness problem in the bay area is mostly caused by the extremely high housing prices, which are ultimately caused by NIMBYism; and by the stupid and self-destructive empathy of the local progressive elites who think it's oppressive to use the police to force the most dysfunctional visibly homeless people living on the streets into involuntary treatment and shelter.
Neither of these phenomena are primarily the fault of the Silicon Valley tech industry; and NIMBYism in particular is largely driven by people who bought bay area houses many decades ago (my family is from the bay area, and I'm absolutely including my relatives in my parents' generation in that number - none of them work in the tech industry).
The impacts of data centers on people living nearby are basically nothing, and pretty much all anti-data-center-sentiment is driven by misinformed or willfully-delusional people. Even the idea that it's a problem that data centers "provide no local jobs" is crazy - there are all sorts of built structures that provide no local jobs because they simply have nothing to do with a business that hires employees, the idea that a data center doing much the same thing justifies making it illegal to build is crazy.
I think there's a better case that building additional housing causes an impact on people nearby than there is that data centers do - because the people who would live in that housing are a type of impact on the people who already live nearby - and I'm still extremely unsympathetic to NIMBYs because NIMBYism is the main reason my own housing costs are so high. Data center opposition is even less justified than housing opposition.
Public free education is already in tatters in many neighborhoods and has been for many decades. People already pay a lot of money to live in a neighborhood with expensive housing prices in order to price out from living there people whose children would make the local public school worse (by e.g. getting into physical fights). People sometimes pay for a private school to avoid this because it is cheaper than a house in a neighborhood with people whose children make good students to spend time in close physical proximity with.
Yes this is exactly what NIMBYs who want to prevent new housing from existing say. And preventing people in a community from having a day in what gets built in their neighborhoods is precislely what state level YIMBY laws in California are intended to do.
As other people have mentioned, it's very likely not the same people; but rather more anti-nuclear people leaving the organization or dying, and more pro-nuclear people joining.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
Yes this is an extremely bad thing. Degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less are enemies of human progress and flourishing. I do not want people like that to have any political power.
Yeah, this might well not be any individual human being changing their mind, but rather new human beings less inclined to be anti-nuclear-power now forming a critical mass within the UK Green Party.
I don't actually believe that it disproportionately affected the Navajo nation. I believe that it affected the Navajo nation some because a lot of nuclear tests were done in the remote western deserts which is where the Navajo reservation is. And I believe that some people who claimed they were advocating for Navajo interests claimed this constituted an offense against them in such a way that it justifies some kind of disparate action law. But I don't actually believe that Navajo were more affected than non-Navajo by nuclear testing; and I don't want people to be able to claim that they were in such a way that it creates any kind of legal obligation on non-Navajo.
Or it could make it worse, depending a lot on highly-specific details of the school and the student's personality. A lot of people really hated the social environment of the schools they were forced to attend as children, and carry the scars into adulthood. On the other hand, a lot of other people liked doing things with their friends at school and have fond memories of it.
Nah the actual bad people are the people calling for the tax, who are primarily motivated by populist resentment of the visibly successful, and who don't have a good sense of what the actual problems in society are or how to actually fix them.
> Personally, I would prefer to not have federal police forces and we could use state police to deport people, but both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.
A lot of states make it illegal for state police to participate in immigration enforcement. And there's a reasonable argument that immigration enforcement is properly the job of the federal government rather than the states; which then requires a federal police force to do that job.
> Imagine that you find that the water supply in your town was built illegally, because the former mayors prohibited the building that was necessary. You may think that is a travesty, you may want to enforce the law strictly in the future, and force the issue, rather than working around it. But what you will not do is tear up the water system and leave the city without water.
If you think that the former mayors are ideologically and morally committed to an illegal water supply, and will immediately stop enforcing the water supply law the second they get back in power (and also somehow the illegal water supply disproportionately helps them win elections); then it might well be a reasonable political move to tear up the water system and leave the city without water. That's one way of forcing the issue.
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take
part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!"
- Mario Savio
Yes, if the biggest political issue in that country at the time was would-be immigrants taking advantage of the slow legal process in order to stretch out their illegal stay in the country longer.
ICE should absolutely be running surveillance ops on immigrants that is their job. That is necessary to do in order to find and deport illegal immigrants, many of whom have been going out of their way to evade deportation for decades.
Housing prices aren't going up because of billionaires, they're going up because of the collective action of millions of ordinary Americans, many of whom are not rich, who own houses and resist the construction of new houses near them to meet demand. Taxing the ultra-wealthy more does basically nothing to make my own housing costs less; making it legal for a housing developer to completely ignore the protests of old retired people on a fixed income and build a new condo development next to the house the old retired person bought 30 years ago would.
Buy some solar panels yourself and use them to generate electricity in your own home? Write to your local legislators expressing support for utility scale solar panel arrays?
Private industry should be able to profit off the sun and it's disturbing that you think asserting this is a dunk. Steinbeck's temporarily embarrassed capitalists quote (not "millionaires", that is a misquote of what he actually wrote in 'A Primer on the 30s' for Esquire magazine in 1960) was referring to well-off liberals involved in socialist activism in the 30s and having a naive, self-interested understanding of what policies would actually help the proletariat. The government often can't be trusted to run efficiently because the government is insulated from having to actually make a profit delivering services people want to pay for, and is often being used for other poltical ends by people who do not care about wasting taxpayer money. Communal infrastructure is often not something everyone benefits from because infrastructure that is legally required to serve everyone by law often has a bunch of compromises that make it practically unusuable for some group of people who can't do anything to change it because they are a numerical minority.
In particular, a lot of people say this about major social media platforms when they are censoring content the speaker things is genuinely bad; and then call for government regulation of those platforms in order to prevent them from censoring content the speaker likes and thinks is important. And even if the government did just nationalize Facebook, the fact that it's no longer a private company doesn't remove the political component of the decision - people argue and vote on what they want the government to do, and then sometimes a court rules that it's unconstitutional for the democratically-elected government to do the thing it wants to do.
Why should I believe your claim that AfD content is getting pushed on YouTube? Isn't it more likely that you personally hate AfD and so you find it salient and enraging whenever you see any AfD content at all yourself, regardless of exactly how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works on your account or whether they treat AfD particularly differently than any other political content? Are you actually measuring this?
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
No, we should put them in jail in order to keep them off the subway in the moment as well as to disincentivize other people who are considering fare-jumping. Murder is not the only additional crime an antisocial person who is already committing the crime of fare-jumping might commit, that affects the well-being of everyone else using public transit.
He might've been deterred from committing the murder if he wasn't on the train at all but was instead in jail because he got immediately arrested by the cops for fare-jumping. Also murder isn't the only crime I don't want to happen on transit, that is most likely to be committed by someone who is already breaking the law against fare-jumping to be there at all.
People sleeping in their own private tents on public land in urban areas is as much of a problem as people sleeping on public transit is. I want protectors of law and order to catch and arrest people sleeping in tents in public parks just as much as I want them to do so for people using public transportation as shelter. If there isn't enough law enforcement resources to do both and it's necessary to prioritize, then I would reluctantly say to prioritize public transit, simply because public transit is more enclosed and so it's harder to quickly get away from people who are a threat on it. But ideally we'd do both.
We don't actually have the technology to build housing on the cheap for the most marginalized people in society, who would trash that housing without intensive and expensive and very often coercive support from some kind of social worker. One of the biggest reasons many homeless people avoid the homeless shelters that do exist for the most distressed people in our society, is because the other most distressed people in our society living in the same shelter are prone to stealing from them or physically harming them. And another reason is that they want to irresponsibly use drugs in a way that makes them a potential threat to others and so is banned by the shelter.
Fare jumpers absolutely need jail - the sort of person who jumps the faregate is also much more likely than the average person to be a nuisance or a violent threat to other people on public transit. I think it's more important to jail fare jumpers than a lot of other types of petty criminal, because enclosed public transit is one of the most important areas in a city to control crime; people need to feel safe on public transit in order to want to use it to get around. The sort of person who fare-jumps is extremely often homeless, mentally-ill, or a gang member - not someone who is capable of being compelled to do a minor chore for the station without way more coercive effort than the station employees can be expected to provide. The right response to fare-jumpers is to have police - uniformed specialists in using violence or the threat of violence to enforce public order - physically remove them from the public transit station and keep them in a locked room under guard where they can't harm someone else.
Is it incorrect that immigrants being kicked out (or being disincentivized to come to begin with or remain) has decreased demand for housing in the US, causing house prices to fall?