buss

You're right that a LVT would help, but the existing regulations prevent people from actually redeveloping their land into more productive uses. When it's illegal to build apartments in over 70% of San Francisco, that's the first and lowest hanging fruit to pick.

You're right about everything. A LVT would go a long way to solving our problems, but it must also be paired with dramatic zoning reform to actually allow land to be redeveloped into a higher use. Doing that is illegal in the vast majority of San Francisco and the Bay Area at large.

Opposition to Prop 13 is building, and I think we will see meaningful reform within 10 years. Hopefully full repeal within 20. But this is an even bigger political lift than fixing our broken Bay Area governments.

If you haven't already, check out http://thecommonssf.org/, an org based in SF that's centered around LVT.

See other discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20779868

I mean... investment in productive activity is the opposite of rentier capitalism.

Yup, this is correct. NYC is very far from anything resembling a "deregulated" market.

The agglomerative effects of cities are real and extremely positive, both in terms of technological innovation and cultural progress. Cities tend towards liberalism and breed new ideas. Advocating that we collectively abandon the Bay Area and try again someplace new would result in a massive destruction of wealth and human potential.

There is no universe where bootstrapping a brand new region with world class universities and infrastructure is cheaper than just fixing a broken bureaucracy.

> And the solution? It's just build more houses, so the rents go down

Right, but the problem is that it's largely illegal to actually build more houses in San Francisco.

Ah, shoot. I knew I forgot something.

I'm advocating that tech, as a collection of individuals, get involved in the social structures that can influence policy and politics. We've sat on the sidelines getting blamed for things for too long.

It absolutely has been outside the realm of acceptable political discourse. Jane Kim, who ran for mayor in 2018, said "The only way to make San Francisco more affordable is not by building a lot more market rate housing as possible, it’s by building as much Affordable and middle-income housing as possible." https://medium.com/@sbuss/no-on-kim-58ef07cf459a#1379

We still have electeds who say it's not a shortage, but an affordability problem. They literally do not believe that building more market rate housing will help.

We almost passed a development moratorium in the Mission in 2015. Public opinion has swung fast in our direction.

We have plenty of land; the problem is the regulations that make it illegal to build apartments in over 70% of the city. Check out http://sfzoning.com

This isn't a solution. You're misattributing the effect with the cause.

Developers aren't building more _now_ because it's illegal in the majority of the city, and where it _is_ legal, your permits take about four years to get. By the time you're approved to build, the market has moved out from under you.

We have to change the laws that make building illegal, and to do that we have to change the politicians.

Most of SF has a 45 foot height limit :\

Hey all, I wrote this! Feel free to email me at steven.buss@gmail.com with any questions or comments. Also if you have a few bucks to spare for my campaign, please donate at https://buss2020.org/donate

I was just in San Diego for GopherCon and, boy, what a beautiful place. This change will ensure San Diego can keep growing and prospering, meanwhile San Francisco continues to stand athwart history yelling STOP!

For legalizing construction of new apartments, the strategy is multi-pronged:

1) ballot props to make development by-right (must be a ballot prop rather than legislation because the problems are in the city charter which can only be changed by ballot prop)

2) adjust fees and inclusionary zoning requirements to be realistic. Right now the inclusionary zoning requirement is more than the market can bear, so development is drying up.

3) rezone all of SF to allow greater densities and heights. This is a combination of legislation and ballot props. Rezoning by ballot allows skipping a years/decade long environmental review.

4) CEQA and other environmental regulation reform. CEQA was designed in the 70s to preserve open space, it now encourages sprawl because nobody can sue you with CEQA if your new development doesn't have existing neighbors. And CEQA considers decreased traffic speeds as a negative impact, so any new development in a city can be stopped due to adding traffic.

5) eliminate parking minimums

6) reform or eliminate discretionary review, which allows any person to stop a project for years

7) change the scope of authority of the planning commission. It has dictatorial power over what gets built, does not reflect the demographics of the city, and is unelected. They should not have as much power as they do. More details in my article: https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-of-the-san-...

There are more policy directions, but this is just off the top of my head.

If we get enough YIMBYs and pro-reform Democrats on the DCCC, then the type of candidate the Democratic party supports will fundamentally change. The DCCC on my side of the city (East side) has 14 seats, so we have to run and elect as many pro-growth people as possible.

Enacting this vision will take years of diligent hard work, but that's what I'm signing up for.

Overly restrictive land use policies is one of the reasons I'm running for DCCC in San Francisco. The DCCC chooses who the "official" Democrat is in a race, which almost always translates into that person winning their race. The DCCC is controlled by NIMBYs, which is why we only elect NIMBY politicians. If you want this to change, we have to get pro-growth people on the SF DCCC.

https://buss2020.org for some details, and https://buss2020.org/donate if you want to chip in!

Absolutely. A friend of mine founded a company to produce carbon-net-zero biodegradable plastics. Their seed round went well, and making great progress, and are currently raising a series A. If anyone's interested in learning more, email me steven.buss@gmail.com.

A speculator necessarily performs no capital improvement, so developers are by definition not speculators. They're turning an unproductive piece of land into a useful commodity. Calling productive activity, that people apparently value, does a disservice to creators everywhere and entrenches NIMBY attitudes.

I think the green-ness relates more to the fact that growing timber captures carbon dioxide, while producing steel and concrete emit carbon dioxide. The production of the glue, and the processes to glue the timber together certainly emit CO2, but nothing near the emissions of a steel foundry.

It's all engineered lumber. "This high-rise is being built using glulam, CLT, and Metsä Wood’s Kerto® LVL (laminated veneer lumber)"

glulam = glued laminated timber AKA pieces of regular timber stacked & glued together CLT = cross-laminated timber AKA glulam but instead of stacking the lumber, you lay it out in perpendicular layers and glue it together LVL = laminated veneer lumber is like the above, but made like plywood out of wood bits instead of solid lumber, with a hardwood veneer on the outside

The wood is also treated to be fire, moisture, and insect resistant

This article is claiming that globalism and free trade are responsible for all the world's ills, when in fact these two principles have resulted in the longest period of peace and prosperity the world has ever known. Millions of people have been risen out of poverty due to global flows of capital, goods, and people.

I posit that the author is blindly blaming all of society's ills on a scary word, and that the author is merely a nationalist seeking to advance their own interests above the rest of the people on the planet.

This sentence is particularly absurd: "it is reflected in the neoliberal hostility towards the poor, the weak, the destitute, the ' losers', expressed in its denial or abnegation of responsibility for their plight or welfare, and its project of dismantling the welfare or providential state." Neoliberalism, in fact, seeks to expand parts of the welfare state via policies like universal basic income and to help the poor, weak, and destitute thrive. It also seeks to regulate markets well, so that they serve the best interests of society while incentivizing growth and progress.

Here's what neoliberalism is actually about (via https://neoliberalproject.org/about-us/):

* We believe in free markets, and the power of markets to alleviate poverty and generate unparalleled economic growth

* We believe in strong institutions, which are the precursor to unparalleled economic growth

* We believe in intelligent regulation and redistribution - the state has a role to play in regulating markets where they may fail, and ensuring the gains from free markets are widely shared.

* We believe in the classical liberal freedoms - freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly, etc.

* We believe that all people, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. have equal rights and deserve agency.

* We stand for the creation of a new, revitalized liberalism - neoliberalism - that can guard the open society and guide it into a prosperous future.

If that sounds good to you, and you live in the Bay Area, sign up to be notified of our next meetup: https://neoliberalproject.org/san-francisco-neoliberals-regi...

I'm mostly aphantasic: I get brief flashes of images, completely out of my control, and I can't hold onto them; images appear and disappear in a split second. After learning about aphantasia and the very surprising reality that some people can just see whatever they want in their head I started practicing. I've only gotten slightly better in about two years of practice. Best results are as I'm falling asleep, but I still cannot force an image to appear, I just try to hang on to whatever shows up, though it still doesn't last longer than a couple seconds. So this doesn't seem like something one can meaningfully improve through practice :/

Ah, yeah, looks like you have to activate billing. You'll be solidly within the free tier, though, so you won't be charged.

Eh, not exactly supersede, but the runtimes are definitely slowly converging. It's a goal of mine to make them easy to switch between -- sometimes you'll want flex because you need a VM, most times you wont. But your code should be easily portable between them. With this release, they are nearly identical already.

So two of the solutions are flex and go1.11 on standard. Is the third solution the older runtime versions (eg 1.9 and earlier)? If so, then there's really just two solutions, since 1.11 replaces 1.9 on standard.

Also, the NYTimes just published their project which integrates with HashiCorp's Vault: https://open.nytimes.com/open-source-simplifying-serverless-...

I don't think I can say much more than: technical choices that required a different path to fetch resources from the broader internet.

You can use net/http to fetch URLs now :)

Glad you're enjoying both Go and GAE!

I mean running a GRPC server, yeah. It's a limitation of our networking stack which we're working on fixing.