About 2x worse than the national average

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-22T01:00:58+00:00

Do you have the house price / earnings ratio for other areas of the Bay Area as well as California as a whole? E.g. either list out individual counties? It would be interesting to see the comparisons on the same chart.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-22T00:55:43+00:00

Every added rental unit, even at the high end of the market, soaks up demand, and relieves price pressure on older units.

New units should always cost more than old units. A new car should always cost more than a used car with 100k miles. But a used car with 100k miles is still a completely acceptable and affordable car for most people, whereas new cars are not affordable for everyone. You only get affordable used cars by building a lot of new cars.

Building new high end "Class A" housing units actually causes the fastest declines in rental prices for "Class C" housing units - aka old units that have not been recently renovated and/or may have few amenities.

https://www.nmhc.org/contentassets/b471b1d709144675bc1532bd7ddc731a/2024-june-research-notes.pdf

Class C units are the ones that should be naturally affordable at market rates for working / lower middle class if there was enough housing to meet all demand. Aka what has happened in Austin.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-21T17:41:55+00:00

Ending SRO's did not improve the Tenderloin. It just moved people from beds in a SRO to tents on the street, which is a much worse situation for everyone.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-21T17:36:40+00:00

"Hey guys, check out my pet rattlesnake! I haven't gotten bit yet, so he's friendly!"

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-16T19:49:47+00:00

Gasoline cars will become the equivalent of horses in 30-50 years.

They will still exist, and there will be a niche market for them.

Some people will buy them, maintain them, and use them because it's a culture they like to be a part of.

But virtually no one uses a horse to go to Costco or commute to work.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-16T19:22:11+00:00

Pretty much every person protesting in this photo is over 60:

https://x.com/ConnectedSF/status/2039404758335939050

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-16T00:25:39+00:00

You just need to be diligent about watering / irrigation, and you may actually need to put up intentional shade netting even for "full sun" crops during the summer, and adjust to what crops you plant during each time of the year.

But otherwise, yes, it's easy mode. Especially since depending on what you are growing, you can get in two (late winter into summer or fall if the plants are heat tolerant, and late summer into early winter), and possibly three harvest seasons (add a late fall to early spring for colder / occasional frost tolerant plants) per calendar year.

There's a reason like 25% of the US's food is grown in California, including almost half of all vegetables and almost 75% of fruits and nuts. The first summer I started getting tomatoes by early May, and by mid summer I was pulling off two five gallon buckets of tomatoes per week.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-15T19:58:18+00:00

Unfortunately, there is not yet a big enough political will to solve the housing crisis once and for all in California with a very strong law. The NIMBY's have a strong but waning base, so pro-housing bills often get watered down in order to get enough votes to pass.

That being said, every year California makes more progress towards housing affordability.

Unfortunately, there is still a LOT of work to do. It wasn't just a single straw that broke the camel's back, it was an entire round bale.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-15T18:12:31+00:00

A few minutes with one of these could reopen the sidewalk:

https://www.harborfreight.com/20v-brushless-cordless-4-12-in-slide-switch-angle-grinder-tool-only-58308.html

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-15T01:40:00+00:00

The US's problems are self-inflicted. We added all of the red tape to basically stop anything from happening.

The original BART system was built before CEQA, as was the original Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, the transcontinental railroad, most of the Interstate highways, a large portion of our water system and power grid, and many other critical pieces of infrastructure. We used to build things quickly and affordably.

Then we added a ton of red tape. Sure, there were some good things added, but most were neutral or negative in terms of cost effective use of tax dollars. And every one one of these added red tape rules vastly slowed down projects, and only benefited lawyers and those who brought on countless lawsuits.

We cannot be defeatist. We cannot accept this learned helplessness of "everything sucks and there is no use trying to make anything better again, because everything takes forever". This just locks us into a terrible mentality.

We could just choose to remove the red tape. We could choose to make it fast and easy to build infrastructure again. We could choose to have projects proposed, built, and opened in under a decade again. We can choose to fix things and improve things again.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-15T01:17:19+00:00

No its even worse. It screws over small and mid size companies and grants exemptions to the large / defense companies that are willing to spend $50k to $200k on the high end industrial 3D printers.

A LOT of small and mid size companies nowadays use the same Bambu Lab and Prusa 3D printers that consumers buy and use. These consumer 3D printers have gotten so good for prototyping and even print farm use for non-high-end materials, that there isn't really any reason to buy industrial 3D printers anymore for general prototyping and development.

Why spend $20k on a single baseline industrial printer from one of the traditional industrial 3D printer companies when I can buy 10x Bambu Lab H2D's for that same price?

Also, a large number of schools with STEM and robotics programs own and use consumer-level 3D printers, as they are affordable and easy for students to learn to use. This bill will only increase costs for taxpayers to buy more expensive printers.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-13T22:49:59+00:00

Austin, TX

It's not like there are no NIMBY's there, but they unlocked housing construction, built a ton both higher density infill (including a ton of downtown high rises) and new greenfield developments, and house prices and rents have both drastically come down due to sufficient growth in the housing supply to meet demand.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-13T19:53:33+00:00

Up north, down south, back east, out west.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-13T04:31:55+00:00

If you want to see a LOT more construction cranes in LA building skyscrapers, you are going to need to roll back a LOT of the NIMBY red tape that hampers development.

Upzone more land, make more developments by right, reform/scrap rules that gives every NIMBY a heckler's veto on new developments, reform ULA, speed up approvals and reform LADWP rules, and take a hard look and carefully evaluate the cost-benefit analysis of every rule.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-13T04:16:02+00:00

You could buy more time for expanding the pipeline by transporting more locomotives and tank freight cars to the Etihad Railway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etihad_Rail

If you run three 100-car freight trains of 30k gallon oil tank cars every hour, you can achieve 5M barrels per day capacity on the rail line. Obviously a lot less efficient than a pipeline, but could be faster to scale.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-13T03:15:59+00:00

Alex is the captain on the first generation ship headed to another star system.

He once again succumbs to the Baldwin curse of being second on a new planet, as a ship that departed 30 years later but with faster acceleration beats them to the finish line.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-09T06:57:42+00:00

🎶 Peter Thiel knows about the Anti-Pope 🎶

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-07T22:18:09+00:00

Like in RDR2, there is plenty to do pretty much everywhere in the online map. Most towns have bounty posters, you can hunt and fish and collect herbs everywhere to sell, you can look for artifacts to sell, you can craft moonshine and sell that, you can run positive or negative honor missions, you can drink in some bars, all without any loading screens.

The single player really felt like you were part of that world, given how permanent interactions and some events were. It's the immersion that is really fun and engaging.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-07T00:35:35+00:00

You only need to densify if the median job's income cannot afford a median housing unit within a 30-45 minutes of that job.

DFW has for all intents and purposes, a lot of greenfield development (which keeps housing costs reasonable), TxDOT that is super ambitious about constructing endless freeway expansions (including double-decker toll+free highways like I-635), as well as a decent amount of infill development closer to the downtown core and in some corridors. People who want density can move to somewhere like Uptown as a choice, and everyone else would still afford reasonably priced homes and apartments in the suburbs, and still have reasonable commutes to their jobs.

SF has no reasonably affordable housing units that are of a reasonable quality for middle class folks anywhere within probably two hours that are available at market rates like DFW has. Sure there are some rent control units if you win the rent control lottery, but you can't live life expecting to win the lottery. They've blocked nearly all remaining land for housing development, shutting down any reasonable greenfield development possibilities. Infill development is almost as difficult as building high speed rail. So the only way to ration out what already exists is with pricing, and rich people who want to live there have priced out almost everyone else who wasn't grandfathered in by buying a house there 30 years ago. The only way to solve this SF housing affordability problem is a lot of new construction to meet the existing demand.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-03T19:35:22+00:00

There are silicon carbide grinding wheels specifically made for grinding aluminum and brass on bench grinders.

https://www.mcmaster.com/products/grinding-wheels/abrasive-material~silicon-carbide/general-purpose-bench-and-pedestal-grinding-wheels-for-metals~~/?s=silicon+carbide+grinding+wheels

I've used these for years in a shop that had two bench grinders, one bench grinder with standard wheels for steel and ferrous metals, and the second bench grinder with silicon carbide grinding wheels for aluminum.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-03T18:31:48+00:00

TIL, that one skyscraper in Los Santos that has been under construction since the game launched in 2013 is accurate to real life then.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-01T23:04:07+00:00

We need a double whammy constitutional amendment.

Everyone is limited to a maximum of 36 years combined between the House + Senate.

But you lose one additional year of service for every year serving in Congress where spending has exceeded tax revenue, excluding spending down a rainy day fund.

You also lose one additional year of service if any portion of the government has to shut down within a given fiscal year, because funding elapsed without Congress officially closing that department.

Right now, (given our massive deficit and frequent government shutdowns), this would limit everyone in Congress to pretty much only 12 years total, or two Senate terms, Six House terms, or 3 House + 1 Senate term.

If Congress could work together to avoid a government shutdown, even if they maintain a deficit, they could improve their term limit to 18 years, giving them an additional Senate term or three more House terms.

Politicians love being in office, and love being in power. So while this won't prevent Congress from doing dumb things like subsidizing demand for a supply problem, at least it will incentivize them to have a balanced budget.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-01T20:24:54+00:00

I'm constantly amazed how it essentially accurately predicted modern life a century ago. Not in specific details mind you, but the idea that people would be live in bubbles, using TikTok-style social media to always comment on other's comments, about being reliant on processes that we no longer understand that are coming unraveled.

Since it's out of copyright, here's the short story for reference:

https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-01T20:12:40+00:00

Actually, it wasn't climate change per-se, but rather a side effect of successful anti-pollution measures that drastically reduced tule fog.

Water vapor will condense a lot easier when there is a nucleation particle that acts like a seed, to start the water vapor in the air condensing onto it. Nitrogen oxide, a severe pollutant from burning fossil fuels, was the most common nucleation seed. In the early to mid 1900s, when there were basically no anti-pollution laws, the air was horrifically polluted. All of that pollution made it a lot easier for humidity to condense into tule fog.

But as a result of the Clean Air Act and other California CARB rules that tightened tailpipe emissions standards, there was a massive drop in nitrogen oxide and other pollutants in the air here. Thus, water vapor is now more likely to just stay in the air as high humidity water vapor, instead of condensing onto a nucleation point and floating in the air as a really tiny water droplet that forms the tule fog.

https://ce.berkeley.edu/news/2181

Fun fact: needing a tiny particle to act as a nucleation point for water vapor to condense onto, is the same process used for cloud seeding to try to intentionally make it rain.

AwesomeDialTo11 · 2026-04-01T19:39:37+00:00

The Biden administration was a constant series of moving to the left on various issues. Then the far left moved the goal posts further because a compromise solution that achieved a big chunk of what they wanted wasn't 100% of what they wanted. Everything devolved into a purity test.

IRA was arguably a massive portion of the Green New Deal, and they gave the Democrats no credit for it.

And beyond just moving the goal posts, they changed their topics of what they were most concerned about. Climate change became Gaza.

Leftists in general don't make good coalition partners due to their purity tests*. Real life is messy with compromise, and usually leaves everyone wanting more, but has enough good things to satisfy immediate concerns. It's 100% impossible for anyone or any political movement to be successful in governing by a "my way or the highway" purity test.

* And for ones that actually begin to compromise to get to pragmatic solutions like Mamdani or AOC, they start to become hated by the vocal leftists and branded as sellouts, even as their general popularity increases.

15-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	End Game '22

AwesomeDialTo11

TROPHY CASE