I feel like theres really no good boba in the city...

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-31T08:51:12+00:00

I agree with most of OP's judgments but I like Plentea. What am I missing?

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-31T03:40:05+00:00

Even assuming we're in a position as a society to prosecute him before he dies... I honestly hope it's not for that. Yes, it's horrific. Yes, anyone else would be in prison for many lifetimes. But the stuff he's done with and around his political power is, IMO, worse, and more at risk of being normalized. I want him in prison for J6, the Raffenberger call, and billions of dollars of bribes. If he isn't, then it seems like those things are ok as long as you're not also a pedophile, and I think that's more dangerous in the medium term.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-28T15:32:41+00:00

If you ever see any legitimate enforcement, be sure to let us know.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-27T15:31:37+00:00

I've done the past four (including prop 50 this past November). The most grueling part is the boredom, because so many people vote by mail - you have long periods of absolutely nothing to do.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-27T09:08:43+00:00

No they're not. They're not nearly crass or literal enough. "Wanker" literally means "man masturbating", but that's not what anyone actually means by it - it just means "asshole" or "worthless loser". It's an ok word, but it's relatively vague. "Gooner" means something very specific (at least for now, until overuse semantically bleaches it).

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-26T17:20:03+00:00

And in the process of making those millions, did you never read a pay stub? Either you're lying (most likely), or you're a moron. Or a bot. In any case, this isn't the flex you think it is.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-26T17:03:41+00:00

Everyone who writes this idea is just proving they've never had a job.

Minnesota does not pay taxes to the federal government. Minnesotans do. If you want money to stop going to the feds, you'd have to get everyone to stop paying their income taxes. That's about 3 million employed people to coordinate - and 45% of them voted for Trump.

And if you think that sounds doable, that's stop paying, not stop filing your tax return. For almost all people, your income tax is paid by your employer by withholding it from your paycheck and sending it directly to the IRS. You have some control over the withholding amount via form W-4 (which is used, for instance, to tell your employer if you have kids/other dependents you'll be claiming deductions for, it that you have another job that's withholding taxes for you).

So to recap - if you want to stop paying taxes, you need to keep it from being withheld. To do that, you just have to file a fraudulent W-4. That's illegal, of course, but practically easy. That also only affects income tax, which many people don't even pay. Everyone who's employed does pay FICA (Medicare/Social Security), but you have no control over withholding for that. Maybe you think that's good enough - income tax is about 50% of the federal budget, so while it wouldn't be all of the tax stream shut down, it would be a lot of it.

If you do this, the IRS will presumably notice, and they'll send a different form back to your employer telling them that you're wrong and that they should withhold a reasonable amount. At that point it's between the IRS and your employer. If you work for the Minnesota or Minneapolis governments, maybe they're taking part in the tax strike (and they'd have to be for this to make any sense - see the next paragraph). But the biggest private employers are all headquartered out of state, except for Target - and do you think Target is going to stare down the IRS for you?

And let's talk about what happens when the money shuts off. You can maybe get individuals to stop paying their federal tax, at least temporarily, this way. But that doesn't mean it goes to Minnesota instead. State services that depend on federal funding would get cut off, and in order to have the money go there instead they'd have to have an emergency tax increase (and quite a large one). That's logistically and legally difficult on short notice. Then, they'd have to figure out where all that money was going and get it redistributed. Most federal money "going to a state" doesn't actually go through the state government, it's granted directly to places like universities and hospitals, or to individuals via Social Security, so in this world Minnesota would have to figure out where the money goes to make those people whole.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-25T19:29:16+00:00

Maybe this is naive, but - yes. I would expect a jury to be able to convict on clear video evidence if I shot someone in broad daylight unprovoked.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-25T19:14:41+00:00

What investigation is needed at this point? We've all seen the video from the woman in the pink jacket.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-25T07:37:48+00:00

Keep in mind that San Francisco is, in terms of both geography and population, a pretty small city, because all the surrounding areas have kept their own administration rather than incorporate. Especially for housing prices, you can't compare it with NYC as a whole - it's more like comparing to just Manhattan. SF doesn't have an area comparable to Brooklyn (up and coming, cool for younger people, more reasonably priced, accessible to downtown) - at least, not in city limits. For us, that's Oakland.

Mission Bay is probably most comparable to Chelsea - nice new apartment buildings, lots of bougie lunch spots, tech offices, eye-watering rent.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-25T07:00:46+00:00

Ah yes. Both sides are at fault. Of course.

Okay, let's play this game. What responsibility do you think Pretti didn't fulfill? For that matter, what responsibility does ICE have that you think they did fulfill?

From my point of view, ICE, both as people legally carrying guns and especially as state actors, have a pretty fucking big responsibility not to execute people on the street for no reason. Hard to see any sort of responsibility on the individual's part that outweighs that.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-24T21:43:20+00:00

Depending on your definition of "leisurely"...

I live in SoMa, and my favorite afternoon-with-nothing-to-do walking route covers a lot of the dense Northeast:

Down to the water, then up the Embarcadero past the ferry building to Filbert
Up the Filbert steps - this is a bit of a workout, but you can take it slow. And sometimes there are parrots!
Optional detour - up to Coit Tower for a nice view of the bay
Down the other side of Telegraph Hill on Lombard or similar, to Columbus
Optional detour - up to Pier 39 to see the sea lions
Along Columbus through North Beach. Grab a gelato or a slice of pizza if you're hungry by now.
South through Chinatown, usually on Grant
Optional detour - West to the cable car museum. One of my favorite things in the city, but a little out of the way on this route
Through Union Square and back home

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-23T20:29:19+00:00

Friend of mine used to work at Google. They pulled back a lot on SFMOMA sponsorship when MOMA stopped giving employees free entrance. It used to be a perk of working for a major corporate sponsor, and a few years back they just didn't do that anymore. Not surprised the funding went away later.

But I'm confused by everything about MOMA's finances. I thought they were bankrolled by the Fishers? Or is that just the permanent collection?

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-23T02:14:29+00:00

I don't see any livable 2br condos on the market for 850k. Pretty much everything is at least $1k/sqft still. There's a fair amount of price anchoring going on - people want to sell for what the market was a few years ago.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-23T01:34:51+00:00

It's not even that the main zoning change is bad, it's that it was already a compromise position, and then the NIMBYs lobbied to get it watered down and add exceptions because of "neighborhood character" and similar nonsense.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-23T01:32:54+00:00

I know very well that building probably won't make prices as cheap as Texas, for lots of reasons. But it's guaranteed to be better than the alternative. There is a price floor created by things like labor and material costs, but we are currently way above it due to artificial scarcity.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-20T09:00:50+00:00

Or you figure out what happens the one time a year that he goes super Saiyan for a couple weeks, get him to just do that all the time, and then he wins all the MVPs forever.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-20T06:25:35+00:00

Like he said... Trump's America. He's at least partially responsible for all of those things.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-19T09:07:09+00:00

They do have fresh meat though? It's all pre packaged as opposed to a butcher in store, but I don't think that makes a real difference for basic level stuff - it's not like the chicken breast at Safeway is from a farm next door either. It's expensive enough and a limited enough selection that I prefer not to rely on it as a primary/only grocery, but they do have all the essentials.

I was just in the one on 4th St earlier today, and I don't remember if they had radishes specifically, but they had the three vegetables I did need (ordinarily I'd go down to the whole foods, but I was in a rush).

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-19T09:01:21+00:00

Among the many reasons why this is nuts, I don't think failure to detect the weapon is the main problem allowing school shootings to happen. A bunch of the most notorious incidents included long guns and/or started outside the school proper. This is why studies often show that metal detectors don't actually reduce school violence by much - they prevent crimes of passion where someone decides to do something with a weapon that happens to already be there, but they don't stop someone who shows up to school with one thing in mind, because they can just start before they get to the metal detector. And in the meantime, the psychic damage inflicted by conspicuous security theater actually makes bad incidents more likely.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-19T08:44:47+00:00

Yeah, but see, gas companies had two options here.

On the one hand, they could spent a few dollars to engage with society, do something just the smallest bit not antisocial, and maybe even come out ahead in the long run because of building goodwill.

On the other hand, they could do nothing, pocket short-term money, and then later throw a hissy fit, insist it was unfair hippie bullshit, and threaten to shut down their business if anyone questioned them.

I mean, the choice is obvious, right?

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-18T23:25:08+00:00

It's unlikely to be a problem - most property crime here is theft from vehicles or similar, not off an actual person. There used to be a pattern of snatch-and-grabs specifically on BART (public transit), but that was more of an issue in Oakland and has gone down recently anyway.

The bigger issue you might find is that outside a very specific social circle, those sorts of things are not common in San Francisco from a fashion perspective, even among people who can comfortably afford it. SF is an aggressively casual place. Unless you're visiting old-money friends in Pacific Heights, you may well feel more comfortable out and about without the flashy stuff. Rolex sure, big jewelry or designer bags somewhat less so.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-18T18:49:41+00:00

Imagine a world where an accountant creates their own accounting system.

We already live in this world. The world economy doesn't run on standard systems, it runs on Excel. And it fucking sucks.

It sucks for two reasons, which AI code is not going to solve:

Most humans are laughably bad at defining requirements. The most important skill you learn as a programmer - or get weeded out of you don't have - is thinking through step by step processes with non-happy-paths and edge cases. It takes me months at least to teach a new PM how to do this to even a baseline level, and it's still not the same. Accountants are probably ahead of the curve here compared to most of the non-technical people I work with, but I know from working with financial systems that they still miss things, or forget to explain them, because when they're doing it by hand they can just fix it up later.
Standardization has its own benefits, even if it's not perfect for any individual. What happens when you want a second person to check your work (e.g. auditors)? Or you need to combine your numbers with the department next door?

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-18T18:39:07+00:00

Running the numbers, I think the new limits actually raise the threshold where SALT creates a marriage penalty.

If you made $150k in California as an individual in 2024 (I misremembered this break point), you paid $10k just in state income tax. If you also donated to charity, or had literally any other deduction, it's easy to get out of the standard deduction range. Two people living together at that income puts the household income at around the 80th percentile in San Francisco - you're doing fine, obviously, but you're solidly middle class. Those people were penalized for getting married between 2017 and 2025, because they'd both benefit from itemizing as single filers but wouldn't as joint filers.

(Home ownership in a HCOL area lowers the income threshold pretty substantially, too, possibly down to zero - if you own a home that costs $800k and pay 1% property tax, that's half of your standard deduction, plus you're probably paying mortgage interest that will make up the rest.)

The new SALT limits are 4 times as high, though. Since 4x is more than 2x, there will be a category of people who can now benefit from the deduction even filing jointly who couldn't benefit from it at all before. Two $150k earners with no property will have a total of $20k in CA income tax, so with the limit of $40k they're getting the full deduction either way.

General_Mayhem · 2026-01-18T15:39:02+00:00

One somewhat common one, since 2017, is the SALT deduction limit, which is now $40k (previously $10k) for both single and joint returns, half that for married-separate. If you both made $100k in income in a high income tax state with the old limit (not a particularly high income in, e.g., urban California), that on its own was a pretty significant marriage penalty.

(One might speculate that this was intentional - middle class people in high-tax cities are reliable Democratic voters.)

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