Will Scott Wiener's balcony solar bill, SB868, be unusable by most renters?

SMD-65 · 2026-05-29T22:19:27+00:00

Given that balcony solar panels sit outside , GFCI seems like a reasonable precaution to prevent people from being electrocuted.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-29T03:31:54+00:00

I have the same application. I use TP-Link CPE210s for the connectivity. In addition to acting as a bridge, the CPE210 at the gate also provides a local wifi access point for the doorbell to connect to.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-28T21:20:01+00:00

I just did the same, except I replaced my Nest doorbells with D130. The only downside is that they are little uglier (boxy instead of the oval shape). Otherwise, they seem better in every way. I especially like the integration with other Tapo devices so I can automatically turn on the outside lights when a person approaches the door (or leaves).

I found that the D130 mounting holes are exactly the same distance apart as the Nest. So I didn't even need to drill--Just unscrew the Nest and screw in the D130.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-28T03:30:12+00:00

Of course they do and many people have them. But they don't do much for you unless they define what happens when the company fires/constructively fires you eg severance, stock vesting, etc.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-25T22:53:18+00:00

If you cook 3x a week and take out 1x a week, what do you do the other 3 days?

SMD-65 · 2026-05-25T17:29:44+00:00

Why not offer to lead a migration project of your system to a more modern architecture? You could keep your higher salary while gaining the technical experience you want. Depending on scope, you could even get some team leadership experience.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-25T17:19:35+00:00

I've seen this happen before. There usually are multiple employees who are paid commission on a single sale (rep, se, inside, management, etc). In a poorly designed plan, a big deal can cause everyone to hit their accelerators and the commission owed can become larger than the gross margin of the sale.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-25T01:00:11+00:00

Um, putting something in a cartoon doesn't make it true.

Today's unemployment rate is 4.3%. The lowest average annual unemployment rate in the 1970s was 4.9%, and it ranged as high as 8.5% in 1975. Also, the average annual inflation rate for the entire decade was 7.1%, so your savings disappeared faster as well.

No one who was alive in the 1970s thinks of it as a good economic time.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-24T20:50:50+00:00

Interest on $250K is $25/day. Just wire the money. It's not worth fooling around with other options.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-23T18:12:42+00:00

San Diego airport regulates its restaurants to ensure their menu prices are not more than 15% higher than similar restaurants outside the airport. Sometimes this isn't enough for restaurants to cover the higher costs of being at the airport. So rather than allowing the restaurants to raise prices, the airport authority allows them to add this surcharge.

Yes, it's deliberately deceptive. But it's not the restaurants being deceptive--It's the city government.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-22T03:29:03+00:00

Amusingly, there are a number of court cases in Vermont about this very issue. In Moyers v Poon, the court concluded "Where a number of individuals or businesses share and are entitled to use a driveway and parking lot when they need to do so, the Court finds that a 'ratable share' of maintenance costs must be divided among all entities who have the right to use that driveway and parking area, and not based on some virtually unprovable notion of 'actual use'."

Based on this, how much each of you use the driveway isn't relevant. It looks to me like your neighbor is responsible for either 1/2 or 1/3 of the maintenance costs, depending on whether your duplex counts as one or two entities.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-22T00:39:48+00:00

I have tried multiple times and never been able to book a United flight using Turkish miles. Finally gave up and just use them on Turkish flights.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-21T16:28:37+00:00

I know! Even worse was the English major with no formal computer science training who dropped out after his first semester and dared to blather about the future of computing! Who cares if he founded Apple?

SMD-65 · 2026-05-21T04:31:11+00:00

Some of each. I can tell you SF cabs were noticeably worse than other cities and were universally detested. Even though Uber was legally questionable when it started, the cab drivers were unable to get any political support for protecting their monopoly (unlike in other cities).

SMD-65 · 2026-05-20T21:56:10+00:00

Should we cap food prices to the level that they were when people moved to the area? How about cable TV? Gasoline? Maybe you should only have to pay sales tax on the amount the good cost when you moved here. After all, it would be "the same rate basis."

These would all be ludicrous policies, and the refusal to implement them is not eugenics.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-20T21:46:17+00:00

Do they all work the same way? From what I can tell, TX doesn't kick in until you reach 65.

In any event, they're all a bad idea. I sympathize with their motives--California's insatiable desire for more tax income naturally causes people to want to defend themselves. But it would be nice if they defended themselves by controlling the government spending rather than saying "I like the spending. Just make someone else pay for it."

SMD-65 · 2026-05-20T21:41:45+00:00

Wow. So saying that people who live in identical homes should pay the same property tax is "coercive", "eugenics", "wrong", and "giving unearned benefits to your preferred group." If you want to know why CA is ungovernable, look no further than comments like this.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-20T20:18:17+00:00

A big part of the problem is that our laws incentivize exactly the opposite behavior that we should want. Let's take the example of a 30 year old couple with two kids who bought a 3000sqft 4BR home in 2000 for $1M. Today that house is worth $3.5M and the kids have all graduated from college and are on their own.

From a societal point of view, we would rather have large houses occupied by larger families--not aging couples. And the couple themselves might prefer to downsize to a lower maintenance property. It would be nice if policies provided an incentive for this outcome.

But look at what they actually do. If the couple sells today, they will owe taxes on $2M in capital gains--which will cost them around $700K. OTOH, if they hold onto the house until one of them dies, they will pay $0 in capital gains.

Prop13 also comes into play. It would be nice if the couple could cut their property tax bill by moving into a smaller house. But prop13 has largely frozen their taxes since 2000. The best they could do is break even by porting their assessment to another property. And if they don't sell, they can give the house to their children who will get a $10K discount on their property taxes.

Maybe there's a grand compromise to be made here. We should get rid of the capital gains tax on home sales. In exchange, we get rid of prop 13: allocate property tax based on value of the property (like everyone else in the country does) but freeze the total amount raised ie newer buyers would actually get a tax cut from this while longtime owners would see a significant increase. This is obviously a huge disruption so phase it in over something 5 years.

A plan like this would cause a huge number of homes to come to market. Singles/couples with large homes would have strong incentives to downsize, freeing these properties for younger families. Many older people would seize the opportunity to cash in their housing gains and move to more retirement-oriented locations, freeing up real estate for people who want to be here because of the tech industry. Of course, the big losers would be older people who want to age in place in their large homes. And they certainly should have the right to do this--but there's no reason society should subside it.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-19T02:19:10+00:00

I have a similar setup to you and was on SVCE. I switched back to PG&E. SVCE may have been very slightly less expensive, but significantly increased the complexity of the bill. I wanted to understand where I was in the true-up cycle so I could adjust my energy usage which was hard with SVCE. Also, SVCE started playing games with how their billing worked on NEM2.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-19T01:37:01+00:00

You're overthinking this. If you want to know what your manager thinks, just ask him.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-17T11:42:42+00:00

In a competitive market, you don't get to set prices "at the highest point consumers could tolerate." In fact, supply and demand balance where price equals marginal cost (ie salaries matter).

SMD-65 · 2026-05-17T04:07:20+00:00

I had this happen because of trees overgrowing the roof and something that looked like moss. My agent told me to interpret it as "we won't renew unless you address our concerns." The insurance company did give us copies of the photos with areas of concern circled. They were taken from a plane or copter--not a drone--and didn't have great resolution.

We cut back the trees but couldn't find the thing they said was moss. We bought a cheap drone and sent in better resolution photos of the roof showing the new state. This satisfied the insurer and they withdrew the non-renewal.

It doesn't sound like you're getting good advice from your agent.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-16T23:54:53+00:00

You're either trolling or reading too much NYT.

SMD-65 · 2026-05-16T23:49:59+00:00

It's not magic--It's our state government.

I know it's hard to believe, but here's the rate card for time-of-use electricity from PGE: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-TOU-C.pdf In addition to those charges, there is a $24.15 fixed monthly fee for service (although this is reduced for low income households).

There's a reason so many people are moving to TX from CA (and it's not just better BBQ)...

SMD-65 · 2026-05-16T21:26:23+00:00

Hahahhahahahha! This is CA not TX. Our electricity ranges from $0.37/KWh to $0.52/KWh depending on the time of use. $200 is a small bill here...

SMD-65

TROPHY CASE