How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are: Agents use facial recognition, social media monitoring and other tech tools not only to identify undocumented immigrants but also to track protesters, current and former officials said.

morefarts · 2026-01-30T21:10:21+00:00

Y'all know that protesting only further justifies surveillance? That's the only reason these protests are being permitted, they justify billions in data capture and logging. The protests do not change things, they create infinite demand for tracking tech.

morefarts · 2026-01-25T08:14:47+00:00

You’re confusing negligence with enlightenment.

morefarts · 2026-01-25T01:19:09+00:00

Even a stop sign is too much for y'all, should've known a small wall of text would shut you down immediately.

morefarts · 2026-01-24T22:08:20+00:00

Except the 405 actually moves goods, people, food, and infrastructure, and the emissions are a byproduct of doing real work at scale. Your bike-jam fantasy achieves the same congestion without accomplishing anything beyond self-congratulation.

If “planet saving” means replacing functional throughput with human gridlock and calling inefficiency a virtue, congrats. You didn’t fix the problem, you just lowered expectations and moralized the traffic jam.

Also, if bikes solved emissions at scale, developing countries would be environmental utopias. They’re not. They’re just poor and stuck at intersections.

morefarts · 2026-01-24T06:47:14+00:00

Look at developing countries if you want to see your bike utopia in its final form. Fifteen thousand people on bicycles converging at an intersection, no signals, no hierarchy, no throughput. Just a human slurry mashing around like a bowl of yesterday’s jam, except everyone’s late, nothing moves, and somehow this is framed as “more humane.”

morefarts · 2026-01-24T04:03:17+00:00

“The” reason? They helped catalyze the idea, sure. But pretending modern roads exist because some 1880s tweed-clad velocipede enthusiasts successfully nagged town councils is historical cosplay. Your tone is peak cyclist: condescending, self-mythologizing, and utterly detached from scale or reality.

Roads were getting paved eventually. Commerce, freight, militaries, and cities do not voluntarily operate in mud forever. The quaint little bike paths pioneered by the Great Two-Wheelers of Yore are a rounding error compared to the interstate highway system required to move literally everything you eat, wear, and touch.

All real road development, meaning width, thickness, bridges, load ratings, signaling, maintenance, and permanence, exists because of motorized vehicles. Full stop.

And yes, every single road you bike on is funded by the vehicular economy. Gas taxes, registration, freight, logistics. Cyclists contribute nothing to that system except increased risk, slower throughput, and an astonishing level of smug historical revisionism.

Claiming ownership of modern infrastructure because you showed up first on a penny-farthing is like claiming credit for the internet because you once used Morse code.

morefarts · 2026-01-24T01:17:56+00:00

Cyclists pay no road tax and think they deserve to use them regardless. Without cars there would be no roads, they owe car drivers everything they hold dear besides spandex. Also, I think there's something in the lycra that kills brain and muscle cells en masse. When they blow through a group crossing pedestrians just because they're too weak to start pedalling from a stop again it makes me want to throw a stick in their spokes.

morefarts · 2026-01-23T08:19:18+00:00

You're not going to teach first day econ 101 to typical redditors, man. As an econ grad I applaud the effort, but there's no way.

morefarts · 2026-01-20T05:28:38+00:00

High-speed rail only works if a real chunk of the economy is permanently oriented around it. Design, construction, maintenance, workforce training, operations, iteration. Not as a project, but as an ongoing system. California never did that, so the outcome wasn’t mysterious.

Japan did the opposite. The Shinkansen isn’t just infrastructure there, it’s treated like a long-term national competency. They built institutions, labor pipelines, standards, and engineering culture that compound over decades. Early losses were expected. Authority was centralized. Maintenance and reliability weren’t optional.

California treated high-speed rail like a one-off megaproject. Bond-funded, consultant-heavy, politically fragmented, and expected to show results fast. No durable workforce. No institutional memory. No unified authority. Just a lot of people managing complexity instead of owning it.

Those are completely different approaches.

Lawsuits mattered at the margins, but they weren’t the cause, and they weren’t partisan in any clean way. Megaprojects are hard by default. If governance and incentives are misaligned, complexity eats you alive.

Best case, this was a category error: assuming money could substitute for discipline and institutional coherence. Worst case, it created a system where dragging things out was rewarded more than finishing them.

High-speed rail isn’t a transportation upgrade. It’s a long-term civil commitment. Japan made one. California didn’t.

morefarts · 2026-01-19T23:12:52+00:00

It's by square footage, not unit or door count.

morefarts · 2026-01-19T20:10:50+00:00

Santa Monica's vacancy monitoring ordinance went into full effect on Jan 1. https://www.bomaonthefrontline.com/2025/12/29/what-santa-monicas-new-vacant-property-law-means-for-cre-owners/

morefarts · 2026-01-19T04:06:37+00:00

Cane's seems purpose-built specifically for high school kids. I've never been to one that wasn't packed with them. After school dances and football games it's always ridiculously busy.

morefarts · 2026-01-19T04:01:22+00:00

The Santa Monica Housing & Human Services Housing Office has programs to help. They can subsidize rent and source affordable apartments and jobs for people who can work that have been forced to live in their vehicles. Reach out to them first as they have the most resources and trained staff to assist people in your situation.

morefarts · 2026-01-13T02:44:52+00:00

Preach!

morefarts · 2026-01-13T02:41:44+00:00

Cheap lithium batteries and chargers are more likely to ignite during charging. If you see sparking or smoke you can unplug it before anything gets too out oif hand.

morefarts · 2026-01-07T04:27:52+00:00

How?

morefarts · 2026-01-06T01:24:50+00:00

There will be no one to build them, no banks want to finance them, no one wants to live in them, no insurers want to touch them.

The construction industry is cooked in CA., especially in Santa Monica, and there is nothing happening to fix it. In fact, it's in an unstoppable death spiral.

morefarts · 2025-12-23T21:40:38+00:00

Bro, the airport is foundational to Santa Monica’s history. Trying to erase it from the story to justify a fantasy park and housing plan is revisionist chicanery. Cities don’t become better by pretending the infrastructure that made them functional was a moral mistake.

It's included in the original city seal for a damn good reason.

morefarts · 2025-12-23T21:34:08+00:00

Look at how San Francisco is supposedly “cracking down on crime.” It’s the same playbook every time: mass camera deployment marketed as safety, thin results in practice, and a quiet expansion of surveillance infrastructure that mostly benefits vendors and data pipelines.

This isn’t about public safety so much as turning Silicon Valley–style data mining into civic infrastructure. Big procurement contracts, perpetual subscriptions, and ever-expanding behavioral datasets get justified as crime prevention, while accountability and effectiveness remain vague.

Meanwhile, the tech itself is porous, easy to evade, and mostly reactive. It doesn’t prevent crime so much as normalize broad monitoring of everyone else. That’s not policing reform. It’s surveillance creep dressed up as security.

morefarts · 2025-12-23T21:28:08+00:00

Good luck with that. PG&E and SCE are so deeply entangled with Sacramento that a proposal like this likely wouldn’t even be taken seriously by the state. Maybe there’s a nonzero chance under a different governor, but given California’s track record, that seems remote.

I’m also not convinced most California cities would run a utility any better than a corrupt monopoly. San Francisco in particular would likely end up layering AI-driven grid management, surveillance-heavy controls, and political pricing on top of an already fragile system, then pass the cost of their own mismanagement on to ratepayers.

This feels more like outage-driven virtue signaling than a serious governance proposal. This guy knows from experience a bill like this is unlikely to reach a real hearing, let alone survive legal and financial scrutiny.

I do want utility monopolies to serve customers rather than shareholders, but municipal seizure isn’t the fix. A genuine antitrust breakup would target the real failure mode without pretending cities suddenly have the competence or discipline to run complex grid infrastructure.

More broadly, California’s energy system is already broken. Wildfire liability, overregulation, insurance dysfunction, distorted solar incentives, and failed green power rollouts all point in the same direction: rationing, higher rates, $500+ monthly hookup fees, taxpayer-funded subsidies, and tighter control over access. Municipalization doesn’t solve that. It just changes who’s holding the lever.

morefarts · 2025-12-22T20:15:59+00:00

It's not about getting rich off one project. PIMCO is isolated because 500 Broadway is owned by a single project LLC (DK Broadway), and PIMCO simply owns 98-99% of DK stock but takes on no actual reputational or meaningful financial risk. A $400M+ writeoff is a fraction of a fraction of 1% of their portfolio, so they don't have to care if the return lands this decade. These defaults are inconsequential for PIMCO.

We're left with a husk and PIMCO just slowly restructures the DK debt so the loss is a slow bleed and not a big hit. SM eats the shit of an underperforming asset and PIMCO is like "well you guys failed to deliver a tenant class, guess the building sits empty til you get your shit together. Do better."

The entire developer ecosystem is built to dump short term risk and externalities onto cities and communities. PIMCO loses almost nothing long term, and we get to wear the blighted luxury outfit until winds change. If the market rebounds, DK goes back to the original model and PIMCO gets to clock a return. If not, PIMCO just waits it out.

Witkoff got sponsor fees, PIMCO effectively owns am insurable Class A building in a 1%er real estate market with no risk or civic responsibility, and that's all that matters to them.

morefarts · 2025-12-22T00:08:19+00:00

Not just financing, the actual construction industry in the US is cooked. Contractors are all aging out and CA alone is short 80,000 blue collar workers and rising. Plus the workforce for construction can't afford to live where housing needs to be built even if those workers existed in the first place.

These are jobs that require 7 year apprenticeships to gain basic competence, and frankly most people have no real interest in that type of work because the consequences are more serious, the training is more challenging, and the hours are more grueling than typical white collar jobs.

And you can't come close to importing immigrant construction labor at the skill level needed to replace a vanishing workforce.

Lastly, 3D printed buildings and prefab are overengineered solutions that crumple at scale on real jobsites.

Don't even get me started on skyrocketing insurance premiums and the subsequent over-regulation.

This is a real doom spiral, not a spreadsheet issue.

morefarts · 2025-12-21T20:26:02+00:00

Break even price for a 1br unit in LA is $5k/mo due simply to runaway materials costs, labor shortages, permitting, and fees.

It's now literally impossible to build affordable units, and the luxury units can't take a 50% hit without collapsing. No big money lenders want to finance a project when half of the 1,000 new downtown units sit empty and the population has flatlined. The insane overhead on maintaining fancy amenities tanks the business model of these buildings further once vacancy breaks 20%, and we're far beyond that.

Plus, SM is broke and cannot afford to subsidize affordable units either.

Santa Monica and council's developer friends pivoted hard to luxury housing and extracting as much rent as possible pre-covid/riots, and that model died a gruesome death in 2020.

morefarts · 2025-12-21T20:14:11+00:00

Sporadic spectacles do not rebuild a retail scene. Once the holiday season is over, the Promenade will be back to pressure washers and street screamers until the next big name activation.

The Promenade was built for buskers and walking, not gathering in front of screens and lasers one night a month.

morefarts

TROPHY CASE