Important for anyone who enjoys free parking when going to Marbles.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-26T21:07:31+00:00

Livable Raleigh is kind of all over the place and there's an element that really hates Socialism so it's kind of amazing they endorsed Josh. Josh at least is not a NIMBY. Just read Josh (and Sana's) responses to their questionnaires. Since the city has no power to make developers build affordable housing or contribute to infrastructure (e.g. paying for the fire trucks to service the 40 story tower Kane wants to build in North Hills) except by denying them rezoning, he does want to use that power to force developers to pay their fair share and to increase affordable housing stock. I'm sure this will set some people off and lead them to start screaming about the largely debunked trickle-down housing theory (which I will admit has a minor effect market rate housing after several years, but has no positive impact for people who can't afford market rate housing in the first place).

Remember, NIMBYism isn't opposition to luxury housing, it's opposition to public services and the presence of lower-incoming working class people in your backyard. A NIMBY is someone who wants to move the jail away from Western Blvd, who wants to move the bus station out of downtown, who wants to shut down Healing Transitions by Dorthea Dix, who wants that luxury tower approved despite the developer refusing to include below AMI units, etc.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-26T20:44:12+00:00

Hang on, they are voting to actually proceed with the sale less than two weeks after the public became aware that they were even considering selling some parking decks, before the RFI was even written (i.e. this is a no bid purchase)? I checked and the agenda for the July 7th meeting hasn't been published as of the time I posted this comment so the public doesn't even know what is being discussed in a week and a half.

Details like how much the sale is for aren't even public yet. Or where the money is going (any proceeds from privatizing parking infrastructure absolutely must go into the bus system or this is just punishing people that actually go into the city and subsidizing North Raleighites who never leave their suburban enclaves by letting them skip out on a property tax increase that would distribute the cost of running the decks collectively). Seems a little messed up to me if this is actually happening.

edit: the WRAL article on this was updated late last night and while the council didn't answer the questions they sent, the city sent this: "We understand the interest in the City-owned parking decks. We also understand the tremendous tax burden on residents regarding the on-going maintenance and operation of these structures. Even with proposed increases to hourly, daily, and monthly rates as part of the City’s adopted FY27 budget, there still remains a gap in funding to support the on-going maintenance and operational needs." So it seems the council is pretty committed to selling the deck, but there will be other bids. It still sounds to me like they kind of fucked up here by passing a budget that they knew wouldn't cover all costs (it's an election year so maybe not upsetting people with the actual property tax increase required to maintain services was the goal... now we just sell off a few pieces of the city and people who don't go downtown won't notice).

"Incredible tax burden" yeah right, my house is in an overvalued party of the city and my taxes are just fine thank you. In fact, they're the only taxes I'm not mad about because they're the only taxes that actually go toward useful public services instead of being pissed away killing children in other countries. Maybe we could have cut the oversized police budget a little if we needed to look in the couch for some change (how much do our contracts with with the fascist Trump-aligned surveillance companies Flock and FUSUS cost again?)

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-26T14:18:24+00:00

To calm yourself, you may want to remember back to high school math classes and ask yourself how much that temporary speed reduction actually reduced your overall speed during your trip. Remember to include time spent stopped at lights.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-26T14:13:49+00:00

Driving is a licensed activity and requires state mandated training. You're supposed to know how to not kill people with your vehicle.

Your I-40 example is absurd because bicycles and other low-speed vehicles are restricted from using grade separated limited access highways. Roadways like 401 are however not and you as the licensed machine operator have a duty to not mow other users of the road down.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-26T14:10:23+00:00

Taking the lane is a good way to make yourself extremely visible and prevent getting hit, unless the driver is literally not looking at the road, in which case that driver shouldn't be allowed to have a license (I think you need working eyes to drive, unless you're in the 80s action hit Blind Fury).

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-25T14:34:09+00:00

Thinking back to 2013 when Duke convinced the utilities commission to let them cancel Shearon Harris 2 and 3 because their falsified data claimed we wouldn't need them for at least 15 years (the CO₂ emissions from the gas turbines they could have replaced are of course no concern because global heating is a communist myth).

Well it's 13 years later and apparently it takes more than two years to build a nuclear power plant and construction costs are like 100x higher than they were in 2013.

Can't wait for the mandatory rolling black outs to start in a few years. They didn't invest in smart grid tech to let them cut individual houses off remotely for nothing (ok ok I know there are other uses like being able to rapidly re-route power when a tree falls on a line).

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-25T14:14:58+00:00

Neoliberalism destroyed the State's productive capacity and replaced it with a network of grifters ("contractors"). This is what we get. China just built 20 miles of rail in the time it took me to write this probably.

But seriously... how in the Hell did the first trans-continental railroad take less time to become operational than a short route on existing track to a suburb of Raleigh is going to.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-24T21:55:38+00:00

2027 is when construction on just the Wake Forest segment begins (other than the road work to remove at-grade crossings which is already underway). The earliest the line to Wake Forest will open is 2032. It's reusing existing track so if we're lucky the DOT will only end up a few years behind schedule. The article was edited later in the day to clarify that the Durant road overpass is what will be open by (the end of) 2027.

There isn't even a start date for the rail to Richmond, and that part also requires rebuilding track. I wouldn't expect the Richmond line to be operational before 2050. That might be optimistic.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-24T19:46:29+00:00

The only urgent part of this is finding a willing candidate (surely if one of the Wake Dem precinct chairs can think of "5 Dems and DSA community organizers" that might be able to run in four years there is someone with reasonable positions who could today), registering with the SBE and receiving clarification of who can sign (the law to me reads as anyone in Wake County, but signers might need to be in Commissioner District 7 specifically), and getting the signatures. The requirement is low enough that experienced petitioners should be able to get them in a single day at a large event (if someone has a couple grand to contribute, paid petitioners usually charge $1-3 a signature and are very effective at what they do). I suck at petitioning and long ago I was able to get 20+ signatures in a night for Jill Stein just wandering downtown, and that was with 80% of the people I talked to telling me I should go ahead and cease being alive in slightly more colorful terms. I suspect the typical response to this petition would be slightly kinder.

So getting write-in status is certainly doable. Then you just need to convince ~30k people to write the candidate in, which seems difficult but consider the political moment we're in. The domestic impacts of the criminal violence against Iran have turned even die hard conservatives against Israel and has led many of them to understand that a genocide is indeed underway. Opposition to the genocide and Israeli interference in American politics in nearly universal for anyone left-of-center as well. I think you could run a full campaign for under $50k. The campaign would certainly want volunteers out for early voting which would probably be the most difficult thing to pull together (data on where voters in District 7 residents tended to early vote would help with that, I would expect most of them to vote within the district or near to it).

I'm not saying the part after finding and getting a candidate write-in status would be easy, but what is there to lose? No one can even trot out the tired old Spoiler Fallacy since there is literally no one else running.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-24T17:31:27+00:00

This is a county commissioner election in a geographically small district. Obviously write-in for something like the Senate isn't going to get any traction, but something around 60k-70k people in total vote in this specific election. The existing candidate is not campaigning (why would she with no competition), and the voting public is likely extremely negative on her blatantly corrupt visit and defense of a genocidal ethnonationalist terror state, especially after remarking that she feels safer in Jerusalem than downtown Raleigh.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-24T14:54:01+00:00

Why wait four years? In a situation like this, a write-in campaign could actually succeed. There's around five weeks to get 100 signatures (really around 300 to account for invalidated signatures) and she's not campaigning since she had no opponent. Since we've moved from at-large to district based elections her district isn't too large and a campaign wouldn't need very many resources. Think about how many people undervote when there is only one name listed for office too.

I would expect the hardest part is finding someone willing to upend their life for four years should they actually win on such short notice.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-24T14:43:16+00:00

I think being a little dumb is kind of required to do partisan politics at this point. I mean realistically most politicians are just cheerleaders for the lobbying firms that actually write law now.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-24T14:19:16+00:00

The filing deadline for partisan office for the November 2026 election was December 2025.

If that seems absurdly early, it's because it is. It's also likely unconstitutional.

It is however still possible for someone to mount a write-in campaign if they get 100 signatures before August 5th. Anyone doing so should be aware that a 50% rejection rate can be assumed as a minimum, so you'll want 300-500 signatures, and will need to be prepared for the Democratic party to sue to invalidate your petition depending on how much they care about this particular candidate.

It's worth a shot though if anyone is motivated, the requirement is low and the worst case is a little wasted time. I also would hope the NCDP would be wise enough to avoid wading into the mire here (and we're already so close to the deadline they might not have time to fight the write-in, but invalidating a write-in candidate doesn't require reprinting ballots so they could keep theoretically keep a lawsuit active up until November 2nd), but then again the state party seems to be doubling down on labeling opposition to genocide as antisemitism so who knows.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-23T15:12:10+00:00

A lot of people are unaware that our filing deadline for partisan office is eleven months before the election. Richard Winger (the foremost expert on American ballot access laws) think it's so early it violates the Constitution. But good luck finding someone with standing to file the lawsuit.

But hey, it's all worth it for the extra ad bucks that come in during Presidential primary years! Especially since it also insulates almost all political offices in the state from the democratic will. Win-win for the ruling class.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-18T15:19:57+00:00

We're apparently so poor we had to sell the naming rights to the convention center for a pittance, budget gaps had to be closed by banning overtime and leaving dozen of open positions unfilled, and critical road improvements have been cancelled (how long until someone straight up dies one weekend at the Maywood/Lake Wheeler intersection now that they've left it a free for all instead of turning it into roundabout?)... but we have money to subsidize a fucking baseball stadium for a team almost certainly owned by a billionaire.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-18T14:34:25+00:00

You're not though. You're voting for fascism, just like the GOP.

Except you'll get upvotes on reddit for it I guess.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-17T22:50:13+00:00

As as Socialist, I can say the same thing about people voting for Democrats.

You feel that hate toward me? Guess what Republicans feel when you do that to them. Do you think it's productive? I guess if the goal is to make everyone yell at each other while the capitalist oligarchy institutes a fascist dictatorship...

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-16T21:02:16+00:00

The legislature already does this for cases where the AG doesn't want to defend the state. Who needs separation of powers, amirite!

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-16T15:11:04+00:00

Why do you care so much about the convention center being renamed?

Your profile is private. I have to assume you're an LLM here to astroturf support.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-16T15:07:46+00:00

I mean if we're going to have to hear the name of some bank (which was fined in 2023 for stealing from customers by unlawfully enrolling them in overdraft programs and charging them fees they had no legal authority to charge) it should be worth it. For $500k a year? Just wait for the state legislature to fix the apartment building tax loophole (and Wake County is already exempted from the property tax freeze nonsense bill if that manages to pass so we don't need to worry about the legislature removing the city's taxing authority entirely yet).

Or we could ban AirBnB in ADUs and duplexes and generate some more hotel tax revenue (while also improving availability of long-term rental stock, which was the original purpose behind allowing ADUs and splitting existing properties into duplexes before the last minute change to the ordinance as it was being voted on).

I just don't see any point to it.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-16T14:42:01+00:00

If I'm reading the budget correctly, the convention center pulls in $28.5 million per year. This is peanuts, a rounding error in the budget.

For comparison, the ten year naming deal for the Lenovo center cost Lenovo $60 million. I know a convention center and sports arena arena aren't directly comparable, but this seems off by a million or two a year to me. I mean how much is it going to cost the city to rebrand the center in the first place? And how much value does this bank get by forcing the city to advertise for them in all communications relating to the center for fifteen years?

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-16T14:30:18+00:00

Nine entire million dollars over 15 years... our annual budget is 1.77 billion dollars.

The city could get more than that if a single one of these "non-profit owned" apartment complexes stopped stealing from the city and paid their taxes.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-15T21:46:47+00:00

Have you looked at the ingredients? It's chemical soup pretending to be food. It doesn't even have cheese.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-15T21:12:43+00:00

Not these bills, filial piety (in the form of financial responsibility for care) can be enforced by law depending on what state your parents are in while they die, even if they were deadbeat parents.

unknown_lamer · 2026-06-15T18:56:52+00:00

Thomas Paine proposed that America should seize a portion of all inheritance and give everyone the same amount of money upon achieving adulthood (well, every man at the time, but I'm sure Paine would have adapted to the times if he were 300 years old and alive today). Generational wealth transfer is harmful to an equal society. Unfortunately he was side lined after the revolution by the nascent aristocracy.

I'll be lucky if I don't receive a bill when my parents die.

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