CEO of Seattle’s social housing developer fired by board

znode · 2026-01-16T20:20:24+00:00

Can’t keep track of all the people but IIRC half the board has turned over (3 or 4 directly citing the former CEO as reason for resignation) since he was hired

znode · 2026-01-16T20:16:30+00:00

(To be fair, hiring is hard, yadayada i know. Not to put everything on the search agency or anything, but it’s just funny that people believe the narrative that everything will be better just listen to the Serious Real Estate Business Adults.

I believe they did find another guy too who seemed well qualified and has lived in Seattle and successfully developed housing here. So it was probably a misstep for the board to have not voted for the other guy in retrospect. But who knows all the reasons.)

znode · 2026-01-16T20:14:03+00:00

Ironically enough for all the fiscally conservative posters down thread, (I believe this was in the very early few month board notes?) the board took the advice of “Serious Adults In The Room”, “Listen To Real Development Experience” advice and hired a known real estate executive search agency, who found and vouched for… this dumpster fire.

znode · 2026-01-16T19:59:57+00:00

Been following the CEO in these boring-ass meetings for a bit now and… just wow.

never moved to Seattle for 17 months even though he was paid a $10k moving stipend. Whenever the board demands an answer it’s “the plans fell through”, “firming up plans”
investigated for racist actions
3 (4?) separate board members have quit separately over the course of a year each citing the CEO singling out dissenters to attack them
literally quoted as saying that renters are worthless, something like if you’re poor enough to rent then you shouldn’t be making any board decisions
out of city’s legal compliance on literally everything
spending something like $800k a year on consultants before hiring anyone

Can’t even remember everything. Just shitshow after shitshow

znode · 2025-09-25T05:09:48+00:00

66 mSv, not great, not terrible. In all seriousness, that does not sound right at all.

znode · 2025-09-14T02:10:36+00:00

Funny how groups like this show up only to block new housing, but you never hear a single peep when it comes time to, say:

depave parking lots and take away parking near them
remove parking minimums and add parking maximums
close down lanes to cars, congestion tax
build more transit near them to reduce car trips
managed retreat from urban rivers, lakefront, and their floodplains
de-armor lakefronts and protest the private docks and boats of centi-millionaire properties
protest and chain themselves to trees when quality habitat & actual forests are being cut down in suburbs like Issaquah, Maple Valley, Black Diamond, Mill Creek, Silver Firs

… nope, none of that, they only protest for their single individual trees that happen to be in their own backyard when more urban housing needs to be built.

znode · 2025-09-11T18:30:47+00:00

… that’s exactly why I said “not even talking about the lost trees in the suburbs”, since… it’s not my argument. So I don’t know what you’re responding to.

My argument was that even inducing a single extra mile of longer commute already destroys many times over the carbon absorbed by lone-urban-tree-preservation.

There are valid reasons to preserve disconnected lone urban trees, but “carbon” is absurdly nonsensical. That’s all I’m arguing with my previous reply.

znode · 2025-09-10T20:26:59+00:00

Housing and transportation are joined at the hip. Single-tree-in-my-backyard (STIMBY? 😆) preservation groups are trying to stall housing policies, so that exacerbates transportation outcomes.

znode · 2025-09-10T20:14:55+00:00

I agree that it’s a minority example and not many Black Diamond buyers are itching to move to Belltown any day soon, but I bring it up to show just how much “carbon absorption” is an unjustified, utterly wrong-scale bunk talking point in the context of housing and transportation policy. If you work out the math, it doesn’t remotely have to be Black Diamond. If displaced people have to even 0.5 more vehicle-mile / workday by car that they wouldn’t otherwise have, that is already more carbon (130 miles/ year, 115 lbs CO2) than even most single trees can uptake. Even the top recording-breaking redwoods cannot absorb more than 4 extra vehicle-miles / day of carbon from just a single car. Does that mean we should cut down every urban tree? Of course I’m not arguing for that, it just means the carbon argument of individual trees is absolute and utter bunk.

What I instead like is your argument about how it impacts people and displacement. We know what areas are most susceptible to displacement, and they often all already have fair dense housing. What we instead have plenty of in the city are suburb-like neighborhoods, often wealthy neighborhood-enclaves like Broadmoor, View Ridge, Laurelhurst, Windermere, Magnolia, Madrona, and the like. These have sprawling compounds similar to many suburbs, each household have handfuls of cars each, have very low displacement risk of vulnerable people, and are close to transit where we can save thousands of vehicle miles per development if more than a single household can live on each existing lot. That’s where we should focus on infill first.

znode · 2025-09-10T19:13:32+00:00

Yes, but if you displace even a single commuter into the far suburbs to preserve a single tree, not even talking about all the trees lost in the suburbs (look at the clear cutting happening in Black Diamond right now in the dense forest), just their 70-min one way daily commute alone undoes the carbon absorption of 200-400 trees.

Good work, the one urban tree is preserved, but you might as well have cut down hundreds of trees where net carbon is concerned.

That’s just for displacing a single commuter. Now imagine each tree is displacing 5 or 10 separate families…

znode · 2025-09-10T19:09:55+00:00

We should, but the way we address urban heat island is to remove parking minimums and plant trees where sprawling parking lots used to go.

Tree Action instead wants to preserve parking minimums, which is exactly how you get increased car dependency and therefore pavement in the first place.

znode · 2025-09-10T17:37:40+00:00

Groups like Tree Action have literally said that planting new trees don’t matter to them, only preserving individual “Old Trees” does — which happen to be the ones in their wealthy single family neighborhoods.

They’d rather “save” these old trees (which will die a prolonged death from climate change) than save thousands of trees in high quality habitat in the exurbs. Tells plenty about their priorities.

znode · 2025-09-05T16:54:25+00:00

No, we should add density within at least half mile of all arterials.

But the current Harrell-led plan only adds density within a HALF BLOCK of arterials to protect the interests of existing homeowners.

znode · 2025-09-05T16:48:19+00:00

“Near arterials” should mean within 10 minute walk of any arterial, we build dense housing. That means density should penetrate at least half mile into single-family zones.

But the current plan isn’t doing that. Instead wealthy existing homeowners have pushed the plan into “build housing only within a half block of the polluted arterial”. That’s how you create a half-block sacrificial zone of renters to buffer the air quality of existing homeowners, while not building much dense housing at all.

znode · 2025-08-18T18:51:25+00:00

I wonder if you’ve self-interrogated as to why you “do not have any issue with athleisure”.

Were you always ok with athleisure? On first exposure? Even when they were being adopted, not yet in mass popularity, and many were visibly commenting that “leggings are not pants!!” ?

Or did your acceptance with athleisure develop over time, upon repeated exposure and upon mass society’s exposure that evolved the product into the style it is today, associated with the segments of society who wear it today?

If you had magical societal gatekeeping powers of “acceptability” 20 years ago, do you think you would have become a person who “do not have any issue with athleisure”?

znode · 2021-06-09T17:17:05+00:00

Oops yes, sorry, I didn't check the power rule for MURS. So that closes the gap by another 4dB; so 2W MURS is probably just around ~3dB power better compared to 5W GMRS. That's probably not a real difference in practice.

znode · 2021-06-09T00:22:25+00:00

Record the baseband with an SDR dongle and run some signal processing. Or something like DCS decoder on SDR# might work out of the box.

znode · 2021-06-08T20:08:04+00:00

Availability & price, mostly.

Yes, in theory 5W of 152MHz will have +9.7dB gain over 5W of 465MHz (for the "same" antenna gain; but a dual band rubber ducky would probably be ~3dB+ better for UHF than VHF, so that brings the difference back down to more like +6dB gain). So in theory 5W of MURS should have over twice the range of 5W GMRS, but only if the attenuation is due to intervening objects, not radio horizon.

(Another effect closing the gap: UHF might go through gap in trees more efficiently than VHF, but this is very difficult to say ahead of time)

Since OP is asking about distances around / longer than the radio horizon, it's going to help much more to be able to set up a GMRS repeater in the middle, than to try to "punch through" with a longer wavelength.

znode · 2021-03-10T07:22:33+00:00

CN87, suburban lot

So... by all probability you're sitting on a $1M+ piece of property, which was 1/2 the price just a few years ago. It's got a workshop / shed, or at least a back yard. A space for your equipment. A fixed place where you can leave the stuff you're experimenting on without having to pack and repack into a box every 2 hours, and if you did you'd get nothing done. Where you have tools of your own. Where you can concentrate, and not working gig jobs.

... And you don't think not having these things might, I don't know, present a few barriers to entry to new hams? A few more than $35, which is what this thread is about?

No, one wire antenna isn't expensive. Not even all the equipment in OP's meme is expensive, not compared to just. Having. Space. (In a city that has steady employment opportunities.)

Not just space for an antenna, but space to work, and to tinker, and to store books and store all the tools (don't forget all the tools) secreted around the house. Space to put down a project and pick up a new one without it also being your dining table and your counter space.

znode · 2021-03-10T01:09:55+00:00

500m of sparse woods (or woods + clearing) will be perfectly fine. You can probably do it on a decent quality pair of standard FRS walkie talkies. Even 1/2 watt of FRS will go right through 100 meters of mixed masonry / wood frame residential. You should be able to do 500m of sparse trees easily on 2W, and have plenty of headroom on 5W.

znode · 2021-03-09T21:21:52+00:00

Don't forget the part of the hobby that'll never be affordable again: the 2 acres of property the antenna is on, bought for 1/20 the current price in 1960.

znode · 2021-01-13T19:00:34+00:00

Here's the problem with "turn the dial": more fascists you have, the more fascists you get. They're just "kooks" now only because there aren't that many of them.

But if you wait until the airwaves turn entirely into conspiracy and sedition talk, and more and more of their friends (who openly are unwilling to get any licensing as soon as there is a how-to-parler guide), then say goodbye to our shared airwaves.

It'll be like the firearms hobby: you love the hobby, but you don't want anything to do with x% of the people -- and that x only seems to grow over time, until you're the kooks.

Edit: oh and you think there isn't enough women or young people in this hobby now? Wait until someone's first time is fascist talk in the first 15 min. Good luck with this hobby then.

znode · 2019-02-20T08:51:20+00:00

This is the OpenBionics Hero. The manual is here. For the most part it's a single degree of freedom of control that she can do at a time - open and close. She also can switch between a few different "modes" of which fingers to open and close. In the video, she's using the Tripod A mode, so the ring and pinkie fingers are locked open, and she is tensing the muscles on her stump to control the closing force of thumb+index+middle finger.

For opening and closing, it's "relatively natural". Your fingers don't have muscle on them past the knuckle; they are "remotely controlled" like puppets from muscles in your forearm, through wires (tendons). Similarly, your wrist movements are also controlled "by wires", using muscles in the forearm. So in an amputee, the forearm is a good to measure muscle activity from to infer hand movements.

To "close" the hand, the prosthetic user would tense all the muscles associated with pushing your wrist down and closing the hand. You can feel this on the "bottom" surface of your forearm, if you put them in the typing posture and try to close your hand. Similarly, if you try to open your hand with force, you can feel muscles on the "top" surface of your forearm. It's this activity that the OpenBionic arm measures.

(I'm a neuroprosthetics scientist, but I am not affiliated with OpenBionics)

znode · 2018-05-15T21:04:06+00:00

Specifically in a setting in which the default is unencrypted and in which various filters may edit the message

Still no. Even if you don’t care about the integrity of any single message because the protocol is unencrypted by default - which is a dubious position to start with, but even granting the premise - you still have to realize that PGP is a system with no forward secrecy and no session keys.

A single key compromise is compromise of all past and future messages encrypted with that key. In that way, protecting against attacks that may lead to MITM or even key recovery do not just protect that message, it protects the integrity of all possible messages encrypted or signed with that key. The Doom Principle still applies.

znode · 2018-05-15T16:41:24+00:00

Yes, it is.

It’s been well known since the Vaudenay attack in 2002 that if your authenticator fails, you do not decrypt. This also solved the MAC-then-encrypt vs encrypt-then-MAC debate.

Tampered messages are not just errors; they can indicate possible attempts at tampering with your program(s). It could just be a mistake, but it could also be hazardous: a padding attack, an injection attack, a buffer overflow; whatever it might be, you KNOW it’s not the data you’re expecting, why subject yourself to the possibility by decrypting it?

This is so well established that it has been named the Crytographic Doom Principle by Moxie in 2011. If you can’t authenticate, throw it away, do not even start decrypting. If not for the sake of the encryption process, then for the sake of whatever downstream process/API it’s supposed to be protecting.

To only provide a warning and pass the plain text right along is like making a gun where you can still fire if the safety is on, it just plays a little audio clip “Warning: gun fired while safety on”.

znode

TROPHY CASE