The sheer hubris of this beggars belief. Maybe we can get a skillshare from Elizabeth Holmes on how to build a lasting company or Adam Neumann on how to con your way into making a billion dollars?
- wait, that last one might actually be interesting...
AKA off campus dorms. This isn't targeting the urban professional, it's for those who want to continue the dormie lifestyle. One of the biggest universities in the country is just a couple stops away on the light rail.
Bingo, when I first moved out here I lived a couple blocks west of this place. It was 70% college kids. They also have a massive park and ride garage there, so I think I know where all those car free people will stash their cars.
Which says nothing bout car-less lifestyles. I went to grad school in a smallish town in a mostly (upscale-ish) rural area. I was mostly fine without a car. I lived mostly on-campus. I had friends with cars. Activities were mostly structured around the idea that students wouldn't have cars. Etc.
But, if I'm living/working there, I probably have to drive to my job, for far greater access to stores, to outdoor activities, to visit friends who are more spread out, etc. Sure, you can sometimes extend a college lifestyle for a few years but, for most people, that doesn't really work long term.
This is the first mainstream security truck at an affordable price. The sales on this are going to be higher than anybody expects. Every rapper, drug dealer, and dirtbag politician that doesn't want to go out like Tupac will buy one. The weekend warriors who had to give up their Hummers will buy one. The Mexican/Colombian cartels will all drive them because it's already bullet resistant but with that power, it can easily be modded with an extra 1/4 inch plate. The regular folks who live in places where carjacking is common (Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, etc.) will buy them. It's going to sell very, very well.
Good riddance to the Navajo plant. While it may have been providing some decent wage jobs on the reservation, it was otherwise despoiling the environment around a remarkable corner of the world.[0]
I'm seriously saying that burning coal isn't that much worse and not that much difference. People who think that solar is better are just fooling themselves. There is no free lunch and those solar panels are going to wear out, so it's not "forever" at all. And big ugly solar farms in the desert are just a different kind of "blight".
It takes conservatively 4 years for a panel to generate as much energy as it took to manufacture. It takes even more for that container ship to move them here. They're supposed to last 20 years, but really can be as poor as 15 and they loose efficiency each year. So 1/3 to 1/2 of their lifetime is just plain wasted already which means the stated efficiency and economics are grossly overestimated.
So yeah, I wouldn't build more coal plants either. Natural gas is like 1/3 the price of either solar or coal. But to applaud destroying existing infrastructure? And to shore that up with propaganda like "blight the landscape". That is naive and won't do anything to fix the basic problem.
If we choose to be wasteful materialistic energy hogs, then we have to pay for it. So give up your house AC and your car and everything else that uses so much electricity first - then play that moral high road card. The problem isn't the supply source or even the choice of raw material. It's wanton greed and wastefulness of the consumers.
Compilers are eventually self-compiling. Computers are used to design more powerful computers. Solar panels will eventually be made with panel-generated electricity.
If "protecting the public" was truly the goal, why not make taxi driving as simple as getting a commercial endorsement on your license? Driving 50 people in a public bus only requires X hours in a classroom and an extra exam (or two, depending). Interestingly, the medallions were affixed the the vehicle (thus allowing anybody to use it), the total number of medallions were artificially limited and the choice parts of the city were off limits to competition. Does that really protect the public or does it just protect those who own the medallions?
You should look at the history of why taxi regulation came about and why the "right" number of taxi badges per city was a system that much of the world arrived at. It also brought minimum service obligations, driver standards and fair pricing.
Deregulated taxis had cartels, increased and varying prices depending on destination and poorer customer service. Bad enough that many countries and cities found they had to regulate.
Now, whether medallions that are separate from vehicle and driver, and thus have a value in their own right are the best way to regulate is another question entirely. In the US specific case it seems emphatically not. Quite why many US cities had such poor taxi service when other countries have managed much better is beyond me.
If you want to argue with the phrase "protect the public," that's fine. The point is that, pre-smartphones, the medallion system ensures a functioning system, a modicum of safety, no fare surprises. It was not intended to produce the _lowest possible fares_ for riders.
This article is remiss in not mentioning how Jarvis et al. also got commercial property included in Prop 13. With many commercial properties held in trusts and corporations, the ownership never "changes" and generations of beneficiaries pay a pittance in taxes on incredibly valuable real estate. San Francisco, in particular, strikes me as a city awash in properties that haven't changed hands in generations because even a crappy old warehouse practically mints income.
Thankfully, Californians have the opportunity to correct this giveaway with a vote for a split-roll in 2020[0].
re the rain tax: if that means the mall owner has to open up some of those acres of asphalt to reduce stormwater runoff or landlords end up jackhammering the cement slabs covering the front and backyards (because spraying herbicide a couple times a year is way cheaper/easier than regular gardening service) then I fail to see the problem.
Your giant slabs of cementitious landscaping are contributing to my heat island effect so the tax is a small reminder to rip the unnecessary bits out and plant a couple trees instead.
- wait, that last one might actually be interesting...