When I first moved to Sacramento from LA I saw multiple attempts to build high density housing projects seemingly get delayed by neighbors occupying admittedly beautiful and restrained early-20th century single family homes.
Most notably somebody bought and bull-dosed Dimple, an amazing used music / movies / clothing store near the original Tower Records location, with the intention of putting a multistory housing development there. That was years ago and of course its still just a huge crumbling concrete lot fenced in with barbed wire.
But since pandemic restrictions lifted we've seen a ridiculous number of 3-5 story housing developments going up all over midtown. It's honestly shocking and so far they look beautiful intermingled with the overgrown trees and houses built in the early 1900s.
We've got our problems in Sac but it feels like a vision of the future of California. I hope I start to see this with the same frequency more when I visit the bay.
Got any street view examples? I'm always interested in urban success stories.
To me 3-5 stories is the sweet spot for density most cities should be aiming for. You get plenty of people in a given area without it feeling crowded. 3-5 story buildings are among the cheapest to construct since you can use pretty run-of-the-mill techniques and materials to maximize the square-cube law per dollar. It's dense enough to make investment in mass transit really viable without really straining city services like water and sewers. Plus it avoids the "Manhattenification" suburbanities seem so terrified of any time the word density is hinted at.
> I saw multiple attempts to build high density housing projects seemingly get delayed by neighbors occupying admittedly beautiful and restrained early-20th century single family homes.
There is plenty of space to build high(er) density housing in Los Angeles if you know where to look [1]. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to fight tooth-and-nail against NIMBY types to build 5 over 1s next to SFH when you've got way better options. This is true for almost every city in America too. Urban infill needs to be prioritized to boost density. Everything else is inefficient at best and wasteful and unnecessary at worst. You cannot have cars and have density. It's a contradiction.
Another cautionary tale that too many of us ignore with our virtue signaling: "I support X because it sounds good for cause Y". Unfortunately, we often don't consider system or policy resilience - how will it hold up if people intentionally abuse its rules. Sometimes it doesn't help cause Y and has other negative effects.
I would put heritage building laws into a similar category of well-intentioned rules that can so easily be weaponized alongside overly strict environmental review.
In isolation keeping a neighbourhood character by setting rules around the paint colours and trim designs permitted seems like a benign set of laws to keep some interesting older neighbourhoods around. In practice they lock a city at a specific low density, often very close to the downtown core since the oldest development tends to be closest to the action. It can also exclude poorer residents (or even pretty well off people who can afford a $250,000 reno but not the $500,000 it'll take to satisfy the heritage committee).
I love an old victorian house, but not when there are hundreds of people living in tents next door and thousands more terrified they will have to join them because the cost of living is rapidly rising. If someone wants to pay to move that charming house to an area of lower average density, great. Otherwise it needs to come down to make way for hundreds of new units so people can actually afford the city.
The unintended consequences of laws often vastly outweigh the benefits. I am a big proponent of time limiting laws as well as requiring higher levels of support upon renewal, that way laws that have serious unintended consequences will be removed automatically.
If we had functioning government, this could possibly work.
Instead, in the current national regime, it has a tendency to ossify current laws. Most legislation can only pass when the stars align (one party has house/senate/president), so even fine legislation would regularly ‘expire’ and not get renewed.
Business planning is also thrown by self destructing legislation. A stable regulatory regime allows businesses to invest appropriately and optimally. Changing regulations more often (via expiring laws that might or might not renew) will necessarily introduce inefficiency.
Another variation I think I read about is where the law is implemented with an explicit goal that must be achieved by a certain date, and if the goal is achieved, the law becomes a regular law; if the pre-defined metric is not met by the certain date, the law disappears.
If a software team just argued about what software to build, finally came to an agreement on what they should build and then built it saying it was done without getting any feedback from the users of the software would not be successful. Likewise government shouldn't release a law and expect to never have to tweak it. In fact they should be prepared to make changes until they get a satisfactory result.
I think its a lack of guiding principles as to how new legislation gets drawn up. It leads to stubborn refusal to do anything. Most people don't mind change, so long as the change is predictable and their neighborhood doesn't get worse.
Plus a lot of the fears are based in the wave of public housing that was constructed in the 70s. Tenants with no investment in their dwellings will shoot a community into a death spiral. Look at Detroit and numerous other cities. There are other issues involved, but that was significant factor.
But time limiting laws won't work. There will not be enough time to review them before they expire, so they'll all be extended en masse. It'll just be another bureaucratic step that costs time and work.
If you like the article, the author has a book out, 'Arbitrary Lines' about zoning in the US, its ugly history, and what we should replace it with: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines
Also an interesting guy to talk with if you get the chance.
California has many problems, but CEQA really is uniquely bad.
If I was Californian Emperor, I'd look at the 49 other states that get by without CEQA, and just copy the legislation from some state with a good track record on these issues.
Strong agree, this needs to be reevaluated. In particular, Washington State has fantastic environmental protection laws that don't get in the way of good environments improvements.
CEQA is a bad first draft of an environmental law, the definitions are bad, the logic is bad. And CEQA even protected things like level of service of traffic until recently, which greatly increased car traffic and pollution. For the era when it was passed, CEQA was probably good, and it has accomplished lots of good, but today it's causing as many problems as it seems to solve.
Couldn't this also contribute to increased home prices in older single-family home neighborhoods? Or it could go the other way, too, depending on the desirability of new neighborhoods versus legacy neighborhoods. I speculate that this type of legislation, despite the benefits, might serve to further entrench generational and class differences between neighborhoods. I'm generally for this type of legislation, but I'm seeing some potential unforeseen consequences.
> But in 1972, the California courts interpreted a “public project” to include any private development that required governmental approvals.
And there it is. This is the real bane of our society, that a group of lifetime elected partisans can completely change the obvious meaning of a law, strike down laws, uphold blatantly unconstitutional laws, you name it.
So, we have a huge power grab by the government at some point in the past, and the government is totally unwilling to relinquish that power.
The article is never defines the term. That is kind of crucial to understanding what the objections are. This is precisely the kind of writing that infuriates me, because there is a lack of effort to understand anyone with opposing viewpoints.
> Infill housing is the insertion of additional housing units into an already-approved subdivision or neighborhood. They can be provided as additional units built on the same lot, by dividing existing homes into multiple units, or by creating new residential lots by further subdivision or lot line adjustments. (From wikipedia)
So if you own a single family home and add on to it (mother in law apartment, over garage unit, duplex conversion, etc) you're creating infill housing.
We should add 2021 to the title. A lot has changed since then.
California has passed a bunch of laws to address this. Some of these passed before 2021 but the effects are only being felt now.
For example: each town or city is required to file a housing element with the state showing how they will meet their quota for increased units. Failing to do so was given teeth in the late 2010s and the targets got a lot higher. Now when a town falls out of compliance the so-called "builder's remedy" comes into effect. This means a court can approve projects bypassing pretty much all local zoning, planning ordinances, review processes and environmental review (ie CEQA) as long as it meets certain requirements (eg 20% "affordable" housing).
Santa Monica fell out of compliance and had courts approve 4000+ new units. it' remains to be seen how many will actually be built but it's a start.
Much of the Bay Area is currently out of compliance or at risk of being out of compliance.
All the while you'll see the same arguments. Something as simple as townhouses or multi-family dwellings will "ruin the character". NIMBY supported councils trying to fight state requirements, etc.
But this is only one of many pieces of legislation. Others include automatic approval for higher density housing with a sufficient right-of-way (70' IIRC), easier approval for building residential over commercial (something that is illegal in most of the US), etc.
My sincere hope that there will be enough support for this to ultimately repeal Prop 13. It's estimated this has cost the state hundreds of billions of dollars and represents a massive giveaway to the states richest residents.
My understanding was builders' remedy skips all the municipal planning rules but that CEQA still applied as a state law. That makes it a key tool left for NIMBYs to smother a project to death.
Environmental justice lawsuits and regulatory action is probably the single greatest impediment to just about every major public works project, from nuclear plants to housing and mass transit. It's not just in California, but California makes it especially easy for one person to stop major developments.
Pretty sure the idea of a large low income housing building going up next to your house is universally undesirable.
The article bullshits around that fact with "disabled veterans" or some such nonsense, but the reality is the building will be something between a homeless shelter and a section 8 housing.
California infrastructure was originally scaled for around 20m people. There are currently currently around 40m people and rising living in the state.
There are huge cyclical environmental events - periods of drought, wildfires, torrential rain and flooding (the entire central valley flooded in 1892, killing 40k people, bankrupting the state and wiping out housing, cattle and crops).
We have a mediocre electric grid that fails if any of the above environmental events happen. We allow 95% of rain water to flow into the ocean then promote panic about global warming when the inadequate reservoirs are depleted in dry spells.
We don't need to pack people like sardines into metropolitan areas any more. We need to create smaller, more human living spaces closer to resources. There is so much undeveloped land in the state but we are wrecking historically important locations instead of thinking new development. The YIYBY activists are obsessed with existing cities, they are rooted in the past.
You want more sprawl? Sprawl that puts people farther away from the job centers and requires the state to build brand new expensive infrastructure in all of these places rather than benefitting from existing infrastructure. Look at how much it less costs to maintain infrastructure in denser settings compared to single family home suburbs. Not to mention if you have more sprawl you are potentially putting people in the way of the wildfires as they push into the forests. And then there are all the other environmental problems that come with sprawl...
We have the engineering knowhow to be able to build taller buildings, that can withstand earthquakes, and it has definitely improved since the 70s.
Infrastructure is not frozen in amber. It's honestly attitudes like these in the comment above that are the most corrosive to US as a nation. This is a sick disease that has taken root in the American mind, and I don't know what's the cure.
Couple of typing errors on my post earlier: flood was 1862 not 1892, and 4k died not 40k. I didn't mention that the 1860's also had 2 major earthquakes, a drought and wildfires.
It is a general problem with regulations that they create bias for no-action. So in complex society with many regulations there is so much friction that vetocracy just wins.
There is a big problem in the U.S. where people don't trust bureaucratic regulation so we do it through the courts instead, which is much more expensive and 'random' because decisions are made by judges and not technocrats. Those technocrats are in theory more qualified to design regulations and are more accountable to voters who elect their bosses. You can go too far with regulations as well (see regulatory capture), but a new election can in theory more directly improve a regulator than it can improve the complex random set of rules set up by the courts.
With laws like CEQA and NEPA, lawsuits just keep layering condition upon condition that needs to be addressed to be compliant. Environmental impact studies have been getting bigger and bigger (and thus much more expensive). Fighting lawsuits is much more burdensome and time consuming than just having a regulator (which is not to say that regulatory oversight is never burdensome, just better than what we have). It also means rich people who can afford lawyers are more able to enforce regulations than poor people. This is a difficult hole to get out of unless we can persuade voters to push politicians to reform these laws.
It drives me crazy that California is seen as the model of big-D Democratic governance when there's another state nearby, also with a more-or-less permanent Democratic majority, which is not a dysfunctional mess.
Pretty much just gerontocracy life. It is common for many societies to take this path. Repeated technology successes by the youth have permitted California to keep the machine going but the old here continue to bleed the young dry like vampires.
Decline is inevitable when technology gains stall. San Francisco is the bellwether. The city is already reeling. We will repair it or it will break.
All through the way down, our parasitic elders will lament its decline, denying their role in it.
The discussion seems to focus around people who don't want their neighborhood to change but California has global problems such as "where to get the water" that are sensitive to the total number of people in the state.
It's even more of a struggle to provision transportation infrastructure for these people, whether or not it is public transit or more roads and parking for cars.
People forget that California has about the same population density as Germany despite being mostly uninhabitable, uninhabited, military reservations, farms larger than some European countries, etc. Sure San Francisco is not up there in density with the densest cities such as Singapore (5 million), Hong Kong (7 million people) and the Gaza Strip (2 million) but answers from those places might not be scalable to a state with 40 million people and in fact all of those places struggle with inequality and governance issues.
If you look at the numbers, California total water use is going down over time, even as population has risen. Efficiency has outpaced population growth.
And that's just residential water use, which is a tiny fraction of agricultural, which is far more wasteful, and often used to grow alfalfa to export internationally, in addition to dairy in the state.
So the total number of people in the state is nowhere near a cap from water.
As for transit, that is easily solved with density. In the vast majority of California, even in its larger cities, it is not legal to build densely enough to support transit. Which means that everybody drives everywhere, which doesn't scale at all. Transit and density with mixed use solve the problem in two ways, by both greatly reducing the need to drive for miles for any small errand or social event, and replace it with means of transit that are orders of magnitude more efficient than cars.
Most people even if they actually have legitimate concerns do not possess the aptitude to make meaningful decisions. They will make whatever micro change they can as long as it's morally correct in their head simply for the fact that it errs to the green side vs the corporate/consumer side. Obviously, this just leads to shooting yourself in the foot.
Here's something I'm seeing on recent LCDs, they show this popup (with a countdown) when you first turn it on:
> In compliance with California Energy Commission, the brightness and contrast settings cannot be adjusted in the sRGB mode. Would you like to remain in the sRGB mode?
1. LCDs already only use maybe 15W. Changing the brightness makes almost no difference.
2. Changing the contrast makes absolutely no difference in terms of power usage
3. sRGB mode implies I'm going to see the image the way it's meant to be displayed. Switching to racing mode (whatevr the hell that means), among 10 other options like "movie mode" to bypass it sounds like a non-starter especially given that LCD menus are practically impossible to use. Disabling brightness makes the monitor likely to find the trash can as it will be uncomfortable by default if the room lighting is too dim or too high compared to the monitor.
4. A popup should not be a thing on a monitor. It already has the worst GUI on earth. The physical buttons are randomly placed. They react in literally 1-2 seconds each time you manage to even press the right one. And they switch up the GUI and button designs every 6 months with someone who has zero know-how.
5. LCDs are beta tech and there is always something a vendor can do to massively improve. Examples include: input lag from bad programming, viewing angle phenomena, VRR which doesn't really fix anything in the long run but was still easily sellable, the future when they fix strobing which is just a small engineering exercise of rearranging timings, but the difference will be big enough to merit buying a new LCD. Just the intro of IPS which didn't even fix the viewing angle but substantially improved it had almost every tech enthusiast trashing his old LCD for new ones, circa 2007.
6. Every single CCFL LCD ever made is now in the trash and each contains mercury to boot.
7. Vendors also lie to the consumer to trick them into buying new LCDs, further reducing any green benefit. A massive example of this is when they switched to LED backlights and every single piece of marketing material, from in store to manufacturer deliberately called them "LED monitors" to make it seem like this is a new technology.
[+] [-] pkdpic|3 years ago|reply
Most notably somebody bought and bull-dosed Dimple, an amazing used music / movies / clothing store near the original Tower Records location, with the intention of putting a multistory housing development there. That was years ago and of course its still just a huge crumbling concrete lot fenced in with barbed wire.
But since pandemic restrictions lifted we've seen a ridiculous number of 3-5 story housing developments going up all over midtown. It's honestly shocking and so far they look beautiful intermingled with the overgrown trees and houses built in the early 1900s.
We've got our problems in Sac but it feels like a vision of the future of California. I hope I start to see this with the same frequency more when I visit the bay.
[+] [-] theluketaylor|3 years ago|reply
To me 3-5 stories is the sweet spot for density most cities should be aiming for. You get plenty of people in a given area without it feeling crowded. 3-5 story buildings are among the cheapest to construct since you can use pretty run-of-the-mill techniques and materials to maximize the square-cube law per dollar. It's dense enough to make investment in mass transit really viable without really straining city services like water and sewers. Plus it avoids the "Manhattenification" suburbanities seem so terrified of any time the word density is hinted at.
[+] [-] ericmay|3 years ago|reply
There is plenty of space to build high(er) density housing in Los Angeles if you know where to look [1]. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to fight tooth-and-nail against NIMBY types to build 5 over 1s next to SFH when you've got way better options. This is true for almost every city in America too. Urban infill needs to be prioritized to boost density. Everything else is inefficient at best and wasteful and unnecessary at worst. You cannot have cars and have density. It's a contradiction.
[1] https://la.curbed.com/2018/11/30/18119646/los-angeles-parkin...
[+] [-] dalyons|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Forestessential|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimi|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rkhleung|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theluketaylor|3 years ago|reply
In isolation keeping a neighbourhood character by setting rules around the paint colours and trim designs permitted seems like a benign set of laws to keep some interesting older neighbourhoods around. In practice they lock a city at a specific low density, often very close to the downtown core since the oldest development tends to be closest to the action. It can also exclude poorer residents (or even pretty well off people who can afford a $250,000 reno but not the $500,000 it'll take to satisfy the heritage committee).
I love an old victorian house, but not when there are hundreds of people living in tents next door and thousands more terrified they will have to join them because the cost of living is rapidly rising. If someone wants to pay to move that charming house to an area of lower average density, great. Otherwise it needs to come down to make way for hundreds of new units so people can actually afford the city.
[+] [-] VectorLock|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] testhest|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yojo|3 years ago|reply
Instead, in the current national regime, it has a tendency to ossify current laws. Most legislation can only pass when the stars align (one party has house/senate/president), so even fine legislation would regularly ‘expire’ and not get renewed.
Business planning is also thrown by self destructing legislation. A stable regulatory regime allows businesses to invest appropriately and optimally. Changing regulations more often (via expiring laws that might or might not renew) will necessarily introduce inefficiency.
[+] [-] yboris|3 years ago|reply
A law requires further legislative action for it to not disappear on a certain pre-set date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_provision
Another variation I think I read about is where the law is implemented with an explicit goal that must be achieved by a certain date, and if the goal is achieved, the law becomes a regular law; if the pre-defined metric is not met by the certain date, the law disappears.
[+] [-] zip1234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starkd|3 years ago|reply
Plus a lot of the fears are based in the wave of public housing that was constructed in the 70s. Tenants with no investment in their dwellings will shoot a community into a death spiral. Look at Detroit and numerous other cities. There are other issues involved, but that was significant factor.
[+] [-] tgv|3 years ago|reply
Well, there are two exaggerations.
But time limiting laws won't work. There will not be enough time to review them before they expire, so they'll all be extended en masse. It'll just be another bureaucratic step that costs time and work.
[+] [-] jgalt212|3 years ago|reply
Like the assault weapons ban?
[+] [-] davidw|3 years ago|reply
Also an interesting guy to talk with if you get the chance.
[+] [-] nhchris|3 years ago|reply
Let me guess - denying minorities access to white people?
[+] [-] BurningFrog|3 years ago|reply
If I was Californian Emperor, I'd look at the 49 other states that get by without CEQA, and just copy the legislation from some state with a good track record on these issues.
[+] [-] epistasis|3 years ago|reply
CEQA is a bad first draft of an environmental law, the definitions are bad, the logic is bad. And CEQA even protected things like level of service of traffic until recently, which greatly increased car traffic and pollution. For the era when it was passed, CEQA was probably good, and it has accomplished lots of good, but today it's causing as many problems as it seems to solve.
[+] [-] yboris|3 years ago|reply
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-house-...
Progress can be made
[+] [-] ldayley|3 years ago|reply
Couldn't this also contribute to increased home prices in older single-family home neighborhoods? Or it could go the other way, too, depending on the desirability of new neighborhoods versus legacy neighborhoods. I speculate that this type of legislation, despite the benefits, might serve to further entrench generational and class differences between neighborhoods. I'm generally for this type of legislation, but I'm seeing some potential unforeseen consequences.
[+] [-] linuxftw|3 years ago|reply
And there it is. This is the real bane of our society, that a group of lifetime elected partisans can completely change the obvious meaning of a law, strike down laws, uphold blatantly unconstitutional laws, you name it.
So, we have a huge power grab by the government at some point in the past, and the government is totally unwilling to relinquish that power.
[+] [-] starkd|3 years ago|reply
The article is never defines the term. That is kind of crucial to understanding what the objections are. This is precisely the kind of writing that infuriates me, because there is a lack of effort to understand anyone with opposing viewpoints.
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
So if you own a single family home and add on to it (mother in law apartment, over garage unit, duplex conversion, etc) you're creating infill housing.
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
California has passed a bunch of laws to address this. Some of these passed before 2021 but the effects are only being felt now.
For example: each town or city is required to file a housing element with the state showing how they will meet their quota for increased units. Failing to do so was given teeth in the late 2010s and the targets got a lot higher. Now when a town falls out of compliance the so-called "builder's remedy" comes into effect. This means a court can approve projects bypassing pretty much all local zoning, planning ordinances, review processes and environmental review (ie CEQA) as long as it meets certain requirements (eg 20% "affordable" housing).
Santa Monica fell out of compliance and had courts approve 4000+ new units. it' remains to be seen how many will actually be built but it's a start.
Much of the Bay Area is currently out of compliance or at risk of being out of compliance.
All the while you'll see the same arguments. Something as simple as townhouses or multi-family dwellings will "ruin the character". NIMBY supported councils trying to fight state requirements, etc.
But this is only one of many pieces of legislation. Others include automatic approval for higher density housing with a sufficient right-of-way (70' IIRC), easier approval for building residential over commercial (something that is illegal in most of the US), etc.
My sincere hope that there will be enough support for this to ultimately repeal Prop 13. It's estimated this has cost the state hundreds of billions of dollars and represents a massive giveaway to the states richest residents.
[+] [-] theluketaylor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbroockman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pxmpxm|3 years ago|reply
The article bullshits around that fact with "disabled veterans" or some such nonsense, but the reality is the building will be something between a homeless shelter and a section 8 housing.
[+] [-] olivermarks|3 years ago|reply
Attempts were made to verticalize housing in the 1970's bay area, with predictable results from building life cycles such as Geneva towers in San Francisco. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Remembrance_of_Genev...
We don't need to pack people like sardines into metropolitan areas any more. We need to create smaller, more human living spaces closer to resources. There is so much undeveloped land in the state but we are wrecking historically important locations instead of thinking new development. The YIYBY activists are obsessed with existing cities, they are rooted in the past.
[+] [-] toshredsyousay|3 years ago|reply
We have the engineering knowhow to be able to build taller buildings, that can withstand earthquakes, and it has definitely improved since the 70s.
[+] [-] N1H1L|3 years ago|reply
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-build-nothing-country
[+] [-] olivermarks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zajio1am|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toshredsyousay|3 years ago|reply
With laws like CEQA and NEPA, lawsuits just keep layering condition upon condition that needs to be addressed to be compliant. Environmental impact studies have been getting bigger and bigger (and thus much more expensive). Fighting lawsuits is much more burdensome and time consuming than just having a regulator (which is not to say that regulatory oversight is never burdensome, just better than what we have). It also means rich people who can afford lawyers are more able to enforce regulations than poor people. This is a difficult hole to get out of unless we can persuade voters to push politicians to reform these laws.
[+] [-] Analemma_|3 years ago|reply
It drives me crazy that California is seen as the model of big-D Democratic governance when there's another state nearby, also with a more-or-less permanent Democratic majority, which is not a dysfunctional mess.
[+] [-] renewiltord|3 years ago|reply
Decline is inevitable when technology gains stall. San Francisco is the bellwether. The city is already reeling. We will repair it or it will break.
All through the way down, our parasitic elders will lament its decline, denying their role in it.
[+] [-] makeitrain|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
It's even more of a struggle to provision transportation infrastructure for these people, whether or not it is public transit or more roads and parking for cars.
People forget that California has about the same population density as Germany despite being mostly uninhabitable, uninhabited, military reservations, farms larger than some European countries, etc. Sure San Francisco is not up there in density with the densest cities such as Singapore (5 million), Hong Kong (7 million people) and the Gaza Strip (2 million) but answers from those places might not be scalable to a state with 40 million people and in fact all of those places struggle with inequality and governance issues.
[+] [-] epistasis|3 years ago|reply
And that's just residential water use, which is a tiny fraction of agricultural, which is far more wasteful, and often used to grow alfalfa to export internationally, in addition to dairy in the state.
So the total number of people in the state is nowhere near a cap from water.
As for transit, that is easily solved with density. In the vast majority of California, even in its larger cities, it is not legal to build densely enough to support transit. Which means that everybody drives everywhere, which doesn't scale at all. Transit and density with mixed use solve the problem in two ways, by both greatly reducing the need to drive for miles for any small errand or social event, and replace it with means of transit that are orders of magnitude more efficient than cars.
[+] [-] rqtwteye|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pydry|3 years ago|reply
Yet is still growing almonds in massive quantities.
This discussion is starting to remind me of when Trump got really invested in the number of birds killed by wind turbines.
[+] [-] dbttdft|3 years ago|reply
Here's something I'm seeing on recent LCDs, they show this popup (with a countdown) when you first turn it on:
> In compliance with California Energy Commission, the brightness and contrast settings cannot be adjusted in the sRGB mode. Would you like to remain in the sRGB mode?
1. LCDs already only use maybe 15W. Changing the brightness makes almost no difference.
2. Changing the contrast makes absolutely no difference in terms of power usage
3. sRGB mode implies I'm going to see the image the way it's meant to be displayed. Switching to racing mode (whatevr the hell that means), among 10 other options like "movie mode" to bypass it sounds like a non-starter especially given that LCD menus are practically impossible to use. Disabling brightness makes the monitor likely to find the trash can as it will be uncomfortable by default if the room lighting is too dim or too high compared to the monitor.
4. A popup should not be a thing on a monitor. It already has the worst GUI on earth. The physical buttons are randomly placed. They react in literally 1-2 seconds each time you manage to even press the right one. And they switch up the GUI and button designs every 6 months with someone who has zero know-how.
5. LCDs are beta tech and there is always something a vendor can do to massively improve. Examples include: input lag from bad programming, viewing angle phenomena, VRR which doesn't really fix anything in the long run but was still easily sellable, the future when they fix strobing which is just a small engineering exercise of rearranging timings, but the difference will be big enough to merit buying a new LCD. Just the intro of IPS which didn't even fix the viewing angle but substantially improved it had almost every tech enthusiast trashing his old LCD for new ones, circa 2007.
6. Every single CCFL LCD ever made is now in the trash and each contains mercury to boot.
7. Vendors also lie to the consumer to trick them into buying new LCDs, further reducing any green benefit. A massive example of this is when they switched to LED backlights and every single piece of marketing material, from in store to manufacturer deliberately called them "LED monitors" to make it seem like this is a new technology.