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DorintheFlora's comments

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail

FYI: Existing train (Amtrak) service in the Central Valley is being expanded currently and they are looking to expand it further. The expansion, from 6 trips to 7, went into effect June 20th. Fresno is the same city where ground is being broken on the nation's first high speed rail.

This sort of contradicts this editorial claiming high speed rail makes no sense and will not fly.

http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article84917817.html

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail

The officials who have to make the budget tradeoffs that weren’t on the ballot in 2008 are finally pushing back. The question now is when they’ll have the guts to pull the plug.

  We can do "The Innuendo"
  We can dance and sing
  When it's said and done we haven't told you a thing
Don Henley - Dirty Laundry

http://www.metrolyrics.com/dirty-laundry-lyrics-don-henley.h...

It is an editorial -- in other words, opinion not news -- and the strongly worded title really does not fit with the content. This should not be getting taken so seriously here.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: Huge helium discovery 'a life-saving find'

But if we raise the price of helium to prevent depletion of resources, helium will be expensive too.

Although artificially raising the price of diamonds seems to have been an effective strategy for the diamond industry, that is in part because they found a marketing angle where the high price of a diamond engagement ring is a strong emotional signal between a prospective couple. In most markets, people simply are not going to pay more for something than it benefits them. Raising the price can have the consequence of pushing people to go look for other alternatives.

Price has to be reflective to some degree of underlying value or benefit. Further, if creating helium comes at the cost of destroying more real value than it creates, this is simply a lose-lose prospect across the board, regardless of the price tag you can attach to helium.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: New Cities

Sorry to have made assumptions. My understanding is that there was no pre-existing infrastructure suitable to cars. The dirt and cobblestone roads that existed were inadequate, to put it nicely. I have read up a good bit on such things and drawn a very different conclusion from you.

In the US, personally owned vehicles are critical for sprawling suburbs and rural life. It is a big country with low density. Cars should not be necessary in the big city. Those that are designed well make it possible to live without a car. In much of America, it is quite challenging to live without a car. This is partly due to choices we have made, not because it had to be that way.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: New Cities

The world would be better served if you studied how to tweak existing cities to make them more pedestrian-friendly and people focused. They are too car focused.

You should start by reading "How buildings learn." Old buildings that work extremely well typically did not start off as superior. They typically gained value over time as residents added improvements that worked well because they lived there and understood the problem space.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: New York passes bill making it illegal to advertise entire apartments on Airbnb

I generally try to not be sarcastic. Thank you for making an effort to answer in good faith.

The point I was trying to make is that the subject of affordable housing seems to have fallen into the same pattern that discrimination against women or people of color has fallen into. There is always, without fail, some reason (aka excuse) as to why this specific woman or this specific person of color does not deserve the promotion or should not be listened to, etc. It isn't their gender or skin color, it is that they aren't saying it right, being too emotional, etc ad nauseum -- standards that white males don't get held to. Affordable housing seems to be a topic where there is always some excuse as to why it is relevant this time, why it isn't a valid argument in this case and so on.

I do know something about these topics. I don't agree with you that homelessness is mostly about mental health issues and addiction. It is far more complicated than that. That piece of it gets far too much press. It becomes just another excuse to dismiss the fact that many people on the street have some income, just not enough to afford a middle class lifestyle, and affordable housing is in incredibly short supply in this country.

When you dismiss homeless people as merely insane addicts who cannot function in society any way, it is a convenient way to wash all of society clean of the responsibility of providing adequate amounts of affordable housing because we don't really know how to reliably cure mental health issues or addiction. So, it absolves the world of really doing anything about the problem because, hey, it isn't really fixable, so you can't reasonably expect "me"/the world to really try and you can't reasonably hold us responsible.

I fear I am wasting my breathe, so to speak. So, in the interest of not pointlessly beating a dead horse, I plan to stop here.

Thanks for engaging me.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: New York passes bill making it illegal to advertise entire apartments on Airbnb

Homelessness has been increasing nationwide for about 3 decades or so:

http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/why.html

This is because the supply of affordable housing has been dwindling while demand grows:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1292331...

This is not specific to New York per se. I guess you have every right to argue that this is just a New York issue because this this a New York law under discussion, but lack of affordable housing is hardly specific to New York and AirBnB is also hardly specific to New York.

So, while you no doubt have some valid points, the fact is that affordable housing is simply not happening nationwide. And when people do what you are currently doing -- and most people do -- of saying "yes, BUT..." and acting like somehow this specific instance is not relevant or doesn't count, well, again, affordable housing is simply not happening and there is always an excuse and it is always not the thing we are talking about THIS time.

So, do you have any pointers as to how and when it would be okay to make any points about it without them being dismissed out of hand as irrelevant, not on topic and so on?

Thanks.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: California surpasses France as world's 6th largest economy

If we do too good of a job of keeping out Mexicans, we will have serious food shortages. There will also be other areas that suffer -- like upscale landscaping that seems to be mostly maintained by Mexican workers -- but the whole food shortage thing worries me lots more.

So, I hope we don't get too clever about it.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: New York passes bill making it illegal to advertise entire apartments on Airbnb

I am a bit fed up with hearing this kind of thing. We are all human beings.

If you are rich, you get accused of being in it for the money. If you are poor, you are accused of being in it for the money. If you have a vested interest, you are accused of bias. If you have no vested interest, you are told go away and STFU.

Poor people do not have the time, energy and money to advocate for changes that would potentially free up a MERE 30k rental units. They are too busy trying to survive. People with money are generally too busy trying to get richer or keep what they have to put time into trying to make the world an actually better place.

Who is allowed to say "This is bad for affordable housing" and be taken seriously? It seems like there is no one on the planet who is allowed to advocate for affordable housing. We are all guilty of something. Meanwhile, affordable housing simply is not happening.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: New York passes bill making it illegal to advertise entire apartments on Airbnb

Not only that, but I think there is reason to believe that AirBnB further stresses the housing market and adds additional fuel to the existing divide between the Haves and Have Nots by putting more rent monies into the hands of the Haves and creating more scarcity of housing for those looking for a long-term rental, not an alternative to a hotel.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: California surpasses France as world's 6th largest economy

Still, it seems thin for HN. Even given that many people here live in California and HN is headquartered in California, it doesn't seem like something interesting, discussion worthy and meriting hitting the front page.

I mean, I like this little tidbit about California and have for years. But this isn't particularly substantive.

DorintheFlora | 9 years ago | on: California surpasses France as world's 6th largest economy

Fifth largest, sixth largest, eighth largest -- it kind of does not matter. A single US state has a larger economy than the vast majority of nations. It's pretty impressive, but it isn't really news. This has been true for a long time. I have seen it said that "California is the American dream squared" or something like that.

DorintheFlora | 12 years ago | on: Complaint-Driven Development

From the article:

Since that change, I haven't heard word one about our terrible, onerous, awful default body and title character limit policies. Not one. Single. Complaint.

So, they didn't do what the customers said they wanted, but they did work on the issue until people quit complaining.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

― Henry Ford

Plus, IIRC, for the Edsel, they did ask customers what they wanted. And it has gone down in history as one of the worst cars ever.

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