I think that’s Tom Brady? I have no idea what the fuck this means.

Until electrification, a lot of the passenger cars used by Caltrain were old Metra galley cars.

The whole second floor was single seats. Loved it.

I thought The Brutalist was incredible. I was really disheartened to find out about the AI usage.

tfw you want to compete with China

Also, that picture is not “UC Berkeley’s Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center” that’s the Valley Life Sciences Building. I had to go double check that they hadn’t renamed it and mercifully they had not.

back in my day we just called it margarine

Presumably Cheyenne still has the same brand of upper-middle-class clueless white people that every city in the US has?

afaik the Trump cult hasn’t embraced Shen Yun/Falun Gong the way that they’ve embraced Trump

Not endemic to New Zealand. Just Australia and Papua I’m pretty sure.

It’d be very funny if all the tech guys who saw Oppenheimer wanted to be him so much that they just act in terrified awe of everything they work on.

Like, “Juicero is going to destroy the world! I am become death!”

Hey, rest of the world, have you tried not having any endemic mammals so that birds evolve over millenia to fill that ecological niche? No? Worth considering!

From the article it sounds like this is only possible because Biden waited until late October to even add this rule.

You had four years, dawg. It seems that Democrats only do a flurry of activity right before they leave office, unlike the Republicans who front-load everything.

I’m honestly shocked more states haven’t shot themselves in the foot like California has. In the 70s, property taxes in California were skyrocketing for a lot of reasons, but primarily they were one of the few ways for local governments to raise money and housing prices (and therefore assessments and taxes) were going up because of all the new people moving to California. Consequently, conservatives latched onto this resentment of increasing property taxes and passed Prop 13, which limits the amount your property tax can go up to about 2% a year (the number is actually indexed to inflation between the range of -2% and 2%, so some years property taxes have gone down!). And the value of a property is assessed at the most recent sale price.

But there were a whole host of intentional side-effects to this bill. It had been sold as “keep grandma in her home!” the very same rhetoric you’re seeing today. However, it applied to all property in California, not just residential. So, for example, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco has a property tax basis from 1977, because it, and most commercial buildings in California, are owned by trusts, and the trust (which has ownership of the building) is sold instead of the building, so a reassessment never occurs. You can see for yourself. The assessed value of the Transamerica Pyramid, a 48-story skyscraper in the middle of downtown San Francisco, has an assessed value of under $6m. Its property tax bill is $70k/yr.

The other built-in side-effect was that, fairly often, inflation is higher than 2%/year, so even if property values weren’t going up, or more people weren’t moving in, the growth of local governments’ personnel costs would outpace the growth of their tax base. So local governments have had to do a lot of two things: cut services and raise other taxes elsewhere. Most often they raise sales taxes. So a fairly progressive tax (property taxes are a form of wealth tax) have been backfilled with an incredibly regressive tax. On top of this, there is not a single local government in California whose tax revenue per capita has returned to the same level as before Prop 13, leading to chronically underfunded schools and services.

And the last tiny wrinkle is that property tax collection shifted from the cities to the counties, who then disbursed the money to the cities according to a formula. What formula? Well they simply kept the funding splits the same as they were in 1977. What does that mean? Well it means that if your city was a wealthy one that had a high property tax rate in order to pay for high-quality services, that advantage you had over your neighboring cities is now locked in forever. Even if those other cities have added drastically more housing/residents. This is part of the insidious reason why even local governments in CA are so NIMBY: they don’t see extra revenue commensurate with the increases in population, it’s distributed based on a formula from 1977. So the town of Atherton, CA, which has zero commercial properties and zero apartment buildings (mostly just mansions) sees more benefit from Redwood City building 1000 new units of housing than Redwood City does.

Anyway hope that doesn’t happen to you!

Edit: Also forgot to add that inheriting a property also doesn’t trigger a re-assessment, so if your parents were landlords in 1977 and you inherit their rental properties your costs are fixed even if, for example, market rent rises 500% over 10 years. (This is no longer the case as of 2020, but it was until then. Now, you have to live in the property you inherited in order for the tax basis not to change.)

During the Greek housing crisis in the 40s, they came up with a system called antiparochi, by which a homeowner would “exchange” their land to a developer for some number of apartments in the building they would construct. Older people could downsize, maintain ownership of a domicile, and even gain some liquidity by selling or renting the apartments that were exchanged to them. And it drastically increased the housing supply, which drove rents down for everyone else.

In the US, this is pretty much illegal, because so many of our zoning laws effectively ban apartment construction.

Kind of a non-sequitur, but your comment reminded me about it.

Havana couple beers

Make larb and eat it out of cabbage cups.

Man convicted of doing cartoon crimes: “This whole system is political!”

“Palestine never existed” is pretty deep down the rabbit hole of weird Zionist alt history.

But they can’t override Congress’s budget anyway.

No. Democrats can’t do that. Republicans can do whatever the fuck they want.

They’ll just do it again next week but with carveouts for industrial subsidies.

probably have to wait for the third term for that

This tweet is from his first term.