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Elon Musk moves to Texas

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Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#951

Post by lwansbrough »

jariel wrote: post #942
SllX wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abusing police powers to curtail private property rights isn’t the high ground.

"Abusing police powers to curtail private property rights isn’t the high ground." It has nothing to do with police powers, it's called zoning and it's absolutely a legitimate part of our governing structure. If the residents of SF wanted to go Hong Kong style full on skyscrapers everywhere, they would have. Bulldozing communities to create utopian/dystopian hyper density is one of the most short-sighted urban concept…

> It has nothing to do with police powers, it's called zoning and it's absolutely a legitimate part of our governing structure.

Zoning is a mechanism of economic suppression to appease the haves and separate them from the have-nots. They de-diversify and oppress.

> If the residents of SF wanted to go Hong Kong style full on skyscrapers everywhere, they would have.

Yes my point is that they didn’t, and now they’re paying the ridiculous cost: $3000 for a bachelor. Do anything other than work for FAANG? Sorry, you don’t get to live here. Please bus an hour so you can serve me coffee.

> Bulldozing communities to create utopian/dystopian hyper density is one of the most short-sighted urban concepts going.

Bulldozing exclusive communities and replacing them with inclusive ones, which create more local business opportunities and reduce dependence on transportation. Calling high density planning short sighted in favour of single family dwellings is absurd.

> There's plenty of space, go elsewhere.

This mindset is what causes suburbia, which has an absolutely disastrous impact on the environment and local economies. And leads to class segregation (which is a proxy for racial segregation in the US.)

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#952

Post by lwansbrough »

woah wrote: post #711
lwansbrough wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t build luxury housing, affordable housing becomes luxury housing. San Francisco is a perfect example of NIMBY extremism and the damage it does to communities.

It's worse than that: The entire concept of "luxury housing" is a lie. The words "luxury housing" are designed to make you think that it is taking up space that could be used by non luxury housing. Like the only reason a new apartment is so expensive is because it has a gold-plated toilet or something, and if only the developer had built an apartment without a gold plated toilet you could afford it. But in Minneapoli…

If you consistently get the choice between paying $2000 for that or $2000 for a dingy basement suite with no windows, then yes it is luxury and will stop the price of those less desirable homes from rising. The key is to ensure supply outpaces demand. Meaning: let developers build luxury developments. The more the merrier.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#953

Post by lwansbrough »

jariel wrote: post #824
lwansbrough wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t build luxury housing, affordable housing becomes luxury housing. San Francisco is a perfect example of NIMBY extremism and the damage it does to communities.

Just the opposite, every community has a right to decide their future. If a community says 'we'd rather be homes and don't want to turn everything in to high-rises' then that's entirely their discretion. It's definitely not any individual townships moral or civic responsibility to change their community to accommodate either state/national strategic planning, especially for the benefit of people who do not even live…

> If a community says 'we'd rather be homes and don't want to turn everything in to high-rises' then that's entirely their discretion.

Nobody is arguing it’s not their discretion. I’m just saying it makes you a bad actor in the larger community of people who would like to benefit from the opportunity of living in a city that they otherwise might not get if they weren’t living in the city.

> especially for the benefit of people who do not even live there.

They don’t live there because they’re being systematically and economically excluded from living there by people of means who are unaffected by the damage they’re doing to their own local economy.

> There's plenty of physical space in Cali, if anything, the opportunity might be in Sacramento and in-between.

So... not in your back yard?

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#954

Post by Retric »

rayiner wrote: post #914
Retric wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turnout says far less about political views than you might think. Voter suppression is a common and effective tool used to keep a political party in power even as they loose popular support. All it takes is realizing changing X rule like a deadline will help or hurt your party and then voting based on that rule. Eventually this can fail, which oddly enough tends to flip states so they can quickly go from solidly part…

We just had a massive natural experiment in loosening voting laws that showed that “voter suppression” is less extensive than many people assume. Take Georgia for example. Turnout was up 20% compared to 2016. But the Black share of the electorate went down again, to the lowest levels since 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/17/upshot/georgi... . What flipped Georgia was white voters in the Atlanta coll…

Voter suppression isn’t specifically targeted at minorities. That’s a common misconception, it’s tailored to individual states voting patterns. Overall turnout consistently favors Democrats which doesn’t win every state, but control doesn’t require every state.

As to the extra voting in Texas. 2020 had an additional + 1205300 Republican votes and + 1381258 Democratic votes in a solid red state which just hit 1/2 of voting age population. That’s 46.6% Republican and 53.4% Democrat and means those extra votes very much favored Democrats. Project a 20% increase in turnout with that kind of margin and Texas is in dead even recount territory.

Of course any election where Texas is that close Democrats have already won by such a margin as to make possibility flipping Texas largely irrelevant. Further, looking at these numbers it’s clear why targeted voter suppression becomes so significant.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#955

Post by yxwvut »

elindbe2 wrote: post #593
yxwvut wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the private beneficiaries of those subsidies should bear some responsibility for covering the costs?

California would've had to make that responsibility known up front. They chose not to do that. And California directly benefitted from the money they spent. That benefit is electric vehicles in the hands of its population, which improves the state's pollution levels long-term.

Agreed on all fronts. More of a 'woulda-coulda-shoulda' than anything.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#956

Post by hiq »

egsmi wrote: post #312
hiq wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In EM's case, I suspect he spends more time business-traveling than at home anyway, so it would be pretty difficult to prove which of his houses he "lives" in. I'm not sure about that. I think in these high profile cases tax authorities are more inclined to look into it given how much money there is in the balance. And it's somewhat easier to track people like EM precisely because of their lifestyles: flights would…

I'll bet EM travels more than the typical CEO, who already travels a lot. Especially if the company is international. https://hbr.org/2018/07/how-ceos-manage-time "About half (47%) of a CEO’s work was done at company headquarters. The rest was conducted while visiting other company locations, meeting external constituencies, commuting, traveling, and at home." Shockingly I didn't see anything about time spent on Hack…

I meant that yes he travels a lot, but no that doesn't make it harder to know in which state he has been the most (or whichever rule applies in the US to determine in which state you officially reside) and thus to figure out where he should pay taxes.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#957

Post by todd8 »

mwfunk wrote: post #778
woah wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a massive windfall to people who have been homeowners for 40 years in California. High rents due to the fact that you're not allowed to build new housing, high property taxes paid by new residents, while old residents pay nothing, high income and sales taxes to paper over the gap in the budget left by the lack of property tax paid by longtime residents. The whole system has been optimized to milk as much mo…

Not only that, but there's often comments about how people moving from CA to TX are fleeing the results of a presumably left wing tax code to enjoy the benefits of a presumably right wing tax code, but it's not that simple. CA is as expensive as it is in large part because of NIMBYs and tax schemes that were absolutely the product of right-wing ballot initiatives for the most part. OTOH, a large part of the appeal of…

> IIRC TX takes in ~$150b from the Federal government, but only pays ~$100b into the system. CA (like NY) pays more into the system then it takes out, so about ~$50b of the annual budget of TX is literally bumming money from other states, albeit indirectly.

This isn't true. According to the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government report dated Jan 8, 2019 (which used the data from the Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2019) the fifty states all had differing Federal expenditures vs Federal receipts but Texas and California were close. See page 15 at [1].

On a per capita basis, here are the federal expenditures per dollar of receipts for a few states:

    Connecticut      0.74     50th
    New Jersey       0.82     49th
    Massachusetts    0.83     48th
    New York         0.86     47th
    North Dakota     0.94     46th
    Illinois         0.97     45th
    New Hampshire    0.98     44th
    Washington       0.98     43rd
    Nebraska         0.98     42nd
    Colorado         0.99     41st
    California       1.00     40th
[1] https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1-7-19b-Bala...

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#958

Post by bryanlarsen »

ekianjo wrote: post #892
lotsofpulp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, perhaps also Texas regulations prohibiting marijuana, assisted suicide, proper sex education in public schools, no liquor permits for public traded companies, restrictions on mail in voting, etc.

You make it sound like restrictions on mail in voting is a bad thing.

IIRC, mail in voting increases fraudulent voting at a rate of about 1 vote per 100,000 vote increase in the participation rate.

Restrictions on mail in voting are only a good thing if you want to restrict the participation rate.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#959

Post by CyberDildonics »

wolco2 wrote: post #766
CyberDildonics wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2000 Anywhere was a very bigoted place. This really is not true, in many big cities it was another common facet of life that people were by and large apathetic about at that point.

This is true. Even in big cities with large gay populations the reason why gay villages aros is because of safety. Now gay areas are disappearing from big cities because satefy is less of an issue and acceptance is much more widespread in society.

I think you might be thinking of the plot of the movie 'Milk' while not realizing it took place over two decades before the time being talked about here.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#960

Post by TMWNN »

thrav wrote: post #908
djur wrote: post #881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think the answer to this is obvious, but it's sufficiently non-obvious to me that I don't even know which answer you're assuming.

Provo is full of overly polite Mormon families and BYU. They chose cartoonish examples of polite conservative locales to make their point. There are plenty of conservative places that would be upset to see Harris / Biden attire. Look no further than the classic Top Gear episode with the Gay Pride car and the Clinton car driving through the south.

> Provo is full of overly polite Mormon families and BYU. They chose cartoonish examples of polite conservative locales to make their point.

Are Fort Worth and Pensacola also filled with "overly polite Mormons"? Are they also "cartoonish examples of polite conservative locales"? (Congratulations, by the way, on making polite Mormons and conservatives sound like bad things.)

Conversely, are San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Cambridge "cartoonish examples of crazy extreme leftists", or are they (unfortunately) typical of places where such congregate?

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