Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what from?
Wokeness
It will come after them. Where there are rich people, there are people who want to exploit them using the government as attack vector.
They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
271–280 of 502 posts
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because race is deeply entwined with culture, and culture is in everything. Every culture owns cars, but not every subculture does things with cars that require you to do most of the work yourself in your driveway. It’s like Ehrlichman’s famous quote: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, an…
There are an incredible number of topics that are deeply entwined with culture and issues of many kinds, that doesn't mean it's useful to turn a local law concerning garage mechanics into something about race. Would allowing only minorities to work on their vehicles at home solve the problem? It seems obvious (to me, at least) that it wouldn't, so why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much…
> Would allowing only minorities to work on their vehicles at home solve the problem?
This is a strawman - nobody is asking for this!
> why would race need to be brought into the equation when it's so much easier to communicate about the core issue rather than discuss things in the context of a more complex issue of race and equality?
Let's look at literacy tests for voters. These are similar as you can absolutely construct a plausible argument for them that never mentions race at all - "We just want to make sure that people voting actually understand what they're voting for". And there were likely advocates for these laws who believed that! And literacy tests of course affected more than just African Americans. But - the near universal consensus among historians was that the primary intent was to suppress black votes.
Not discussing race when discussing voter literacy tests is avoiding the crux of the actual issue. If you only engage with voter tests on the "actually understand what they're voting for" level you're avoiding the much more important conversation of whether this law is passed in good faith.
> The likelihood that it disproportionately hurts members of a certain race wouldn't matter if the issue was solved in a way that benefits everyone.
And therein lies the rub - how can it be solved in a way that benefits everyone? If there was a universal benefit solution for every problem politics would be easy! In the case of literacy tests there is no such solution - there was nothing that you could give the advocates for suppression policies that would make them happy that wouldn't come at the expense of minorities. In this case? Hard to say, but I really doubt there's an amicable solution.
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The system we have created around real estate and home ownership is optimized to erode culture and atomize community. We like to pretend that this is somehow inevitable, the will of the market, but we need to own it - this is the world we have built for ourselves. How is it not the will of the market? I don’t see any option other than to limit people’s freedom to move about the city/state/country.
What's pushing people out is the rising cost of property, caused by more and more money bidding for less space. If the government had done more to create more space, prices would not have risen so dramatically. What if government policy for the last few decades had been to keep housing as affordable as possible. So if average rent in a city started increasing, the government would make sure new apartments and got bui…
We'd end up with megacities who'd continuously expand and grow denser, swallowing their surroundings in that case, wouldn't we?
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#274To be fair, I'm a middle-aged white engineer raised in San Jose, CA relocated to ATX in Dec 2020. I live at the corner of I-35 east-side frontage and 5th in a mega apartment complex. I've tried meeting many of my neighbors and most are asocial/antisocial. There are 2 women roommates and an African-American kid who are legit cool that I've met so far. Also, I don't even know the people across the hall. My conclusion f…
> Heck, my upstairs neighbor complained about my music on the weekend during the day without introducing themselves and not diplomatically. Tangential (and probably just a perennial old guy complaint), but it seems like people have forgotten how to do this. If you have an issue with something your neighbor is doing, then go talk to them . Don't leave an aggressive note. Don't let it boil over until you're so upset yo…
The risk of a confrontation escalating makes dealing with such things myself a very unattractive option, especially if it's a stranger. I've had a simple, polite request to turn down the thumping music at 1 AM end with me blocking punches, retreating to my unit, and calling the cops. Better to leave it to people who do such things professionally.
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race? (Maybe I'm just overly sensitive and it doesn't happen as much as I perceive, to be fair) I don't agree with the law, but literally every race owns vehicles. Why complicate the issue with racism if there doesn't need to be any complication? Seems like a clear cut issue that people can unite over that instead is being made into a minority…
> Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race? Because there is no other reasonable, understandable reason to ban "working on your own car on your own property". Unless it disproportionally hits certain races--which would at least help explain the root motivation of the law.
Are you saying that you think the people who pushed this law had no opinion whatsoever on the activity itself, but just wanted black and latino people to suffer through an arbitrary ban?
It seems much more reasonable to guess that neighbors were annoyed by the activity itself and passed a nimby law because they're selfish.
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find. Every othe…
> Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find. Big citi…
Exactly. If they have to clarify it in some press release, then they should be amending the ordinance so that it is clear.
Unfortunately, the system is lazy. Politicians don't bother to amend laws when these issues arises, police can use their "professional discretion" to enforce or not enforce a law (which leads to unequal enforcement), and the courts tend to "interpret" laws in ways that don't make sense (partially because of the politicians I mentioned earlier, but also a misapplication of statutory construction rules and lenity).
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#277At the general level, I doubt anyone is surprised to see this story, and there will likely be more to come as tech flocks to Austin (though it was already a notable tech hub with some of these pressures already before the billionaires decided to give it the seal of approval). To me, the more interesting question here is how does Austin avoid what happened to SF, where tech hollowed out nearly all of its existing cult…
> To me, the more interesting question here is how does Austin avoid what happened to SF
It doesn't.
There is a limited number of cities with weather conditions humans prefer.
Some people think others care about culture - no, they mostly don't. They care about weather conditions, safety and job opportunities. Culture is a nice to have feature.
Unless governments get busy building new cities/towns, every existing city with favorable weather conditions will turn into rich people, next to homeless people, or just rich people, if they enact laws against homeless people to get rid of them.
By the way, if governments get busy building new cities/towns, you don't get rid of the problem, you just delay it until every favorable location has a city, and then you're back to having this same problem.
It's the same as dating - we can't all have miss universe, because it's a zero sum game. If you live in a small town and got to date miss universe, who didn't get discovered yet, you shouldn't get mad when a talent agency visits your town and takes your miss universe to New York to be a fashion model and date a super athlete. You should be grateful that you got to date miss universe for a while not due to merit in a zero sum game, but due to pure luck. But, you know, good luck explaining that to the guy who lives in a small town, had a beauty and now doesn't anymore. Those fucking talent agencies, maaan.
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race? (Maybe I'm just overly sensitive and it doesn't happen as much as I perceive, to be fair) I don't agree with the law, but literally every race owns vehicles. Why complicate the issue with racism if there doesn't need to be any complication? Seems like a clear cut issue that people can unite over that instead is being made into a minority…
> Why does it seem like people feel the need to make anything they can about race? Because there is no other reasonable, understandable reason to ban "working on your own car on your own property". Unless it disproportionally hits certain races--which would at least help explain the root motivation of the law.
Not having thought of any explanations is not the same thing as there being no explanations... someone should ask the people living in the community how that law got support.
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, the risk of retaliation may be too high. While the likelihood may be low, the magnitude of the consequence is great.
It seems like this comment is based on either an incorrect image of how this conversation ought to go, or a problematic prior about how inclined one's neighbor might be to violent retaliation. In most cases, I'd suggest mitigating this risk through your style of interaction, not your initial choice about how to interact at all. GP was just suggesting a normal human interaction. If "retaliation" is a risk after your i…
Maybe a bad prior, but one that arose from personal experience.
If you haven't had to spend the night wondering whether your neighbor was going to barge in and murder you, waiting for the moving truck to arrive in the morning ... Well, I suppose you might not share my priors.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what could have been done to prevent it. My neighbor's list of grievances was largely imaginary. His tales of how he wanted to kill his pets seemed earnest enough to make his personal threats equally disturbing.
Re: They Just Moved to Austin. Now They Want to End One of Its Traditions
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Odd answer, but go to the megacities that show resilience and are building housing. In the US, so far that may only be NYC. I know that's not amazing to hear if you have other reservations about NYC, but I think it's the reality until mid-sized cities catch on and get their shit together. The other answer IMO is to pick a city no one in tech is even thinking about, and the growth rate is expected to be slow. Not to j…
NYC is building pied-a-terres for money launderers. The whole Hudson Yards was engineered as a phony rehabilitation of Harlem so they could sell visas to millionaires who could then turn around and buy a luxury apartment in the "blighted" neighborhood they revitalized.
> The whole Hudson Yards was engineered as a phony rehabilitation of Harlem
Hudson Yards is not anywhere remotely near Harlem, and was built on a deck over what's been a rail yard for a century.
I'm don't love what was built there, but it certainly wasn't rehabilitating Harlem and not a single person was directly displaced by building there.