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Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

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Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#61

Post by gerdesj »

rayiner wrote: post #10

[flagged]

You might regret that opinion one day. Local govt is quite literally small govt that you can participate in with a chance of actually having a say. It's all very well having a mad man at the helm of the good ship USofA. You may love or hate him but you can be sure he does not give a shit about your neck of the woods.

I gather that "Bumfuck XX" is the approved term for a region within XX state that is a bit out of the way and I heartily approve of that.

If you live in Bumfuck AQ (for example) you might have local issues that you might think are better served with a local rather than state or federal approach.

Some of your states are quite large. For example TX is nearly three times the land area of the UK which manages to cram three separate nations within its islands, one of which is minority shared with Ireland and the rest is even more complicated!

If you are happy with big govt then all is fine. That is what you'll get if you try to remove the old ... glue. Those old sub divisions are communities ie groups of people who are effectively the civic or regional version of families.

I suggest you strive to keep those webs of community together rather than try to tear them apart in the name of administrative efficiency or you will discover what bumfucked really means.

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#62

Post by matheusmoreira »

abtinf wrote: post #42

The HN rules need to expand to ban all AI generated posts.

I'm going to ask the same questions I asked the lobsters community.

Define "AI generated".

Whole article generation? LLM draft with human finish? Human draft with LLM finish? Is proof reading OK? Or is it permanently tainted the second an LLM touches it?

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#63

Post by jeremyjh »

danans wrote: post #30

> They lost. So why did it still cost us $400 million? Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?

No. It says the direct payments created other funding gaps that caused further delays that added costs, but provides no information about what those were, much less any evidence that they are due only to this lawsuit.

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#64

Post by nine_k »

shitloadofbooks wrote: post #54

What is the name for the literary device that LLMs use where it explains something and then follows with a "pithy" "gotcha" sentence? > > Atherton didn't have to win. A CEQA lawsuit doesn't need a strong legal theory to do damage — it just needs to introduce enough risk that funders freeze and clocks keep running. The delay is the weapon. In my opinion, this construct is massively overused by LLMs and is extremely ja…

Now that LLMs can produce texts in any form, and of a considerable length, may we please stop bickering about the form, and concentrate on the content? Because otherwise we'd allow LLMs troll us: produce slop to mask where the content is lacking, and have us generate more words about the slop, ignoring the content further.

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#65

Post by em-bee »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #43
danans wrote: post #30

> They lost. So why did it still cost us $400 million? Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?

It did not. In fact the article comes dangerously close to admitting that there is correlation without correlation, it opens with: > Here is the short version. In 2012, Caltrain budgeted its electrification project — the backbone of the Peninsula's transit future and a prerequisite for high-speed rail to ever reach San Francisco — at roughly $1.5 billion. By 2017 that number had ballooned to $1.9 billion. In between,…

you have to be fairly negligent to think you're going to build something in California without a massive legal headache

that's not fair. the question was: did the legal headache cause the budget-overrun. predictable or not, your response does not show that it didn't.

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#66

Post by SwellJoe »

austin-cheney wrote: post #35
reducesuffering wrote: post #20

Atherton resident Marc Andreessen Apr 18th 2020: "It's Time To Build" "We can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities"[0] Andreessen family 2 years later: "IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development! I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton... They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values"[1] [0] https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ [1] ht…

I can sympathize. People in my town, Fort Worth, have been saying the same things for years. People were moving in too fast causing home values to sky rocket, so everyone was saying they need to build houses faster to prevent a property tax explosion. You can only build single family homes so fast, so then came the hundreds and hundreds of multi-family apartment campuses and home values immediately tanked. They got w…

Housing values did not tank in Fort Worth. You can't just make up the results to suit the story you're telling. Fort Worth housing prices have mostly tracked alongside the rest of the country (big spike upward starting around 2020, then leveling off, and then a slight correction, but still much higher than 2019). Many cities have shown a very similar pattern.

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#67

Post by meindnoch »

shitloadofbooks wrote: post #54

What is the name for the literary device that LLMs use where it explains something and then follows with a "pithy" "gotcha" sentence? > > Atherton didn't have to win. A CEQA lawsuit doesn't need a strong legal theory to do damage — it just needs to introduce enough risk that funders freeze and clocks keep running. The delay is the weapon. In my opinion, this construct is massively overused by LLMs and is extremely ja…

Reframing.

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#68

Post by Drunk_Engineer »

decimalenough wrote: post #45
danans wrote: post #30

> They lost. So why did it still cost us $400 million? Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?

The article's somewhat dubious argument is that the 2012 budget estimate was $1.5B, the actual cost by 2017 was $1.9B, and the $400M difference was caused entirely by Atherton's law suit. Which is obviously a bit sus, because the actual lawsuit froze everything for only around 18 months from Feb 2015 to Sep 2016.

The CBOSS fiasco, which added $200 million in costs, certainly can't be blamed on Atherton.

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#69

Post by altairprime »

saagarjha wrote: post #58
altairprime wrote: post #19

Can the county remove Atherton from its services coverage boundaries until the $400M of costs have been recouped?

Atherton does not have a Caltrain station anymore.

That sounds more like something they would celebrate than suffer.

Re: Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M

#70

Post by em-bee »

decimalenough wrote: post #45
danans wrote: post #30

> They lost. So why did it still cost us $400 million? Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?

The article's somewhat dubious argument is that the 2012 budget estimate was $1.5B, the actual cost by 2017 was $1.9B, and the $400M difference was caused entirely by Atherton's law suit. Which is obviously a bit sus, because the actual lawsuit froze everything for only around 18 months from Feb 2015 to Sep 2016.

there was also a delay in the decision for funding until may 2017. that's another 8 months. but then we don't know when that decision would have been made originally.
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