Big part of the reason why I left big tech to work in infrastructure. None of this Faceboot stuff is going to matter if we are drowning in sewage. That and the comfort that if/when things go to hell I will still have a job.
But hey I would like to point out that a bunch of the problems we are seeing are fixable with law changes. Housing is too expensive? Get rid of zoning. Global warming threatens to kill us all? Carbon tax and gradually increase it. Faceboot sucks but we are the ones that refuse to vote.
get rid of zoning
(To be clear here, I’m not being accusatory or anything here, I’m genuinely curious) When you say that, what, exactly, do you mean? I feeling like I may be thinking something different from you, because when I picture getting rid of zoning, I see businesses/companies taking over everything and making neighborhoods a bleak nightmare. For example, we just recently had a Chinese group open up a smoke shop in a place not zoned for it. (skipped every single process required of new businesses to open) They got caught fast because the neighborhood they were in started having issues with the shop’s customers, so someone blew them in to permitting. Thats what I picture happening with no zoning, but without the ability to turn in the problematic businesses.
Right so you are mentioning ethnicity in a conversation justifying zoning. Not a great look, considering what zoning has been used for.
As the US desegregated zoning laws by sheer numbers increased as well.
I only mentioned it because they were a foreign company from China that ignored all the rules and set up shop. They weren’t US citizens of Chinese decent. But if you immediately want to jump to racism, you do you.
It’s great to latch on to ethnicity as the part of a statement to attack. But realistically reducing housing cost by eliminating zoning just turns neighborhoods into shitholes.
You move into an area and buy a house worth x amount of dollars, years later someone buys the house next to you and turns it into a junkyard. All of a sudden your property is worth dramatically less. You’re lowering housing prices by taking away the money from individuals buying their houses.
You say you’re in infrastructure, what happens when they build 27 apartment buildings, on a fringe property near the beginning of the service line and everyone downstream of them starts to get backups? Roadways, power, zoning and planning by zoning is the only thing that allows infrastructure to stay running.
You said “Global warming threatens to kill us all? Carbon tax and gradually increase it” as if that will save us when the temp is +3° higher than the average in the 1800s
A while back there was a discussion with Elon Musk and Jack Ma. Musk talks about living on Mars and Jack talking about making life better on Earth. I can’t believe now that back then I thought Musk was the smart one…
The orca arrives in panel 5.
Effective Altruism go brrr