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BillBrasky Memorial Political Chat Thread

I'm kinda surprised Putin hasn't had Julian Assange killed in British prison. Putin hasn't hesitated to kill loose ends outside Russia and has done so in England before.
 
Thankfully, I don't shop at Vons or Pavilions. I'll let my friends know.

No one should use DoorDash unless it's a critical need.
 
The counter to that outrage is that food is now cheaper.

At the end of the day you gotta realize that only 10% or so of the population or so is actually intelligent enough to able to command a significant salary. Fortnite costs $60 and 30 years ago Super Mario Brothers 2 cost $60. The remaining 90% are gonna have to make do with a job that gets them an iphone, a netflix account, a playstation 5, and cheaper food. The free porn was nice too, but BIG MEDIA had to go and fuck that up for all of us a month or two back.
 
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stugotz said:
The counter to that outrage is that food is now cheaper.

At the end of the day you gotta realize that only 10% or so of the population or so is actually intelligent enough to able to command a significant salary. Fortnite costs $60 and 30 years ago Super Mario Brothers 2 cost $60. The remaining 90% are gonna have to make do with a job that gets them an iphone, a netflix account, a playstation 5, and cheaper food. The free porn was nice too, but BIG MEDIA had to go and fuck that up for all of us a month or two back.
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food is cheaper?
 
Political Chat Thread - All Topics & Rants Welcome

stugotz said:
The counter to that outrage is that food is now cheaper.

90% are gonna have to make do
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Is food cheaper?
“Have to” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. Humans have suffered a lot of injustice under the fatalistic guise of “having to make due”. You are not disconnected from these events, nor are they inevitable.

I don’t know how you voted on Prop 22, but you certainly could have voted for it, and even if you didn’t, you certainly realize that labor laws change over time, and up until the past 35 years, labor law had been moving progressively in America.
 
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Our conditions are not inevitable or intractable, and for a person of privilege such as Palma, resignation is complicity.
 
Political Chat Thread - All Topics & Rants Welcome

myDeaconmyhand said:
Is food cheaper?
“Have to” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. Humans have suffered a lot of injustice under the fatalistic guise of “having to make due”. You are not disconnected from these events, nor are they inevitable.

I don’t know how you voted on Prop 22, but you certainly could have voted for it, and even if you didn’t, you certainly realize that labor laws change over time, and up until the past 35 years, labor law had been moving progressively in America.
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Prop 22 is a difficult one. I enjoy $20 Uber rides from the airport, if it passed it would have just resulted in Uber costing as much as a $50 cab ride. The drivers also do enjoy the freedom of being able to have a side gig that fits their schedule. The downside being few of them realized just how little they made when factoring in depreciation. But if it did pass at the end of the day over half of those drivers would no longer be able to have their side gig and the cost of transportation for the community at large would have drastically increased.

Being in charge of HR for multiple companies in CA, I can tell you that the progressive labor laws in CA certainly seem to really overstep to the point of being impractical. You can certainly understand the general republicans take of wanting to reduce regulations on businesses, cause many progressive policies really just increase the cost of doing business across the board. It really just results in the cost of real estate (and rent) being 50% higher than it should be, and creates a whole lot of money for otherwise useless lawyers, insurance companies, and HR representatives. I find it rather sad that my single most valuable skill in life is now that I know some of these rules, because many of them are just silly.
 
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The cost of transportation with ride share and delivery services are artificially low because those companies are operating at an extended loss in order to drive regulated competitors from the marketplace. Regulation does drive cost of living increases, but not at a 1 to 1 ratio. All labor costs can not be transferred to consumers. The unfounded fear-mongering around every.single. minimum wage increase proves this.
 
Not trying to be antagonistic, but it’s very disingenuous to portray lower wage labor rates as driving the cost of living in California, or any other popular living place. No one is moving to Los Angeles to deliver groceries - but grocery delivery drivers are being driven to starvation by companies using contract labour loopholes to crush unions and avoid giving employee benefits.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
Not trying to be antagonistic, but it’s very disingenuous to portray lower wage labor rates as driving the cost of living in California, or any other popular living place. No one is moving to Los Angeles to deliver groceries - but grocery delivery drivers are being driven to starvation by companies using contract labour loopholes to crush unions and avoid giving employee benefits.
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The cost of living (as well as the cost of many things in LA) I believe I portrayed was increased because the cost of regulations. Largely speaking, land owners can't build what they want to build to increase the supply of housing. The entitlement process for a multi-family project in the city is now damn near close to 3-5 years.

There's a well known lawyer in town who objects to pretty much every potential large project because we "failed to consider the environmental impacts of the traffic patterns" which is really just a shakedown to get the developer to pay him off to the tune of millions of dollars to drop his lawsuit so someone can move forward. There are various unions like carpenters unions who file similar type lawsuits to extort people to use their union members (or likewise take a payoff to drop the suit). The process of negotiating with the city the % of affordable units to include likewise is a process that typically takes years.

You can read about it here. This happens on pretty much every project we work on. It's beyond insane:

http://www.opencompca.com/news/developers-california-environmental-quality-act-ceqa/


Therefore, if you're buying a piece of land to turn into apartments, you're paying interest to carry the project for 3-5 years, you're paying the lawyers and architects hundreds of thousands more than you would need to without all these regulations. You're paying environmental consultants and mitigation work to get to a standard that's in come cases 20-30 times more conservative than pretty much everywhere else in the country. All of these things slow down the building of new supply, and drastically increase the costs of that supply that does come online.

I recently completed a sale of an office building where we spent about $100k in analyzing whether the vapors from some paint we stored were coming from the ground or not. If it was determined to come from under the ground, it would have delayed the project years as we would have had to litigate the neighbor to spend hundreds of thousands if not millions more cleaning it up. All because of one chemical that California's standard is that at that parts per billion, if you worked in the office every day of your life and breathed the air 8 hours a day for forty years you'd have a 1 in a million chance of catching cancer where every other state in the US their standard is 1 in 100,000.
 
stugotz said:
The cost of living (as well as the cost of many things in LA) I believe I portrayed was increased because the cost of regulations. Largely speaking, land owners can't build what they want to build to increase the supply of housing. The entitlement process for a multi-family project in the city is now damn near close to 3-5 years.

There's a well known lawyer in town who objects to pretty much every potential large project because we "failed to consider the environmental impacts of the traffic patterns" which is really just a shakedown to get the developer to pay him off to the tune of millions of dollars to drop his lawsuit so someone can move forward. There are various unions like carpenters unions who file similar type lawsuits to extort people to use their union members (or likewise take a payoff to drop the suit). The process of negotiating with the city the % of affordable units to include likewise is a process that typically takes years.

You can read about it here. This happens on pretty much every project we work on. It's beyond insane:

http://www.opencompca.com/news/developers-california-environmental-quality-act-ceqa/


Therefore, if you're buying a piece of land to turn into apartments, you're paying interest to carry the project for 3-5 years, you're paying the lawyers and architects hundreds of thousands more than you would need to without all these regulations. You're paying environmental consultants and mitigation work to get to a standard that's in come cases 20-30 times more conservative than pretty much everywhere else in the country. All of these things slow down the building of new supply, and drastically increase the costs of that supply that does come online.

I recently completed a sale of an office building where we spent about $100k in analyzing whether the vapors from some paint we stored were coming from the ground or not. If it was determined to come from under the ground, it would have delayed the project years as we would have had to litigate the neighbor to spend hundreds of thousands if not millions more cleaning it up. All because of one chemical that California's standard is that at that parts per billion, if you worked in the office every day of your life and breathed the air 8 hours a day for forty years you'd have a 1 in a million chance of catching cancer where every other state in the US their standard is 1 in 100,000.
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all of this whining is literally the same as your "food costs the same" comments earlier
 
developing housing in California is pretty bonkers compared to working in the Midwest

in addition to the long entitlement process, if you're in PG&E territory, it can take up to two years to secure power to a building; also, impact fees are very high and discourage anything but luxury housing

there is also a state law preventing developers from using state funds on more than 49% of units, so it's a bit more challenging to knit together the funding stack you need to build affordable housing

I don't think all the regulations are a bad thing -- state solar requirements are going to have a pretty enormous environmental impact, for example


that said, there are also so many more resources available for housing development, so it kind of shakes out even -- problem is that the demand for affordable housing is so much higher across California than most any place else in the United States, a few notable urban areas notwithstanding
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
developing housing in California is pretty bonkers compared to working in the Midwest

in addition to the long entitlement process, if you're in PG&E territory, it can take up to two years to secure power to a building; also, impact fees are very high and discourage anything but luxury housing

there is also a state law preventing developers from using state funds on more than 49% of units, so it's a bit more challenging to knit together the funding stack you need to build affordable housing

I don't think all the regulations are a bad thing -- state solar requirements are going to have a pretty enormous environmental impact, for example


that said, there are also so many more resources available for housing development, so it kind of shakes out even -- problem is that the demand for affordable housing is so much higher across California than most any place else in the United States, a few notable urban areas notwithstanding
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And the same politicians who are crying for the need for more affordable housing are at the same time the ones who are on the take from developers.
 
no doubt the Democratic pols are largely hypocritical pieces of shit

notable how much legislation happens at the ballot initiative level in CA and not in the halls of government
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
no doubt the Democratic pols are largely hypocritical pieces of shit

notable how much legislation happens at the ballot initiative level in CA and not in the halls of government
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Ballot initiatives are not a predominantly Dem thing as they cost so much to get on the ballot. You have to get hundreds of thousands to millions of signatures. Just collecting signatures costs millions of dollars.

Ballot initiatives should not exist.
 
 
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