stellar678

Presuming that conventions, standards, best-practices will continue to evolve as people do this work - whether with or without AI - I can't see any reason why the resulting advancements wouldn't be published in a way that builds a record for the future.

My documentation tends to be more thorough and well-maintained when I'm building software with a coding agent. A million tokens of context tends to be better at that kind of thing than my own brain when I'm neck-deep in solving a difficult problem.

And presuming the best practices are adequate and don't need to evolve (which seems unlikely) - then the current public historical record is also adequate.

Why not just buy Apple if you’re looking for a company focused on extracting profits from a cash cow rather than risky innovation with big potential upside and downside?

I kinda wondered about this forever as well. Then one day I was chilling in my local worker-owned cooperative bakery when the Brinks truck came by to do the bakery's cash pickup. Armed driver. Guard waiting next to the truck holding a long gun. Two guys (presumably armed) going into the business to get the cash and take it out to the truck. That's all pretty expensive!

Smaller family-owned businesses will just take cash to the bank - but it's super common for somebody to eventually surveil them long enough to rob them one day as they're transporting the cash to the bank.

It's pricey to handle cash!

> Fulfilling a contract they've executed several times before? slow clap

More than you can say for the Boeing launch that took the astronauts up last summer.

Sprawl patterns are not caused by natural market forces.

They are caused and enabled by land-use zoning that uses state force to limit the use of private property, along with massive market distortions like government-funded freeways and the building of low-density infrastructure without a sustainable mechanism to pay for maintenance and operation of that infrastructure.

But I'm also not a free-market absolutist and I'm not sure I believe there has ever been an unencumbered free market. Markets are just a mechanism to organize and manage a complex system. There are always forces in place which nudge the overall behavior in one way or another while still leaving the market interactions to hash out the details. That's fine - we just need to nudge things is the "right" direction.

Thanks for the link, very interesting. The maps that I see are presented as possible candidates for how to meet the housing goals, not a fait-accompli - and they're overwhelmingly concentrated near 101 and the Bay.

I doubt that Marin County is very interested in trying to provide public health and other county services for a bunch of low-income folks moving way out to rural coastal communities. Seems likely that most of the housing going into unincorporated Marin will be smushed right up near 101.

But what about local low-income folks in West Marin like your friends, or the service workers in tourism, hospitality, etc...? Has anybody in your village association talked about what it would take to preserve local control but with a serious commitment for Point Reyes Station to provide housing to meet the needs of local low-income folks?

History has shown that basically once a community exists in California, residents start using local control to blockade housing - with the result being that new housing is mostly built in exurban sprawl by developers who pave over and then subdivide wild lands. These big hammers coming down from the state are basically a self-inflicted wound on the part of supporters of local control.

To provide some personal context: I grew up in the Russian River area. Housing is silly expensive and yet basically nothing gets built, so the towns are turning into retirement/vacation communities. There's roughly no housing that's accessible to people working local jobs, unless you inherited property from your family. I don't think those communities should be sopping up the housing demand for people working in San Francisco, but something's got to push them to build housing for the people who work right there.

Can you describe a bit more clearly what the state is requiring of towns around Point Reyes?

Looking at the top line numbers of the Regional Housing Needs Allocation plan - the Bay Area needs to make space for an additional 440k homes in the next 9 years. Presuming that gets allocated evenly based on population, Point Reyes Station with 1,000 people needs to build about 6 homes per year for the next decade.

Even one huge apartment building would massively overshoot the needs for Point Reyes Station. But I suppose the requirements would be more sensibly met with townhouses or small apartments or some kind of senior housing.

Am I missing some numbers, or maybe there's another program or changes that I'm not aware of?

I generally agree that our low density places should stay low density. Point Reyes is not a job center, not a sensible commuting destination, and a difficult and expensive place to build basic infrastructure like power, water, sewer - so it doesn't make sense to build a lot of housing there.

Hmmm. I grew up in rural Northern California and we had propane that would be trucked in. Is that what you mean by having a tank? I don't live there any more, but my old neighbors tend to be buying backup generators now so they can keep their fridge and internet running when PG&E cuts off power so their distribution lines don't start fires. (This cuts into a whole other issue about people who want to live in the forest asking for extreme subsidies on all the costly electric infrastructure it takes to serve their low density lifestyle.)

Electricity is overall more plugable, versatile and evolvable than appliances that directly consume hydrocarbons. You can meet your source needs using some combination of grid connection, solar, backup generator, backup batteries, etc... - and you can evolve this source side of things over time without being forced to constantly retrofit the load-side systems in your house.

The thing is "I absolutely must have gas installed in my house for cooking" turns into "well let's buy the gas water heater, and the gas central heating, and the gas dryer" and all of a sudden you're using was more piped-in gas for for non-cooking things than you are for cooking, but "cooking with gas" was the hydrocarbon foot in the door at your house.

Otherwise you might opt for an electric tankless water heater, a heat pump HVAC system, and just an electric dryer.