Train electrification would at minimum reduce pollution from diesel trains, and in the case of Caltrain, improve train services and reduce the number of cars on the road.
It is peak irony that a piece of environmental regulation is being used here to delay the upgrade works. On brand for California, of course.
Caltrain already electrified this track and got rid of nearly all its diesel trains; those are only used from San Jose to Gilroy which is not electrified (and not anywhere near Atherton).
Were the environmental regulations actually intended as roadblocks and the environmentalists were useful idiots, or did the regulations start out useful and get hijacked, or were they always bad but it was an unintended consequence?
Like is the reason why free X is better is just because whenever rules are made, the maker of rules can be corrupted to make rules for corrupters? And corrupters always exist, so minimizing the rules attack surface is a good strategy. And corrupters try to broaden the attack surface by having more rules and rule generation mechanisms in place.
The regulation, called CEQA, was passed under Governor Reagan, to protect the environment. Back then, the environment had a different connotation than it does now, so it wasn't about protecting plants and animals but was more about keeping things the way they are now. It basically protects what we now call NIMBYism, and it succeeds at what it was passed to do.
It is often used to block projects that will reduce pollution or produce clean energy, because a building might be ugly or produce too much shade, which the regulation prioritizes.
It was about the environment (response to wildfires). It’s just that shortly after it passed, the Supreme Court ruled that it applies to any project that needs government approval and subsequently became a NIMBY tool. CEQA + Prop 13 are the cocktail that are the center of almost all of California’s problems, which are fundamentally about housing.
I think it's the US fragmentation between city/county/state/federal, exacerbated by our asinine suburban municipality system. A town of 8000 has equal say to a city of 2M. Unless the feds insist (which they only do for highways and military installations) then it's incumbent on the state to wrangle its counties, which they were practically designed not to do.
Honestly LA's biggest problem, for example, isn't that the buses and Metro are insufficient (they might be) but that they're operated by 18 different agencies across 24 municipalities spanning 4 counties (made up numbers, but representative). Every tiny section gets to object, provide input, demand concessions, or outright refuse to cooperate. You see this to a limited extent with London boroughs, so i understand, but nobody seems to have mastered it like California.
Here in Chicago this has never been quite so bad, but it's still similar. The state just passed new rules to consolidate the Chicago area Transit systems. Thankfully we're drastically more functional than LA from the get go, and unlike LA, Chicago controls the vast majority of desirable land in the area, so the city has a lot more political power to ensure things keep working.
Regardless: the suburban/regional networks are massively worse than those within the city, funding is a nearly-annual state-v-city showdown, the state owns the highways within the city so they can override certain city decisions regarding bike lanes/bus lanes/trams....
I need to point out: the better acceleration from electric trains means you can run trains at tighter schedules, too. They're smoother, quieter; basically every aspect is an upgrade for users, including the environmental aspect. It's not just about money/emissions
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.
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.
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, the Town of Atherton sued.
While I don't agree with what Atherton did here (in general, I did not look at the specifics), you have to be fairly negligent to think you're going to build something in California without a massive legal headache. This is a legislative problem which it sounds like, for this narrow case, the legislature actually solved (shockingly to me). I find it hard to blame the residents of the city for exercising their rights.
> This is a legislative problem which it sounds like, for this narrow case, the legislature actually solved (shockingly to me). I find it hard to blame the residents of the city for exercising their rights.
Filing frivolous lawsuits is also a right but we don't withhold our criticism of that practice. What Atherton did seems like the wealthy person's equivalent of that, down to it being dismissed. Legal? yes. Cynical and amoral, also yes.
«The good news is that California's legislature noticed. In 2024, prompted directly by this fiasco, California passed AB 2503, exempting rail electrification on existing right-of-way from the CEQA reviews that Atherton exploited. One veto point, closed.»
Maybe California is not as hopeless as it may look.
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?
well, that's kind of my implied criticism. which is why i checked what would happen if i removed all the em-dashes. it's not that much better. but i think the number of em-dashes also matters. check your article with and without em-dashes, see what difference it makes.
Imo the article is completely copy/pasted from Claude. The figures, which couldn't be copy/pasted verbatim, were screenshotted/pasted.
Quoting from the article.
> The Town of Atherton's lawsuit against Caltrain electrification is the clearest case study we have of how a tiny, wealthy minority can hijack a regional public project — and stick everyone else with the bill.
The unnecessary emdash-for-effect is a huge LLM-ism. No human I know uses such a device in writing.
> 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, the Town of Atherton sued.
"Here's the short version" along with the bolding of the numbers tells us something about the "author's" prompt. He prompted it for a short version, and told it to include those two numbers.
I challenge any commenter to name one time they began a paragraph with the meager "Here's the short version."
> One veto point, closed.
Why is the comma even there? Classic LLM melodrama.
I've never been able to figure out what's so great about Atherton. The houses are big, but other than that, it's nothing special. Woodside is a nice horse community with hills and sequoias. Los Altos Hills used to be; there was a time when the Los Altos Hunt ran the town. Palo Alto is next to Stanford. Portola Valley used to have more patent holders per capita than anywhere else in the US. Atherton is just a bedroom town on flatland with big houses.
sometimes that's it... you're thinking they are not great and if others feel the same, then it's no wonder they feel insecure and are fighting footing for recognition.
It's the only option for large flat lots in the middle of Silicon Valley. Aside from the famously responsive police department, city services are basically non-existent, but the residents have their own private libraries and recreation centers.
> I've never been able to figure out what's so great about Atherton
It's 90s/2000s tech and finance leadership money - excluded from Woodside and Portola Valley so Atherton was the next best thing back then.
Not being around Asians played a huge role as well - in the 1990s and 2000s, Saratoga, Cupertino, the Fremont Hills, and the parts of Palo that fell under Gunn High became "Asian" and we were viewed negatively by Silicon Valley types back then. I remember the white flight first hand [0]
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." (2005)
Their kinds still populate HN.
> Woodside is a nice horse community with hills and sequoias
Older money (1950s-1990s)
> Palo Alto is next to Stanford
Palo Alto was much more "middle class" (think like Fremont or Dublin is today) back then
Atherton residents include people like founders of A16Z, Stephen Curry and others. The funny thing, 10-15 years ago, a number of residences were second houses and generally empty.
Back about 15-16 years ago, there was an international incubator BlackBox based out of one of the properties in Atherton.
Time and again, a small group of people who have motivation and resources wins against numerous members of general public who are neither coordinated nor motivated enough.
The state should be able to collect damages for frivolous NIMBY lawsuits. I don’t care if they’re ashamed. If they’re fine paying more taxes to behave like idiots, who cares.
> Where do the fundraising events for House, Senate, and the State House happen
Atherton is wealthy. But it’s surrounded by the Bay Area. Atherton is uniquely civically engaged, but that’s about it. Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Cupertino and San Francisco can each muster more capital than it can, to say nothing of LA.
They absolutely can in aggregate, but all those towns you listed only became "rich" in the last 10-15 years, and their wealthy members tend to be extremely disassociated with the local political scene from personal experience giving advice to my peers.
Atherton, along with Hillsborough, Ladera, Potola Valley, and Woodside represent old and oldish money who were much more engaged and locally entrenched.
These are peers of Draper, Ellison, Conway, Steyer, Newsom, Getty, Schiff, Pelosi, Sobrato, Panetta, and Siebel and are an entirely different social and political strata.
There is a money as well as a racial component, which is ironic as a significant portion of the community were Italian, German, and Irish Catholics who were excluded by descendants of the Hearsts and Stanfords barely 70 years ago.
Edit: I completely agree with you. The issue is organizational though - California local and state government is structured in such a way that local priorities can override collective goals, and this goes well beyond weaponized environmental reviews or NIMBYism.
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]
I am rarely in Atherton and have no connections to it.
However, I really appreciate both dense city centers and nicely organized single family home towns and neighborhoods.
So it makes perfect sense to me that one would advocate for the network effects of upzoning and building in dense, transit and service connected job centers ... and simultaneously be against breaking up an existing equilibrium in a smaller town.
Urban and sub-urban sprawl is an aesthetic and environmental disaster and it disappoints me that what was once a progressive imperative (working against sprawl) was jettisoned the moment it ran counter to economic self interest.
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 what they wished for. Now we have traffic, electric grid, and school system over crowding because they still can’t build everything else fast enough. Even still people keep moving in, about 65 new residents a day.
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.
> expand that exemption from CEQA to include a public project for the institution or increase of other passenger rail service, which will be exclusively used by zero-emission trains, located entirely within existing rail rights-of-way or existing highway rights-of-way.
Unfortunately it does not works as intended all the times. From what I have personally observed, everything falls down to the city planners on the interpretation of the code changes.
I'm confused; AB2503 does specify some building standard changes ... to be studied and then adopted by 2032.
We're talking about how it exempts many things from CEQA litigation. Since it's been less than a year, I'm not sure how well we can gauge its effectiveness.
Meanwhile, even worse is the effort to fight wind turbines - an extremely-well-organized network set up by the fossil fuel industry that uses local residents to astroturf for them. They provide talking points, lawn signs, graphics, guidance on social media posts, the works.
I came across Henry Fudge recently, who is a former wealth manager, economist and I think startup investor. He did a video on the cost blowouts of the UK's HS2 [1] where, apparently, £5.3B was spent on a tunnel to take the train underground through a wealthy commuter town north of London called Amersham. It's not quite as wealthy as Atherton but still. There was no engineering reason for the tunnel. The money was spent by British taxpayers to protect the views of some of the wealthiest people in the UK.
What's interesting is that many who defend our current mode of production (capitalism) either don't know or have forgotten that Adam Smith (of The Wealth of Nations fame obviously) had a very negative view of landlords, calling them essentially parasitic. I mean this is where the term "rent-seeking" comes from. Landlords and landowners essentially extracted value from the economy for no productive economic output. In other words, they were parasites.
Fudge has written papers on what he calls the "Housing Theory of Everything" [2] and calls the property market a "rentier black hole". When property becomes the best-performing asset, it redirects all capital that might otherwise go to producing things and (in his opinion) this is what really hollowed out British industry. He also argues for a land value tax, similar to what France has (IFI).
I find this interesting because it's an area where capitalism theory and socialist theory agree yet protecting house values has somehow become the entire focus of our economy. Even the term, the "tragedy of the commons" was a 1968 invention [3] and this still dominates discourse even though it was disproven with empircal evidence, work which garnered the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [4].
So land accumulation is both capitalist and socialist so how did we get here? I guess the landowners. So when people defend the likes of Atherton doing this, it's not based on any ideology at all. Oh and the poster-children for rent-seeking still have to be the Resnicks [5].
CEQA was a well-intentioned law. But as we've seen it's been effectively weaponized by the billionaires, the propaganda has been created NIMBYs and we now have an economy that most rewards land-hoarding with no economic output. And that's the real reason this happens and will keep happening.
I agree completely and empathetically and vehemently with the idea behind the message.
The slop & aggressively poor argumentation, the kind that I think would have caused me to fail it if I tried it in speech & debate in middle school, leaves me feeling empty.
They keep saying $400M, $400M, $400M, $400M, and the only cost they came up with is $20M. It makes me uncomfortable to support the overall cause if this is how it'll be played, because, setting aside morality of tactics, it's not playing to win. Anyone who is at the margins will see it plainly and be given a reason not to listen.
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 jarring to read. The pithy followup "The delay is the weapon." feels like Year 8 Debate Club and is very melodramatic and cringy.
It must be possible to steer the LLM away from this?
I wouldn't find it so grating if I wasn't constantly reading it. Maybe 5 years ago I would have liked this writing pattern. Same for those diagrams they include.
What it lacks is the effort it takes for a couple minutes to whittle down the writing to the essential parts and bring out the particular style of the author. Even before this wave of LLM stuff started, I knew that it's editing that makes good writing. LLMs are mostly a single-pass process. Maybe it would be improved by having a couple intermediary high-temp thinking stages. the time tradeoff is worth it if it's producing some blog or speech to be consumed by 100s or 1000s of people even if you are only improving the writing by, say, 5%.
To be honest, I don't mind the diagrams when I'm the one prompting it. Other than the fact that it is a waste of tokens, and full of clickable dialogs that waste more of my tokens.
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.
Local governments are obsolete, a holdover from when you had to have a government entity over areas within a day’s horseback ride. States should disestablish these towns and counties and reorganize them as administrative subdivisions of the state that answer directly to the governor and state legislature.
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.
States are sovereign entities and cannot be dissolved. Local governments are organs of the states and can be dissolved.
Local control is desirable, the question is the proper granularity of local control in the modern era. The structure of places like the Bay Area with dozens of little towns that have veto power over everything is too granular. Planning should happen at the granularity of entire metro areas.
That sounds too extreme. I like Australia where states (ok much less populated than US states!) have certain building powers esp. to build rail infra but local can manage planning rules pertaining to an area but within a state level framework.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any unit of planning beneath the state. I’m saying they shouldn’t be incorporated entities that have the power to sue and be sued in their own separate from the state.
I live in Australia and local governments are too small and cause idiotic delays to things. They’re always being taken to administrative tribunals and losing and the state government periodically has to suspend their planning powers to make progress happen.
I liked the government structure of the ACT when I lived there with a territory government that also had all the local government responsibilities for bins etc.
Train electrification would at minimum reduce pollution from diesel trains, and in the case of Caltrain, improve train services and reduce the number of cars on the road.
It is peak irony that a piece of environmental regulation is being used here to delay the upgrade works. On brand for California, of course.
Caltrain already electrified this track and got rid of nearly all its diesel trains; those are only used from San Jose to Gilroy which is not electrified (and not anywhere near Atherton).
Were the environmental regulations actually intended as roadblocks and the environmentalists were useful idiots, or did the regulations start out useful and get hijacked, or were they always bad but it was an unintended consequence?
Like is the reason why free X is better is just because whenever rules are made, the maker of rules can be corrupted to make rules for corrupters? And corrupters always exist, so minimizing the rules attack surface is a good strategy. And corrupters try to broaden the attack surface by having more rules and rule generation mechanisms in place.
The regulation, called CEQA, was passed under Governor Reagan, to protect the environment. Back then, the environment had a different connotation than it does now, so it wasn't about protecting plants and animals but was more about keeping things the way they are now. It basically protects what we now call NIMBYism, and it succeeds at what it was passed to do.
It is often used to block projects that will reduce pollution or produce clean energy, because a building might be ugly or produce too much shade, which the regulation prioritizes.
It was about the environment (response to wildfires). It’s just that shortly after it passed, the Supreme Court ruled that it applies to any project that needs government approval and subsequently became a NIMBY tool. CEQA + Prop 13 are the cocktail that are the center of almost all of California’s problems, which are fundamentally about housing.
I think it's the US fragmentation between city/county/state/federal, exacerbated by our asinine suburban municipality system. A town of 8000 has equal say to a city of 2M. Unless the feds insist (which they only do for highways and military installations) then it's incumbent on the state to wrangle its counties, which they were practically designed not to do.
Honestly LA's biggest problem, for example, isn't that the buses and Metro are insufficient (they might be) but that they're operated by 18 different agencies across 24 municipalities spanning 4 counties (made up numbers, but representative). Every tiny section gets to object, provide input, demand concessions, or outright refuse to cooperate. You see this to a limited extent with London boroughs, so i understand, but nobody seems to have mastered it like California.
Here in Chicago this has never been quite so bad, but it's still similar. The state just passed new rules to consolidate the Chicago area Transit systems. Thankfully we're drastically more functional than LA from the get go, and unlike LA, Chicago controls the vast majority of desirable land in the area, so the city has a lot more political power to ensure things keep working.
Regardless: the suburban/regional networks are massively worse than those within the city, funding is a nearly-annual state-v-city showdown, the state owns the highways within the city so they can override certain city decisions regarding bike lanes/bus lanes/trams....
The US is a mess lmao
I need to point out: the better acceleration from electric trains means you can run trains at tighter schedules, too. They're smoother, quieter; basically every aspect is an upgrade for users, including the environmental aspect. It's not just about money/emissions
> 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.
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.
Reasonable to think agencies involved would wait for the outcome of the lawsuit to act, no? So those 3 years in limbo were likely also attributable.
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.
From the article's first source:
https://calelectricrail.org/how-environmental-law-holds-back...
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, the Town of Atherton sued.
While I don't agree with what Atherton did here (in general, I did not look at the specifics), you have to be fairly negligent to think you're going to build something in California without a massive legal headache. This is a legislative problem which it sounds like, for this narrow case, the legislature actually solved (shockingly to me). I find it hard to blame the residents of the city for exercising their rights.
> This is a legislative problem which it sounds like, for this narrow case, the legislature actually solved (shockingly to me). I find it hard to blame the residents of the city for exercising their rights.
Filing frivolous lawsuits is also a right but we don't withhold our criticism of that practice. What Atherton did seems like the wealthy person's equivalent of that, down to it being dismissed. Legal? yes. Cynical and amoral, also yes.
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.
«The good news is that California's legislature noticed. In 2024, prompted directly by this fiasco, California passed AB 2503, exempting rail electrification on existing right-of-way from the CEQA reviews that Atherton exploited. One veto point, closed.»
Maybe California is not as hopeless as it may look.
The HN rules need to expand to ban all AI generated posts.
I use AI to generate diagrams but not having the time to just clean up the diagram is pretty bad.... at least take the time to do that.
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?
pangram says 100% generated. whatever that means: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350638
> pangram gives this a 100% score, on account of the em-dashes.
By that logic, at least one of my articles is 100% AI generated.
> And just like that, lone has a conservative garbage collector. Until next time. Soon I'll write about—
well, that's kind of my implied criticism. which is why i checked what would happen if i removed all the em-dashes. it's not that much better. but i think the number of em-dashes also matters. check your article with and without em-dashes, see what difference it makes.
Imo the article is completely copy/pasted from Claude. The figures, which couldn't be copy/pasted verbatim, were screenshotted/pasted.
Quoting from the article.
> The Town of Atherton's lawsuit against Caltrain electrification is the clearest case study we have of how a tiny, wealthy minority can hijack a regional public project — and stick everyone else with the bill.
The unnecessary emdash-for-effect is a huge LLM-ism. No human I know uses such a device in writing.
> 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, the Town of Atherton sued.
"Here's the short version" along with the bolding of the numbers tells us something about the "author's" prompt. He prompted it for a short version, and told it to include those two numbers.
I challenge any commenter to name one time they began a paragraph with the meager "Here's the short version."
> One veto point, closed.
Why is the comma even there? Classic LLM melodrama.
No, proof reading isn’t okay. No LLM involvement should be allowed whatsoever, exactly the same as the current HN policy on comments.
Welp. Guess I'm gonna get banned from HN as well.
Bye!
It's absurd at this point.
I think we should have a letter writing campaign to shame residents of Atherton. There's not that many of them.
I've never been able to figure out what's so great about Atherton. The houses are big, but other than that, it's nothing special. Woodside is a nice horse community with hills and sequoias. Los Altos Hills used to be; there was a time when the Los Altos Hunt ran the town. Palo Alto is next to Stanford. Portola Valley used to have more patent holders per capita than anywhere else in the US. Atherton is just a bedroom town on flatland with big houses.
sometimes that's it... you're thinking they are not great and if others feel the same, then it's no wonder they feel insecure and are fighting footing for recognition.
don’t forget cachet among well off people.
It's the only option for large flat lots in the middle of Silicon Valley. Aside from the famously responsive police department, city services are basically non-existent, but the residents have their own private libraries and recreation centers.
> I've never been able to figure out what's so great about Atherton
It's 90s/2000s tech and finance leadership money - excluded from Woodside and Portola Valley so Atherton was the next best thing back then.
Not being around Asians played a huge role as well - in the 1990s and 2000s, Saratoga, Cupertino, the Fremont Hills, and the parts of Palo that fell under Gunn High became "Asian" and we were viewed negatively by Silicon Valley types back then. I remember the white flight first hand [0]
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." (2005)
Their kinds still populate HN.
> Woodside is a nice horse community with hills and sequoias
Older money (1950s-1990s)
> Palo Alto is next to Stanford
Palo Alto was much more "middle class" (think like Fremont or Dublin is today) back then
[0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236377590902105
Atherton residents include people like founders of A16Z, Stephen Curry and others. The funny thing, 10-15 years ago, a number of residences were second houses and generally empty.
Back about 15-16 years ago, there was an international incubator BlackBox based out of one of the properties in Atherton.
Time and again, a small group of people who have motivation and resources wins against numerous members of general public who are neither coordinated nor motivated enough.
Wasn't 10-15 years ago the financial crisis?
2008
> we should have a letter writing campaign
The state should be able to collect damages for frivolous NIMBY lawsuits. I don’t care if they’re ashamed. If they’re fine paying more taxes to behave like idiots, who cares.
Where do the fundraising events for House, Senate, and the State House happen ;)
Atherton is a vibe, but it's an older demographic of tech and finance successes (the 1990s-2000s scene).
> Where do the fundraising events for House, Senate, and the State House happen
Atherton is wealthy. But it’s surrounded by the Bay Area. Atherton is uniquely civically engaged, but that’s about it. Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Cupertino and San Francisco can each muster more capital than it can, to say nothing of LA.
They absolutely can in aggregate, but all those towns you listed only became "rich" in the last 10-15 years, and their wealthy members tend to be extremely disassociated with the local political scene from personal experience giving advice to my peers.
Atherton, along with Hillsborough, Ladera, Potola Valley, and Woodside represent old and oldish money who were much more engaged and locally entrenched.
These are peers of Draper, Ellison, Conway, Steyer, Newsom, Getty, Schiff, Pelosi, Sobrato, Panetta, and Siebel and are an entirely different social and political strata.
There is a money as well as a racial component, which is ironic as a significant portion of the community were Italian, German, and Irish Catholics who were excluded by descendants of the Hearsts and Stanfords barely 70 years ago.
Edit: I completely agree with you. The issue is organizational though - California local and state government is structured in such a way that local priorities can override collective goals, and this goes well beyond weaponized environmental reviews or NIMBYism.
I'd like to see someone calculate how much Mercer Island's nimbyism added to Seattle's light rail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawfare
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.
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] https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...
I am rarely in Atherton and have no connections to it.
However, I really appreciate both dense city centers and nicely organized single family home towns and neighborhoods.
So it makes perfect sense to me that one would advocate for the network effects of upzoning and building in dense, transit and service connected job centers ... and simultaneously be against breaking up an existing equilibrium in a smaller town.
Urban and sub-urban sprawl is an aesthetic and environmental disaster and it disappoints me that what was once a progressive imperative (working against sprawl) was jettisoned the moment it ran counter to economic self interest.
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 what they wished for. Now we have traffic, electric grid, and school system over crowding because they still can’t build everything else fast enough. Even still people keep moving in, about 65 new residents a day.
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.
Andreessen is not a good person.
it's time to build (ew, no not here... somewhere else)!
Relevant Onion: https://theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favo...
CEQA is basically a weapon for the rich to stop anything. It needs massive reform.
A big reform passed in 2025: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...
Also AB 2503:
> expand that exemption from CEQA to include a public project for the institution or increase of other passenger rail service, which will be exclusively used by zero-emission trains, located entirely within existing rail rights-of-way or existing highway rights-of-way.
Exemptions for favored things. Should do a full reform.
Directionally correct, but doesn't go far enough.
Is there any serious argument against repealing CEQA? NEPA exists. As do public lands.
Unfortunately it does not works as intended all the times. From what I have personally observed, everything falls down to the city planners on the interpretation of the code changes.
I'm confused; AB2503 does specify some building standard changes ... to be studied and then adopted by 2032.
We're talking about how it exempts many things from CEQA litigation. Since it's been less than a year, I'm not sure how well we can gauge its effectiveness.
This is from my own personal experience for normal housing project. The city officials works as conservatively to safeguard themselves.
Why not push legislation to make them pay damages for a frivolous lawsuit?
Capitalism is a cancer to society, we let corporations dictate the progression of our country.
Meanwhile, even worse is the effort to fight wind turbines - an extremely-well-organized network set up by the fossil fuel industry that uses local residents to astroturf for them. They provide talking points, lawn signs, graphics, guidance on social media posts, the works.
https://climateadvocacylab.org/resource/against-wind-map-ant...
One of their victims was Cape Wind. The project would have made the cape and islands almost 75% carbon-free power for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
They've been desperately trying to kill off Vineyard Wind, too. And they have killed off many individual turbine projects.
I came across Henry Fudge recently, who is a former wealth manager, economist and I think startup investor. He did a video on the cost blowouts of the UK's HS2 [1] where, apparently, £5.3B was spent on a tunnel to take the train underground through a wealthy commuter town north of London called Amersham. It's not quite as wealthy as Atherton but still. There was no engineering reason for the tunnel. The money was spent by British taxpayers to protect the views of some of the wealthiest people in the UK.
What's interesting is that many who defend our current mode of production (capitalism) either don't know or have forgotten that Adam Smith (of The Wealth of Nations fame obviously) had a very negative view of landlords, calling them essentially parasitic. I mean this is where the term "rent-seeking" comes from. Landlords and landowners essentially extracted value from the economy for no productive economic output. In other words, they were parasites.
Fudge has written papers on what he calls the "Housing Theory of Everything" [2] and calls the property market a "rentier black hole". When property becomes the best-performing asset, it redirects all capital that might otherwise go to producing things and (in his opinion) this is what really hollowed out British industry. He also argues for a land value tax, similar to what France has (IFI).
I find this interesting because it's an area where capitalism theory and socialist theory agree yet protecting house values has somehow become the entire focus of our economy. Even the term, the "tragedy of the commons" was a 1968 invention [3] and this still dominates discourse even though it was disproven with empircal evidence, work which garnered the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [4].
So land accumulation is both capitalist and socialist so how did we get here? I guess the landowners. So when people defend the likes of Atherton doing this, it's not based on any ideology at all. Oh and the poster-children for rent-seeking still have to be the Resnicks [5].
CEQA was a well-intentioned law. But as we've seen it's been effectively weaponized by the billionaires, the propaganda has been created NIMBYs and we now have an economy that most rewards land-hoarding with no economic output. And that's the real reason this happens and will keep happening.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76460341810...
[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory...
[3]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...
[4]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
[5]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
I agree completely and empathetically and vehemently with the idea behind the message.
The slop & aggressively poor argumentation, the kind that I think would have caused me to fail it if I tried it in speech & debate in middle school, leaves me feeling empty.
They keep saying $400M, $400M, $400M, $400M, and the only cost they came up with is $20M. It makes me uncomfortable to support the overall cause if this is how it'll be played, because, setting aside morality of tactics, it's not playing to win. Anyone who is at the margins will see it plainly and be given a reason not to listen.
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 jarring to read. The pithy followup "The delay is the weapon." feels like Year 8 Debate Club and is very melodramatic and cringy.
It must be possible to steer the LLM away from this?
I wouldn't find it so grating if I wasn't constantly reading it. Maybe 5 years ago I would have liked this writing pattern. Same for those diagrams they include.
What it lacks is the effort it takes for a couple minutes to whittle down the writing to the essential parts and bring out the particular style of the author. Even before this wave of LLM stuff started, I knew that it's editing that makes good writing. LLMs are mostly a single-pass process. Maybe it would be improved by having a couple intermediary high-temp thinking stages. the time tradeoff is worth it if it's producing some blog or speech to be consumed by 100s or 1000s of people even if you are only improving the writing by, say, 5%.
To be honest, I don't mind the diagrams when I'm the one prompting it. Other than the fact that it is a waste of tokens, and full of clickable dialogs that waste more of my tokens.
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.
Reframing.
Local governments are obsolete, a holdover from when you had to have a government entity over areas within a day’s horseback ride. States should disestablish these towns and counties and reorganize them as administrative subdivisions of the state that answer directly to the governor and state legislature.
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.
While you’re at it, why not disestablish the state and have everything federal?
There is value in local control - with some glaring exception.
States are sovereign entities and cannot be dissolved. Local governments are organs of the states and can be dissolved.
Local control is desirable, the question is the proper granularity of local control in the modern era. The structure of places like the Bay Area with dozens of little towns that have veto power over everything is too granular. Planning should happen at the granularity of entire metro areas.
That sounds too extreme. I like Australia where states (ok much less populated than US states!) have certain building powers esp. to build rail infra but local can manage planning rules pertaining to an area but within a state level framework.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any unit of planning beneath the state. I’m saying they shouldn’t be incorporated entities that have the power to sue and be sued in their own separate from the state.
Should these sub-state entities be able to pass their own laws?
Some towns for example have laws against leaf blowers in a state where leaf blowers are unregulated. Some towns ban certain dog breeds.
No.
I live in Australia and local governments are too small and cause idiotic delays to things. They’re always being taken to administrative tribunals and losing and the state government periodically has to suspend their planning powers to make progress happen.
I liked the government structure of the ACT when I lived there with a territory government that also had all the local government responsibilities for bins etc.
It would take like two minutes to cross Atherton on a horse.
More like twelve minutes (unless you mean the short way across). But yeah, your point stands, lol.