And how many things can you not say that about?
And if I can be mildly rude here in the Pit, to a point… why the hell should it be easier?
Well, South City and Oakland is a kind of shitty split, but it could be worse. If both of your employers are BART-able, then El Cerrito/Albany area isn’t too bad. You can probably afford Piedmont too. If you’re not BART-able, then Hayward is workable going across the San Mateo bridge. 880 is shitty death trap, but if she can take 580 it could work.
Though it sounds like you’ve found a place already so hopefully that works out!
I’ll speak only for myself.
The San Francisco area is best known for “tech” but it’s also a huge biotech hub.
I’m trying to cure diseases. I’ve had one great idea in my life that I’ve spent the past ten years developing into a drug that is now in patients. I’m hoping that some day this drug will be available to change people’s lives. I’m a scientist, and not a clinical trial guy, so my role in the development of this drug is ramping down and is now in the hands of many other people with the appropriate clinical skill sets.
Now, I have to decide what to do next. I would love to start over and develop another drug for even more patients. I even have what I think is another pretty good idea.
But, for my family, the right move is very likely to cash out in a few years and leave the bay area. If it were a little easier, I would probably give it another go. I did much of this work before kids, so things were a bit easier for us to pull it off the first time. I don’t know if it’s selfish and I love what I do, but I’m absolutely not willing to sacrifice my family to cure diseases.
What a ridiculous response. But OK, why don’t you give us a cite that earthquake concerns are a main reason that permits for new housing units are so difficult to get in SF.
The same way I remember and know that saving a human stranger takes higher priority over saving my dog. Because I don’t have some shriveled up system of ethics inside my brain that is a mangled mess of nature worship over the concerns of all mankind.
READ/LISTEN to people like BillMcKibben, he WORSHIPS the natural world, presumes that this particular SLICE of climate is the most precious thing in all creation, so precious that ANY perturbations caused by the hands of man is an affront to GO… Gaia, his goddess. Thou shalt have as close to zero environmental impact, if some fish population is at risk of going extinct, and the choice must be made between that and the well being of thousands of human beings, f*ck the human beings. In fact, we have TOO MANY people (Paul Erhlich neo malthusian we are all gonna die type catastrophists).
Nihilist and masochists towards the entire human race. And you DARE act as if “I” am the one with the problem? I have barely scratched the surface of their insanity, and likely yours.
It’s not just one fish, it’s the health of the entire delta’s ecosystem. it’s just the delta smelt is an excellent indicator of such. Sort of like a canary in a coal mine.
Clearly you are just a paid shill for Big Human Hating Nature Worship. Connect the dot.
Naw, I correct morons for free.
OK, so the kill-all-humans Gaia worshippers are one guy. This one guy speaks for everyone who doesn’t want to pave the world.
It’s not like if we took all the water that goes into the rivers so the fish don’t all die would turn California green again. The drought is not because we took all the water we used to give to productive Jesus worshipping farmers and started wasting it on a fucking fish.
“There is no drought.” You and fucking Donald Trump.
Japan has worse and more frequent quakes than San Fran, and handles them just fine.
It seems like an obvious solution is to just build up, and utilize more public transportation to get around. When the obvious refuses to be done, then yes, it’s time to get out because the area and people are too broken to modernize.
Which kind of begs the question. How would someone design an advanced mecca of a city, some sort of neo soeul looking cityscape that could have an ULTRA dense population with the transportation options and space to make it all work?
Neo Seoul
Someone must be working on these sorts of designs and concepts, I wonder what they’ve come up with?
For certain definitions of “fine”:
Have you ever been to Noe Valley? The children outnumber the adults, and every other business is designed to cater to them.
I have been. According to this, the children are about 14% of the population in Noe Valley in 2010 - a far cry than outnumbering the adults.
According to this, 62% of homes in Noe Valley were non-family, and 82% of households did not have children in them. Average people per household was 2.10.
According to this, Noe Valley has 13% children, pretty much in the middle of regions in SF, with the highest being Bayview at 25%. CA overall is at about 24% children.
Looking at Zillow right now, the cheapest house for sale in Noe Valley is $1.35M. The next one up is $1.5M is 2 bed/1 bath, and 963 sqft at 1404 Sanchez St. There are 17 places for rent, the cheapest being $3650/month for a 1 bed/1 bath place on 4308 23rd St.
Hey, for some people all of that’s great. That sounds abysmal to me and doesn’t change my perception that SF hates children. And crime sucks there too (in Noe Valley, and all of SF).
He’s just one of the worst. But here’s a clue that someone is a people hating masochist towards humanity. They are overly worried about population and think the earth can’t sustain more people, or worse, that we need to radically shrink the population, because human beings are an invasive species, a cancer on the natural world that needs to be reigned in.
I want:
cleaner air
clean water
electric cars
solar
hydro
wind
nuclear
less coal
less natural gas after a long enough time
lab grown meat for less environmental impacts of factory farming
gmo crops to increase yields and to engineer more nutrients into our foods
But in the service of that, I don’t want to take a sledge hammer to human beings if at all possible. And if it’s needed, there has to be a REALLY good reason. Reason stronger than Hanson thinking if we don’t cut carbon emissions by X percent by 2030 it’s “GAME OVER” for the planet…
Right, like it was game over with FAR more radical shifts in climate over the eons from asteroid strikes, super volcano explosions, land separations and continental shifts, invasive species invading other areas and gutting the local wildlife, mass extniction after mass extinction, all these chaos and change and death goes on for BILLIONS of effing years, but now when Human beings are the cause of some of this for a few hundred or thousand years, everything needs to stop and we need to crawl back into the gutter.
Anti progress trogodytes. Get a clue. We need to modernize faster, we need to get everyone wealthy so everyone can AFFORD to have less impact on the environment, we need to make it so that no one needs to burn wood or coal to get power. Progress, not scarcity and austerity of energy use is the way forward.
We don’t need to use less energy, we need to use TEN TIMES MORE, but in the process switch to nuclear and other renewable sources, so we can use more, do more work, and STILL have less impact. But not immediately, we need to make the cleaner technology cheaper, so even the people who don’t have the kind of excess cash to pay the premiums can afford to switch as well.
The environmental movement should take a page from Elon Musk. He is not trying to win people over by arguing that tesla cars are better because they have less impact on the environment and rest his laurels there. He is trying to make electric cars BETTER in all areas vs gasoline cars, because he knows not everyone cares about the eco angle. Is it cheaper to operate? Does it not look like a frog (nissan leaf)? Does it have better range? Is it cheaper to buy? (answer = no, but coming down because THAT is what he is working towards, making the cleaner less impactful technology cheaper so even NON latte sipping yuppies can actually afford cleaner technology).
Those are dense cities, but… maybe I am asking for too much, but is that the best we can do? What if we had a clean sheet and could build/engineer something from the ground up?
I think I’ve just seen too much sci fi.
http://media02.hongkiat.com/cities-of-the-futures/futurecitytoorobertdbrown.jpg
Because the VC geniuses who founded the original firms could, and thus did base their work and lives in SF, a city that was then already far too expensive for most mid-grade workers.
When you max out the density and SF is no longer beautiful, interesting or cool, the tech ghods will just move elsewhere, and keep Serving Humanity from, say, Lake Tahoe or the Kona Coast. And their acolytes will just have to find some way to live there, too, and contribute to that Serving thing.
Thanks, this helps me understand the incredibly stupid title and flawed premise of your thread and subsequent comments. It appears that you are an idiot.
Bill McKibben (it’s actually a separate first and last name with a space in between, not one name like “Madonna”) has not said what you claim, let alone screamed it in all caps. The central point that McKibben is making is the same one that climate scientists are making, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether the present climate is optimal. It has to do with the rate of change at which the climate is being forced, which has the potential to have destabilizing effects like weather extremes that last thousands of years and induce permanent changes in the world’s atmosphere and ocean circulation systems. And at the same time cause catastrophic sea level rise all over the world. Potentially even worse, it affects all life on earth because the ecosystem can’t adapt at nearly a fast enough pace, especially to rapid changes in regional climates. And lest we humans get too smug about it, “life on earth” includes us, and we are far more dependent on other species than might be immediately obvious, many of which are already under threat if not altogether extinct. Furthermore, both the climate system and the biosystem have critical tipping points beyond which runaway feedbacks prevail.
For some value of “X” and some milestone in time, Hansen (not “Hanson”) is right, and the plausible range of those values is not radically different than his estimates.
Yes, the earth has endured catastrophic events including many climate changes in the past, though no such climate changes (except for brief periods in rare cases) come anywhere close to the rate of change we are presently experiencing. And “mass extinction” is not a phrase that should be bandied about with impunity. Think, if you can, about what it means.
Good idea. If everyone was wealthy enough to own their own private jet (hydrogen powered, of course!) to get to their own private island, the world would be a terrific place – we could probably multiply the population tenfold. And everybody should have above-average intelligence, too. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter describing this Utopia.
The impacts that population growth has on our world – the one we depend on for survival – go far, far beyond just carbon emissions and climate change. Just one random factoid: the plastics we consume are ending up in the ocean – see Great Pacific Garbage Patch for one vivid illustration. The plastics turn into microplastic particulates that are ingested by all kinds of marine life and threaten ocean life and bidiversity in several important ways. They can become bound to toxic metals and PCBs through adsorption and other processes and make their way up the food chain. Concluding factoid: at the current rate of plastic pollution, by around 2050 the total mass of plastic in the world’s oceans will outweigh the fish.
Climate change is just the immediate threat. We affect just about every single facet of the environment, in more ways than it’s possible to list, and managing those impacts is the singular long-term challenge we face as a species. It’s not that it can’t be done, but we can’t blithely underestimate the magnitude of the challenge. We don’t have to be energy-poor if we’re smart about where we get our energy, because there’s practically an infinite supply of it, but we do have to realize that the earth’s resources are finite and already under stress.
I know a lot of founders of a lot of biotech companies (I’m one of the founders of my company, actually). None of us are VC people. All of us are science people. Genentech was founded partially by a VC guy, but that was decades ago and the location of that company in the SF area was because of its proximity to UCSF.
It has more to do with the fact that there is a strong academic medical science community in SF. Biotech hubs solely exist near university systems because all of us come from academia and all of us still collaborate with universities. I keep trying to convince my company to move to Utah, but so far no one is listening.
So you’re saying that rather than insulating my house I should just install a larger furnace? That’s fucking ridiculous.
Using less energy to do the same task just means we’re doing to cheaper. I don’t need a phone that uses ten times the energy of my current phone, in fact a phone that used 1/10th the energy would be 10 times better.
Out of all the silly right-wing ideas about economic growth, the idea that if you just shovel more energy into the economy you get more output is one of the silliest.
Energy is work. Using less work to do the same task is the definition of progress.
We don’t want to preserve the environment because it’s sacred, we want to preserve the environment because we’ve got to live on this shithole of a planet, and it would be nice to not have to wade through drifts of garbage while wearing gasmasks and radiation badges every time we leave the house.