Engineer on @googlechrome. Involved in CSS and W3C standards. Previously @mozilla, @w3ctag. Mastodon: @dbaron@w3c.social
Rockville, Maryland, USA
Joined March 2008
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Of course, this seems rare, I suspect because single story houses don't *look* fancy. Maybe also because people like multi-story layouts.. But I like to think it's the former.
Anyway, that's today's tale of how the math in the zoning code changes the buildings around us.
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So this means that someone constructing a single-family house in Palo Alto who wants to maximize floor area, doesn't care about a lot being in the basement, and doesn't care about reducing the size of the garden/lawn/etc., actually maximizes floor area by building single-story.
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But, if you (unlike the law) think of the habitable basement as floor area, this means that a single story house with a basement is allowed to have *more* floor area than a multi-story house on the same lot, since the above-ground limit is the same but the basement can be bigger.
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But then I started to think about Palo Alto's zoning code for the R-1 zone. (See library.amlegal.com/nxt/gate… section 18.12.)
And I remembered that single-story houses are allowed to cover more of the lot than multi-story houses, to allow them to have the same limit on floor area.
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But this one was unusual. Unlike most of the fancy new houses I walk past in Palo Alto, this one was single story. Single story plus a fancy habitable basement, that is.
At first glance that seemed odd.
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An excruciating series of yearslong local processes to rezone for not enough housing because ABAG set the targets way too low...
More I think about this, it's clear that the state Legislature has decided that rather than significantly increase allowable homebuilding by itself, it will force cities to do it through an excruciating series of 539 individual local yearslong processes
“Be one of the first to try it,” they said. After the... 100 million plus people who have already downloaded it!
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Some hard parts would be figuring out the rules for splitting large purchases across years, and figuring out a fair way to transition to this new regime.
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There are a bunch of good reasons to do a consumption tax rather than an income tax, probably with the progressive rate structure steeper than what we use for income taxes. Forms would work like income taxes today with deductions for saving and additions for loans.
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This feels a lot like general deferral of income tax on investments, if it's not spent. Why should it be specific to investment income and not available for earned income?
Seems like one path here is a consumption tax rather than an income tax.
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"Your family is obviously qualified, but have you ever worked as a mechanic?"
"Yeah, in my father’s garage, yeah."
"As a mechanic? What did you do in your father’s garage?"
"Tune-ups, oil changes, brake relining, engine rebuilds, rebuild some trannies, rear end..."
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In the past few days, I've seen a significant increase in the amount of spam that's sent via Google Forms.
I've used the "Report Abuse" UI that Google has... but the form itself is uninteresting; the spam is in the email message that sends it.
Were those without children more likely to make wills because (as today) the default rules were less likely to be what they wanted?
(Hopefully the paper addresses this; I can only see the abstract.)
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Is this the full list?
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1804, 1808)
John Quincy Adams (1824 won, 1828)
Benjamin Harrison (1888 won, 1892)
William Jennings Bryan (1896, 1900)
Thomas Dewey (1944, 1948)
Adlai Stevenson (1952, 1956)
Donald Trump (2016 won, 2020)
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Here's an image of the most interesting markings. There are no markings like these on the other mail from the same sender that arrived promptly. Note that there's a mark from "LOUISVILLE KY 400" on 19 AUG that is overwritten by another "LOUISVILLE KY 400" mark from 28 OCT.
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Some of this is likely connected to government malice, with the political appointees supervising the postal service trying to impede mail voting in the election.
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