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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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
The earmark ban has made Congress less accountable and more dysfunctional. It is time to abandon the experiment. nyti.ms/2VgnVyi
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Android annoyance of the day: why would I ever want “Reset All Timers”? Can I make it not be there?
It's like a one click “mess up my life” (or at least my dinner) button.
I've managed not to do this, but I'm always afraid of it.
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These photos (from the real estate listing at 905waverley.com/) do not look like they're for servants.
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Oh, I already did; see nitter.vloup.ch/davidbaron/statu… (thread) and nitter.vloup.ch/davidbaron/statu… ... but our common readers might still enjoy it.
That screenshot cuts off another key piece. (And if you walk around rich parts of Palo Alto you can spot the new houses by the light wells and the egress ladders for their basements.)
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They sort of do count for lot coverage, since they're not allowed to "extend beyond the building footprint". (PAMC 18.12.090 (a) codelibrary.amlegal.com/code…) But you're right about FAR, and that's why they're so popular.
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Some of us remember Bush v. Gore. Giving party affiliation of judges has seemed necessary since then.
(And remember that under many counting standards, Gore should have won the election: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_U… .)
The phenomenon predates Trump. When party affiliation proves to be poor predictor of how a judge or justice will vote in controversial or high-profile cases, then it may stop.
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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So I was taking a walk in Palo Alto today -- I think along Webster Street -- and noticed one of those (common in Palo Alto) new-ish homes with fancy light wells for the habitable space in the basement. (It's popular because basements don't count as floor area for zoning code!)
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
In this op ed piece, @tconnors22 and I discuss the impact of COVID-19-related shutdowns on children’s immune system development.
nytimes.com/2020/11/25/opini…
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
If 40k people died in building collapses every year, you'd better believe that structural engineers would have some explaining to do.
It is mind-boggling to me that we do not hold transportation engineers to the same standard.
The “burden of stopping this carnage” rests on many shoulders, but principally on the civil engineers who continue to build our cities to a high speed standard. It’s time for a civil suit.
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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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