7 ms·
Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M
- outside1234 4mo agoCEQA is basically a weapon for the rich to stop anything. It needs massive reform.
- surfmike 4mo agoA big reform passed in 2025: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-development-infill-budget/ https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...
- JoshTriplett 4mo agoAlso 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.
- sroussey 4mo agoExemptions for favored things. Should do a full reform.
- loeg 4mo agoDirectionally correct, but doesn't go far enough.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoIs there any serious argument against repealing CEQA? NEPA exists. As do public lands.
- sandeepkd 4mo agoUnfortunately 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.
- mlyle 4mo agoI'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.
- sandeepkd 4mo agoThis is from my own personal experience for normal housing project. The city officials works as conservatively to safeguard themselves.
- smcg 4mo agoI think we should have a letter writing campaign to shame residents of Atherton. There's not that many of them.
- Animats 4mo agoI'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.
- nielsbot 4mo agodon’t forget cachet among well off people.
- segmondy 4mo agosometimes 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.
- alephnerd 4mo ago> 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 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236377590902105
- rayiner 4mo ago[flagged]
- jeffbee 4mo agoIt would take like two minutes to cross Atherton on a horse.
- perching_aix 4mo agoMore like twelve minutes (unless you mean the short way across). But yeah, your point stands, lol.
- dnnddidiej 4mo agoThat 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.
- jackvalentine 4mo agoI 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.
- rayiner 4mo agoI’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.
- hollerith 4mo agoShould 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.
- quantumwoke 4mo ago[flagged]
- refulgentis 4mo agoNote to future selfs? (-selves?) Around Opus 4.6 release it got good enough people tried laundering it all the time, and around 4.8 the group dynamics were such that it was worse to call it AI writing than launder it as your own. Regardless, there was still enough of a taboo around it that the way people would try to launder it began to often include an AI-generated "sources" table, which was also aggressively bad, but lord knows no one reads those. So it was just another sigil that misled.
- em-bee 4mo agoif we are going to complain about AI content then i suggest we also include some evidence to make the argument at least somewhat insightful. i'll start: pangram gives this a 100% score (without the sources section), on account of the em-dashes. remove those and the score drops to 49%. include the sources and the score drops to 36%. (edit, i misread the score: after removal of the em-dashes the result is 48% generated and 49% assisted, add the sources, then it is 33% generated, 36% assisted, and 30% human. i didn't check the original text including the sources. i ran out of free credits.)
- chipotle_coyote 4mo agoMan, if only Anthropic hadn't invented the em dash in 2023, it wouldn't be so easy to use that as such a surefire way to distinguish AI writing!
- em-bee 4mo agothat's the thing. em-dashes are such a low hanging fruit, that i fear that they soon will be gone. i mean if i am ever to post an AI generated text, removing them is the first thing i would do. (edit: turns out it doesn't help as much as i thought it would. see the edit above)
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- refulgentis 4mo agoI 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.
- mslate 4mo agoThat is a very uncharitable read.
- refulgentis 4mo agoThat is a very uncharitable read.
- altairprime 4mo agoCan the county remove Atherton from its services coverage boundaries until the $400M of costs have been recouped?
- saagarjha 4mo agoAtherton does not have a Caltrain station anymore.
- altairprime 4mo agoThat sounds more like something they would celebrate than suffer.
- reducesuffering 4mo agoAtherton 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/ https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ [1] https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andreessen-opposes-apartments-in-americas-richest-town/ https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...
- micromacrofoot 4mo agoit's time to build (ew, no not here... somewhere else)!
- decimalenough 4mo agoRelevant Onion: https://theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favor-public-trans-1819565837/ https://theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favo...
- austin-cheney 4mo agoI 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.
- SwellJoe 4mo agoHousing 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.
- nayuki 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawfare
- danans 4mo ago> 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?
- AdamJacobMuller 4mo agoIt 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.
- danans 4mo ago> 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.
- AdamJacobMuller 4mo agoI agree, and I do not take issue with the general complaint (frivolous lawsuits) I am merely pointing out that your ire should be directed more at the legislature not at the people.
- em-bee 4mo agoyou 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.
- abtinf 4mo agoThe HN rules need to expand to ban all AI generated posts.
- ZeWaka 4mo agoIt's absurd at this point.
- zitterbewegung 4mo agoI 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.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoI'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?
- em-bee 4mo agopangram says 100% generated. whatever that means: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350638
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago> 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—
- em-bee 4mo agowell, 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.
- pibaker 4mo agoTrain 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.
- dekhn 4mo agoCaltrain 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).
- pfannkuchen 4mo agoWere 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.
- dlcarrier 4mo agoThe 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.
- smugma 4mo agoIt 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.
- aleksandrm 4mo agoCapitalism is a cancer to society, we let corporations dictate the progression of our country.
- jmyeet 4mo agoI 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/7646034181075537174 https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76460341810... [2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory-of-everything https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory... [3]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy%20of%20the%20Commons.pdf https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy... [4]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false... [5]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-californias-water-supply/ https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
- shitloadofbooks 4mo agoWhat 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?
- nine_k 4mo agoNow 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.
- meindnoch 4mo agoReframing.
- tarpitt 4mo agoI 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.
- nine_k 4mo ago«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.
- george916a 4mo ago[dead]
- KennyBlanken 4mo agoMeanwhile, 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-anti-offshore-wind-network-eastern-united-states 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 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.
- ortusdux 4mo agoI'd like to see someone calculate how much Mercer Island's nimbyism added to Seattle's light rail.
- nobodyandproud 4mo agoWhy not push legislation to make them pay damages for a frivolous lawsuit?
- owentbrown 4mo agoAtherton has a *beautiful* public library adjacent to a defunct Caltrain station. It's great for kids and has a really nice cafe, ideal for VC meetings and networking.