I don’t know what makes me feel older - the fact that I had no idea what today was or the fact that it’s the 20th anniversary of my first holiday at UC Santa Cruz 😱

Straight to jail

I mean they should just maintain the rent registry as an anonymized open dataset that is kept up to date, no need to rely on rent board staff to do this analysis. Just give us the data.

Behind Mamdani’s Smile, a Politician Who Can Be a Ruthless Operator

Good article www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/n...

The heavy-handed approach has bruised some allies, who say the Democratic mayor is wasting capital on internal fights that they worry are sometimes driven less by strategy than by a desire to exert personal control over the movement. More than a dozen spoke extensively about what they see as a disconnect between his public and private personas, but insisted on remaining anonymous because they feared the consequences of angering him. Mr. Ossé declined to comment. Others argue that Mr. Mamdani is making smart bets to push his policy priorities through Albany and build up democratic socialist power. The mayor, they say, is not interested in lost causes, even noble ones.

Someone is buying scary looking ads that link out to this NY Times article - I think it's meant to be bad for him but all of this just makes me respect Mamdani even more

It sucks that it’s this way, but a billionaire who can put in the time and work and money without needing to climb up through the interest group system of “Choose your fighter: SEIU or Building Trades” is someone with a real opportunity!

And I have to think that “no elected experience” isn’t that much worse than “only ever been in Congress” - exact same amount of relevant experience in state politics/policy.

spaceballs meme, oh no. not again.

I struggle with this, like I don't know how to square the idea that we're objectively better off than 25 years ago with the way people struggle with rent, healthcare, childcare, etc. I know we spend all day looking at the depression factories in our pockets but there must be more than that.

Honestly I’m just waiting for the Brownian Restoration.

We need lawn signs that say “I guess steyer?”

If the only choices are “random billionaire who has been futzing around and spending money on politics for ten years” and “ex backbench three term congresswoman from MSNBC”, I guess I’ll take the former?

My least popular YIMBY opinion is that the capital gains exemption should be like $2 million+, considering most of these people are going sit on their houses long past the time that it makes any sense for them and pay $0 anyway.

There are people that live in $3 million homes, but they're not millionaires

AYFKM

I don’t necessarily agree with the end goal there, there are trade offs. Current system also relies on $ from Congress/GOP, hence the focus LIHTC over Section 8.

I see the general issue as, we need to operate and manage a scarcity regime while moving toward an abundance regime. It’s tough.

I don’t love it for new builds but need to think about it more. I like the idea of private for profits building BMR but a big part of that is because they don’t need mountains of explicit subsidies. An implicit subsidy isn’t much better, and in some ways is worse.

There is potentially a massive opportunity here - look at ED1 in LA - but my main thing is who is going to own and operate the building, and are they getting a property tax abatement, because if so then this project team is getting a big big long-term subsidy from the city and county.

😂😂😂

😂❤️😭

Alright well you can tick up total support by the two voters in the house! Thats how polling works right

Not entirely!

Also possible they just didn’t poll 94706 because only a teensy bit of it is in Berkeley.

Adding this to my list of beefs that I have with the open data portal!

Once again, 94706 is the forgotten zip code of Berkeley

Yeah search is great. Funny little tools.

I heard about that one! Pretty neat.

Yeah that's the kind of thing it's great at, right? I'm at the point with it where I realize I need to put more effort into context management and developing "agentic" workflows if I'm going to get more value out of it. That just sounds annoying and lame and I don't want to do it.

Stackoverflow, still very randomly saving the day

The whole idea of a base project, which is not a real project, having a specific number of units on which to base a density bonus is pretty weird.

That said, could be more about how Oakland interprets state law than state law itself?

I know using tab complete isn’t exactly “writing code” but it’s wild to me that folks will fight withC Claude to spit out 250 lines of code you mostly don’t want or need that maybe does what it’s supposed to when you could have spit out thirty lines that does exactly what you want in less time.