Thou Shalt Regulate Thy Bovine Flatulence

Posted on January 31, 2017 by RL CRABB

If the Presidonald follows through with his threat to cut EPA regulations in half, you can count on California politicians to double down on ours, more if possible. The war between the feds and the state is going to make living in California even more expensive than it is now.

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23 Responses to Thou Shalt Regulate Thy Bovine Flatulence

  1. Stronzo says:
    January 31, 2017 at 2:16 pm

    Not necessarily. There are many nations with far stricter laws on pollution, and their economies are doing just fine. Some studies actually show it being more expensive to play dirty, and I seriously doubt if the 8th largest economy in the world will even skip a beat.
    Gov. Moonbeam might be your salvation, after all. (He actually seemed pretty smart, when I met him and Linda in Nevada City, many years ago.) We like him so much, up here in Oregon, that we elected our own Gov. Brown. So far, so good.

    Reply
  2. rl crabb says:
    January 31, 2017 at 2:58 pm

    Proposed 42% gas hike…Another $65 registration fee…Everything in every store that moves on the road will cost us more. What’s that? Just raise the minimum wage? Yeah, that’ll fix it.

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  4. Stronzo says:
    February 1, 2017 at 2:22 pm

    With the highest population in the union, (12 million more people than the next nearest state), one might find that claim logical. And certainly, when it comes to the Golden State, there isn’t enough room on your blog to list everything that California leads the nation in, let alone the world. California is one incredible place, the scope of which I seriously doubt that any one person has ever grasped.

    But interestingly, although the California Department of Housing and Community Development, (which is lobbying to get legislators to build another 1.8 million homes in a hurry), says it’s #1 in homelessness, the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development disagrees, citing Hawaii as #1, with New York at #2, and CA at #3. *(That’s using a more realistic equation of the number of homeless per 100K, instead of the gross amount.) No doubt that will all change when Trump’s brain surgeon takes over.
    Same with poverty, where CA is #35 at 16.4%, (middle of the pack), while Mississippi is at the bottom with 21.9%, (unsurprisingly). **

    I guess everyone uses alt-truth to some degree, and for their own purposes. Fret not, homeboys; your doing fine.

    * https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/08/08/which-states-have-the-highest-levels-of-homelessness/?utm_term=.4d8310e9fc93
    ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_rate

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    • rlcrabb says:
      February 1, 2017 at 6:03 pm

      Tell it to the school teacher who told me about the crying children in her class that have no food and nowhere to live. Oh yeah, just anecdotal…doesn’t fit your stats. Must be bullshit. Right.

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  5. Stronzo says:
    February 1, 2017 at 7:57 pm

    The alt-truth comment was in reference to the CA Housing Authority’s claim to be #1. Poverty and homelessness is one of the major challenges of our time, and not likely to see a lot of focus from our billionaire POTUS. It’s up to us, as individuals, to make a difference in that category. To that end, my wife and I donate over half of what we are able to grow here on our little farm; from eggs and chickens, to produce, beef and pork. It ain’t much, but we like to think it helps.

    I hope the teacher you mention was able to connect the children’s family with the resources available in your area. There’s no excuse for people to go hungry in Nevada County, (or anywhere else in America). Perhaps if we stopped spending 40 cents on the dollar for never-ending war, we might find the funds to help a little more. That, and not characterizing the poor as simply feeders at the trough in one post, and a teary anecdote the next. The growing number of people who desperately need assistance are not scamming the system, and they are the overwhelming majority of welfare recipients. Takes a pretty cold heart to see it any other way.

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    • rl crabb says:
      February 1, 2017 at 9:08 pm

      These children have no homes to go to. The housing crisis is very real here in California and Nevada County. One of my fellow editorial board members gave me a list of the fees and mandates she was obligated to pay before one shovel of dirt could be turned on their property. It was over $80K.
      In the past week I’ve seen three young women who have either left or are in the process of leaving Nevada County and/or California due to the lack of housing and employment opportunity. That’s just me. Who knows how many others there are?

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    • Michael Anderson says:
      February 1, 2017 at 9:27 pm

      Bob, it’s a real crisis and it’s only going to get worse as long we’re divided. I believe that housing and homelessness is something upon which progressives, conservatives, and libertarians in Nevada County can all work together, but it means putting down the knives, acting like adults, stop aggressively promoting a Great Divide, and get to work. Not “work” as in “infiltrating the ‘enemy’s’ organizations and converting them or destroying their efforts,” but “work” as in “sitting down with your alleged enemy, breaking bread, smoking the peace pipe, and start building consensus and coalition.” Not only that, the various political entities in Grass Valley, Nevada City, and Nevada County need to take the lead instead of sitting back and waiting for our vast, disparate, and siloed volunteer community to bear this heavy load. It’s not rocket science, it’s social science; it requires that idealogues sit quietly and StFU for a change.

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      • rl crabb says:
        February 2, 2017 at 6:09 am

        First, you have to get their attention. I find it difficult to convince some people that a problem even exists. If Jerry was standing here in front of me, I’d tell him to his face.

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        • steven frisch says:
          February 3, 2017 at 7:27 am

          I have a couple of observations about the housing crises in Nevada County.

          First, Bob I think you should know that both behind the scenes and through legislation Governor Brown has strongly supported loosening regulations on building new housing to try to alleviate the problem. Respectfully, he is not the sole player here, and his efforts to ease regulations have been countered by numerous interests.

          Second, I am going to ding the people who are often my friends, environmentalists and slow growth advocates, you are now actively harming working families in our state.

          The entire debate over growth and development has focused on the wrong issues: the question is not should we build new housing–we should–the question is where, how, with what standards and with how much environmental impact. The equation that people should be focusing on is the relative ecological footprint of new housing, which is a location specific equation. Traffic counts, emissions, noise, etc. are all locations efficiency issues that can be solved with a combination of good planning and good design. The more ecological impact housing has the higher the price should be, and in fact, the marketplace, even sans regulation, partially works that way today. The theory here is location efficiency, if we actually made developers, and thus consumers, pay for the full cost of poor location efficiency choices they make, instead of having the taxpayers subsidize it, we could solve this problem in short order.

          Frankly there is more than enough already zoned land and subdivided property in the state to not only build the 1.8 million homes we are in arrears to meet need, there is enough to absorb the future market for at least 50 years, according to research done by UC Davis.

          The solution lies in actively placing housing in communities where existing infrastructure is in place, where we can improve access to and headways for transit, and in close proximity to jobs.

          If the slow growth environmental community was wise they would be actively supporting growth and development in such places in order to reduce pressure on greenfield and outlying development which is more expensive to serve with infrastructure. This would have the additional benefit of actually reducing the cost of serving the infrastructure and act as a hedge against raising taxes and fees. Unfortunately they often don’t behave that way because the true objective is not environmental improvement it is convenience. Too many participants in such efforts are really out to exclude inconvenience from their lives.

          I have been working on this issue for years, and in the last 2 years have leveraged more than $22 million for affordable housing in Nevada County. All of that housing has been in Truckee, largely because Truckee made a decision to proactively promote affordable housing and go out and find the investments that could work.

          There is a community leadership issue here…if community leaders take this issue up and work to 1) find the developers who want to do this type of product (and by that I mean both affordable and middle income housing), and 2) work with them to streamline the process, support access to the funding necessary, and work with them to create certainty for investors (permits) to ease the burden of building, the problem could be solved.

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      • John Dough says:
        February 2, 2017 at 8:56 am

        In order to resolve the problem we must first admit the problem exists. Unfortunately the problem is us. We continue to elect legislators who are owned by the lobbyists and unions. These legislators then enact ever stringent requirements on housing as their payback. Consequently we have the most complex and costly set of rules and design requirements of any state in the country. And to make it even worse, anyone foolish enough or naive enough to proceed despite the process, will then encounter our own Nevada County brand of “not in my back yard”. We are doing it to ourselves and it does not appear that we are willing to stop doing it.

        Reply
        • steven frisch says:
          February 3, 2017 at 7:41 am

          BTW although I agree the NIMBY issue is real, this whole “union” argument is, in my humble opinion after much research, a red herring.

          Almost every impartial study of construction housing costs (and by that I mean economic analysis done by academic institutions as opposed to industry advocacy groups) shows that the modestly increased labor cost (which admittedly depends upon where you are in the country but in California is only about 20%) is more than offset by delivering projects on time and on budget more regularly, improvements in liability for worker safety, and reductions in defects that must be rectified after construction. It is also important to note that construction labor cost on projects in California is usually about 14% of the total project cost, so you are talking about 20% of the 14% of a project that is labor cost. That is $2.8 million dollars on a $100 million project, before you take into account certainty, worker compensation liability, and defect costs.

          Reply
  6. Judith Lowry says:
    February 2, 2017 at 6:11 pm

    Long before Jerry, there was Hammurabi.
    This is where it started, and it’s all about human nature.
    Quit assigning blame and get to work.

    http://distressed-homeowner.tripod.com/id29.html

    Reply
  7. rl crabb says:
    February 2, 2017 at 6:34 pm

    Yes, I suppose I’ve been pissing in the wind for the last thirty years. I’ve been nicely suggesting that people appreciate having a roof over their head, and wouldn’t it be a good idea to remedy the problem? Other than the co-housing projects, there hasn’t been much movement. (And the NC co-housing ended up being more expensive after the planning commission got done tinkering with it.)
    And Hammurabi’s building code is still used in a number of states. Although you can’t be put to death, you can be sued and run out of business. That’s what they have things like Angie’s List for.
    California has done its best to make us as safe and energy efficient as humanly possible, but it comes at a very high cost. Meanwhile, children live in cars.

    Reply
    • Judith Lowry says:
      February 2, 2017 at 8:56 pm

      And some children, in third world countries being plundered for resources by more developed countries, don’t even have cars to live in, if they even get to live at all. While more privileged kids, a world away (but not really), bitch about not having enough bars on their fancy phones.
      Not buying it Bob.

      Reply

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