Local tv channels have the broadcast rights for the home team area - like SNY in New York has the rights for the Mets. Their contracts specify that they have exclusive rights to the broadcast for their coverage area, so internet coverage must be blacked out.
What restricts someone from constructing a tall building?
If I buy a piece of land, and it's my property, I can do whatever I what with it right? Who can stop me from constructing a tall building on my own property?
The United States is a free country right? I assume a free country respects property owner's freedom to whatever[1] they want with their land?
[1] Of course excluding actions would cause significant harm to one's neighbors, like environmental pollution.
I was actually asking that question in a rhetorical sense.
I'm well aware of zoning laws. I think when they're taken too far, they impinge on personal liberty.
There are localities that mandate that every house be painted the same color. The Bay Area zoning laws benefit a few (the landlords) at great cost to everyone else who lives there, and stunts the growth of the regional economy. (If taller building were allowed and property prices were more sane, there would be more companies and more people, thus leading to economic growth).
I think what we need is a constitutional limit on state power in the United States. The Tenth Amendment[1] and the Enumerated Powers Clause[2] limit federal overreach, but there is no analogous limit on state power in the U.S. Constitution. The states' powers are not enumerated, well-defined or limited in any way, and states are free to legislate on almost anything (unless it infringes on an enumerated right of the people or a right covered under Ninth Amendment[3]).
> I'm well aware of zoning laws. I think when they're taken too far, they impinge on personal liberty.
Well then it's a good thing we have courts to decide what "too far" is. The Supreme Court has decided that zoning laws are not inherently unconstitutional (Euclid v. Amber), but they've struck down more infringing laws on multiple occasions. Maybe you don't agree with the exact balance they've chosen, but that's your problem, not a fatal flaw of our government.
> I think what we need is a constitutional limit on state power in the United States.
We already have one: the Supremacy Clause. Federal laws and the national constitution override state laws in all cases. If a certain right is not granted either by a state or by the Supremacy Clause, it's because both the state and the Federal government have decided that particular right isn't a natural one. Again, you seem to be taking your particular conceptions of liberty and what the law should be, and deciding the government is flawed for not obeying them. A lot of us like the current system.
If there's a particular right you feel should be Constitutionally protected against state laws, we have a system for that with Constitutional amendments enforced by the Supremacy Clause. Propose one to your representative if you like. But your suggestion of more non-specific Constitutional limits on state power is not going to win you many followers: the vague right-libertarianism of your attitude will alienate the Left, and the Right will balk at your suggestion of more Federal limits on state power. You're walking a lonely road here.
You've got a lot of good points. I agree that the current system works very well, and I personally appreciate it deeply (esp. considering how well-functioning it is, compared to many other countries today). But there's always room for improvement, and I was just suggesting something that I think could be an improvement.
Why do you think having federal government pass laws to override local government is less threatening to personal liberty than allowing local governments to manage themselves?
The Bill of Rights[1] restricts both federal and state power. It, empowered by the Fourteenth[2], has been used by the courts to strike down state (and federal) laws as unconstitutional several times. This has overall been in the interest of the people, and have served to protect our individual liberty -- wouldn't you say so? And the rights of the people enumerated Bill of Rights is supreme over all laws whether passed by Congress, state government, or local government.
What I'm essentially arguing for is for a sort of massive expansion of individual liberty through federal restriction of state power, by for example, having a list of "Enumerated Powers of the States" similar to the federal Enumerated Powers clause added to the Constitution, and establishing (just as in the Tenth Amendment) that all powers not specifically delegated to the states are reserved to the people. This would expands personal liberty, as it would put well-defined limits on what the states can legislate on.
Of course excluding actions would cause harm to their neighbors with their actions.
What would you call it when your new 50 story building leaves neighboring properties in permanent shadow, or get in the way of their previous panoramic views of the bay?
Most of the other comments are off base for Mountain View/Sunnyvale shoreline area. Google and Linkedin can't build tall buildings here because their campuses are next to Moffett federal airfield and the surrounding area is subject to building height restrictions.
There's a map for this, I'll edit my comment when I find it.
Edit: I found the map (http://i.imgur.com/B48yRGK.jpg), the maximum building height for this area is 182 feet above sea level. The Google campus sits around 15 feet above sea level and LinkedIn around 50. That works out to a max height of around 10 stories for the Google area, 7 stories for LinkedIn. So actually, it's higher than I thought.
There are quite a few tallish (7-10 story) buildings along 237 and Central expressway that seem to skirt this restriction.
This has got to be wrong. Have you seen the "Moffett Towers" buildings that are actually bordering Moffett Field? Google's buildings are 2 floor max; Moffett Towers has 6-8 floor buildings.
Google's current buildings were built years (or decades) ago, long before the current space crunch, and say nothing about current City policy. The maximum height in the current North Bayshore Precise Plan is 140 feet above ground (155 feet above sea level), which takes it pretty close to the federally imposed limit.
Which confirms the fact that current zoning code is more restrictive than the federal guidelines for the airfield, in direct contradiction to the claim that Moffett was restricting the heights rather than the city.
There was a skyscraper in downtown San Jose that was proposed a few years ago that was designed to the maximum height allowed by San Jose airport. After the designs were finalized, the FAA decided that the maximum height was too high, and lowered it a few feet, leading the developer to almost abandon the project, before redesigning it at some expense.
Lesson: it's a mistake to design to the limit.
I suppose in some idealized, maximally YIMBY world, the difference between 8 stories and 10 represents some horrible market interference by "NIMBY asshats". But in the real world, Google would be foolish to build above 8 stories no matter what the Mountain View city council says. The Precise Plan just reflects the practical limits of building in that area.
That's not true. There are at least seven four storey buildings (Alza, Crittenden) on the main campus, and there's also a new 5 storey building on Pear Ave. But almost none of their buildings were built new, most were already built and acquired. Their proposals for new buildings have mostly been around 6-8 storeys, but they've had problems getting the city to approve their plans. I believe the LinkedIn land they acquired also already has approval for taller buildings.
You're right, the other comments aren't incorrect (I wrote that word earlier), it's just in this spot there's federal restrictions on building height that prevent certain developments.
The citizens of Mountain View want nothing to do with tall buildings. They only have a handful that are over 5 stories.
A 12-story building was planned back in 2012 and they almost had a protest over it. The name of the town is 'Mountain View' and not 'city skyline view', after all.
This shocked me the first time I went out to SV. I thought the bay would be a deep body of water with a shoreline, and it's basically a mud flat / salt factory. Really disappointing. Many cities built along rivers have better water views & access.
As a Seattle refugee, I still don't understand why there are so few boats on the bay.
I get that the Bay is not Lake Washington.. but seriously, lakes vary in height too, and still have docks.
Somehow the bay has almost no docks, no boating (except some sailboats way up north in SF), no recreation at all. Is it water quality? Chop? Regulation?
there is a marina in redwood city, but notice how shallow the bay is south of SFO (aside from the channel) - much of that is mudflats (lakes don't have tides), marine preserves, etc.
Damn. DAMN. I didn't realize it was that shallow. (I'm familiar with the RWC Marina as I bike by there on my commute, and in college I rowed out of Seaport). Thanks. Obviously it goes without saying that if the water is only (say) 5m deep, there's a hell of a lot of crap between 0m and the 5m floor.
The changing height is not as much of an issue; plenty of lakes vary in height by 5-10ft and docks accommodate it just fine.
The muddy marsh/salt ponds surprised me too! But there are a few spots where the actual Bay (open water) is visible... e.g. Baylands Nature Preserve in Palo Alto. Also nearby hills have views -- I used to take walks to the top of the hill behind Google's Crittenden buildings, from where you can see a good bit of the southern Bay and up the peninsula northward. (Those hills also used to be MTV's garbage dump, so it could be worse!)
Then why not build down instead of up? Besides the obvious suckitude that is working under ground? Build 5 floors of prisms and light pipes above ground and send sunlight down 20 stories or whatever the math works out to.
Mountain view borders the coastline of the bay. I just used a tool[1] to find the level above sea they are, and it shows ~ 8 ft. I imagine there are problems building below sea level when you are only a few hundred feet from the coast.
Biggest question I had when I first arrived in bay area. Gov. Regulation are the reason why it is a bit harder to have taller buildings, tech companies have lot of money to go for more land grab is the main reason.
If you are building a building with X floor area the city government requires you to have f(x) area as open land. If you want to build a very tall building it will have to look like the Saruman's Tower. This regulation is part of the reason why Sunnyvale or Mountain View do not look like SF. It is also the reason why property prices are so expensive. The good part however is that it means less crime, better neighbourhoods and overall good quality of life.
Are the better neighborhoods, crime rates, and qualities of life a result of lower-rise buildings, or because the cost of living is so high that only the wealthy or upper-income can afford to live there?
Asking the real questions. I'm not sure what the correlation between tall buildings and crime is. "Better neighborhoods" is usually code for the sorts of things people don't say in public and it seems to be that quality of life is more dictated by your level of income rather than where you live.
It's happening. I think the one thing people need to realize is the big "space crunch" in the Bay Area is a relatively recent issue. There is NIMBYism to be sure, but development is slowly catching up. Look at the Sunnyvale side of Moffett Field, it has rapidly grown a collection of tall buildings.
The potential issue that was brought up in Mountain View is an unwillingness to become a "company town" for Google. Residents can remember being a "company town" (to a lesser extent) for SGI and then SGI went poof, leaving the Shoreline area vacant for a time. I actually think it is good for residents to be suspicious of tying their fates to one very large employer; nothing lasts forever.
The same issue may one day impact Cupertino...how many companies could or would want to acquire a single property as big as the "spaceship" campus? Apple isn't going away anytime soon, but this is still a valid concern.
Would it really be that bad for them if Google went belly up sometime in the future? Sure their property values might decline, but in the interim they'd go up. Is it that bad if property values go from x, to x + y, back to x, as opposed to just staying at x? In the interim, allowing Google to expand means they'd get a bunch of new infrastructure, run down parts of the city would be rehabilitated, the area would gentrify some. I'm not sure how these people are acting/voting in their own interest.
The land they just gave to Google was going to be used for more buildings. I doubt they were going to build skyscrapers, nor could they with the amount of additional parking space that would be needed. The North Bayshore area isn't really accessible except by highways, and even those are pretty much at capacity - in fact, the city council has approved only a limited amount of office space due to the strain on transportation infrastructure.
Indeed, their plan that the city rejected did include an additional off ramp.
But highways are nonetheless terribly inefficient. One extra lane or off ramp isn't enough to handle all of Google's traffic. They've already widened 101 around Google, rebuilt the whole Shoreline/85/101 interchange area to add more lanes, etc. The bottleneck is the off ramps themselves and the local streets -- they cause traffic to back up onto the freeway and make all lanes congested.
The real solution is to allow more housing to be built close to the campus, and elsewhere in Mountain View, so that more people can walk/bike/take transit. The land use just across 101 is really inefficient right now.
Indeed, there's been discussion about connecting Moffett Blvd to the North Bayshore neighborhood a new bridge over the creek that would connect to La Avenida. And creating a spur of the Light Rail system into the neighborhood as well.
The problem isn't locking so much, it's that you have to dispatch to a kernel thread when you're requesting and sending data, paying the cost of that context switch every time. In userspace you can spin a polling thread on its own core and DMA data up and down to the hardware all day long without yielding your thread to another one.
sure, that saves you from dumping TLB state - but you still need to save register state, copy data from a user supplied buffer in to a kernel-owned device-mapped buffer - wiping L1 data and instruction caches in the process.
For 99% of use cases this isn't a problem, but if you're trying to save every possible microsecond, then it definitely does.
Sure, I was more commenting on the parent post that suggested that the cost was doing to a "context switch" when its not a context switch at all its mode switch - to "kernel mode."
If you are trying to save microseconds you are probably running special hardware like the SolarFlare network cards which also run the drivers in user space. These are generally hedge funds or high frequency trading shops. I can't imagine anyone else could justify the price.
The next big problem is the lack of a unified charging infrastructure. Yes, you can buy a trunk full of adapters.[1] Teslas use their own plug, for which there are a CHAdeMO adapter, a J1772 adapter, and adapters for standard 120VAC and 240VAC outlets. A full set of adapters is about $700. [2]
The Chevy Bolt uses Combo Cord, which supports J1772 and CCS.
Looking around Silicon Valley, almost all charging points have J1772. Some are free, some require payment, and some require membership in a charging plan. Higher power stations are mostly CHAdeMO.
There's a big retail markup on electricity. $0.59/KWh at some stations. And there are payment "plans", which look like cellular phone plans. Tesla's "Supercharger" is supposedly unlimited once you've paid your $2500, but apparently if you use ones near your residence, they send you nag messages saying it's really for travelers.
> Tesla's "Supercharger" is supposedly unlimited once you've paid your $2500, but apparently if you use ones near your residence, they send you nag messages saying it's really for travelers.
Because its meant only for travelers. Its for unlimited cross country travel, not as your local free filling station.
Yes, but you don't need chademo. Your car comes with 120 and 220v, plus j1172, plus you don't need an adapter for superchargers. So $0 additional cost. Plus it comes with the wall charger. So you might live in a place with Chademo, but its only useful if it exists, and there is no high power charger. So the extra set would $450, but you actually need $0 extra - and it fits in the corner of the trunk. I've owned a tesla since 2012, and I don't have chademo. I've spent exactly $0 extra on the plugs you suggest. I have been from seattle to portland, eastern washington, Vancouver BC, Whistler, Banff. Just using regular j1772 and superchargers.
I live in an area with a lot of CHAdeMO chargers, and I've never been tempted to buy the adapter... near-home charging (I have an apartment) and superchargers have done the job, even for longer trips.
When the bosses wanted iPhones, the company got iPhones. When the bosses want to plug in their electric cars, the parking lots will get charging stations.
If Norway is any indication, it shouldn't be much of a problem. Once the EV market share hits a certain threshold, build-out of charging infrastructure explodes, as it becomes a good investment.
Grocery stores are starting to have deals with charging station companies, because it gives them a competetive advantage to have a charging station at their store.
Some government incentives can be great to give the infrastructure that initial boost (to help boost initial EV sales) but it seems the market can handle it after that.
Two car households look like a large enough market to get past the chicken and egg problem. The vast majority of daily driving is within the range of a base model Tesla.
This is going to sound flippant, but I mean it seriously: The advantage to fungible electricity seems to me that we've already solved the hard parts of charging infrastructure. We have electric grids that reach just about every building, and with modern lighting standards most parking lots and parking facilities too.
Certainly there are "last mile questions" like number of charging devices and type of charging plug(s) and adding plugs to circuits/stringing new circuits near building exteriors and in parking lots and figuring out who to charge for that, but none of them have particularly "hard" problems left to solve at this point.
How fast do these go compared to a bicycle? I saw a few of them on the street and they didn't seem to be moving faster than a brisk walker.
My impression was that bikes are generally banned because they move fast enough to cause serious injury yet are silent enough that pedestrians don't hear them coming.
I've seen a few of these in London they aren't really faster than a fast walking speed which makes people who use them look very silly.
They are quite often laughably used in shopping centers or and super markets mostly because allot of the pavements in London are horribly uneven which probably doesn't provide a very good surface for those.
I've seen 2 guys on those things at Westfield last weekend arguing with a bunch of confused staff that didn't knew how to treat them.
I don't really get this device it doesn't help you to commute any faster, it doesn't increase your pedestrian commute range if you aren't fit to walk you won't be able to use one of those (they got quite a stringy weight limit, and require quite a bit of effort to balance yourself on) anyhow.
It's a bit funny to see fit and young hipsters pretty much using a 500$ mobility scooter...
It's not an especially high barrier if your strategy doesn't require you to build physical infrastructure (most strategies don't require this). You have programmers, hardware, colocation costs, direct exchange connection costs, trading fees, etc. The programmers are by far the most expensive component.
