Are fire alarms that go off constantly a necessary outcome of some dumb American building code?

In case you ever wondered why California is such a laggard despite its grand progressive vision of itself, you should spend some time with its political class.

If the City Auditor did a report about how much tax support Berkeley Repertory Theater already quietly receives, I think most residents would be pretty surprised.

The Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein redeemed my one month of Netflix that I thought was a total loss after House of Dynamite. 10/10 for Frankenstein.

Sometimes you just wake up thinking "I will bicycle to Rio Vista."

Wonderful story here. Go read.

If transit agencies don't want Waymo to drink their various milkshakes, they need to sort out their fare systems. Once someone has the Waymo app they get the same experience in any city. Nobody really wants to figure out how to load Santa Monica's local payment instrument into Apple Pay.

The narrative has been violated. Memes: AI is boiling all our water and it doesn't even do anything useful! Water scientists: We used AI to predict water consumption, which has been falling for decades. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

The worst-case scenario presented in this report, a case that requires the industry to make every mistake imaginable, results in a nationwide aggregate water footprint of 1.5 million acre-feet per year, which is not a lot of water. It is 0.5% of current withdrawals.

This bus stop/bulb-out was just built literally yesterday in Berkeley. Seems like a great place to stand and wait for the bus, yes? Note also the depth of water over the ADA ramp. The way these structures are drawn, or the way the contractors read the drawings, isn't right.

We should ask the public editor about this! [touches earpiece] I've just been told that the last Public Editor of the New York Times was fired in 2017 after “squandering the most important watchdog job in journalism” and was never replaced.

Honestly, we could have used a lot more cancel culture.

Someone at Google needs to just immolate their career by breaking the glass, printing out Epstein's gmail account, and sprinting out the door to the nearest fax machine.

My favorite Berkeley student apartment building that I always talk about secured a massive down-assessment correction, presumably based on gross rents. This helps answer the question of whether rents ever go down in new apartment buildings. This amounts to about $615k lower tax bill this year.

This SFGate front pager is vociferously anti-Fresno and I kinda like it. It is nice to see "sprawl bad" as fact, not opinion. www.sfgate.com/centralcalif...

What's really irritating is you still meet lots of people who believe all this Forester stuff. And some of them are not even 70 years old.

Garmin: good at thermodynamics.

The city council meeting is hearing a presentation about local amendments to the state fire code, and it feels like my bsky feed has spilled out into real life. Especially since that's not why I'm here.

Tired of "frivolous" attempts to landmark buildings that tie up housing, some Berkeley City Council members want to change the process.

The computation complexity needed for this Reddit post sadly goes unmentioned. The result is also interesting. www.reddit.com/r/Urbanism/c...

Leaving aside the fact that this person has little to offer policy-wise, it's also the case that they only seem young because Nancy Pelosi is already 9000 years old. Everyone over 45 needs to just sit out and not run for what amounts to entry-level elected offices.

Love watching four guys show up at the job site across the street in four otherwise empty crew cab pickup trucks.

Being in Marin sucks. It's not just the Cayennes and the G-wagons, it's the bicyclists who you can tell their other bicycle is a G-wagon. The whole place just has the worst vibes.

I honestly did not know that baskets were this powerful. I used to gas up my car every month, spending ~$25/mo on gas for my car. After I put a basket on my bike, it's down to ~$25 per quarter. First time I had to gas it up since that post.

Did Bay Wheels set another record for monthly ridership in the East Bay in October? Not quite. Missed it by three rides. But it was a record for Octobers.

I'm just going to put this out there. If your city has an affordability crisis, and a homelessness emergency, it should not also have a law on the books with the avowed purpose of making property more expensive. It's beyond time to repeal those.

Demolition proceeding on block of University Ave where the Regents of the University of California are immune to local landmark designations.

this guy again

It's possible this politician has other reasonable policy positions, but the one that reads "AI is the biggest energy crisis in America" is, on that point at least, not a well-informed person.

It still blows my mind that in the year 2025 wood smoke is equal to or greater than cars in terms of dangerous pollution, this is true not just in France but also California, according to this BAAQMD white paper.

It's kinda weird that society is incapable of eradicating even simple kinds of misinformation. It just grows and spreads. Example: there must be tens of thousands of books, magazines, and sites that repeat the "quick soaking" method of cooking beans, which is pure nonsense. This will never go away.

I found this question irresistible. It's a neologism and most of the pre-1980 occurrences are discussing armor and artillery tactics. An early example of "break up the massing" in architectural literature gives this near-cubic example, where apparently the very slight modulation qualifies.

Moderately annoying that Waymo is going to expand into every city in California before they consider the People's Republic of Berkeley.

Some local busybodies are trying to head off the possibility of redevelopment of a central Berkeley parcel, and the way they are doing that is by trying to designate a 1991 Trachtenberg as a landmark. This must cause them mental anguish, surely. It looks like "baby's first strip mall".

Jackie Fielder eulogizing a cat, an honor she has yet to bestow upon any of SF's dozens of humans killed in or by cars. Because none of the crooks in the background give a damn about street safety, either.

Superficially these are both pro-housing outcomes. Measure J is a zoning overlay, Measure K is a spot rezoning. But it seems to me that at least one and perhaps both of these are vulnerable to the argument that prevailed last month in New Commune v. Redondo Beach, that overlay zoning is insufficient

My takeaway from last night is that Democrats should field ambulatory candidates. I hope that's not considered ableist or ageist or whatever.

These are basically the same map

Keep this one to show to doubters of machine learning.

Local parking mogul has swept about 20 homeless campers off the lot at 4th and University, and erected an 8-foot fence. Oddly when this happens on sacred land the press doesn't get worked up about the injustice and indignity of it all.

Jackie Fielder, who I can't recall ever mentioning one of the dozen dead pedestrians in SF this year, is on X organizing a memorial for a cat, with the pumper-dumper of this crypto coin. SF DSA is a dumping ground for the gullible.

This is way off in the fractal details of Berkeley real estate, but an eyesore I see every day is this abandoned store on a prominent block of University Ave. The City has been trying to force these guys to reinforce the brick since ... 1989. In the 4th decade, they are starting to file liens.

256 feet? In my Berkeley? Tell me more.

Looking at recent months of Berkeley rent registry data, one thing I want to highlight is the stability of these rents in August. For this cohort of studio and 1-bed apartments, the rents in August have been about $2400/mo for a decade...

This seems like a little bit of progress but the timeline shows how fruitless the "builder's remedy" is. If you have to be in court for years and years arguing about whether Redondo Beach has a valid housing element or not, there is no real remedy.

Oh no! My cyclocross bike got wet.

Good morning from Mare Island, headquarters of the United States Navy strategic reserve of obsolete cranes.

What do people who hold strong opinions about data center energy consumption have to say about this relationship, I wonder.

Some crackhead tried to steal my bike from right in front of me while I was sitting there sipping coffee at a sidewalk cafe. Have at least a little respect.

What kind of illness do you have to have before it makes sense to gather community input for a year on the topic of whether this corner should be squared off like literally every other corner throughout the entire city?