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.

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?

Which is obviously a bit sus, because the actual lawsuit froze everything for only around 18 months from Feb 2015 to Sep 2016.

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.

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.

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

Atherton is a vibe, but it's an older demographic of tech and finance successes (the 1990s-2000s scene).

Local control is desirable, the question is the proper granularity of local control in the modern era. The structure of places like the Bay Area with dozens of little towns that have veto power over everything is too granular. Planning should happen at the granularity of entire metro areas.

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.