Disqus - Latest Comments for danlyke

Re: Petaluma Police Chief in tune with city’s values

danlyke — Sat, 06 Jun 2020 12:04:56 -0000

I appreciate that Chief Savano is making the effort, but black Petalumans I've talked to have given some pretty ugly examples of being questioned because they looked like the suspect, ie: black. And, yeah, the $80k purchase of rifles for the PPD is not a good look for an organization that I'd rather have focusing on de-escalation and de-militarization. We've come some distance from when I first moved to Petaluma, where the police department web site was had very militarized imagery "for recruiting", but talking with people of color in Petaluma suggests we have a hell of a long way to go yet.

Re: Getting the job done on Rainier

danlyke — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 15:03:48 -0000

Given that Ranier would require a bunch of auto-oriented infrastructure in order to pay for it, it decidedly wouldn't solve any traffic problems, just induce more demand. And the fact that the pro-Ranier crossing contingent on the council was too chicken to split the funding measure a few years ago and let there be another referendum on a Ranier crossing, that would actually be attached to the funds necessary to pay for it, indicates that the city residents are far more educated about the real costs and impacts of the project now.

We already subsidize the heck out of roads that we can't afford to maintain, building more roads that will result in negative net-income is just further fiscal irresponsibility, and subsidy of development patterns that do not serve the city.

Re: 20170124

danlyke — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 21:07:53 -0000

"When I'm surfing pornhub..." Uhhh... Rayne hasn't saved the porn industry. Porn producers, and especially performers, aren't making anything off of pornhub. If we're gonna save porn and see real orgasms, we're going to have to pay the producers and performers who actually produce porn with real orgasms. That stuff is getting knocked off Pornhub for copyright infringement.

Re: Death of Petaluma’s street tax disappointing | Petaluma Argus Courier | Petaluma360.com

danlyke — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:29:21 -0000

Need at least another buck a gallon before the gas tax pays for the direct infrastructure costs of automobile travel. Let alone the indirect costs like health impacts. This is why we need to implement a VMT, to help make the costs direct and let us make smarter decisions.

Re: Death of Petaluma’s street tax disappointing | Petaluma Argus Courier | Petaluma360.com

danlyke — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 12:16:01 -0000

I was polled, and they missed the critical question on the poll: This city has been profligately spending money on development which cannot pay for the infrastructure that development requires. We're throwing money down the rathole of building completely unsustainable housing and commercial developments, and then complaining about congestion and bad roads.

And then we have a council majority that keeps making noise about boondoggles like the Ranier cross-town connector, which would have to enable billions of dollars of economic growth in order to make sense.

I'm a hundred percent for this tax to fix what we have and enable denser in-fill so that we can gain the revenue necessary to become economically sustainable. But I cannot trust the people who have been giving away the town assets to outside developers, and who are talking about how eagerly they want to do even more of that, to make decisions with additional revenue.

Elect a city council that has any economic sense and is looking towards ways to grow the city intelligently, and I bet this tax would pass with a huge majority. But we have to do that first.

Re: Petaluma Argus-Courier Mobile

danlyke — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 13:36:03 -0000

Yay! We got a cross-town connector that'll actually help alleviate traffic!

Re: Mixed-Use Is a Fine Idea, but Quality Still Matters

danlyke — Sun, 21 Sep 2014 11:42:12 -0000

So despite my urbanism advocacy, I looked at that picture, and thought "I'd hate to live in that environment". And I thought a bit about why I'd hate to live in that environment, and then saw the parking lot at the far end, and realized that the landscaped path in a narrow alley in between stucco buildings was something I associate as being plopped down without context in the midst of larger auto-oriented patterns. I bet it's a mile to the closest bus stop, and those buses run on hour headways.

Aspects of that development as visible from the picture also make me question the quality of the physical design and construction. I realize it's just a stock photo, but it's telling to me that the stock example is exactly what many of us who dabble in urbanism rail against.

Re: The Petaluma Argus-Courier

danlyke — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:16:47 -0000

It occurs to me that if you're going to spend $115M, that'd probably buy about a mile of making the McDowell/East Washington intersection dual level (estimates on-line seem to run about $80M/mile for elevated roadway). Maybe just turning that area into a spaghetti junction to get cars clear of the shopping center traffic and through to the neighborhoods would avoid turning 101 back into a neighborhood street with all those intersections...

Re: The Petaluma Argus-Courier

danlyke — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 17:57:22 -0000

So you make a strong argument that the development impact fees charged to developers weren't sufficient to provide the infrastructure those houses needed. However, there's no way that roughly $300 per household per year in perpetuity necessary to build and maintain the Ranier crossing (at current estimates of around $115M) could ever pay back. That one stretch of road would have to bring unfathomable returns in property values and/or increased sales tax revenue.

I'm no expert on municipal finance, but if this is really necessary, perhaps the beleaguered houses could set up a special assessment district to finance the necessary infrastructure that wasn't rolled in to their initial purchase price?

And this seems like a definite argument for voting out those who, in the face of this overwhelming evidence that Petaluma's impact fees aren't high enough, decided recently to lower those fees further.

Re: Did Metro Build a Perpetual Motion Machine?

danlyke — Tue, 06 May 2014 13:37:36 -0000

Is it possible that anyone working in transit is unaware of the pneumatic transit systems of the 1860s?

And is "Frank Bigelow, President of Pasadena-based WWT Tunnel" the same as California Assembly Member Frank Bigelow (R-O'Neals)?

Re: Cyclist injured in Stony Point Road collision

danlyke — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 15:29:00 -0000

Wait: "...when he [Christopher Wright] collided with a southbound Nissan Altima." vs "The bike suffered damage to the rear wheel and the Altima suffered moderate front-end damage, including a broken windshield." What? What?

Yeah, these freakin' cyclists, backing into cars at 40MPH! Won't someone think of the drivers?

Re: Impudence, moreanimalia: griseus: DEEP-SEA BOTTOM...

danlyke — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 11:07:03 -0000

Like the overall sentiment, but http://ga.water.usgs.gov/ed... would like to take issue with the statement that "Water makes up 98% of the earth's volume".

Re: Impudence, Don’t tell thin women to eat a cheeseburger. Don’t...

danlyke — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 19:30:46 -0000

I think you could remove "a) you are their doctor, or b)" and leave it at "SOMEBODY GODDAMN ASKED YOU.".

(Also: Hate Disqus.)

Re: Impudence, sergei17: Igor Sikorsky - H-5 Dragonfly ...

danlyke — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 16:08:38 -0000

When bad-ass test pilots wore a fedora and a suit. None of this "nomex flight suit and helmet" wussery for Mr. Sikorsky.

Re: Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Feds

danlyke — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 20:06:46 -0000

But "no more than" is the correct comparison operator: If you are directly linked (Bob has exchanged email with Alice), are linked by one person (Carol has exchanged email with Bob who has exchanged email with Alice), or two (Doug exchanged email with Carol), those are all "less than or equal to two people", or "NO more than two people".

I do wonder at the nature of those links, though: if the connection is that we've both received email from an exiled Nigerian prince...

Re: Impudence, grooveland: (via Kitsch Kitchen Ads ‹ Voices of...

danlyke — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 17:56:47 -0000

When I was in High School in Connecticut, in the '80s, I lived in a house with carpet in the kitchen and in the downstairs half-bath. Bad, bad, bad idea, but that's never stopped an architecture or mid to upper end subdivision developer before.

Re: Impudence

danlyke — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:19:26 -0000

Who is that guy and what book is he shilling? Because I'll go buy it *right now*.

Re: Impudence, ST:ID Redux: Against Lindelof

danlyke — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:38:17 -0000

The last N action movies I've seen have had me rolling my eyes mid-way through because at some point they deteriorate into deus ex machina behavior which feels more like bad poetry designed to try to wrench feeling from me, rather than tell a story. It all feels horribly manipulative, and makes me think of those gawdawful "open mic" nights where some woman with an acoustic guitar thinks a bunch of words evoking the wonderfulness of her last relationship accompanied by strumming makes a song.

My problem is that if I'm going to not bring my brain to a movie, I want _Rivers & Tides_ or _Kooyanisqatsi_. Not CG with flashlights shone across the lens of the live shots.

And, historically, Star Trek is about bringing your brain. So, yeah, after the first J.J. Abrams one I had no desire to continue seeing the franchise, skipped this one, and have had that decision reaffirmed by every review I've read.

Re: Expanding table with interesting mechanism

danlyke — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 22:25:53 -0000

Yeah, it's a Jupe table, looks like the same mechanism that the DB Fletcher "Capstan Table" uses to store the leaves internally. Neat to see the mechanism exposed, but it's been done. It will be interesting to see the IP fight, as I think Fletcher was claiming patent on the particulars of that mechanism.

Re: Impudence, thequantumuniverse: jawns-striped-sweater: ...

danlyke — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:10:22 -0000

Fap fap fap

Re: Impudence, npr: shortformblog: Beer “Science”: We’re...

danlyke — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:38:02 -0000

Confession: Sam Adams is a beer I would have drunk back when I was a radical (economically) conservative. But I wasn't, at the time, high turnout.

Re: Scripting News: Dear Canon: Time to add communications to your low-end cameras

danlyke — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:15:08 -0000

Of the thousands of slides, and tens of thousands of digital images, I have in my various archives, only a few of those pictures are pretty enough to stand alone. Most of them rely on the context in which they were taken.

This is what the current phone apps get. I still carry a camera (Canon G9) almost everywhere because it's really really tough to fit a half-decent camera into a phone form factor, and as of the iPhone 3G that I carry Apple hadn't even come as close as the cheap flip-phone it replaced.

Some of the functionality I'd like to see could be done on the back end, import the photos and tag them, but it'd sure be handy in the field to be able to group photos (ie: keep these separate because I'm planning on turning them into an HDR, even though I have some others of the same subject that looks similar), to maybe set up a few names of people and quickly tag who's in them when I'm off on vacation with a small number.

Most of the things I want to do with my digital photos can be done as an afterthought, some of those things can even be done with existing tools right now, but it's the tool that makes it easier that'll win.

So, yeah, since the megapixel wars have gotten silly and better optics are hard, the best place for camera designers to innovate is to realize that they're not selling a tool to capture pictures, they're selling a tool to help us communicate our experiences with our extended families. Put that in a mission statement.

Re: Scripting News: An epiphany about Twitter

danlyke — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:34:48 -0000

In the "If I don't keep a copy on my machines I don't own it" philosophy, most of my status updates get saved to a database with a "been posted to service X yet?" flag in it, and another process queries that and attempts to post the ones that haven't been yet.

So for those I don't notice the Twitter outages.

Of course all of those are published to an RSS feed on my own server. Now if I could just get the folks who are reading me on Twitter to switch to that RSS feed, and publish their own, we could drop Twitter from the equation altogether.

Re: Scripting News: My last trip to Calif as a Californian

danlyke — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:17:01 -0000

Hmmm... Gonna have to read this through again slowly. My family moved around enough that I don't think there is a region I can call myself a native to. I'm a transplant, will always be a transplant, and have chosen to call California home because it's got the most transplants of anywhere I've lived. So, in a way, I'm finding my native land amidst the nomads.

Thanks for the thoughts to ponder.

Re: Covering a small city (Scripting News)

danlyke — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:44:25 -0000

I'm currently talking with my city's IT department to see what we can do about getting more data out there. Fire and police dispatch are entirely different systems from the stuff the IT department has jurisdiction over, and we understand the desire for operational secrecy, so we're stepping gingerly.

However, there's lots of other good stuff that could be out there that needs a bit of internal shake-up, for instance the IT folks have a ready-to-go database for road closure information that they're having trouble getting various other departments to use, so we're trying to figure out how we can get enough into that database to make it of use to citizens, so that we can leverage the outcry when it doesn't work to get the rest of the city departments online.

Keep us up to date on what you discover as you dig deeper in this. As the folks I'm talking with have told me the city is only one well worded sunshine law request from total meltdown, so if we educate ourselves we wield a really big stick. We just have to figure out how to swing it without causing more damage than forward progress.