Municipal consolidation is like a #1 civil reform issue in the United States. It Has To Happen.

The problem with a wealth tax is that people move to avoid it. Folks proposing this tax had a clever idea to avoid that: backdate tax to Jan 1st, put it on Nov. ballot. So the billionaires are moving now, and California may lose their tax revenue even if the initiative fails.

After 8 years, we did it! SB 79, the biggest upzoning bill in state history, just passed the Legislature. Brief 🧵, with some important thank yous. 1/x

[BILL ALERT] AB 609, which exempts infill housing from additional review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) while preserving CEQA review for planning, has passed out of Assembly Appropriations and is headed to the Assembly floor!

[BILL ALERT] SB 79, which broadly legalizes more homes near transit stops like train stations and rapid bus stops, has passed Senate Local Government! Learn more: cayimby.org/legislation/sb-7…

Many stories get told about why DoorDash won: The business school version: they had the right strategy. They launched in the right markets, acquired the right restaurants, and designed the marketplace the right way. The hustle culture version: they out-executed everyone else. They just shipped faster until they had better selection, a better product, and more reliable delivery. The financial markets version: they got lucky. Grubhub and Uber were both public and playing with one hand tied behind their back during the most pivotal moment in the fight. The reality is that all three are true. Increasingly, success in every competitive market requires the right strategy, rapid execution, and good luck. You need to be in the right place at the right time, have the right idea, and still run very fast. Full essay on the story below 👇

who happens with property tax valuation when a house burns down in California's crazy system does it stay pegged where it was? or will the new-build property get re-evaluated?

So is everything bad about California governance the result of a ballot prop from before I was born?

I wrote my reflections on visiting San Francisco and its vibes: an all-encompassing pursuit of greatness. I touch upon the recent cultural and political ascendancy of Silicon Valley and how an abundance movement that would last should look like. writingruxandrabio.com/p/the… "Yet there is nothing bourgeois about the ambition that animates San Francisco: the ultimate, unspoken goal here is not merely success, but greatness, in all the depth and power that the word implies. This is accompanied by a certain disdain for the tepid ambition of those who merely follow the “established path”. The ultimate goal is having a say in how the future itself will play out, or “bending reality to one’s will”. Being a real world ubermensch. Great people have existed everywhere, but I am not sure there has ever been a place in history that has concentrated so many people who want to be Napoleons. Of course, this is somewhat delusional. Statistically speaking, one cannot sanely expect greatness in one’s life. But, as Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart point out in Boom: The End of Stagnation, (constructive) delusion is a prerequisite for greatness. The narratives pervading San Francisco create a self-fulfilling prophecy and do ultimately generate extraordinary things. Not for the individual aspirant, of course: in this story, each ambitious young person arriving in SF is merely a coin toss. But inspire enough coins to toss themselves high enough, and collectively, greatness shall be reached. Failures do not matter, it’s the 100x successes that drive everything forward." And what a successful long term pro abundance movement coming from the Valley should look like: "It might also need to answer the pervasive question: “What for?”. The purely cerebral might need to think how to touch hearts, by conveying some of the thymos of those who develop technology to those who don’t. This means that, unlike Effective Altruism, it has to paint a picture of progress enabled human flourishing that goes beyond dry statistics. In order to motivate the mundane to admire the Great, the Great might need to first pay some homage to the mundane. When I talk about such a movement’s success, I do not even necessarily mean with the average voter, but also, and perhaps more importantly, other elites. The truth is that even most of those who are, relatively speaking, “winners” in today’s society, find eternity a bit too cold, knowing very well that the chance to uniquely shape the future is reserved to extremely few and that their own flame shall not burn for too long after their deaths."