It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!
oink oink oink oink is that the smell of PORK?:)
But really, aside from that, is the infrastructure in Alaska and Canada and eastern Russia up there really of the sort that could take advantage of a big project like this? It's all well and good to ship cargo and electricity and such through a tunnel, but without having a way to get it to / take it away from the tunnel, I'd be skeptical of the utility.
And of the line losses. That's a thought. Which is greater- the line losses of electricity going from Russia to here, or the cost to ship coal from an equivalent power plant in Russia and in the United States?
As for safety- the main risk is definitely not from the radiation so much as if you're contaminated and ingest some of the stuff, and it stays in your body for years at a time. They had one on Apollo 13, the Lunar Module. It burnt up over Fiji. They looked really hard for any signs of contamination, but there wasn't any. There have been other accidents as well, including some Soviet probes as well as American, a few of which led to some minor contamination.
There is absotively posolutely zero chance of any of these devices doing anything like a big dangerous nuclear reactor meltdown or an atomic bomb or anything like that. It's physically impossible.
Well, if you put the conspiracy theories aside for a moment, they stopped publishing it because
M3 does not appear to convey any additional information about economic activity that is not already embodied in M2 and has not played a role in the monetary policy process for many years.
Of course, that's what they WANT you to think!!
And no, I haven't noticed that the cost of most food items have gone up 25-50% in the past year. In fact, aside from things like Milk which fluctuate wildly, I think they've been pretty steady. Perhaps these price increases are specific to your location. Perhaps you just need to reconsider where you're shopping.
In fact, the Consumer Price Index for March 2007 (which, of course, includes groceries) was just published yesterday. It's presently at 205.352, up from 199.8 a year before- or, an increase of ~2.8%. This is practically a textbook example of a normal, low inflation rate. But don't let any facts rain on your parade.
This is the "haha" factor for you! Government *prints* money. As much as they want. And US is probably one of the worst countries in that regard. IT just hasn't cought up with them yet. The government can print as much as they want, but they've apparently been smart enough to realize that if they print billions of dollars, then the money wouldn't be worth anything anymore. Rather, they increase the money supply at a certain rate (specifically, the Fed conducts open market operations, buying and selling government securities, in order to get the interest rate on a certain class of funds to match a certain level - that's the Interest you hear them talking about so much). At present, that gives us a nice, stable inflation rate of 2-4% a year. This is really not too surprising, or harmful. (And they do need to increase the money supply, since the economic output of the country is also increasing, and if there's more stuff to buy with the same amount of money, you get deflation. That's a bit more harmful.) This is one of the reasons the Federal Reserve is so independent of the government - specifically, that the members of its Board of Directors are appointed with 14-year terms. This is what keeps any current El Presidente from messing too much with the money supply for short-term political gains.
As for your complaint about measures of M3, well, that's not really liquid enough for most people to worry about as Money most of the time. A CD of over $100,000 (one of the components of M3) isn't really money money, that someone is going to go out and spend: it's an investment. It's just going to sit there and earn interest. For years, usually. It's really only Money, Third Class - it doesn't work too well as a Medium of Exchange. Repurchase agreements and such (also in M3) are similar.
Actually, I was listening to the BBC World Service on our local NPR station this morning, and they had a snippet comparing this to Star Trek as well. (I didn't really listen: it was towards the end and I was heading to class). I thought it was a pretty stupid comparison as well, since "magnetic shielding against charged particles" is really a very small subset of the phantasmagorical array of capabilities which are ascribed to Star Trek shields.
All true, but the fact that people wait until the deadline is not news. If you're going to get into the online tax-prep business, you'd better have a stout server. This kind of failure can kill a business.
Or a stout series of servers, God knows you shouldn't be relying on a single box to handle that information with that liability. IBM called; they'd like to sell you some On Demand e-Business infrastructure. (I'd bet Sun has some "grid computing" power to sell as well...)
Compare and contrast the energy removed from the air by a 40MW wind farm and the thermal energy released into the environment by a 40MW coal plant (never mind the emissions just this instant, either). Which do you think has a greater impact on atmospheric conditions?
Hey, all else about his politics and lifestyle aside, wasn't Bill Clinton pretty widely perceived as a jerk for sleeping around (and then lying about it in court)?
But are those features useful or conducive to the sort of collaboration and feedback that NASA is presumably seeking? Or are they a hindrance?
IRC channels have reasonably well-developed moderation features and are particularly resistant to attacks by animated flying penises and the like.
Interfacing with IRC channels is a pretty well-defined and simple process, and there are a variety of tools available. You can be in more than one channel/place at once. You do not need to worry about being out of earshot of a conversation accidentally and can view an extensive scrollback of past events. You don't need to worry much about awkwardness with gestures, what your avatar is wearing, or anything like that.
I can think of very few useful features that Second Life has and IRC lacks. The primary one would be images and videos. (They have hyperlinks for those on IRC.) I'm sure a 3D model or two could be made, but the Second Life construction system is not particularly conducive to detailed technical modeling, and they would only really be useful for publicity.
Have you seen what the world economy's growth is projected to look like years from now? Keep compounding that measly little 1.3 percent growth rate...
Reanalyzing the Stern Report, Yale University economist William Nordhaus recently noted that a "high-damage" scenario might reduce global GDP by almost 14 percent in the year 2200. On the Stern Report's own assumptions, "This means that per capita consumption would grow from $7,800 today to only $81,000 in 2200," instead of $94,000 (in today's dollars). That's not good, but it hardly seems catastrophic.
MAC addresses are not visible to the Internet in general (and when you are connecting to Blizzard's servers in specific). You connect to the Internet using IP (OSI layer 3, the Network layer). MAC addresses are only visible to your Ethernet (/token ring/802.11/etc) connection (OSI layer 2, the Data Link layer). Banning an IP is the best you can accomplish at the network level, and IP addresses these days are notorious for being a little evasive (ever heard of DHCP?) - you can't single out Just One User on the Internet.
You know, you're right. I should have put more (or different) qualifiers on that statement. It's definitely a Libertarian magazine, though, and it's definitely a big Libertarian magazine, and it's definitely indicative of some sort of thought within the Libertarian party from a pretty Libertarian perspective. How should I describe this magazine? Help me out here.
Average expected lifespan, "medieval" Britain: ~33 years Average expected lifespan, world, 2005: 67 years That's with "influenza" already taken into account.
"Ah yes, we have Slashdot" -- and a million billion other opportunities. The rich are richer, but the poor are richer too. I do hope you can come up with some vague notion of all that we've gained since then, because for good hard historical statistics on life expectancy, income levels, levels of inequality, and such, I'd really need to go to the campus library for a book, and it's closed right now, and I have class in the morning...
So you are telling me that I should base science on a political group? That sounds like listening to the Pope in the middle ages telling people that the earth is the center of the universe and the debate is over.
No, I said that "I would advise [people] to look at Reason's articles... and, with all due consideration, study, and time, try to develop a healthy attitude about the reality of global warming." It is apparently obvious to you that basing your ideas about Science on political groups is Not Healthy. So, umm...
no, you shouldn't do that.
And I think a Healthy attitude is not particularly well served by breaking out the "omg Pope Middle Ages" comparisons on your opponents. There was a Slashdot article some time back about a study finding how political thought is essentially emotional, and not rational:
"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged... Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want... Everyone... may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret 'the facts.'"
I worry that this is the case here. You appear to appeal to the Scientific. If you do, indeed, value reason and logic, then I hope that you can quash the emotional reaction and see the reason in Reason's articles, and elsewhere, evaluating it on its own merits rather than how well it serves your biases.
...
On a related note, I wasn't able to tell: are you coming from more of a "pro-global-warming" angle or a "global-warming-is-fake" angle?
Okay. Thrown chairs aside, since this part of the discussion is oooobviously going to turn into a Global Warming flamefest, I'll just ask you to consider the following. There is a little political party out there called the Libertarians. In some ways - particularly with regards to economic policy - they're a lot like the Republicans, or at least the Republicans-before-Bush, only extra-more-so: free trade! free trade! small government! sometimes even no-government! privatize everything! fewer laws! fewer lawsuits! free speech! down with affirmative action! et cetera et cetera. In other ways, they're a lot like the Democrats - mostly with respect to some parts of social policy. Gay rights! Free love! Pro-choice! I won't enumerate all of this here, but I hope you get the idea. In some ways, they're sort of like the polar opposite of the Socialists. They usually lean a bit Ayn Rand.
I mention them because of all the possible groups out there, they're about the last that would think to jump on the global warming bandwagon. And yet, Reason Magazine (Free Minds and Free Markets!), the definitive Libertarian magazine, has at this point pretty much accepted: global warming exists, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to it, and a variety of things will Need To Be Done about it, one way or another, sooner or later. And I think this sort of thinking, coming from this group, should serve as sort of a bell-weather in politics. And I think that their approach to the topic is one that the Republican Party should strongly consider mimicking: stop squabbling about what is and isn't happening, and why. Worry instead about What Should Be Done.
Now, granted, their ideas of what Should Be Done and the state of things are not very much in line with what the Democratic Party would probably favor. They had a recent article entitled The Convenient Truth on the topic (and they lambast current global-warming politicans for "mistaking panic for virtue").
... This argues not for passivity, and not for delay, but for gradualism: setting up policies that will tighten the screws on greenhouse-gas emissions over the next few decades. The convenient truth about global warming, then, is that radicalism is as pointless as it is impractical. Slow-but-steady is not only the easiest approach; it is also the most effective.
Just as conveniently, the most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon emissions... Fortuitously, a carbon tax could also reduce the U.S. budget deficit and the geopolitical leverage of sinister "petrocracies" such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. Policy prescriptions don't come any more convenient than that.
I would advise any right-leaning free-trade-ish pro-capitalist or Republican types to take a good long look at Reason's articles on the topic of global warming and, with all due consideration, study, and time, try to develop a healthy attitude about the reality of global warming. (As a matter of fact, I would advise any left-leaning types who are actually care about these issues for their own sake, and not merely for some sort of anti-capitalist or anti-Western-decadence agenda, to take a look at them as well, perhaps an even longer one.)
The goal of this optimizer is increased sales/conversion/et cetera. I'm going to hijack this topic a bit and ask: Does anyone know of any other good website optimization tests? I know, of course, of the W3C Validator and I'm familiar with a cacheability tester or two, but... I'd like to know if there are any other good ones out there. Are there any which will check for fun things like metadata and navigation tags (remember and such?) and present you with a big list of all the things you can do to go the extra mile for your site?
On a tangential note, I go to Wake Forest University. We also have an exclusive foodservice contract with Aramark. The food and service isn't terrible, but it's not too grand, and it certainly does cost an arm and a leg and is (as of fall 2005) mandatory for all students - with new freshman required to have a minimum of something like 10 meals a week, I think it was.
We used to be an exclusively Pepsi school, but I do think this has changed now.
If grits are disgusting, you're eating them wrong. You need good hominy grits (I don't care for the yellow kind) that you cook, serve, and let solidify to about the consistency of mashed potatoes.... In fact, come to think of that, you can treat them fairly similarly to mashed potatoes in many respects... DON'T drown them in butter or syrup or salt them to death. That IS disgusting. Just a little little bit of butter, mmmaybe a sprinkling of raisins, and you have a good munchy substance to fill you up with a few carbohydrates, a bit of fiber, and some assorted other small-time nutrition stuff.
Google Maps says it's 558 miles / 8 hours 10 minutes from Berkeley County SC to Washington, DC. By way of comparison, it's just 7 hours 32 minutes from Tampa, Florida. I would not call it "close". Come now. You're in Tennessee? You should know this part of the country better than THAT. Especially if you want to comment on it. Sure, it's five or six hours closer to DC than you, but...
Imagine the checks they will have to pay out now that people can set up their roof as a money farm for 1/10 the cost!
It'll be a bit of a hit, I'm sure, but I'm also sure they'll survive somehow. Imagine the savings they can make by not building another $X00,000,000 power plant and complying with all the environmental regulations and such. You're building the power plant for them! And then they can claim that they're producing more "green" energy, to boot, and perhaps sell it at a higher rate to interested customers...
Where I'm sitting, "TODAY" ends in under 8 hours. Assuming you're pointing to the environmentalism angle, I guess the world is doomed?
On a less snarky note, it's advances like these which give credibility to the philosophy of gradualism in embracing environmentally-friendly technologies. Yes, Al Gore, there is a Global Warming, but it's not going to kill us today, and it's not going to kill us tomorrow, and it may start to make things uncomfortable in the coming decades but we're going to be a lot better equipped to deal with it then. A slow-and-steady approach to making the world more environmentally friendly will combat climate change a lot better than the radical agenda you will so often find advocated.
Carbon dioxide both accumulates and dissipates in the atmosphere very slowly. Because the stock of greenhouse gases already present in the atmosphere dwarfs any one year's emissions, and because any one year's emissions can be changed only slightly, stabilizing greenhouse gases is like turning an aircraft carrier, only much slower. Annual emissions might be stabilized toward midcentury, and atmospheric concentrations at some point after that; but sharp turns are impossible and short-term effects minuscule.
In a blog post last year (at gristmill.org), an environmentalist named David Roberts made the point with startling candor. "In an ideal, abstract policy debate, sure, I'd say we should boost our attention to adaptation [to increased worldwide temperature]," he wrote. "But in the current political situation, I don't want to provide any ammunition for the moral cretins who are squirming frantically to avoid policies that might impact their corporate donors."
This is like denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. And it is every bit as callous and irresponsible. Where climate change is concerned, the truth -- and this truth really is inconvenient, or at least sad -- is that too many activists and politicians mistake panic for virtue./blockquote]
OK. Your problem is oil. That's what's causing you to be expensive compared to the rest of the world.
Actually, in California (which the OP cites), and particularly in the Bay Area (where I'm moving soonish, so I've been researching), the primary primary primary component of your cost of living is going to be HOUSING oh my god $2300/mo for a 1-bedroom apartment? Okay, so that was a high-end apartment in a pretty nice spot, but my parents have a 4-bedroom 3-bathroom house on about a quarter-acre or so for less than half that. If I dig deeper and look at some cost of living figures in depth, San Francisco appears to be cheaper across the board in all the other categories listed (average household consumer expenditures, education, entertainment, transportation, retail, and non-retail)... either that or people are more frugal (perhaps they have to be)...
And why is housing in California so expensive? Many reasons, but oil isn't really a big one. First of all, there's a lot of people who want to live out there for one reason or another. Another major thing is that California has a lot of regulations on land use which limit development, further driving up the price of developable land. Issues with traffic and congestion further shape the development of the area, cramming more people into less physical space; and while the traffic problem isn't the fault of the government, local authorities typically view congestion as a good thing because it means more people using public transport, a major part of the environmental agenda:
In the words of David Solow, head of the Metrolink commuter rail in Southern California, congestion is "actually good" because "it drives people out of their cars."
(Okay, so that's not the Bay Area, but it is California).
Then there are building codes - while the earthquake reinforcements make sense, California's insistence on all that environmental eco-friendliness has shaped development codes and raised the price of construction considerably. And then there are taxes and taxes and taxes. (Including things like the gas tax, 44.7 cents/gallon - only Connecticut is higher). And energy prices are higher for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to, you guessed it, environmental regulations...
California prides itself on being an environmental leader, and I am sure that they are leading the way in weaning the country off oil... but this has made it more expensive, not less. People use oil because it is cheap and makes sense, not because they enjoy being ripped off somehow.
Unfortunately that would prevent the US government from printing and spending money with abandon on it's pet projects so I don't see it happening until there's some kind of a crisis.
Dude, inflation is holding steady around ~2-or-3ish% (2.42% for February, I saw; 3.24% last year). A little inflation like this is widely considered a good thing by those who study economies; in fact, it's just about as close to ideal as you can reasonably expect. I'll take your point about too-much-spending and pet-projects, though. (Hey, the Republicans were at least SUPPOSED to do something about THAT when they took over the government, and, well, look at what they... oh... never mind.)
Slashdot Mirror
oink oink oink oink is that the smell of PORK? :)
But really, aside from that, is the infrastructure in Alaska and Canada and eastern Russia up there really of the sort that could take advantage of a big project like this? It's all well and good to ship cargo and electricity and such through a tunnel, but without having a way to get it to / take it away from the tunnel, I'd be skeptical of the utility.
And of the line losses. That's a thought. Which is greater- the line losses of electricity going from Russia to here, or the cost to ship coal from an equivalent power plant in Russia and in the United States?
As for safety- the main risk is definitely not from the radiation so much as if you're contaminated and ingest some of the stuff, and it stays in your body for years at a time. They had one on Apollo 13, the Lunar Module. It burnt up over Fiji. They looked really hard for any signs of contamination, but there wasn't any. There have been other accidents as well, including some Soviet probes as well as American, a few of which led to some minor contamination.
There is absotively posolutely zero chance of any of these devices doing anything like a big dangerous nuclear reactor meltdown or an atomic bomb or anything like that. It's physically impossible.
Well, if you put the conspiracy theories aside for a moment, they stopped publishing it because
Of course, that's what they WANT you to think!!
And no, I haven't noticed that the cost of most food items have gone up 25-50% in the past year. In fact, aside from things like Milk which fluctuate wildly, I think they've been pretty steady. Perhaps these price increases are specific to your location. Perhaps you just need to reconsider where you're shopping.
In fact, the Consumer Price Index for March 2007 (which, of course, includes groceries) was just published yesterday. It's presently at 205.352, up from 199.8 a year before- or, an increase of ~2.8%. This is practically a textbook example of a normal, low inflation rate. But don't let any facts rain on your parade.
As for your complaint about measures of M3, well, that's not really liquid enough for most people to worry about as Money most of the time. A CD of over $100,000 (one of the components of M3) isn't really money money, that someone is going to go out and spend: it's an investment. It's just going to sit there and earn interest. For years, usually. It's really only Money, Third Class - it doesn't work too well as a Medium of Exchange. Repurchase agreements and such (also in M3) are similar.
Actually, I was listening to the BBC World Service on our local NPR station this morning, and they had a snippet comparing this to Star Trek as well. (I didn't really listen: it was towards the end and I was heading to class). I thought it was a pretty stupid comparison as well, since "magnetic shielding against charged particles" is really a very small subset of the phantasmagorical array of capabilities which are ascribed to Star Trek shields.
Or a stout series of servers, God knows you shouldn't be relying on a single box to handle that information with that liability. IBM called; they'd like to sell you some On Demand e-Business infrastructure. (I'd bet Sun has some "grid computing" power to sell as well...)
Compare and contrast the energy removed from the air by a 40MW wind farm and the thermal energy released into the environment by a 40MW coal plant (never mind the emissions just this instant, either). Which do you think has a greater impact on atmospheric conditions?
Hey, all else about his politics and lifestyle aside, wasn't Bill Clinton pretty widely perceived as a jerk for sleeping around (and then lying about it in court)?
No, no, you're getting Hamlet confused with Animal Farm. I know they're both about pigs, but so is Charlotte's Web!
I can think of very few useful features that Second Life has and IRC lacks. The primary one would be images and videos. (They have hyperlinks for those on IRC.) I'm sure a 3D model or two could be made, but the Second Life construction system is not particularly conducive to detailed technical modeling, and they would only really be useful for publicity.
MAC addresses are not visible to the Internet in general (and when you are connecting to Blizzard's servers in specific). You connect to the Internet using IP (OSI layer 3, the Network layer). MAC addresses are only visible to your Ethernet (/token ring/802.11/etc) connection (OSI layer 2, the Data Link layer). Banning an IP is the best you can accomplish at the network level, and IP addresses these days are notorious for being a little evasive (ever heard of DHCP?) - you can't single out Just One User on the Internet.
You know, you're right. I should have put more (or different) qualifiers on that statement. It's definitely a Libertarian magazine, though, and it's definitely a big Libertarian magazine, and it's definitely indicative of some sort of thought within the Libertarian party from a pretty Libertarian perspective. How should I describe this magazine? Help me out here.
Average expected lifespan, "medieval" Britain: ~33 years
Average expected lifespan, world, 2005: 67 years
That's with "influenza" already taken into account.
"Ah yes, we have Slashdot" -- and a million billion other opportunities. The rich are richer, but the poor are richer too. I do hope you can come up with some vague notion of all that we've gained since then, because for good hard historical statistics on life expectancy, income levels, levels of inequality, and such, I'd really need to go to the campus library for a book, and it's closed right now, and I have class in the morning...
No, I said that "I would advise [people] to look at Reason's articles ... and, with all due consideration, study, and time, try to develop a healthy attitude about the reality of global warming." It is apparently obvious to you that basing your ideas about Science on political groups is Not Healthy. So, umm...
no, you shouldn't do that.
And I think a Healthy attitude is not particularly well served by breaking out the "omg Pope Middle Ages" comparisons on your opponents. There was a Slashdot article some time back about a study finding how political thought is essentially emotional, and not rational:
I worry that this is the case here. You appear to appeal to the Scientific. If you do, indeed, value reason and logic, then I hope that you can quash the emotional reaction and see the reason in Reason's articles, and elsewhere, evaluating it on its own merits rather than how well it serves your biases....
On a related note, I wasn't able to tell: are you coming from more of a "pro-global-warming" angle or a "global-warming-is-fake" angle?
I mention them because of all the possible groups out there, they're about the last that would think to jump on the global warming bandwagon. And yet, Reason Magazine (Free Minds and Free Markets!), the definitive Libertarian magazine, has at this point pretty much accepted: global warming exists, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere contributes to it, and a variety of things will Need To Be Done about it, one way or another, sooner or later. And I think this sort of thinking, coming from this group, should serve as sort of a bell-weather in politics. And I think that their approach to the topic is one that the Republican Party should strongly consider mimicking: stop squabbling about what is and isn't happening, and why. Worry instead about What Should Be Done.
Now, granted, their ideas of what Should Be Done and the state of things are not very much in line with what the Democratic Party would probably favor. They had a recent article entitled The Convenient Truth on the topic (and they lambast current global-warming politicans for "mistaking panic for virtue").
I would advise any right-leaning free-trade-ish pro-capitalist or Republican types to take a good long look at Reason's articles on the topic of global warming and, with all due consideration, study, and time, try to develop a healthy attitude about the reality of global warming. (As a matter of fact, I would advise any left-leaning types who are actually care about these issues for their own sake, and not merely for some sort of anti-capitalist or anti-Western-decadence agenda, to take a look at them as well, perhaps an even longer one.)The goal of this optimizer is increased sales/conversion/et cetera. I'm going to hijack this topic a bit and ask: Does anyone know of any other good website optimization tests? I know, of course, of the W3C Validator and I'm familiar with a cacheability tester or two, but... I'd like to know if there are any other good ones out there. Are there any which will check for fun things like metadata and navigation tags (remember and such?) and present you with a big list of all the things you can do to go the extra mile for your site?
We used to be an exclusively Pepsi school, but I do think this has changed now.
If grits are disgusting, you're eating them wrong. You need good hominy grits (I don't care for the yellow kind) that you cook, serve, and let solidify to about the consistency of mashed potatoes.... In fact, come to think of that, you can treat them fairly similarly to mashed potatoes in many respects... DON'T drown them in butter or syrup or salt them to death. That IS disgusting. Just a little little bit of butter, mmmaybe a sprinkling of raisins, and you have a good munchy substance to fill you up with a few carbohydrates, a bit of fiber, and some assorted other small-time nutrition stuff.
Google Maps says it's 558 miles / 8 hours 10 minutes from Berkeley County SC to Washington, DC. By way of comparison, it's just 7 hours 32 minutes from Tampa, Florida. I would not call it "close". Come now. You're in Tennessee? You should know this part of the country better than THAT. Especially if you want to comment on it. Sure, it's five or six hours closer to DC than you, but...
On a less snarky note, it's advances like these which give credibility to the philosophy of gradualism in embracing environmentally-friendly technologies. Yes, Al Gore, there is a Global Warming, but it's not going to kill us today, and it's not going to kill us tomorrow, and it may start to make things uncomfortable in the coming decades but we're going to be a lot better equipped to deal with it then. A slow-and-steady approach to making the world more environmentally friendly will combat climate change a lot better than the radical agenda you will so often find advocated.
-- a fun article from Reason Magazine, which concludes...Actually, in California (which the OP cites), and particularly in the Bay Area (where I'm moving soonish, so I've been researching), the primary primary primary component of your cost of living is going to be HOUSING oh my god $2300/mo for a 1-bedroom apartment? Okay, so that was a high-end apartment in a pretty nice spot, but my parents have a 4-bedroom 3-bathroom house on about a quarter-acre or so for less than half that. If I dig deeper and look at some cost of living figures in depth, San Francisco appears to be cheaper across the board in all the other categories listed (average household consumer expenditures, education, entertainment, transportation, retail, and non-retail)... either that or people are more frugal (perhaps they have to be)...
And why is housing in California so expensive? Many reasons, but oil isn't really a big one. First of all, there's a lot of people who want to live out there for one reason or another. Another major thing is that California has a lot of regulations on land use which limit development, further driving up the price of developable land. Issues with traffic and congestion further shape the development of the area, cramming more people into less physical space; and while the traffic problem isn't the fault of the government, local authorities typically view congestion as a good thing because it means more people using public transport, a major part of the environmental agenda:
(Okay, so that's not the Bay Area, but it is California).Then there are building codes - while the earthquake reinforcements make sense, California's insistence on all that environmental eco-friendliness has shaped development codes and raised the price of construction considerably. And then there are taxes and taxes and taxes. (Including things like the gas tax, 44.7 cents/gallon - only Connecticut is higher). And energy prices are higher for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to, you guessed it, environmental regulations...
California prides itself on being an environmental leader, and I am sure that they are leading the way in weaning the country off oil... but this has made it more expensive, not less. People use oil because it is cheap and makes sense, not because they enjoy being ripped off somehow.
Dude, inflation is holding steady around ~2-or-3ish% (2.42% for February, I saw; 3.24% last year). A little inflation like this is widely considered a good thing by those who study economies; in fact, it's just about as close to ideal as you can reasonably expect. I'll take your point about too-much-spending and pet-projects, though. (Hey, the Republicans were at least SUPPOSED to do something about THAT when they took over the government, and, well, look at what they... oh... never mind.)