lemming934

I'm generally against the idea of planting as many trees as possible.

Trees are not very good carbon sinks because they decompose and burn. Also, there are also some ecological communities where adding trees makes the land a worse carbon sink.

Avoiding cutting down forests to build suburbs is something I can certainly get behind though.

Do you think anyone ought to go to prison?

If a person has harmed others, and is likely to do more harm in the future, it's appropriate to remove them from society. This is why prisons exist.

Drivers licence suspension typically is the consequence of crimes that are too minor to warrant prison. In this case, the perpetrator has the chance to make changes to their life to avoid prison. For example, they can accept slow public transit, bike to work, get a closer job, move to a place where it's easier to live without a car.

Obviously, It will be challenging for the perpetrator to reorganize their life in a way that does not require them to risk harming others, and many will fail.

But your argument that society is required to accept being victimized by dangerous drivers because it would be inhumane to force them to use alternative forms of transportation (used by millions of people too poor to afford a car, even in the most car dependent cities) is absurd.

something like 15,000 empty houses right now

This statistic is meaningless because many of the cities with excess housing are in places with no jobs

building brand new single family homes doesn’t empower the working class, it empowers landlords

This is incorrect. The important statistic to look at is vacancy rate In almost all the major cities in the US vacency rates are well below the tenant empowering 8% and many are below the 5% rate where tenant have a fighting chance. We absolutely need more housing. I'd prefer duplexes, triplexes, row houses and apartments for urbanist reasons, but the idea that building more houses empowers landlords over the proletariat is ridiculous.

That is not an example of market capitalism. It's an example of regulatory capture by homeowners: capitalist developers would like to build more housing, but homeowners cause the local government to block this.

With housing, we are in an unusual circumstance where both less government intervention (let people build more housing) and more government intervention (build public housing) would be better than the status quo.

In Amsterdam the mode share for all trips is like 30% for biking and for walking and like 20% for driving and for transit

Maybe if Paper abortion existed. But as it stands, the ability of an abortion to free a man from child support duties depends on his ability to convince someone else to get an abortion.

I mean the policy in question was to tax second homes at 10,000%

Presumably that includes houses an organization wants to rent out. It's hard to imagine that this policy wouldnt make it very difficult to rent

ls is actively maintained. The headline is referencing exa, which is unmaintained. eza is a fork of exa.

Even with those concerns, I still like tolls

A. Driving a car has externalities that are currently not priced in the gas tax / registration fees. This means that having toll free roads are also regressive in that they are forcing people who do not drive (often due to poverty) to subsidize those who do drive. It makes sense to make the drivers pay for more of the harm they cause others, and tolls are a simple way of doing this. They are also can help discourage driving since paying every time you drive in a certain area is probably more noticable than paying once a year when you register your car.

B. This is a real issue in 205 where there is another bridge right next to it. Maybe in this case, you can add a toll to both bridges. But generally, the urban growth boundaries in Oregon make it easy to find places to find put toll booths where there is no way to drive around it.

Polls have a margin of error and election results have generally been within the 80% confidence interval 80% of the time.

It is true that when there are less polls (like in special elections) it's harder to get an understanding of the state of the race.