June San Francisco ballot propositions

Vote!Bicycling is fun and all, but it's time for me to do my duty as a voter and finish reviewing the propositions on the ballot of the June election.

I already reviewed California state ballot propositions. But wait, there's more! There's also San Francisco city & county ballot propositions.
  • Proposition A: A parcel tax for schools. I vote no, because parcel taxes are the most regressive tax on the books. A Pacific Heights mansion pays the same tax as a a humble cemetery plot. I'll always vote against parcel taxes.
  • Proposition B: A 400 million dollar bond? This looks like a bond with the title and summary carefully designed to include as many buzzwords as possible: "earthquate", "safety", "fire", "water". This seems like a boondoggle to me. Maybe it isn't. But the burden of proof is against expensive bonds in a debt-strapped economy.
  • Proposition C: This would give the Board of Supervisors a role in selecting the city Film Commission. The Mayor's office can handle it: the BOS has more important business to deal with. I vote no.
  • Proposition D: I vote yes: this makes it harder for city employees to blow out their pensions by loading up on overtime their last year. This bases the pension on the last two years. I'd make it five, but I'll take what I can get here.
  • Proposition E: This requires the police to disclose funds spent on security. I like this: hidden budget items tend towards abuse.
  • Proposition F: No way; this seems like yet another bureaucratic nightmare getting in the way of housing supply.
  • Proposition G: I vote against. I don't think the voters should be expressing an official position on engineering decisions: if Main and Beale works better from a cost and capacity standpoint than the Transbay Terminal for high-speed rail, then that's where it should go. This is an issue requiring far more than shoot-from-the-hip analysis.

So that's two yeses, five noes. That's about right. I think it's important voters put propositions up to a high standard, to discourage abuse of the process. Let legislators make the hard decisions they were elected by the people to make. That's how our system was designed: each individual voter has neither the time nor expertise to analyze complex legislation with the depth and sophistication it requires. This is a fundamental basis for representative governance.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc
Read more