kartik

California was supposed to be the place where you “lived and let live”. How, instead then, did it become the most oppressive, over regulated and overtaxed place in America while also being the worst on crime, housing and education of our kids?

BOOMS WITHOUT BOOMTOWNS "Alongside the trillion-dollar valuations and insta-fortunes, we in some sense should have been building a Tokyo-scale megacity, with San Francisco looking like Manhattan, skyscrapers next to Caltrain stations, and Marin County featuring the apartment towers it’s depicted as having in 'Star Trek: Picard.'" "America has fast-growing metro areas. It’s just that unlike in the past, the growth is not concentrated where the economic boom is happening." "Americans sometimes look with envy on the rapid economic growth achieved in China during this period. But if you look at Shenzhen or any other major Chinese city, what you see is dramatic physical transformation across the course of the 21st century. That’s precisely what American public policy has been hostile to, not just in the Bay Area but almost everywhere that isn’t an unincorporated area on the fringes of a Sunbelt metro area. "To have a broad-based economic boom, we need a boomtown. ... [T]here continues to be unique economic value in allowing more people to live in places that are experiencing booming growth in their core tradable industries. The fact that this doesn’t happen in the United States has greatly muted the value that the high tech sector generates for the average American, and that’s a huge problem."

Introducing a new type of civic tech made possible by AI. Every citizen should have a live, systems view of their government and today we bring that to SF! Track gov entities, spending, news, and more in real time. With LLMs, we can bring this to every city. Who's next?

San Francisco spent the past year studying the city government's commission system and proposing reforms. The Board of Supervisors plans to ignore almost all of them.

The SF government just identified 34 entities that don't actually do anything. They exist in the law but are inactive, and now they might be deleted! This came from the CSTF, which was created by Prop E in Nov 2024. Reminder: most of the good stuff happens after election day.