wfrancis's Comments

Calling Lincoln anti-slavery is being a bit generous. Before the war he was against the *expansion* of slavery (with the end of perhaps abolishing it eventually) and once the war broke out he was primarily concerned with saving the Union, even if it meant preserving slavery. Initially he didn't even allow his generals to free slaves in captured territories. He didn't start to free the slaves in the South (with the Emancipation Proclamation) until the war was going pretty badly for him and he needed some momentum.

He did make it clear that ethically he did support the suffrage of slaves, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_on_slavery
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The biggest downside to saving energy of any kind is that it effectively reduces the cost of energy in total, which actually accelerates growth often by the highest polluters/least efficient users. If everyone in the US bought a super fuel efficient car and oil remained cheap, it would simply put more cars on the roads in India and China, not actually save the world's resources. fun thought of the day :-/
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What's not addressed here is what is the cost of not having those regulations? I live in San Francisco which has extraordinarily high housing costs which surely could be lowered if there were more housing stock. However, much of the area surrounding area outside of San Francisco is reserved park/open space land.

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore take up a huge area north of SF. Large portions of the peninsula south of San Francisco down through the Santa Cruz mountains into Monterey is reserved open space. Across the bay to the east of Oakland and Berkeley significant areas of the hills are open space and park lands. Surely all this reserved space drives up housing costs.

Many of those areas also contain our reservoirs for our water and sensitive/significant biological preserves. Sure, we could develop all of these and bring down housing prices but at what other intangible costs? I think they would be harder to put a dollar figure on.

I'd love to own a house here as much as anyone else but knowing that significant portions of valuable public assets are preserved is worth it.
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  • Member Since 2012/08/07


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