Why is skipping public review bad news for everyone?
Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
It's an incredibly dumb process and bypassing it is good, actually.
It also has nothing at all to do with whether the environmental regulations themselves are being followed.
Public review in practice is a mechanism for concentrated local interest groups that don't have enough democratic legitimacy to win at the ballot box to instead win via a series of Tuesday night meetings normal people don't go to. There's literature on this: public comment overwhelmingly trends negative. People show up to prevent change. They rarely show up to support it, even if they do support it; normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
I feel like this is a complicated issue, because there are two competing values here.
On one hand, fair representation is important, and the idea that every person has an equal say in how governmental decisions are made. One person one vote.
On the other hand, not everyone has the same ‘skin in the game’ for different decisions. For example, if we are deciding if a noisy building should be allowed to be built, someone who lives 5 miles away is not going to be affected by the noise, so they aren’t going to care about that. If someone comes to a community and says “we will give everyone in the community $50 if you let us build this loud building here”, then all the people out of the noise range are going to think that is a great deal. They get $50, and they don’t hear the noise anyway. Why WOULDNT they want to approve that?
So is it fair for the community to decide to make one (or a few) people miserable for years so they get $50?
So things like public review that let a “concentrated local interest group” have more power makes some sense if the thing they are reviewing also has a concentrated local impact.
Of course, there has to be some balance, otherwise we will live in a NIMBY world and nothing will be built.
People naturally have varying levels of skin in the game on various issues. They should not have varying levels of voting power. But that's essentially what public comment process does.
And your natural inclination is to assume that turnout at public comment maps to those people most impacted by an issue. But that's not at all the case! Turnout maps to those most activated by an issue, which is a function of how much free time they have (public comment is generally wealthier and older) and how fearful they are of change (public comment biases sharply towards "no").
I'm fond of asking people locally here how many of them have even considering turning out at public comment opportunities to support new apartment development. I've never met someone who has, even though people here are broadly supportive of housing. But go to a Plan or HPC meeting: there's a line of commenters out the door opposing the apartments.
This is a fascinating train of thought. I get the logic, but where does it stop?
If the idea is that any situation where people are influencing the government/making decisions without absolutely everyone in the electorate being involved, is anti-democratic, at what point are people in the government allowed to make decisions without consulting everyone?
We have representatives for a reason, and part of that reason involves making decisions without having a vote (even when that decision is made by someone several rungs down the chain from the person actually elected).
I'm highly sympathetic to the idea that the actual effect of these types of "public comment" situations and hopefully anyone involved in one keeps in mind the inherent biases of who shows up, but I don't see how you can flat out deny the idea of asking people, you know, the voters, to come give opinions on decisions being made that are inbetween the actual elections.
We arrange to have everybody vote on a designated day. We publicize that day. We make a very big deal out of getting people to vote. We don't do it too often. People show up and make decisions. They should then be able to leave and assume those decisions will be put into action. But in local politics they often can't, because interest groups that lost the election will camp every meeting afterwards with canvassed public commenters jawboning officials to make different decisions.
> People show up and make decisions. They should then be able to leave and assume those decisions will be put into action.
But this isn't the case. In every representative democracy around the world, including ours, the bedrock principle is that elected politicians "vote their conscience", i.e. they are not bound by what they said they'll do if elected. So in practice you can't assume that what you voted for will be put into action. If anything, the track record on that is pretty poor.
This again sounds like national politics and not local. They really are totally different. In local politics the electeds are your neighbors. They serve part time. All of them have full-time jobs (except sometimes the mayor). You don't communicate with them by making time with their staff --- none of the have staff. Instead you generally just text them or meet them for coffee. I've never met Tara Stamps, my county commissioner, but I could be face-to-face with her inside a couple days if I wanted. And that's Cook County, one of the largest densest counties in the country.
> I've never met Tara Stamps, my county commissioner, but I could be face-to-face with her inside a couple days if I wanted. And that's Cook County, one of the largest densest counties in the country.
This was literally my point about "public comment".
We vote for representatives. They then make decisions based on all sorts of things like ancient holy texts and whoever they spoke to most recently.
How is this formal meeting to give opinions antidemocratic but you setting up a personal meeting to influence someone is just fine?
That all makes sense - I'm not involved enough in local politics so I can't comment knowledgebly.
But that doesn't mean the people trying to prevent change have (only) invalid reasons.
Voting is critical, but it still lags behind. Kicking someone out of office a year after they sign off on the new data center doesn't stop the data center from getting built.
Yes. I'm specifically not saying that working the refs with canvassed public comment invalidates an underlying substantive grievance. Public comment can be used "for good" or for evil. All I'm saying is that people using it "for good" are helping clear a path for all the evil usage, which I'd claim right now dwarfs the good.
I happen to disagree with most data center opposition, but I'm not saying data center opposition is per se bad because it's delivered through public comment.
> normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
That's not how the vast majority of this works, and the average best case scenario on this you get to vote a politician out after they already fucked people over.
This sounds like porting assumptions about national and statewide politics into local politics, which is a totally different animal. I hear this a lot from people, and if you're referring to local electeds as "politicians fucking people over", you're probably not thinking locally. If you disagree, can we reconcile our premises? What local politics are you doing that's indicating otherwise to you?
In many environments it ends up acting like a generic "don't build things" mandate. Such a mandate's wins are by accident more often than by target, and it does more harm than good.
I think you have to actually do local politics (I'm assuming you do) to really get just how fucked public comment is as a process, and I think this is an important and useful thing to talk about that just won't be possible to talk about in a data center thread, because of the political valence data centers have taken on.
I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.
A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.
Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.
I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.
(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)
I don't know, this sure sounds like NIMBYism to me. Public comment was used to organize against multifamily housing units. That's approximately the whole story; I think you pretty much just have to add "organizing against new renewable and grid upgrades" to complete it.
We can agree to disagree, so long as we can at least recognize NIMBYism when we see it. "Public comment works great because it enabled us to organize to keep a multifamily development out of our vicinity" is like the archetypical NIMBY project.
"5-over-1 or over-1s, also known as a one-plus-five or a podium building,[1] is a type of multi-family residential building commonly found in urban areas of North America", so either you're wrong about them wanting to build a 5 over 1 or wrong about them being multi-family.
The fact you're using this as an example of public review being a good thing shows how fucked up the process is.
You're cheering for the prevention of building new housing in the most valuable, most useful part of the town. I bet it would have kept all the same retail and restaurants in the bottom too, so there would have been zero downside for anyone who actually uses the street.
Instead a bunch of people with no stake except an aesthetic preference blocked it. How on earth is that a good thing?
If you don't own the land and can't demonstrate a direct, severe impact to you and yours from the actions of someone else, you shouldn't have a say.
"More traffic" is not sufficient. I can actually sort of believe shade from an apartment building could count, but the impression I get is that is rarely a good-faith argument (and in any case it should only severely affect a few people in any new development, so you could easily justify just compensating them in some way rather than outright blocking a development.
> several stories higher than any of the other buildings
If the highest other building was 2 stories then it would have been 4 taller. More likely 3? Not several.
I appreciate your complaint about generic design but damn putting apartments downtown sounds amazing actually, not ruining. Would you have been happy if they had a better design and it was 3 over 1?
"5 over 1" refers to the section of the building code, wooden (part 5) over concrete (part 1) or something like that. Coincidentally it's also the number of floors allowed, but a 3 over 1 would be built of something else.
Interesting claim. Wikipedia is unsure but uses the floor count meaning in the article.
> The name derives from the maximum permissible five floors of combustible construction (Type III or Type V) over a fire-resistive Type I podium of one floor for "5-over-1" or two floors for "5-over-2", as defined in the United States–based International Building Code (IBC) Section 510.2.[1][4] Some sources instead attribute the name to the wood framing of the upper construction; the IBC uses "Type V" to refer to non-fireproof structures, including those framed with dimensional lumber.[5][6]
In most US jurisdictions if you pick reasonable ceiling heights plus a little margin for un-level ground making the building effectively taller on one side 6-floors is also about the maximum number of floors you can build before you get kicked in the dick by all the highrise regulatory compliance so that probably has a bit to do with it.
As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.
Exactly. The "my" in "my backyard" can apply to everyone therefore nothing gets built. The alternative is everything gets built. There has to be a middle ground, which is what zoning laws are meant to accomplish. We have buildings and multi-family housing going up in our town too, but we also have historically-protected buildings on the main street that require some more work if you want to do stuff with them. This is a good balance.
Zoning laws accomplished what they were intended to do, which was to enforce economic and racial segregation by preventing new affordable housing from being built near areas of opportunity. I don't think anybody working on housing affordability thinks this is a good balance, and the trend is sharply towards rolling these rules back. Apropos this particular thread I think it's notable that the most popular way of accomplishing that is to remove home rule authority for municipalities on zoning minimums and re-vesting that power exclusively in the state, which can't be mugged by local special interest groups spawn camping public comment opportunities.
Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting to provide people with affordable housing but people who just want to make as much money as possible, regardless of the effects on people in the neighborhood.
>If you have your own private back yard you're not allowed to refer to condominiums as "luxury".
I live on .1ac in a post-industrial shithole that remains a post-industrial shithole largely because the politics of snooty people mostly a hundred miles away.
The last thing I, or anyone else here, needs is "those people" in our midst telling us how to live. Our lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible.
In the campaign I'm a part of to end exclusionary zoning ("Yes Oak Park"), housing reform opponents claimed to residents that we were advocating for the construction of rock quarries next to people's houses. It's like there's a playbook of bad arguments NIMBYs are drawing from. Thanks for sharing this! It was a useful cite in a local politics discussion.
That's literally what NIMBYs exploiting public comment say: whatever else is happening, at least they're striking back against the psychopathic Private Equity firms who are building all this evil housing.
Blocking datacenter builds is the right thing to do right now. Whether the general public has the right vocabulary to explain why is not so important when the people in charge are actively evil and tasked with the exact opposite of their claimed job title.
We don't agree, but either way, the only thing I'm here to say is that public comment distorts democratic process and entrenches concentrated local interest groups. You're happy about it (in the abstract, apparently) because it's achieving an outcome you support, but mostly what it supports is preventing housing and renewable energy from being built.
Data centers aren't housing and don't always make use of renewable energy. Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them. There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
I'm really not sure how I can be clearer about the fact that I don't agree with the prevailing sentiment on these threads about data centers† but that my reason for commenting here is that public comment processes are a nightmare for democratic policymaking.
† (I think they're fine and moreover I think they're a huge missed opportunity for blue states to get more sustainable and regulated power delivered and data centers running under those regulations, rather that what's going to happen, which is data centers all being located in red states that aren't going to regulate them at all).
Texas is a weird case because they're the fastest growing state in the country and they run their own independent power grid --- badly (see: the winter outage a couple years back). And even then: data centers are going to get built in Texas. Gov. Abbott is doing a performative audit thing, but they're ultimately going to clear projects.
> but that my reason for commenting here is that public comment processes are a nightmare for democratic policymaking.
The public comment process has stopped a lot, a LOT, of shitty things from happening at the federal and state government level. I've seen it happen time and time again, because I've been part of it time and time again. Over decades.
So I see this, and to be honest? I'm going to move on! Because this clashes with a lot of extremely personal experiences to me that have shaped public policy and legislation in positive ways. Sometimes people will get it wrong and it can be corrupted by Big Money like anything else, but it's one of the few levers the public has until they start moving to the different boxes of Democracy.
No, I did not! I've written at length about how I engaged with my local municipality on Flock cameras. The search bar will avail. None of it involved public comment.
> Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them.
People get really irrational about things built near them and their say causes problems finding anywhere to build reasonable things.
> There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.
Give it a residential noise limit and I'm happy to live near a data center. (I am worried about power prices but that's a matter of total number rather than specific location, and utilities charging them enough to cover expansion.)
Given the scale of the buildout, I think it would be sensible to mandate that, for every data center built, the companies doing that must also subsidize a new green power plant somewhere (not necessarily the same region, but where it makes the most sense), proportionally to consumption. Basically each kWh of power has to be compensated. No gas or any other fossil fuels even if there's pre-existing supply.
Separately there's a problem with the lack of enforcement, most notoriously Musk's infamous gas-powered data center that apparently violates a bunch of regulations including noise. Musk does this because he believes that he can get away with it in a sense that the eventual fines, if any, will be dwarfed by the profit extracted. The penalties need to be hefty enough that this computation doesn't work out.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
"The public having access to information on what corporations plan to do in their communities and having the ability to vote to against what corporations want is a blight on the democratic process" is a crazy stance to take.
What you call "a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands" I call "We the People" and it should fall to them to decide what happens in their own communities. It's legal for me to put a hot tub in my living room. My family doesn't have to let me put it there. It's legal to pave over city park in my community and turn them into parking lots, but the people in my city should have a say in that.
> Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
We're talking about data centers, which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone. It's laughable to suggest that skipping public review is a good thing here, because it's only going to result in data centers being sneakily approved contrary to the overwhelming desire of constituents. We can ruminate all day on whether public comments or public review is useful in the grand scheme, but the realpolitik of the situation is that – barring possession of a time machine to go back and elect different representation – it's one of the few levers that constituents have to prevent data centers from moving into their area.
> which are deeply unpopular with just about everyone.
Speak for yourself. Plenty of people support them. The technological progress and economic benefits they bring are good for our country. But are you always an opponent of democracy, or only when you pretend everyone is on your side on an issue?
70% opposition and people who strongly support (7%) continues to decrease. I guess that’s plenty in absolute numbers. But even the Iran war has more supporters than that.
Often not everyone is impacted equally by a policy. So it is reasonable to allow, for example, the people living near a potential data center greater say into what happens.
See, I think it's better if every vote is counted equally, and people with concentrated or high-amplitude opinions about specific issues don't get extra votes. Different strokes, I guess.
Well, if the democratic proces was actually democratic instead of infused with money it could work. As it is now, you buy of some politicians and get your way. If the law is in the way you buy of some other politicians.
democracy is imperfect, I like to view public hearings as helping nudge democracy back toward functionality. Heck humanities very stewardship of our only home in the universe is currently a very dumb process but do we have to delete the stewardship and care, can't we try to improve things, have hearings so we can better pursue solutions to problems?
It's like giving people excessive discretion. Then if you're someone they don't like (eg. a black person if you're racist), then you deal out a maximalist punishment. If they're someone you do like, you let them off and tell them not to do it again.
Policy like this is just corruption. It allows some people to exercise more rights than others, at the expense of the commons.
The other responses answer your direct question, but I was confused about similar flows when learning about SAML so I'll comment in case this is helpful.
SAML is just an authentication protocol, it doesn't really handle user provisioning. Which was confusing to me, because any time you'd use it you typically also need some kind of provisioning mechanism.
SAML does have a concept of "just in time" provisioning, which is what I've seen small SAAS companies typically support when they say they have SAML support. But basically all it can handle is creating accounts in the SP the first time a new person logs in (with valid credentials signed by the IDP). For user provisioning though what you really need is full programmatic CRUD access for accounts in the SP, which is outside the scope of SAML. I don't really understand why the SAML protocol bothers having such half-baked support at all, because you immediately run into issues. For example, giving some users different permissions than others in the SP, or updating accounts in the SP that already exist.
For user provisioning, for SPs that support it you can use the SCIM protocol alongside SAML, which gives you full control over provisioning accounts the way you need to. Then for instance instead of just logging someone out of the SP when they were removed from the IDP, it can fully deprovision the account in all your SPs as well so you're not left with orphaned accounts sitting around.
This was my gut reaction when I first learned about graphql, but in practice when I used it it didn’t end up being an issue (although we didn’t have to run at particularly large scale).
If your data models are pretty well structured, then basically every graphql object is a single table that you get by an indexed field, and traversing relationships can each do a where in query on the indexed id field. The parameters you expose on queries should be for indexed fields. So in practice, you’re not really autogenerating any particularly expensive queries, and if you assume the client isn’t asking for tons of data they don’t need, it’s not much different in query patterns than rest. Except that in some cases, the client can omit fields or related objects instead of re-using the rest route that’s a superset of what they need, so you can save resources sometimes too.
Then on top of all that, you have the option to not auto-map certain queries to the orm in special cases that are more complex, so you always can still write the code yourself to be more strict about what you allow. For writes, you typically would always do this to control exactly which fields you write.
> This makes the piracy route become more and more attractive again - and I don't like that this is the case. I want to pay people for their content.
People like to say this, but, no offense, it just doesn't seem true. It sounds like a justification. (And I'm not judging, I'm just not convinced by this reasoning).
Signing up for 3-4 streaming services is pretty easy. If you use something like an apple tv or fire tv you can even use a global search that links you into the app where the content you searched for lives. If you're willing to pay per episode or movie to rent or buy everything you watch on itunes or amazon, it's even easier and you can get almost anything instantly.
I do agree that in general, the more different streaming services are released the more that people's incentives are starting to tip back towards pirating. But I don't think there's much other reason beyond just cost.
To be clear, I don't pirate and haven't except for niche stuff that I can't get my hands on otherwise.
If money was tight and I didn't have other hobbies I might consider it. But at the moment selling me 3-4 streaming services for $80 a month when I can just watch youtube instead, or pick up a good 4 year old game for $10 is a tough sell to me.
There's excellent Plex servers for <$10/month, which give access to tens of thousands of shows and movies, with the guarantee that anything remotely popular is part of that offering. Versus the more legal option of paying hundreds of dollars a month to access content spread between 5-10 different apps, with stupid limitations such as "no offline viewing" or "check in home every n days", not to mention the incompatibilities due to DRM etc.
I mean I can subscribe to 5 different streaming services and pay $50-60/mo, and how far away are we from having a service that provides a collection of streaming services (i.e. cable TV).
The problem that's happening lately is that streaming services were a way to get away from the expensiveness of cable, but now we're returning the the exact same problem we had then.
Would you normally recommend running tekton in its own k8s cluster, or within the same cluster that runs production workloads? (Particularly if running in something like gke or eks)
It's a joke to say anything else. If a scooter can get hit by a car and mess up the car, we've gotta do something about this nuissance! If a scooter takes up 2 sq ft of space on a curb in between rides, they're ruining our streets! Capitalism run amok! But the entire row of cars parked for free a couple feet away? That's great. Not to mention, tens of thousands of lives lost every year? All good, nothing wrong with that.
It's also got absolutely nothing to do with people vs corporations, using that dichotomy here is absurd. Car makers spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year advertising to people to get them to buy more, bigger, more expensive cars. Not to mention, cars are even often leased or rented. I don't see why the business model of rental vs one-time purchase matters, but even if it does matter to you for some reason, cars and scooters are both rented!
IIRC the latest revisions of sb50 in California would have rezoned the whole state to allow fourplexes (while still upcoming even higher to 5 stories along transit corridors).
But it was blackholed for at least a year by the supreme chancellor of the senate (or whatever her official title is) even though it likely has enough votes to pass if it would have gone to the floor.
Even if the cost premium wasn’t an issue, who has the geometry in their living room to be able to take advantage of an 8k resolution? Even 4K is hard to take advantage of in a living room setting, you need a huge tv with your seating set up very close to it.
Biggest annoyance with the iMac though is you can’t, say, work from home with your work laptop and plug it into the screen.
This is another case with macs where the situation 8 years ago was much better since they used to have target display mode. From what I understand, they killed it because they needed to use a custom format to drive the 5k screen initially. Now regular DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4 have enough bandwidth for it but there’s been no mention of bringing the feature back.
That’s why I said I'm not spending my own money on a development class laptop. I have the same Bluetooth keyboard and mouse at home and at work - in other words, I don’t care about the keyboards on the MacBook Pros. Decent regular monitors are cheap. If/When I do get a 5K iMac for person use, my current two monitors will be attached to it for personal use and attached to my work laptop when I bring it home.
Well, if your work machine is a laptop (and that is the only reason you can take it home) you need to use it, if you want to work at home, hence the need for an screen to attach, which you cannot do, if your screen at home is in fact an iMac. (Work data of course stays on the work machine, everything else is a huge no-go)
On this topic I am always surprised to notice, walking around downtown SF on a weekday that literally every single parking space is taken up by a work truck, like a contractor, repair person, plumbers, etc.
That’s pretty crazy when you stop to think about it. The space isn’t actively being used all day, I’m guessing these folks just know the right time to get there early after street cleaning to get a spot they can sit in all day because it’s cheap. Is there really no better use for this public space on some of the most expensive land in the world? Surely they could unload their equipment and then go park in a garage around the corner.
So to your broader point, yes obviously there needs to be some way to get heavy equipment, furniture, etc into cities. But there’s no reason it needs to be the extreme it is today, with so much priority given to private cars and parking.
Public review is a blight on the democratic process. Instead of having a set of democratically established laws and regulations that apply fairly to everyone, a small handful of noisy people with too much time on their hands can stop anyone they don't like from doing something that is perfectly legal.
It's an incredibly dumb process and bypassing it is good, actually.
It also has nothing at all to do with whether the environmental regulations themselves are being followed.