Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss

Palentir investors negotiating an exit strategy

I hear Palantir has a new technology, call it a time-machine, with which it will be sending key employees back to 1974 to purchase homes in Palo Alto at the prices they deserve. A beta version of this over-shot considerably and apparently there is now a group of x-Palantir people actually living in the age of Hobbits.

(I wrote this on a scrap of paper and handed it to Gennady Sheyner of the Weekly, who had overplayed the thing about Palentiros and other Gen Y complaining about not being able to afford housing here. The note, on the verso, continued:

Mark Weiss, with apologies to Jerry Zuckheimer, J.R.R. Tolkein, Ray Bradbury, GS, H. G. Wells, the Goodby Berlin and Silverstein film circa 1988 with a homeless guy who was actually an art director, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and Philip K. Dick.

edit to add: I meant to say “Robert Zemeckis” of course, meaning the movie director, “Back to the Future” an obvious source. Marty McFly, “Doc Brown”.

come to think of it: new nickname Gennady Shire.

by the way, in the books, “Lord of the Rings” by Tolkien, the palantir was used for evil by Saruman.

Peter Thiel is no Strider

edit to add, 30 minutes later but before a.m. coupa coffee:

I spoke at Wednesday’s meeting about putting a large park in Ventura, the most undervalued neighborhood in Palo Alto. Our Comp Plan — the topic of the public hearing — does stipulate that we want more parks.

I noted, however that when I ran my idea by “Ari” and his daughter, roller-skating at Peers Park on Park Boulevard, his reaction was “Good idea, but what I’m worrying about is my landlord just raised my rent $500 and I don’t know if I can continue living here.”

In my travels recently, collecting 65 signatures to qualify for the ballot, several other people told me the same thing: they may have to leave Palo Alto because their landlords are gouging them.

So why not study Rent Control? I love the speaker who said “I demand government build new housing but I don’t want rent control”. Doesn’t he realize the huge subsidies our government puts into high tech? Isn’t the war a subsidy of big business? (I am indebted to George Packer for some of this).

It’s still one-person one-vote here and there are roughly 40 percent of Palo Altans who rent, so I would think we should be talking about a measure that would help people who live here stay here, and not 2030 how much too much more to build.

This was also brought up by Edie Keating at the Housing Element meeting (she, like me, there as a guest). Ken Allen meanwhile started talking about it in opposition — fair enough. We should discuss these things more fully.

I made a joke to GS of the Weekly about “the age of Hobbits” I thought he’d print it somewhere hereabouts
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Steve Levy strikes me as a Worm-tongue creature, that’s a Tolkien reference, to Saruman, who used the Palantir for evil, and is therefore fair comment, appropriate, and don’t delete me bro!

Posted by Mark Weiss, a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
4 minutes ago
addendum:
do not delete this, it is fair comment, and informational:

Gríma Wormtongue was the chief advisor to King Théoden of Rohan before being exposed as an agent and spy of Saruman.

I swear I am like the Dave Schultz of Weekly postings and deletions, Schultz being a hockey player famous for penalty minutes: I am probably the only person who posts under his own name and still gets deleted. Once I said, apropos of 27 University, ultimately the subject of a Grand Jury report, that the Weekly identifying uber-capitalist John Arrillaga as “philanthropist” is like remembering Genghis Khan as an advocate of family planning. Khan famously had thousands of offspring, a measurable portion of all a continent’s people, or so is said.

What does John Arrillaga say about the Comp Plan?

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Posted by Mark Weiss, a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
0 minutes ago
No, hilarious is that we the people are spending $1.7 million to a consultant in Berkeley to sugar-coat and twist the current General Plan or Comp Plan to rationalize and mesmerize the fact that some powerful entity wants to build more dense housing and more office complexes damn the torpedos.

How much rent relief would that same $1.7 M provide?

I’m a Keynsian but I think this should be discussed. If not now, when?

I’m a Marxist, but only because I think that rhubards cooked like prunes taste more like applesauce than Gail Price does.

take 3:
And seriously folks, speaking of Groucho and the Housing Element, we are way past tense and now living in bungalows:

What I mean is, this is a joke. The Comp Plan is fine. Or we should punt its revision until after the election.