The best antidote to trusting the government is having any knowledge whatsoever of history or current events.

In general? That's standard in several western states, most infamously Nevada.

Here in NH? Probably Eversource.

Yes, replacing two walls with windows in them with one wall with sound insulation and a vapor barrier means less noise and smell transmission.

I take it you've never lived in either a decent duplex or a closely spaced single family.

> Some people might prefer this style of housing. Whether it has downsides in efficiency or not.

That's true, and if that's really their preference then more power to them.

> Also worth noting that due to zoning, large multi-family housing structures aren’t permitted to be constructed in certain areas.

That's more my problem here. If rules like that influenced this project then the rules should be fixed, because people who do want the higher efficiency / cheaper option should get to choose that.

But then we live in a state where most places have 5 acre lot size minimums but no frontage minimums, which lead to ridiculous strip lots that make no sense unless specifically to frustrate future development at the cost of every other consideration.

> You really think your neighbors' homes has no influence on your home value?

I just don't think that effect justifies giving everyone who lives nearby veto power over property usage.

> I have to ask, are you a home owner?

I am.

> Your statement seems really out of touch with the realities of home appraisals and realestate evaluation.

In some places people are really worried about those effects, and the result tends to be suburban HOAs.

The last couple houses I bought were in areas where the effect is drastically smaller. The last place I lived was a dense urban area where demand was so much higher than supply that even stuff like being next to a major airport had minimal effect on property values. Right now one of my 20 closest neighbors is a pig farm and someone got laughed out of town meeting for suggesting the town adopt a noise ordinance in response to their neighbor firing a literal cannon.

The alternative would be rowhouses (or even just duplexes), which could easily be better at both noise and smell insulation than these things.

> It will have an influence on the home values in the neighborhood so it is a concern for the residents of that area.

Not only is this argument absurd, the social norm that people can make this argument without being laughed out of the room is also absurd.

There's very little practical benefit to a stand-alone building if it's six feet from the next building over. Basically it's spending a couple hundred dollars a year in heating costs to save a hundred bucks in sound proofing.

"Take a picture", sure. But deep fakes have been a thing for a while, so artificial photographs are a possibility for people who are simply accused of possessing images.

That being said, this case sounds like it's the simple scenario: real pictures that document conduct that is a crime independent of the pictures.

However obvious a particular case may seem, history is very clear on this point: harsh punishments with reduced due process primarily serve as a political weapon rather than a deterrent against crime.

Military training isn't really broadly the problem. The military explicitly trains to never shoot the wrong people, to not shoot first, and that civilians are not to be treated as enemy combatants by default.

> But we should also be able to have whatever gear they have.

I'd go a step further and say that they shouldn't be buying anything (or accepting it from the feds) unless it will be auctioned to the public after a reasonable service life.

That's a reasonable argument.

Gear? Who cares.

Training? Yes.

More important is liability. There's no excuse for government employees to be able to willfully hurt people and destroy (or even outright steal) their property and then be immune to lawsuits.

Institutions are prizes for whoever can play politics well enough to get control of them. What happened to the ACLU isn't the result of short term political expediency.

I wasn't too upset at them for leaving the 2A to other groups. There are plenty of people who would donate to support the rest of the bill of rights who might have issues with guns, and the ACLU getting their money to defend the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments was great.

The problem came when they started letting modern progressive politics override their commitment to basic civil liberties. They didn't need to get involved in the gay wedding cakes thing, for example.

> on the more conservative side as far as ivys are concerned

That's like saying Rolexes are on the more inexpensive side as far as premium Swiss mechanical watches are concerned.

Does the ACLU of NH still support civil liberties, or are they with the national organization on stepping back from supporting free speech especially for unpopular groups?

The government or any other large institution will never side with you over the wealthy. There may temporarily be exceptions where political power ends up in the hands of a few people who previously weren't wealthy and powerful. When that happens they will quickly use their political power to amass wealth befitting their status.

Liberal institutions and ideals can partially ameliorate this issue, but even in the best case scenario expecting billionaires to pay taxes just means that you fundamentally misunderstand the basic nature of the world you inhabit.

> One of the key points that I read in this thread is that computers work fine.

Then you've horribly misunderstood both the problem to be solved and the mechanisms proposed to solve it. Unless by "computers work fine" you mean "computers are the perfect tool to generate gerrymandered districts".

Computers aren't magic devices that take humans out of the equation. They do exactly what specific humans program them to do in a way that makes it very difficult for even experts to confirm exactly what the computer is doing or why.

> Seems like they could redraw them regularly by computer to balance that out.

One of the key points in this thread is that redrawing districts by computer makes things worse rather than better.

> To me, it seem like the easiest way would be; if the Repubs get 49% of the votes, they get 49% of the representatives.

A couple more steps in that direction gets you to proportional representation, which would be a significant improvement.

Three problems:

1. Nobody actually wants unbiased districts, because they're exactly the same as a random bias. Maybe people will support the idea until they see the resulting maps, and then it will immediately become a partisan issue based on whatever bias the maps have. The compromise is generally "representative" districts, which is just an intentional gerrymander for some characteristic that benefits the team pushing for it.
2. When asking a computer to generate an unbiased answer, it's always easy for the programmers to cheat and generate an answer that appears unbiased by any arbitrary criteria and yet still has the bias they want. This turns out to be exactly the thing that programmers are trained to do. They can use population data? Population density is a proxy for party. They can use racial data to comply with VRA requirements? Race is a proxy for party. None of that? Well, they ran the numbers offline and determined that (coincidentally) whether zip code is divisible by 5 is a proxy for party and happened to use that as part of a random number generation formula.
3. In the end the basic premise of having representatives for geographic districts is innately flawed in a two party system. It doesn't do the thing it's supposed to do, and instead provides a mechanism whereby the politicians get to pick their voters instead of the other way around.

Selecting districts without knowing the underlying political data is the same as creating random political districts. It kind of sounds good, but it's not what anyone actually wants - imagine if NH selected random districts that just happened to be even more biased than the current districts.

Probably the fact that there's no way to select good districts should result in abolishing district-based representation entirely. They're a remnant of democratic government design from before people really understood that political parties were an unavoidable thing - better to accept reality and do something like proportional representation.

Pretty sure it's this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44

> Personally, I would prefer to use a machine to draw districts to be as compactly shaped as possible.

There was a good YouTube video demonstrating the use of a computer program to generate compact gerrymandered districts.

In general, there's no such thing as delegating to an unbiased computer. Instead you're giving the control to biased computer programmers and pretending they aren't in control of what the computer does.

> I always wonder how you choose members who are truly independent?

You can't. Again, you'll have whatever bias the people who appoint the commission have.