“Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this – partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sort of parties.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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The key phrase there is “with expertise and discretion.” That is optimistic indeed, as is the presumption of a positive outcome.
Making people homeless without a plan is not a pretty good idea. Are you a homeowner?
The poor souls who perished in the Ghost Ship blaze would have benefited from this sort of enforcement.
they may have benefitted from some advice and education, but this sort of enforcement benefits no-one.
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All of that may be true (and I think it is), but it is also true that the Trumpistas over at /pol/ are gleefully piling on primarily because they identify such spaces as dens of the evil libruls, as part of the other. There is no altruism there.
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just regular truisms. Lots of em. Bigly.
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We look to you, 4chan, for guidance in these dark times.
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Don’t speak it’s name! You’ll call up that which we cannot put down.
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Right, well we have two issues. 1) Is people being dicks and ruining others fun. Now this article is one examples, but there are many others out there. Like maybe using public land for something you aren’t supposed to and someone calls the police or rangers on you. So yeah, the whole motivation of the trollies is just dickish behavior.
But the other point is: Even though their motivation is to be a dick, any place being shut down because it is breaking violations is 1) against the law (which depending on the law, who cares, or very important) and 2) is possibly being a hazard that might lead to loss of life. Honestly, if it wasn’t people driving trollies but an honest movement to make things safer, I feel people would be applauding.
So while I condemn their motivation, we shouldn’t be encouraging places like the Ghost Ship that is woefully lacking in safety.
Though that brings up another point:
How is that possible? I thought this was a fairly well known spot from the sound of it, with frequent parties and fliers. It isn’t like it was some underground bunker you have to knock in the right order to get into.
I haven’t gotten too into it, but it wouldn’t have passed any safety checks, but I believe that it wasn’t zoned for the sort of activities and establishment it was used as so it wouldn’t receive regular inspections.
We’re all in agreement on wishing for the general safety of others.
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There’s no position so extreme that some nutjob on the internet hasn’t sincerely proposed it.
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The most applause-worthy response to people doing unsafe things is to provide them with a safe alternative.
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What happened with the Ghost Ship was a tragedy, but when you consider how many spaces like this there are and how infrequently this sort of thing happens, the risk is actually quite low, much lower then many acceptable activities. I personally would love to see more unique spaces and communities like this spring up everywhere. Life is not perfectly safe, and trying to regulate it to be so is what pushes art and things like this to the edge of our culture. I’d rather some sort of practical guide to cheap things that can be done to make a place safer and that cities work with them to improve safety as much as possible, without shutting down or punishing them.
I agree. 
Looking at the photos of that place, it looked glorious, not in bad shape.
That’s one thing that confused me about the Ghost Ship incident, looking at the stuff they had in there, there was very easily that value in imported statues and visual decorum. I kept wondering how a poor artist community could afford all that cool stuff. That big garuda alone would have sold for $20k
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Absolutely. It’d be great if more persons could donate their time to making sure these scenes are complaint, but there’s still a lot of money needed to take them up to code.
A lot of the stuff was crafted (I mean, it WAS an artist collective) or dumpster dived.
Probably “bad shape” relating to safety and ramshackle construction.
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Very few of the items appear to be crafted by the community. Most of the statues I saw were most certainly imported, much of it from nepal and tibet, and worth enough that they never would have been thrown out even if damaged (which none of them appeared to be), but rather repaired and worth a lot of money.
The musical stuff looked salvaged, the paintings original, the rugs look all in good shape and imported, the furniture mostly imported the rest salvaged.
That big garuda alone would have sold for $20k.
Their artisticness appears to be in the arranging of the items, not the making of them.
If you look at photos of the place there was easily several hundred thousand worth of stuff crammed in there.
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Yeah, those people should just live on the street?
Most of the people I know who live in warehouse spaces can’t afford rent on a “real” space. I live in Oakland and I know someone who died in that fire.
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Because it is f’ing Oakland and our officials are incompetent, lazy, and/or corrupt (pick two). No one, before now, had a reason to go kick a hornet’s nest by raiding one of the thousand+ warehouse and industrial spaces in the city that might have humans spending the night there permanently instead of just working there.
In this instance, you’re wrong. Sorry. I know people that went there more than a few times. It wasn’t full of “several hundred thousand dollars” worth of stuff. It was mostly full of salvage and things people built.
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I was just going off of whenever the photos i linked to were taken and what they clearly show. Things might have changed since they were taken, I don’t know about that. Never been there, don’t know anyone from there, all I know is limited to those photos, aka I don’t know much.
Do you know if they were running an import store out of that space? Some of the later photos seem to show people perusing import goods setup outside.
Note: Not that any of that matters in regards to the tragedy, I was simply thrown by the value of the items shown vs the description people were verbally giving. I would have loved to have visited there, it looked amazing.
