Politics

[Jebediah Springfield]

Having lived in California now for the past 5-6 months I can tell you California is...different. On one had I can see why so many people love it: nice beaches, beautiful women, nice weather, more things to do than you could even imagine, etc. On the other hand I see why so many people hate it: high cost of living, overcrowding, high taxes, somewhat dysfunctional government, very liberal social values, etc.

California isn't perfect, but it's not hell either. I probably won't spend the rest of my life here though. Not in San Diego anyway. If I stayed in California I would move further north toward Oregon.

Get ready for another host of problems lol

 

[connor_in]

Was it George Carlin? Maybe it was Steve Martin. Anyway, a big time comedian once said that Oregon is the place that people too wierd for California go to.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Was it George Carlin? Maybe it was Steve Martin. Anyway, a big time comedian once said that Oregon is the place that people too wierd for California go to.

Can confirm. Once dated a girl from Oregon.

 

[irishog77]

Was it George Carlin? Maybe it was Steve Martin. Anyway, a big time comedian once said that Oregon is the place that people too wierd for California go to.

Can confirm. Once dated a girl from Oregon.

True story. I've met two girls from Oregon, and they were both in the last couple of years. One was a smokin' hot belly dancer who was really cool and funny....then she started doing background checks on me, asking me about friends of mine on facebook (she and I weren't friends on there), asking me to come visit her at work, and dead set on knowing every detail of every girl I ever dated. The other was a married 23 year old who offered herself to me while at a party of a mutual friend....like 2 hours after we met.

 

[GoIrish41]

California is the most populus state -- full of people who headed west to get away from places east. Maybe they stayed because there was nowhere left to run, but they did stay.

 

[Jebediah Springfield]

True story. I've met two girls from Oregon, and they were both in the last couple of years. One was a smokin' hot belly dancer who was really cool and funny....then she started doing background checks on me, asking me about friends of mine on facebook (she and I weren't friends on there), asking me to come visit her at work, and dead set on knowing every detail of every girl I ever dated. The other was a married 23 year old who offered herself to me while at a party of a mutual friend....like 2 hours after we met.

That might just be cuz you're unbelievably sexy... or they were crazy. Yeah, Ima go with the latter.

 

[Rack Em]

True story. I've met two girls from Oregon, and they were both in the last couple of years. One was a smokin' hot belly dancer who was really cool and funny....then she started doing background checks on me, asking me about friends of mine on facebook (she and I weren't friends on there), asking me to come visit her at work, and dead set on knowing every detail of every girl I ever dated. The other was a married 23 year old who offered herself to me while at a party of a mutual friend....like 2 hours after we met.

How large were they? I'm gonna guess 225lbs +

 

[Rack Em]

California is the most populus state -- full of people who headed west to get away from places east. Maybe they stayed because there was nowhere left to run, but they did stay.

Didn't you ever play Oregon Trail as a kid? They didn't want to cross the Rockies again and all die of dysentery, rattlesnakes, or drown while trying to ford the Platte River.

 

[irishog77]

How large were they? I'm gonna guess 225lbs +

No, I was sober when I met them....so a buck o' five, buck ten.

 

[irishog77]

Didn't you ever play Oregon Trail as a kid? They didn't want to cross the Rockies again and all die of dysentery, rattlesnakes, or drown while trying to ford the Platte River.

I always wondered why cannibalism wasn't a result on that game. We all know the Donner party wasn't the only instance of pioneers chowing down on each other.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

True story. I've met two girls from Oregon, and they were both in the last couple of years. One was a smokin' hot belly dancer who was really cool and funny....then she started doing background checks on me, asking me about friends of mine on facebook (she and I weren't friends on there), asking me to come visit her at work, and dead set on knowing every detail of every girl I ever dated. The other was a married 23 year old who offered herself to me while at a party of a mutual friend....like 2 hours after we met.

Let's be honest here. You're still tempted to make some bad decisions with the belly dancer.

 

[irishog77]

Let's be honest here. You're still tempted to make some bad decisions with the belly dancer.

Oh hell yeah I am!!

 

[Rack Em]

No, I was sober when I met them....so a buck o' five, buck ten.

Sober at a party? Wow you really are a loser. I wouldn't be caught dead blowing anything less than a .20

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Sober at a party? Wow you really are a loser. I wouldn't be caught dead blowing anything less than a .20

0.2 meters? That's a little less than 8''. Pretty aggressive, no? At least you've got standards, though.

 

[irishog77]

0.2 meters? That's a little less than 8''. That's a little aggressive, isn't it? At least you've standards, though.

No, I think he means .2 looks-wise on a 1-10 scale.

So he'd go to town on this guy:

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The New Republican just published an article by William Deresiewicz titled "Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League":

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. Once, a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.

There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school “stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.”

...

Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.

Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect. What an indictment of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word.

At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much. There are exceptions, of course, but professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a “nonaggression pact.” Students are regarded by the institution as “customers,” people to be pandered to instead of challenged. Professors are rewarded for research, so they want to spend as little time on their classes as they can. The profession’s whole incentive structure is biased against teaching, and the more prestigious the school, the stronger the bias is likely to be. The result is higher marks for shoddier work.

Read the whole thing if you have time. There are some very influential individuals on the BoT that are hellbent on making ND into a Midwestern Ivy, regardless of the pathologies inherent in that model. Here's hoping they don't succeed.

 

[Rack Em]

The New Republican just published an article by William Deresiewicz titled "Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League":



Read the whole thing if you have time. There are some very influential individuals on the BoT that are hellbent on making ND into a Midwestern Ivy, regardless of the pathologies inherent in that model. Here's hoping they don't succeed.

One of the priests at the Cathedral in Chicago talked about this article in his homily last weekend. I'd been meaning to find it.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

People have talked smack about California for years. The weirdos we have are famous. Hell, we even laugh at our own reputation. California is someplace you need to live to understand. There are tons of immigrants coming here, some poor and many very rich ones. People tend to only focus on the Mexicans because they are mostly poor. They forget about the upper middle class, the millionaires and billionaires from all over the world that can't get enough of the place. In some ways it's good balance because the wealthy coming here need goods and services. The less fortunate coming here have opportunities because of that. You should hear more about my friend Horacio that just got his citizenship, and just made his first million doing foundations and dry wall. His wife should become legal soon. They are great hard working (oh and Catholics) people. I'm sure life would be easier on them if they had blonde hair and blue eyes, or even if they were black because then they'd have the naacp to represent them.

Don't look at propaganda spun by disparagers. You can't look at California on some report and come to any valid conclusion.

Losing companies amd people to other states. Austin TX could very well be the new home for Silicon Valley and tech. $24 billion in debt and another $330 billion in unfunded liabilities. Propaganda?

CA would be wise to learn from TX and others, even Washington state.

 

[BobD]

Losing companies amd people to other states. Austin TX could very well be the new home for Silicon Valley and tech. $24 billion in debt and another $330 billion in unfunded liabilities. Propaganda?

CA would be wise to learn from TX and others, even Washington state.

You've got to be kidding with this crap. You spew these measly numbers like every other day. I almost think someone has hired you to be a running joke. Austin is a nice town, but California shits their entire economy about once a week. You talk about California as if it were just some state....it's the eighth fucking largest economy in the world. 330 billion to California is piss. Dude we have 2.2 trillion in GDP and its climbing.

Read this please:

Tech, construction drive California’s worldwide GDP gains - Sacramento Business Journal

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

You've got to be kidding with this crap. You spew these measly numbers like every other day. I almost think someone has hired you to be a running joke. Austin is a nice town, but California shits their entire economy about once a week. You talk about California as if it were just some state....it's the eighth fucking largest economy in the world. 330 billion to California is piss. Dude we have 2.2 trillion in GDP and its climbing.

Read this please:

Tech, construction drive California’s worldwide GDP gains - Sacramento Business Journal

Good article, but fails to mention the tech companies leavig for the soon to be new tech hub, Austin.

No, im not kidding you. Those numbers are real and we aren't playing with monopoly money. I never said that CA's private sector wasn't successful. Look at the state's books. CA in the log run to pay them will either have to raise property taxes or state income taxes. Looking at those numbers, don't be surprised if businesses and people continue to leave for neighboring states.

CA does have 12% of the US population (we are huge!!), yet 33% of Americans on welfare are CA residents and that excludes illegal immigrants. Pulled that from the San Jose Mercury Sun, not Fox News.

 

[RDU Irish]

Monday Map: State Credit Ratings | Tax Foundation

CA and IL are lowest rated states for bond investing. Michigan rates better than them. Freaking Michigan is given a higher likelihood of paying their bondholders than California. Unless BobD is arguing they are too big to fail I don't see where size is a value adding factor here.

I will suggest that the local influence of a gross widening between "haves" and "have-nots" in California might have convinced many Californians we have a national problem when it is quite possibly 1) a function of high cost locations, 2) a function of liberal policies coming home to roost.

 

[Bluto]

Interesting article.

Why Nicaraguan Kids Aren’t Fleeing To U.S. | KPBS

 

[Bluto]

Monday Map: State Credit Ratings | Tax Foundation

CA and IL are lowest rated states for bond investing. Michigan rates better than them. Freaking Michigan is given a higher likelihood of paying their bondholders than California. Unless BobD is arguing they are too big to fail I don't see where size is a value adding factor here.

I will suggest that the local influence of a gross widening between "haves" and "have-nots" in California might have convinced many Californians we have a national problem when it is quite possibly 1) a function of high cost locations, 2) a function of liberal policies coming home to roost.

You haven't paid much attention to California politics I take it. The state has had Republican governors more often than not since 1980. What put the state in a tenuous "feast" or "famine" position for the past 30 years or so was the passage of the Howard Jarvis turd/grand daddy of all stupid conservative tax legislation Prop 13. That according to every honest political scientist is the root of basically every single problem the State faces today.

Anyhow, guess who also came up with the do nothing and watch crap fall apart playbook that the House of Reps now uses during budget negotiations? You guessed it, the GOP in California. They used the 2/3 rd super majority clause imposed by Prop 13 to squash even sensible tax reform legislation. This increasingly lead to legislating via the ballot initiative process, which has been kind of a mess as well due to a-hole billionaires constantly floating their pet pieces of legislation. Now that the GOP yahoos are basically gone Jerry Brown seems to be righting the ship and more importantly he's telling Californians they need to put on their big boy pants and pay for the services they want.

So yeah in summary it was "conservatives" who screwed things up, then refused to do anything to fix it, now they are irrelevant. Basically the same trend that the GOP is facing on the national level it would seem.

 

[GoIrish41]

Interesting article.

Why Nicaraguan Kids Aren’t Fleeing To U.S. | KPBS

Exactly. It is violence that is causig people to flee and not poverty. That is why many refer to them as refugees. But Leppy will be on in a minute to tell us why isimg that term is wrong.

 

[RDU Irish]

You haven't paid much attention to California politics I take it. The state has had Republican governors more often than not since 1980. What put the state in a tenuous "feast" or "famine" position for the past 30 years or so was the passage of the Howard Jarvis turd/grand daddy of all stupid conservative tax legislation Prop 13. That according to every honest political scientist is the root of basically every single problem the State faces today.

Anyhow, guess who also came up with the do nothing and watch crap fall apart playbook that the House of Reps now uses during budget negotiations? You guessed it, the GOP in California. They used the 2/3 rd super majority clause imposed by Prop 13 to squash even sensible tax reform legislation. This increasingly lead to legislating via the ballot initiative process, which has been kind of a mess as well due to a-hole billionaires constantly floating their pet pieces of legislation. Now that the GOP yahoos are basically gone Jerry Brown seems to be righting the ship and more importantly he's telling Californians they need to put on their big boy pants and pay for the services they want.

So yeah in summary it was "conservatives" who screwed things up, then refused to do anything to fix it, now they are irrelevant. Basically the same trend that the GOP is facing on the national level it would seem.

So you admit California has a lot of financial problems. Archie Bunker called it the land of fruits and nuts, not like the eccentricities are a new phenomenon.

Almost 2/3rds of the public voted for Prop 13, pretty popular measure at the time and I don't see anyone pushing strongly to undo it. From the surface, I could make a pretty strong argument for Prop 13 being one of the few things keeping you migration issue from getting worse. How many 60-70 year olds who have lived in their house for 20-30 years would be priced out by taxes if they had to reset their values?

I find the "problem" to be in the "good one to have" category, much like farmers that complain about urban sprawl and development. If your property values go up so much as to price you out on taxes alone, you have just made a ton of money and could go buy two houses or farms elsewhere for the same price. Live poor, die rich.

 

[RDU Irish]

Let's compare 12% income tax and 1% property tax with someplace like Wisconsin with 2% property tax and 7% income tax with a focus on middle class folks.

Earn $50,000, live in $200,000 home.
- $6000 income tax, $2000 property tax in CA
- $3500 income tax, $4000 property tax in WI
$8000 versus $7500 total tax, not a big discrepancy

Earn $80,000, live in a $250,000 home
-$9600 income tax, $2500 property tax in CA
- $5600 income tax, $5000 property tax in WI
$12,100 versus $10,600, the gap widens quite a bit from the first example.

Now compare those same examples to North Carolina's 5.8% income tax and 1% property tax
Person A - $2900 income, $2000 property. $4900 total
Person B - $4640 income, $2500 property, $7140 total

Not half as much but a big enough difference to really be felt in the average family budget. On top of the fact you can by a lot more house here for the same dollar.

 

[connor_in]

Let's compare 12% income tax and 1% property tax with someplace like Wisconsin with 2% property tax and 7% income tax with a focus on middle class folks.

Earn $50,000, live in $200,000 home.
- $6000 income tax, $2000 property tax in CA
- $3500 income tax, $4000 property tax in WI
$8000 versus $7500 total tax, not a big discrepancy

Earn $80,000, live in a $250,000 home
-$9600 income tax, $2500 property tax in CA
- $5600 income tax, $5000 property tax in WI
$12,100 versus $10,600, the gap widens quite a bit from the first example.

Now compare those same examples to North Carolina's 5.8% income tax and 1% property tax
Person A - $2900 income, $2000 property. $4900 total
Person B - $4640 income, $2500 property, $7140 total

Not half as much but a big enough difference to really be felt in the average family budget. On top of the fact you can by a lot more house here for the same dollar.

Example of home value difference:

Had a friend who bought a home in CA that could be bought in IN for approximately $100,000 or less...in CA that home was $450,000+

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Exactly. It is violence that is causig people to flee and not poverty. That is why many refer to them as refugees. But Leppy will be on in a minute to tell us why isimg that term is wrong.

I agreed that they were fleeing violence, but poverty and the hope for amnesty in the US is a factor. In terms of US immigration law they are not refugees. Refugees are people being oppressed by their government, whether it's race, religion, ethnicity, political beliefs (Cuba) etc. That's not what's happening here. I can copy and paste the law (not my opinion) for you again if that's what you need.

As I've noted before, kids in LA, Chicago (murder capital of the US), and parts of NYC witness and are subjected to gang violence and drugs every single day. Where are they supposed to go?

 

[Wild Bill]

I agreed that they were fleeing violence, but poverty and the hope for amnesty in the US is a factor. In terms of US immigration law they are not refugees. Refugees are people being oppressed by their government, whether it's race, religion, ethnicity, political beliefs (Cuba) etc. That's not what's happening here. I can copy and paste the law (not my opinion) for you again if that's what you need.

As I've noted before, kids in LA, Chicago (murder capital of the US), and parts of NYC witness and are subjected to gang violence and drugs every single day. Where are they supposed to go?

Here.

CHA 'supervouchers' subsidize Chicago's priciest rents for low-income residents | abc7chicago.com

 

[RDU Irish]

Example of home value difference:

Had a friend who bought a home in CA that could be bought in IN for approximately $100,000 or less...in CA that home was $450,000+

Even if you hold property quality the same, the tax structure of CA eats into budgets significantly. Now add in the fact you can spend half as much (or less) on the same house elsewhere and you have a significant incentive for migration.