Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

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New Hampshire is great; unlike California corruption, whatever hypothetical corruption there is here, I don't have to pay for with my tax dollars. The place is run with Prussian efficiency, so hypothetical corruption doesn't impact my daily life. It's an astounding upgrade.

Unlike California, the roads work (the potholes start on 93 as soon as you cross the border to Massachusetts). Let's do a full stop there. California basically doesn't have weather, meaning the simple governmental function of road maintenance should be trivial. Here we have snowstorms (yes, yes California does too ... in the mountains where nobody lives), and somehow the roads are vastly better. Building new lanes or new stretches of highway also takes months instead of decades. Beyond that, despite the existence of copwatch in places like Berkeley, and the lack thereof here, somehow NH police are not insane stormtroopers. Housing outside of Portsmouth is zoned to be easy to build in, so property is what it should cost. Small businesses aren't regulated to death. Streets are safe despite the fact that you can walk around with a submachine gun in your pocket. Water is clean. There is no pollution to speak of. There aren't vast seasonal forest fires because the state doesn't have lunatics preventing normal forestry management practices. I've been here a year and there have been no pitched street battles between gangs of thugs over ... people talking ... in the entire state; a regular fall occurrence in Berkeley (and no doubt other towns in California). Oh yeah, and it took me 20 minutes to get a NH drivers license and register a car; something that would probably take me multiple days in California.

You can talk about corruption as if it is "well this many people went to jail for corruption" -IMO that is a lousy proxy for corruption. Nothing works in California; it is "failed state" level corruption; anarcho-tyrrany except for Google/Facebook oligarch tier people who probably don't pay California taxes either. If I could bribe minor officials like I could in other failed states, it would actually be an improvement over the way California works now. California is an IRL dystopia. Nice weather though, and some interesting people live there out of what I assume is inertia and provincialism.

You've basically summed up my opinion on CA in comparison with my current state of residence. The only major diffetence is our roads also suck like CA's despite having a similar weather advantage but at least I can blame them on the insane amount of truck traffic (~50% of interstate traffic outside of rush hour) fhat stems from our status as a major manufacturing hub. We don't pay much in taxes and all that sweet, sweet value added manufscturing employment and wage growth is worth the potholes in my opinion.

I recently visited SF, the capitol city of HN's core demographic and my wife and I stood aghast at the sheer filthiness and unseemly nature of the place. Present day San Francisco is a place ripped straight from the pages of a dystopian cyberpunk-ish novel from 20-40 years ago. Excessive wealth cloistered in enclaves surrounded by slums (homeless camps) and a complete degenration of the public square (in a broad sense, I'm referring to all the public spaces in the city center) into a gallery of feces, drug abuse, and general decay all bathed in the glow of private spaces reserved for the wealthy tech elite. The "high tech, low life" aesthetic popularized by that genre has been given life in that city and it is terrifying to see such a nightmare become reality.

That's one anecdotal datum in support of the hypothesis: NH is #12 on the "not enough money to be corrupt" candidate list.

The NH economy is 3% the size of California's, with 5.7% the land area, and 3.4% the population. That suggests it has less than 3% the corruption opportunity, because the state still has to accomplish a lot of the same functions with about 3% as much money. Some things scale by land area or population, and other things are simply flat administrative burden, such as keeping the lights on in the sole state legislature building.

Any person wanting to profit from their own corruptibility would therefore not stay in NH, and would not go to Maine or Vermont, who have even less money to be stolen, but would instead go to Massachusetts, which is #11 on the "enough money to steal" candidate list. And take a ladle, to skim off some of the extra money sloshing around Boston.

This suggests that many of our largest (by money) states could be broken up as an anti-corruption measure, to divide the flows from tax revenues into expenditures into more channels, with less flowing through each. A corrupt person can only fish for dishonest opportunities in one metaphorical river at any one time. How corrupt would Illinois be, if Chicago-Naperville-Elgin-Gary were no longer attached to it? How would California differ if Los-Angeles-Long-Beach and San-Francisco-Oakland-San-Jose were no longer part of it? Would the effect be more pronounced in states where the current capital is not also the largest city: New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Florida?

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