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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in two developing countries in my life, and its interesting how CA is morphing back into that. Small enclaves of super-rich, very high price communities where everything works, surrounded by large swaths of shanty towns where nothing works.

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Conversely I find it interesting how quickly discussions of California quickly morph into the implication that there is little worth considering outside of the specific economy of 'silicon valley'.

I can think of no one - from the people I've known since Kindergarten from the people I've met in the last few months at my new job - who can be described as 'super-rich' or living in 'shanty-towns'. There are plenty of working class folk living quite comfortably but their stories don't fit into our 'outrage culture' so they are conveniently ignored.

This comment makes no sense. In developing countries power gets shut off, because there is not enough of it. CA actually over produces power. The shut off is a result of acute climate change and dry conditions that have affected the state. And unlike a developing country, a corporation in a developed country is responding to legal risk and shutting power down. This is exactly opposite of a developing country, where corporations face no legal risk of their actions at all

Power consumers won’t make the distinction between both scenarios; their power is off in both cases.

That doesn’t equate to “developing country” like living standards as the OP was suggesting. There is a distinction. As someone who actually was born and raised in India, this is not even remotely the same thing. It is like saying traffic jams in NYC are like Mumbai, therefore NYC is like a developing country

>The shut off is a result of acute climate change and dry conditions that have affected the state.

No, no, nope. They are shutting off power to aged infrastructure. This is the one time a global warming culprit is using global warming to gain sympathy. They refuse to update extremely aged and damaged power lines. The same lines that can fall due to normal hazardous weather. Newer ones are not in as much risk.

Look at a map of the blackouts. They aren't large grids. They are specific small areas.

> high price communities where everything works, surrounded by large swaths of shanty towns where nothing works.

This isn't something that's only attributable to CA. Economically depressed towns relatively close to highly concentrated areas of wealth are all over America. Also, the scale of poverty in places like the south, Appalachia, the rust belt, rural America often meets or exceeds that of third-world countries.

Oh there's other poor places, it's okay guys. Let them keep shooting up and shitting in the street.

When you dismiss it like that, you're giving up on a solution and letting it fester.

Ya except Mill Valley and Sausalito in Marin county both experienced blackouts during the most recent shut down. Both of those cities being rather wealthy.

After living in LA for a few years, it certainly does feel exactly the way you describe within the city.

But those juxtapositions are literal blocks apart from each other. The Google campus is next door to a shanty town in Venice, and their security sic the police on them for any minor infractions (or just made up ones). Very similar situation with the redevelopment downtown.

It really does give you a bleak portrait of the tolerance for inhumanity within the context liberal Capitalism. California is ostensibly as “wacky leftist” as the US gets and it’s a bleak, cruel place in many regards.

American liberals are always yelling for more “humanity”, but they keep quiet about the requirement that humanity must come at someone else’s expense. Yes, we need cheaper housing - but not here. Yes, guvment must build better jails - but not here. Yes, please run more buses - but not down my street. Yes, we must accept more refugees - but put them somewhere far away, certainly not anywhere near my child’s route to school.

Liberalism and NIMBYism are joined at the hip. Liberalism is loud and ostentatious, while NIMBYism is prosecuted quietly via the court system, lobbying, and political donations. There’s a certain poetic beauty to how both seem to coexist in the same group of people.

I’m not sure where you get those ideas? Where I live in NYC, they recently shut down a major street to cars so buses could run more easily — and the furthest left want to expand that. The left leaning people I know want to close jails, not build better ones elsewhere. We opposed an Amazon campus in our backyard specifically because it would drive up rents — and the furthest left want rent control.

Liberals are obviously not a monolith of only ethically consistent people, but I definitely don’t see the pervasive NIMBYism.

The Left in New York City are largely socialists by now, who had enough of a long-standing working-class tradition to avoid allying with liberal NIMBYs.

He's honestly pretty spot on about liberals, as the spot on the spectrum in between conservatives and social democrats.

Maybe so, but I don’t read the original comment as a critique of centrist Democrats in particular. (I also don’t think centrist Democrats are alone in the gap between their professed values and their actual ones.)

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Here the same people who yell for affordable housing also go to court to block construction of new towers. The same people who complain about buses stuck in traffic on W 86th St also prevent the introduction of universal metered parking and congestion pricing.

But my original comment was mainly addressing the NIMBYism in California. Look at SF: it's a low-rise city of sky-high demand and prices. Who's preventing new construction? The same local NIMBYs who enjoy rising property values due to severely restricted supply of land that can be built on.

I until very recently lived downtown, where congestion pricing would actually take effect, and the people most in support were again the furthest left.

SF does seem to be more NIMBYish, but I’m not sure why you think it’s a microcosm of liberalism.

"Liberalism" is the "hipsters" of modern leftist politics...

I think you are conflating entirely two different concepts. NIMBYism is a unique California value and closely related to California history rather than a true left ideology. In fact, leftist policies are for more denser urban development, public transit etc as you can see in European countries

I would take away the opposite conclusion. Left-wing government isn’t the solution in California any more than it is in developing countries and failed states; it is the problem.

Public utility districts have been very successful in places they have been permitted to operate, including in the state capital, Sacramento.

Of course PGE spends millions every year lobbying against them.

It’s the same in Brazil. We are basically converging to become Rio de Janeiro minus the natural beauty. Well and the shantytowns in rio have better views.

Can you describe the basis for your "Google sic the police on the homeless" comment? There was a shitty local magazine article about this but my personal experience does not match this perception at all.

I’m friends with housing activists in LA who work on these issues. There was a similar thing with Google Maps cars conveniently showing up right after violent camp dispersals in my old neighborhood.

Here’s an article about it from back in 2015:

https://pando.com/2015/06/22/we-got-geeks/

California has one of the lowest average IQs of any state. If you remove the tech workers and the old-time republicans, there's not many big brains left to go around.

[Citation Needed]

This was the first google result. California is 48th. And that of course includes all the smarties in silicon valley who I assume bring up the average.

https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/we-compared-average-iq-sc...

Wonder what the ranked order looks like for "% of population attending or employed by a university".

And the Asian immigrants. People from south of the border are bringing the average down hard.

Nothing personal, but this kind of comment really grind my gears. When I read a claim like the one made in that comment, I take that as a lead and am grateful that someone brought light to that POV so I can explore more, e.g. freaking google it.

The [Citation Needed] approach would make all comments boringly long and harder to write, all conversations white-paper like, which isn't bad of course, but has its place.

How many times I felt lazy and just dropped my comment because I knew that the [Citation Needed] comments were bound to come, and while I have a good insight about the subject, I had no will to spend more energy on that nor any inclination for taking flak from lazier unconstructive commenters.

“If you remove the smart people, IQ goes down”

We've banned this account for using HN for ideological battle. This site exists for intellectual curiosity, and one of those things destroys the other.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This never goes over well when I say it but, on my most recent trip through America driving across 5 States, much of what we drove through did not look like what I would consider developed. For hundreds of miles the only towns we'd come across had nothing but fast food places a gas station and usually multiple churches and then just houses, no schools, no grocery stores, no hospitals or doctors, though usually a pharmacy, and not much else for at least a hundred miles in any direction from these places. Between these would just be highways dotted with billboards telling you not to kill yourself or smoke meth. You could always see the 'towns' coming about 50 miles away though, first you'd see the massive McDonald's sign in the distance, then maybe a Burger king sign or a gas station sign, a massive monolith spiking 100m into the sky. A lot of it felt really bleak.

I wonder why that never goes well, because it's an incredibly offensive and out of touch statement.

Yes there are schools, pharmacies, and grocery stores, you just didn't see them because you were passing through.

That is nowhere near the level of homeless shooting up in the street, it's just a small community.

Of course you see signs and gas stations, because you are driving through the towns on the highway...

And, where else are people "driving through" supposed to get fuel, exactly? If not for the towns they pass through? Good grief...

Well they must have been hidden from the mapbook and Google maps too, because couldn't find them there either.

That's because most of the country is wild and rural which non americans do not seem to get. This is a good thing and something without precedent in Europe where the wilderness has been stamped out

That's simply a function of usable land. There is very little desert in Europe. Much of the Alps and the Nordic region is "wild". Much of Southeastern Spain is fairly desolate.

Much of the US "wild" area is simply not economically useful for major settlement, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest and far Northern California.

A drive through rural France looked much the same as a drive through Texas, in terms of how often you'd encounter a town and the setup for a particular town. The major difference being that the transition from major city to rural is a lot faster since France has restricted urban sprawl quite a bit more.

You just described most of the Midwest. That geographic structure is just the product of the large agricultural sector. But on many objective measures (home ownership rates, homelessness rates, poverty rates, median purchasing power, school quality, homicide rates), Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, Minnesota, etc., significantly outperform California or New York.

Bleak is a relative term. I’d call it “bleak” if young people have to leave the place where they grew up just to be able to afford a house in a decent school district. Where people are tied together by little more than what industry they work in or maybe the fancy gym they go to.

How can you compare states with little population to a state with 40 mn people ? Of course numbers will look better in a smallish state. Also, how do these states perform when it comes to healthcare access, LGBT rights, environmental changes, renewable energy, immigrant rights ? School quality ? Comparing mostly white states with a state that has 50% 1st or 2nd generation migrants, with non native English speaking parents ? Homicide rates ? SF is on track to have the lowest homicide rate in 50 years. On average, California performs far better than any of the states you mentioned and that is proven by the population differences

> How can you compare states with little population to a state with 40 mn people ? Of course numbers will look better in a smallish state.

These are percentage rates, not absolute numbers, so it's not obvious why the numbers will look better in a smaller state.

> On average, California performs far better than any of the states you mentioned and that is proven by the population differences

California performs worse on many metrics even accounting for demographic differences. For example, in Iowa, Hispanic children score an average of 273 in NAEP's 8th grade math test. In California, they score just 262. In Texas it's 274. Median income for hispanic-headed households in California is about $46,000, versus $48,000 in Iowa. (Adjusted for cost of living, Hispanic households in Iowa have 30% more purchasing power than Hispanic households in California.)

The Midwest is a lot more diverse than people realize - this comment just betrays a lack of knowledge. The Midwest is a lot more than Iowa cornfields and American flags.

And even Iowa Cornfields are host to some LGBT-friendly communities.

Please don't start doing this on HN again. Nationalistic and regional flamewar is off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279406

> Small enclaves of super-rich

Indeed, and these same people often constantly prattling on about progressive politics.

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