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Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I feel this is not only a California problem but the whole US. The country seems to be incapable of or unwilling to address fundamental problems. Instead you are getting endless political fights while infrastructure is falling apart. The contrasts in Silicon Valley and LA are extreme. You have some of the richest people in the world living in beautiful mansions with cities around them full of homeless people, roads full of potholes and power outages. Same for health care. No matter if you like socialized medicine or free markets, nobody should be able to justify the current state of things but nothing gets done.

Sometimes it feels like the whole country is just turning into a weird reality show.

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Yeah, I'm concerned that what we're seeing around the country is institutional decay.

We've been increasingly replacing competence with people who tell us what we want to hear. Entertainment over substance. Short-term, feel good solutions over thoughtful long-term solutions.

Now the results of that are starting to manifest.

Always an appropriate time to remember that Rome didn't fall in a day. We seem to be experiencing the proverbial frog-boil IMHO.

that frog only exists within proverbs! real frogs jump out!

Mars and beyond anyone?

Eventually we'd also turn Mars into California.

Is there any place that isn’t like this?

What fundamental problems? Compared to the majority of human civilisations and most of human history the US is a utopia. It isn't perfect, but the people claiming they are 'trying to to fix fundamental problems' are potentially more of a threat than the problems themselves.

But predicting the end of times is fun and I'll throw in a take. The US as a nation is fabulously wealthy. That obscures the importance of wealth creation and people are distracted from it as a goal. The US political and social narrative is clearly shifting to focus more on wealth/power distribution than wealth creation. There are good reasons for that but it is a lot less fun that the 60s/70s/80s/90s where ultra-rapid wealth creation was the order of the day.

If big policies are adopted or persisted in that destroy wealth, and I cite things like the endless wars & associated loss of liberties or the response to to '08 financial crisis, then the situation will deteriorate.

Would you not call the health care situation a fundamental problem? A large portion of society is at constant risk of financial ruin if they have a serious illness, a lot of of people stay in their jobs mainly to keep their insurance which reduces entrepreneurial activity and a lot of people can’t afford any health care. I would call that a problem that other countries already have solved.

I don’t like it when people are told how good they have it compared to other countries or people in the past. It sounds very condescending. This line is also never used to tell wealthy executives or shareholders how good they have it and they should maybe stop trying to concentrate wealth on themselves. Only the little guy gets to hear this.

A large portion of society is at constant risk of death if they have a serious illness. The range of things people can recover from in 2019 is astounding.

There are always going to be good uses for resources poured into healthcare. It is, without exaggeration, a bottomless pit of ways to spend money. The US does a terrible job of managing healthcare but that is not a fundamental problem; it is horrible but superficial. They could probably get double the quality for the money spent, or halve spending for the same outcome or something. However, there will always be something else needed in healthcare. The goalpost will shift as it has many times before.

> I don’t like it when people are told how good they have it compared to other countries or people in the past. It sounds very condescending. This line is also never used to tell wealthy executives or shareholders ...

In my post that you responded to I am advocating leaving executives and shareholders penniless, ruined and subject to lawsuits. That is what I wanted to happen after '08. Maybe I was too subtle in my allusion.

The fact that basic medicine (insulin) is just left to be provided by the not-really-free market is very telling.

And this is strictly a problem of lack of imagination, political will and compromise.

But that's just the symptoms of a deeper festering problem, namely that of increasing political polarization.

Nowhere is perfect, but I definitely think California is uniquely bad for the US.

My pet theory is that small units govern themselves nest, and I'd support splitting California into as many smaller states as possible.

Of course, a state where building a 4 story housing building takes on average math.inf will not get it together to dissolve itself in anyone's lifetime.

So I guess things will just continue on this track.

Illinois is the poster child for taking this too far.

https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/too-much-government-i...

  I'd support splitting California into as many smaller states as possible

You don't cure a cancer by just cutting it into smaller pieces.

Among other things, that would just replicate CA's legacy of inept representation in the Senate many times over.

I don't think "cancer" is the right metaphor.

I think of government as something very complicated. So the metaphor to me is "you solve a complicated problem by dividing it into smaller simpler problems".

it's funny because what you describe sounds accurate of the megametrapolis of the global south. Terrible public infrastructure the rich avoid, and the poor suffer through. Sad the U.S. seems to be moving that way having lived on the investment of the 30-70s.

Yes, it's important to remember that the Gini coefficients of Florida (leans red) and California (blue) are 46th and 47th most unequal in the country respectively (0.485 and 0.490). Texas (red) isn't much better, at 39th with a Gini of 0.480. Inequality isn't a liberal/conservative, blue/red, or California-specific issue: it's a U.S. issue.

Looking at states is probably a bad approach (too broad). Do you have the same calculation on a per-metro basis? SFO, Austin, LA, Dallas, Orlando, Miami, Houston, San Antonio?

People in US are allergic to putting money into common pools (be it taxes, healthcare, licenses, insurance, infrastructure), even if the aim is better quality of living for everyone. Its EVIL as long as someone else has potential of gaining anything from said payment.

F you I got mine, mah freedoms, communism, handouts, those are the recurring 'arguments'. Take this YT dude learning that in order to run business you need to ... actually get permits, license and pay taxes, and all the comments under the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR5n3v9Sih8 Its a never ending stream of "move to another state", "bad government", "stealing from small guy" while dude hacks Salvage title wrecks on his curb (or illegal condemned structure) and flips them to unsuspecting victims. No license, no registered business, no insurance, no liability. 6 months later he is still at it, whining about receiving permanent injunction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XNHVKSjzOY and contemplating car raffles (apparently being taken down for running illegal gambling sounds better than paying taxes) and tax dodging schemes (charities, non profits).

I just mentioned in another thread that The most fundamental issue US needs to solve for inequality in the US is....whether US can continue to allow corporations to reap the benefits of a strong democracy coupled with the most vibrant economy, while at the same time, bankrupt the communities by continuing to ship jobs overseas and avoid paying any sort of taxes back to the communities where they make a profit.

There are only two parties in the US right now. And one is for globalization. And the other is for stronger US labor unions.

I don’t think there are actually two parties but more like two factions of the same party. One is a little more right leaning maybe but neither is willing or has the courage to address inequality.

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