Comment by csdreamer7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csdreamer7 | Hacker News Reader

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Bullet train: despite earthquakes and mountains, Japan runs a pretty decent network of high speed trains. Politics, well documented by the papers, show how a high speed train had repeated stops added to it, and was slowed down in California to the speed of a regular train while costing much more.

Despite adding an additional 1.0% tax to fund mental health, homelessness has only increased in California. Efforts to reduce prop 13 inflated property values are feeble at best. Senior and junior water rights, where senior land holders can extract as much water as they want over juniors, based on an arbitrary date chosen in law, have not been reformed. CalPers is very poorly funded compared to other states.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of California's success is due to government. Banning non-competes and funding a strong system of community colleges and state universities for example. But other states are 'kinda' adopting non-compete bans and the state has cut funding years ago to those institutions, which makes me question the value of my tax dollars when a house built just after WW2 costs over a million dollars, K-12 is below the national average, and the public universities here cost much more than well regarded ones in other states. The state is not dealing with it's problems.

I left a while ago and I feel better for it.

Edit: grammar and a few words.

Another good point of comparison for the bullet train system is Spain. California is currently projecting to spend $105 billion for 520 miles of track. By contrast Spain built over 2000 miles of track for $72 billion.

I'm not sure this fully tracks. A type of public transit failed in California that succeeded elsewhere. If that is the reference, why can't I point to the tech industry and use it as positive evidence?

And, most of the bad things you are bringing up are happening all throughout the US. Just feels too convenient to say that the tech industry is in spite of the government, but the failures are because of it.

> I'm not sure this fully tracks. A type of public transit failed in California that succeeded elsewhere. If that is the reference, why can't I point to the tech industry and use it as positive evidence?

You asked for an example of another government doing better. I gave you a recent one by California's government. Japan is perhaps the best one, but many other countries do trains a lot better than California despite all the hype and money they put in it's mediocre result. It was a very open question that your follow up questions are trying to pivot to something else.

> And, most of the bad things you are bringing up are happening all throughout the US.

Please read my post again. Being below average in K-12 among the states, despite the high taxes and land values, is not happening all throughout the US.

> Just feels too convenient to say that the tech industry is in spite of the government, but the failures are because of it.

Please read what I wrote carefully above, I did not agree with that fully. My argument was more of the recent CA govt has not been addressing it's problems and the tech industry's success was due to good decisions in the past (and the weather). The recent CA govt actions has been poor. Calling the recent tech boom in spite of government policies is something I can somewhat agree with.

Ah, apologies. This will be a goal post shift, from the question I asked. What I meant was specifically one that does better at the things California is good at.

Think of it as me asking if a tennis player is training well. You want to compare to other tennis players, not cyclists.

You may be able to get some cross learning, of course. But I'm specifically questioning if California's successes are in spite of government. Not if their failures are because of it. These are two questions and it is not clear to me that they would have the same answer.

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