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Comment by wustangdan | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry I'm not following you. Are you saying that what the US has now is well-functioning social institutions with mutual accountability?

Since they oppose this by trying to pull funding from them.

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The US is astoundingly well-functioning and most US citizens astoundingly lucky by historical and/or global standards, and certain kinds of minimally functional mutual accountability are part of the reason why we've gotten this far.

There's also plenty of room for improvement of course (including learning from other industrial social democracies as well as recent internal issues), so that's relative, but the most reasonable perspective to start from is that we're all ridiculously lucky. Without substantial appreciation for that fact we're quite likely to wreck institutions that have gotten us here.

Astoundingly well functioning maybe if you ignore literally every single other developed nation on the planet.

See the parenthetical in the 2nd paragraph of the comment you're replying to.

You're probably correct if you don't consider Southern Europe and Eastern Germany to be developed.

The US government is the bloodiest, most indebted, and most imprisoning institution on the planet.

And I agree, it is astoundingly well-functioning at it.

Republicans have run on a platform of "Government is terrible at it's job" for 50 years, and every time they get elected they work really hard to prove it.

I have a hard time combining this sentiment with my lived experience in California.

Regardless, what's the alternative? Have corporations run everything and only majority share holders get any say? How do you think that'll work out?

Yet, that's exactly what the "government doesn't work" crowd seems to be pushing for. It's great if you're a billionaire neo-feudalist and terrible if you're literally anyone else.

I can imagine alternatives that aren't one of a) unlimited fascist oligarchy (present) and b) unlimited corporate oligarchy (your proposed alternative).

I'm not following you. Are you saying we implement this alternative by removing income tax and replacing it with consumption tax, that corporations will run everything and only share holders get a say?

I'm not sure what this tax issue has to do with the right to vote?

Don't follow the fact that only billionaire feudalists are allowed to think their government isn't working well? Why can't ordinary citizens be unhappy?

No, I'm not talking about the IRS specifically, just the general "government doesn't work" sentiment.

> Don't follow the fact that only billionaire feudalists are allowed to think their government isn't working well? Why can't ordinary citizens be unhappy?

You can think a government isn't working well, but the solution is not "dismantle the government" (which would lead to corporate rule and kind of already has), it's "elect a better government".

You can't vote your way out of an oligarchy. You can destroy and replace it, or you can secede from it.

If California were particularly terrible, it wouldn't be so damn popular, and most of its problems would go away. California does have some specific policy problems, but most of what it has are popular place problems.

It also doesn't pass muster with my own lived experience. I've loved all of the 15 years I've spent in both Northern and Southern metro California, and I'd do it again.

Thousands of Californians left this last year or two and moved to Idaho. This sparked a housing crisis here in Boise, Idaho. I would assume these are left and right of center folks looking for cheaper housing and a better life.

At one point last year the median household income was $75k/year. The median house price was $525k or so. Basically this created the situation if you couldn't afford a house before the housing crisis, the $1500 to $2000 rent payments were going to eat into your income and make it harder to buy a house.

The NIMBY politics surrounding housing has got to go in California. We're beginning to get that here.

> This sparked a housing crisis here in Boise, Idaho.

How interesting. Presumably as enlightened examples of the opposite of California governance, they wouldn't have any such thing as a housing crisis caused by popularity.

Or... it could be they've had the luxury of not having popular-place problems thus far, and like everyone else are suddenly discovering that actual governance is hard.

They came here to escape California governance, I guess, but in the end just made life worse for everyone else living here.

My property taxes have more than doubled over the last decade.

NIMBYs are everywhere while the population is always growing. Did you think you would escape it, or just want to blame city slickers who like a roof over their head?

If you're defending NIMBYism with this post, it fails on many fronts.

Please read again.

People complain of Californians moving here as well, driving up costs but nobody looks at the 385 vacant AirBNB's in a town of 45k (Cedar City, UT). If you had 385 homes open up for student or family housing the rental crisis would plummet and prices would drop to normal. If they go un-filled that means they need homeowners instead of renters and will be back on the market at lesser prices because demand will drop if airbnb is limited. There should be like a set quota of airbnb's per capita (1 per 1k maybe?, and a yearly license by random lottery to see who gets a license).

So you're saying the government should regulate how you use your private property? That's an interesting idea coming from a so-called "red" state.

If you're not living in it and using it for vacation homes, it seems eminent domain makes sense.

Now this is "homes" I'm talking about, not other dense living situations like apartment buildings and hotels.

Hotels should be zoned for commercial activity. He's right about the AirBNB business model increasing homelessness.

What has increased homelessness is communities restricting new building. The homeless have no means for buying the typical AirBNB property.

Not adding supply and taking existing supply off the market both contribute to supply issues.

And I'm not sure that AirBnB avoids any particular segment of the market; it can as easily cannibalize 1bd condos as it can 4bd homes.

>The homeless have no means for buying the typical AirBNB property.

This is partially due to people buying up available housing stock to AirBNB resulting in a skewing of prices.

Many houses that would be back on the market now sit empty with no tenants for significant portions of every month thanks to that business model.

At what point is it reasonable for the major Californian cities to stop growing? Aren't there states where the entire state population could fit inside a single Californian city? Aren't there cities whose population could amount to several US states? People are complaining about California's governance, taxes, and pricing, so what's wrong with encouraging movement to other states?

A popular HN perspective would describe SF's problem as NIMBY and that we should allow developers to build without regulations like mandatory parking, but the transportation situation in SF is really bad. I feel that a city cannot just scale linearly once you pass a certain population / density threshold.

When I go to SF I expect to burn 20 minutes solely on parking or to pay very expensive parking fees for private lots. If you use any major highways in California during rush hour then expect a 30-45 min tax on your time. If people want SF to pass 1M then there needs to be a deliberate public works project to revamp the infrastructure in a massive way.

Also, do people think that building more lots would make things cheaper? London's population is ~9M, NYC is ~8.4M, Tokyo is ~14M. If London gets to 10M, is housing going to be finally affordable to UK citizens? When will Tokyo be affordable? SF is approximately 3-4x the population density of London and 3x of Tokyo. The vibe I get when driving around SF residentials is one of claustrophobic density, like the city can't afford any interstitial gaps between lots for things like trees.

> People are complaining about California's governance, taxes, and pricing, so what's wrong with encouraging movement to other states?

In short, public golf courses -- moreover -- the protection of public golf courses. That's pure NIMBYism right there. California chose golf courses over housing. Think about that.

California is popular because of its _climate_ and despite all of the batshit insane policies that have been legislated.

I'm gradually approaching retirement age and looking for a place with better climate to retire to, but everywhere I've visited - including California - has a lot of negatives that outweigh the positives of where I currently live, which (by a lot of metrics) has some of the worst climate in the nation. Despite all of that, I might still put up with additional crap elsewhere to live in a more moderate climate. Don't underestimate climate as a powerful decider for where people live.

Climate is indeed one of the reasons it's popular. That's not even remotely a counterargument against the premise that most of the state's problems are primarily from popularity rather than policy.

And "batshit policy" shouldn't be taken seriously as a charge without serious specific policy criticisms.

How do you gauge popularity of a state? I am guessing not by the net domestic migration [1], which would seem to be a natural choice in this case.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

> > Republicans have run on a platform of "Government is terrible at it's job" for 50 years, and every time they get elected they work really hard to prove it.

> I have a hard time combining this sentiment with my lived experience in California.

I have no problem at all reconciling it with my 45 years of lived experience in California. About the only good thing California Republicans did for government in that time is provide such a flagrant display of how a minority dedicated to scoring political points with no concern for the general warfare could abuse supermajority requirements as to motivate California voters to change the Constitution to make the state somewhat practically governable despite the existence of the California Republican Party by removing the legislative supermajority requirement for the annual budget.

Amen. And don't forget that some of the formative policies people are critical of now (cough Prop 13) actually stem from periods where conservatives had the pull to win elections and ballot initiatives in California.

And California's progressive lock arguably isn't even really old enough to drive.

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