Why Is California the Way It Is? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is California the Way It Is?

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

86 pointstrevin72 comments

If you think about the structure and condition of SF Bay, as well as the abilities and limitations of sailing vessels at the time- San Francisco was the only place in all of Northern California that was realistically accessible for a Spanish settlement supported by supplies coming from at sea.

The author is incorrect about the other areas in SF Bay that could be "alternatives for bay area capitals." The rest of the areas marked are naturally very shallow tidal mud flats and peat bogs, and are only nowadays navigable by boats due to a combination of dredging, and building raised structures out into the bay with landfill.

SF is the only viable location for a protected natural deepwater port, which is likely why the Spanish settled there first. There may be a few small rocky points on the Marin peninsula that would have worked for docking a ship (e.g. near Sausulito), but these had very little build-able flat land, and lack reliable drinking water- a big problem Marin faces to this day. Those areas also face massive tidal currents right up to the shore, which would be dangerous for an unpowered sailing vessel.

As an SF Bay sailor, this is what I know about deeply... the author getting it so wrong makes me question the reasoning in the rest of the article, which I know nothing about.

Interesting topic, but strangely formatted article. I wonder if it was AI generated in different sections due to the repetition and disjointed statements.

For example, some of the bullet list are sentence fragments cut across multiple bullets. Other times they contradict. For example, the Central Valley is especially flat, but it also contains many mountains.

Based on their bio, the author claims to be an AI educator, amongst basically everything else.

>Understand the biggest problems and how to solve them: AI; automation; GeoHistory; the future of education, healthcare, violence, nation-states, communities, energy, transportation, and more

If I were to guess, this looks like a lightly curated AI subscription blog of listicles. I wonder what their search engine optimization game looks like to drive traffic. I wonder how they pick topics?

It's a twitter thread he turned into a blog post.

That style of bullet use is recommended by the Plain English campaign:

https://www.plainenglish.co.uk/how-to-write-in-plain-english...

I am not familiar, so that may be the case. However, I think the bullet use goes beyond what that linked document describes.

Sometimes the bullets include:

• A statements and a question. Why?

• Only a dependent sentence clause,

• Like this

• Which is odd.

• Sometimes complete sentences are punctuated.

• Sometimes complete sentences are not punctuated

Sometimes the lists used bullets instead of commas, hyphens, and semicolons.

Sometimes the same lists also contained explicit commas, hyphens, and semicolons within points.

The effect, at least for me, was a feeling that the format had little underlying rhyme or reason. Kind of like an ad-hoc ramble

That's pretty much my impression any time I read an Axios article. They took a normally formatted article with paragraphs, and separated out random sentences and phrases into bullet points. They try to introduce some cognitive organization around the concepts of "what happened" and "why it matters", which isn't terrible, but often it just seems like bullet points inserted at random.

Not "premium" so could not read the last of the article.

Highways now seem to be a driving force for the populations in the outlands. Perhaps small towns along the highways get a few restaurants and gas stations for business while small towns not on the highway disappear.

I noticed this looking at a satellite photo of Nebraska recently — the towns lit up following a major East/West interstate across the state.

Maybe you can read the whole thing here: https://twitter.com/tomaspueyo/status/1641853715354091532

It's hilarious that you provide twitter link for that reason. Twitter, for people not logged in, shows just a scrap of text and a graphic. It doesn't even tell if it's a thread or how long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Los_Angeles#Industr...

It's a long story of transaction costs along the way.

> I noticed this looking at a satellite photo of Nebraska recently — the towns lit up following a major East/West interstate across the state.

At least for the midwest - specifically west of Chicago, the way I always heard it was that the towns are fairly equally spaced (look at a night-time light map of the US) because there needed to be a rewatering / refueling place for steam engines, so towns popped up at the range of steam engine service intervals.

I bet the towns existed on a nice line (the rail line) first, and then it made sense to put the interstate parallel to the existing towns.

Yes this sort of things fascinates me - the links from the past explain how fundamental things are structured today. A Harvard professor has a few books about this and talks specifically about how railroads stops from way back when are responsible for much of the layout of suburbia today. I'd imagine much of the placement of things is based on railroads from the steam era.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/388804.Outside_Lies_Magi...

Fun related story re: links to the past https://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html

Even away from the railroads towns would space "roughly" equally if there was nothing else to distinguish them, because they'd be travel destinations for those around them. Something like a day's travel between, which becomes more dense over time, with places appearing roughly at midpoints.

Yeah. If you fly over the Midwest on a clear day, a lot of it is almost a cookie-cutter pattern.

Driving those grids off-freeway (and even off-highway) you come through town and town again, and sometimes it's really clear why there's a town (say, you pass over a river or by a lake in or next to the town) and others are more like what was said "a town that exists only so the map won't be too empty".

My favorite part of it is road jogging: https://aewinc.com/why-do-roads-jog-part-1-of-3/ - because a curved earth can't take flat maps and 1 mile squares without something breaking.

(part 2 https://aewinc.com/why-do-roads-jog-part-2-of-3/ and part 3 https://aewinc.com/finally-why-do-roads-jog-at-some-intersec... as they didn't link well)

The distance a horse can travel in a day (25-40 miles) is another common distance between towns.

Many of California's original cities grew up around Missions, which were constructed to be roughly a day's journey on horseback apart.

https://www.visitcalifornia.com/experience/california-missio...

It's the equivalent of towns being built on waterways in the past. The interstate brings commerce and tourists, and lets you travel from place to place more easily, so it makes sense that people tend to build close to them.

A large part of west Nebraska is known as the “sand hills” it’s not very fertile mainly cattle ranchers are out there. It is interesting that 30 miles or so east of where sand hills start is some very good farm land, but go west into the sand hills you risk blow out if you try to do anything with the soil (basically if you uproot some grass it will create a patch of sand, over time the wind will make the patch of sand bigger and bigger). In fact sometimes people put stuff like used tires in the spots to help prevent blowouts from getting bigger. Another fun fact about sand hills is that when it rains it replenishes the underground Ogallala Aquifer which is a pretty amazing source of water, one of biggest in the world, and very important for irrigation ect. Anyways, I think that geography has a lot to do with eastern side being more populated.

[1] Sandhills: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhills_(Nebraska)

[2] Ogallala Aquifer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

In Nebraska, the towns aren't following the interstate. That's the Oregon Trail. Why does the Oregon Trail follow that path? It's the Platte River which provides convenient access to water while traveling.

So the river was there first, then the trail, then the railroads, then national highways, and then finally the interstates. The towns were mostly established at the same time as the railroad.

I like the simplicity and map-centric focus of this. It leads me to wonder... why can't early education work like this? History classes were always sloooow, looong death marches through bland facts where, as a child, big picture context is rarely established. You're just being dragged through a forest, one tree after another, rather than getting a helicopter bird's eye view of it first.

Since history is an easy example, imagine if each week of class for a given subject started with a fun, grokkable, bite-sized overview like this, with key milestones+landmarks+maps+visual devices laid clear. You get a full story quickly, and then the teacher can spend the next few classes rewinding to go a little deeper on each major topic.

Then, students can pick from <1 of N> ancillary/related topics in that "big idea" to explore on their own and come up with a little presentation of their own in class.

Tangent, but I just wish modern education could see the value in modern content and reverse engineer more interesting lesson plans from it.

FWIW my middle school history classroom 20 years ago (gasp when did that happen) probably had more maps hanging on the walls than the geography classroom. We had maps for every historical period we learned about. It was pretty neat.

It still took me well into my 20’s to realize that history happens in parallel and all those ancient civilizations were just countries existing next to each other. They didn’t come one after another in a steady succession or anything like that.

Do kids these days not get maps and stories anymore?

No, they only get a few website links and jazzed up flash-card style online games.

Books, maps, and chalkboards are a thing of the past…

Probably because memorizing/regurgitating facts/data was straightforward and easy to quantify performance. (And was arguably more important in the absence of the Web and Google.)

As a result of this, memorization is also what does well on standardized testing, and guess what’s prioritized above all else in the modern US school system? Test scores. Little else matters to schools so long as students are getting good enough test scores.

This isn’t very conducive to quality education, unfortunately.

I'm not sure there's a great answer. The situation before school systems were forced to quantify performance as much wasn't perfect either. And there's a lot to suggest that standardized testing for college admissions improves equity rather than the other way around.

> You're just being dragged through a forest, one tree after another, rather than getting a helicopter bird's eye view of it first.

Because the adults don't have consensus over the big picture.

Think about modern events, if you said something about the resolution of a political outcome that either hasn't reached an outcome or it happened over the last 2 years, you are invalidating half of the population and invalidating yourself from it too. And I’m not just talking about elections, I’m referring to territories and everything.

And the reality is that there is almost never a decisive outcome about that resolves the conflict. A bigger conflict happens and prior grievances are put to the way side. The people don't feel that way.

I routinely meet people that say they’re from Mexico, but are referring to a long established city in California that Mexico lost 170 years ago. And I ask some of my Mexican friends about that person and some invalidate their activism and others agree. Never saw that before living in California.

so, talking about some events that occurred is safer than saying the outcome. the book doesn't get rewritten over and over again, just a safe way of teaching something gains consensus. How many parents complained, oh zero, I guess we’re good now.

There's some truth to that. It's a lot more straightforward to have kids memorize the names of Kings and the dates of long-ago battles than to delve into colonial policies of the British Empire or how the US has justified its various wars.

> And the reality is that there is almost never a decisive outcome about that resolves the conflict. A bigger conflict happens and prior grievances are put to the way side. The people don't feel that way.

> I routinely meet people that say they’re from Mexico, but are referring to a long established city in California that Mexico lost 170 years ago. And I ask some of my Mexican friends about that person and some invalidate their activism and others agree. Never saw that before living in California.

/me laughs in European

My country used to be Celtic. Then it was Roman. Then for a little bit it was a country. Then it was Frankish. Then Holy Roman. Then a little bit Italian and a lot Austrian. Then French for a while. At some point the Ottomans invaded the whole thing and didn’t really hold on, but that’s how Europe got croissants and coffee. The 20th century was fun, we were ~6 different countries in 100 years if you don’t count the war occupations …

The kids can handle history. It’s ok.

But there's the rub. What is real "history" and what is revisionist history indoctrinating students based on a politicized narrative? Schools officials are elected and so school district boards, county boards of education, and the state secretary of education can't push curriculum that most parents disagree with. Otherwise those elected officials will be voted out.

Your justification for your conclusion that there is no such thing as consensus seems to be that some people in California insist they live in Mexico.

But isn’t there, in fact, overwhelming consensus that this person lives in California?

There’s a guy who lives under an overpass near my house who thinks he is Jesus Christ but it doesn’t seem particularly useful to draw many conclusions from his claim.

it’s not a justification it’s an example of something that will never be resolved

It is an obscure opinion but it is easy to see how it will be less obscure as the population changes

it lends more weight to just talking about battles that happened instead of policy decisions

Fair example, then. I can’t help thinking that these people are kooks but I’m sure they think I’m a kook. (Maybe at long last, we have uncovered the consensus: kooks all the way down?)

Maybe you have a better vision for education, but so do a lot of other people. And yet edtech startups crash and burn over and over and over.

There’s something intractable about solving problems that are so deeply entangled in society and culture, and yet everyone seems to have a first-thought idea that seems appealing.

What I'm suggesting doesn't require a startup, just better media assets for teachers to be effective rather than JUST massive textbooks and antiquated approaches to curriculums.

Unfortunately, someone has to produce those better media assets. And the people who can do a good job of that mostly don't work for free. So it may not require a startup, but it does require something - some company, or nonprofit, or government agency.

Right, understand you weren't suggesting a complete overhaul of all of education.

But even a textbook change is a huge change. Right now we have a Florida state law resulting in dictionaries getting pulled from school libraries. Texas schoolboards effectively make textbook and curriculum decisions for the rest of the US.

Education is a political football in the US, and always has been, but especially now. In other parts of the world, it varies - but you can bet that Turkish textbooks don't cover what happened in 1915 in the same way that a Greek textbook might.

And so the status quo is very difficult to change.

> why can't early education work like this?

Early education is not really about education but about ensuring that ideally both parents can work (again) and hence produce taxes and increase rent.

It was originally also about making sure that a 13 year old was equipped with some basic skills and knowledge that would help them successfully navigate society, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Literacy and numeracy are key to an organized society, which also produces taxes and increased rent.

Reminds me of a quip I heard once [0] : (sigh) "History is just one damn thing after another."

[0] Recounted by Maurice Herlihy. Well known for his contributions to computer science, but under-recognized for his gentle sense of humor.

FWIW I remember literally making a physical map of CA elevation like this in primary school. Only went to a middle of the pack school in CA too.

Growing up in NJ during my day you spent the first 12 years learning about how amazing pilgrims and Christopher Colombus were, over and over again, until suddenly you hit highschool and the teachers go "lol jk".

You'd be interested in Annales historiography:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school

A good teacher can already do that. Nothing is stopping it.

There are books like 'Historical Atlas' that shows lots of maps threw world history.

This what my school actually did have as the main book.

But its also pretty challenging as going threw specific periods is part of what you have to teach.

I am a big fan of Raymond Chandler, and it’s super interesting to read his books set in LA (which are most of them.) Set in the 30s and 40s, they portray a city multiple orders of magnitude smaller than today. The area between Downtown and Santa Monica was basically rural.

Here’s a cool documentary on the city during his time: https://youtu.be/-MYY4CxG_GQ?si=P1g1k0h-6W0CZtaX

Also reflecting the racial attitudes of the time - Asian/Latino/Black residents were depicted - sometimes sympathetically but as a rule, as persons unfortunate to be the race that they were. A stark contrast to the current melting pot, much more integrated and diverse, and where you can see such ethnicities accepted as a given in society (police/law enforcement, prominent businessmen, cultural icons, and in top tiers of government at judges, politicians, etc)

Thanks, interesting doc, real life Chinatown.

If you like Chandler, you must listen to the six 90-minute BBC radio adaptations, with Ed Bishop as Marlowe from the 1970s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BBC_Presents%3A_Philip_Mar...

Stream or download:

https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Raymond_Cha...

  Cool, retro, atmospheric and crisp. This is not casual 
  listening, you have to pay attention to every name and 
  plot twist. Better than Gould (not difficult), Mitchum and 
  even Bogart, Ed Bishop is the best Marlowe. Perhaps the 
  femmes fatales do not come close to Bacall - who can? - 
  but there are delightful female performances of banality, 
  calculation and evil. Pour yourself a big one, turn the 
  lights down, relax on the couch, and prepare to lose 
  yourself in 90 minutes of perfect noir.

P.S. There was a BBC second series with Toby Stevens as Marlowe, so not these, accept no substitute for Bishop, but they are free to download:

https://archive.org/details/BBCMarlowe

I lived in the Presidio of San Francisco for almost 10 years. One of the best places I've ever lived in my life.

What do you like about living there?

Not the parent but, although I am usually staying in another part of town, it's nice. Near Golden Gate Park, the beach, the coast along the Golden Gate, the bridge itself, pretty close to the Marina and Haight-Ashbury.

I'm usually around the Moscone because events which is one of the areas of town I don't care for that much but definitely see the attraction of the Presidio area.

You're living in a national park, but also 15 minutes walking from civilization.

Quiet, safe, neighbors all know each other and hang out. Quick access to Inner Richmond and Marina for food. Walk to Off the Grid (pre COVID) on Thursdays and Sundays. Presidio downtown shuttle takes you to BART/SOMA in 20-30 minutes.

I lived there for 13 years.... loved my officer house

Ah, time for the obligatory Wendover video!

_Why California Has So Many Problems [video] (2023)_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ngms6iRa14

Nifty hillshades. Too bad some of them aren't credited. Also, this "new" post is just an unrolled Twitter thread from 2023 (thanks to Google Lens for pointing it out).

Do you happen to have a link to that thread?

From @jeffbee in another comment chain:

https://twitter.com/tomaspueyo/status/1641853715354091532

Read Guns, Germs, and Steel

It was one the last major settled/invaded geographically ideal area at the end of the expanding Western frontier that filtered pioneers more than anywhere else from all over the rest of the world (pre-airplane). Now, it's a super-organism with extreme concentrations of wealth, talent, academia, and industry where each legs supports the other with people vying to stay part of it without being pushed out by big money from around the world. Maybe I'll be able to afford a house where my grandparents or parents lived but they're in the $2-4M USD range now.

Most people who move to SF tend to be their own special form of crazy who cannot afford to live there but insist on an irrational, unsustainable lifestyle anyhow.

Having grown up (mostly) in Sacramento, this feels like it ought to be common knowledge - the confluence of the rivers, Sutter's fort, the mill in Coloma, the gold rush, and the riverboat connection to San Francisco are the story of the city itself. But of course, nobody living elsewhere would have reason to care about any of that! - so it's interesting to read an account from an outside perspective.

Sutter's Mill, Sutter's Fort, and the Railroad Museum were popular Elementary School Field trip destinations in the 80's.

And the 90s and 2000s

4th gen Californian here, I lived in all three locations, Bay Area, LA and central valley. The author is right on a few things, and didn't address LA(blocked by paywall I guess). I'll go through them one by one.

San Francisco - One thing that the author missed is the post railroad growth. This was mainly due to a heavy military presence there(presidio, and a navy base at hunters point), my Grandfather who was in WWII was hanging out in SF alot waiting for deployments in the pacific theatre during the 1940's. The Navy and it being a shipping hub sustained the city until we can get into the 1960's which led to the hippie movement(Jack Kerouac and the beat movement before that) and people started flocking there and gave it its current liberal counterculture vibe. In addition the climate is very mild and I personally think its the best in the state(southern california is a bit too hot).

Los Angeles - I don't know what the author has to say about it, but you have the hollywood production houses starting in the 1920's, and also aerospace being a huge presence down there starting a bit before WWII, lockheed(skunkworks), Boeing and many more contractors flourished before and during the cold war, in addition Edwards airforce base was a huge draw for jobs as well and created alot of towns in the inland empire. Lastly the LA area is also a huge transportation hub as my Great Great grandfather(Santa Fe raiload vice president, moved to LA to run things in that area). Universities here include UCLA, USC and Clairemont colleges which led to a slew of talented people moving to the area. Why there are so many people in this area now is quite obvious, the weather is close to best in the world, but water is quite scarce and southern California has always had to supplement its water supply from the northern part of the state.

Central Valley - The 20th century was abnormally wet and rainy compared to California's natural climate which had hundred+ year droughts. But given the ample sunshine and enough rain it is basically one giant farm from Redding all the way to Bakersfield. The weather in the summer is really unbearable with triple digits being very common and humidity in the southern part of the valley. Read the grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck as it portrays the culture when it was starting out quite accurately - meaning huge farms exploiting farmworkers etc. There are not really any of the things in the 2 other areas, aerospace, military or world class universities so its population has been alot less, but that is changing as the coastal areas are becoming too expensive and the fastest growing areas are now in the central valley.

For LA, there's another factor that you left out: Oil. There's a fair bit of oil under the LA basin (hence the tar pits), and the commercialization of that is what made LA the boom town it became. The aerospace and military presences followed the oil.

My grandma got a royalty check for the oil under her west LA house every month. It was just a few bucks but it amused me that they still did it as late as the 1990s.

The growth of LA was also kickstarted by the 1906 SF earthquake, which burnt down ~80% of SF. If you look at the population graph of LA, it tripled between 1900 and 1910, probably due to the relocation of so many people from SF to LA. Here [0] is a paper that discusses the effects of the 1906 earthquake on population growth on the west coast.

[0] https://kaerikss.faculty.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...

You forgot the genesis of the counterculture movement —- anyone who was discharged from the military for being gay was processed through the base in San Francisco and then sent on their way, often with no money. So a lot of them stayed in SF and formed a community to support each other.

Had never heard of that. What is somewhat common knowledge is alot of the counter cultural movement that was going on in SF and the bay area in general was due to a number of factors, protests against the war being one, experimentation with acid being another, see Timothy Leary, CIA(acid experiments in SF with unsuspecting johns seeing prostitutes etc). Also the music scene(grateful dead, etc) which tied into LSD and mushrooms were heavily influenced by each other and started in SF, along with LA and a few other places.

Gold, oil, lack of cold.

tons of coast line, massive amounts of government investment from WW2 on

Government investment probably due to its strategic position during WW2.

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