Comment by benihana | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benihana | Hacker News Reader

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What happened to California? It used to be the center of counter culture, now it's biggest symbol of The Man around. It's a big terrified nanny state where everyone in charge seems to be too scared to let anyone do anything cause it might hurt them emotionally or physically.

I've never lived in California, so I may be way off, but it seems like the decline of a once defiant state is a great metaphor for the baby boomers who made it the center of the counter culture. They started off young and angry, fighting against injustice, and as they got older, the turned into the system they were fighting. They became The Man, scared of things they didn't understand and absolutely terrified of not being in control. It's like watching Citizen Kane if Charles Foster Kane was a state.

The quote "the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution," seems applicable here. Are we all doomed to repeat this fate, to fight the system, accomplish our goals, then become the system as we try to hold on to what we've made?

I think you're extrapolating a bit too much. First off, those who are regulating are not those who founded tech startups. Additionally, if the general startup credo is "Move fast and break things", well, people shouldn't be surprised if they get fined.

If these schools are charging $17K tuitions and are being fined a possible $50K, that seems like a bit of a slap on the wrist. Furthermore, a lot of these regulations are in place for a reason -- and if startups want to break regulations, then they well know they're getting into shady territory. This is hardly "nanny state" behavior -- a good deal of these infractions are warranted (FDA's shutdown of 23andme, transportation on Uber and Lyft), but it varies on a case-per-case basis. I'd much rather live in a place that aired on the side of too cautious rather than just let random folk start whatever they want, causing harm to those around them.

In this case in particular, I'm glad they're regulating this stuff. We see randoms every day applying to work at our startup who have finished these hack-bootcamp things, and they frankly just don't have what it takes to work in a professional environment.

Come to Seattle. It's a tech... nirvana. ;)

Liberal social policies (pot, marriage, choice) but fiscal conservatism (no income tax). Seattle has NIMBYism, but much less so than the bay. Get this: when rents went up, they built more apartments, and lots of them - what a concept!

South Lake Union has turned into this amazing place with incubators and Amazon and Vulcan and Bio Tech all around. Amazon, a major US tech company, has a downtown campus surrounded by apartments and places to eat! Wow! Why is that rare? No need to get mad at Google's busses that shuttle workers off to the sticks -- just put the jobs next to the people and existing transit. There are also local VCs and angels too -- but if you need to raise in SF/SV, it's just an hour away.

>when rents went up, they built more apartments, and lots of them - what a concept!

We'll see if that's still true with Murray in office (hopefully it will be).

Except no gigabit internet. Good luck trying to fuel a tech boom with slow-ass comcast internet.

Not strictly true. I have 100Mbps CondoInternet for $60/mo, and could have 1Gbps for $120/mo if my home usage justified it. Availability is somewhat limited - basically, bigger upscale buildings around downtown.

Really? That one issue makes the difference? Look out, folks. Kansas City is going to be the new tech capital of the world!

Is this rant based on, well, anything?

The "center of counter culture" was a pretty small part of the state. California has always been complicated. You could fit a half-dozen European countries in its area.

What we're reading about here is a modest regulatory action taken by the state to keep an eye on a bunch of brand-new vocational education programs that are taking advantage of a gold rush atmosphere to charge people a shit-ton of money for education that is... well, unproven is the kindest thing I can say about it.

The bureaucrats were pretty clear that as long as these programs are working to comply with existing regulations, they're not going to do anything dramatic. And this is happening at a time where there's a lot of reasonable concern about naive students getting cheated by for-profit colleges. It all seems pretty reasonable to me.

I did some calculations and Californians also pay more in income tax than we do in Ontario, Canada, except we get socialized healthcare and our banks are fiscally conservative. So many things wrong with California, I'm in no rush to move to SF like other the other Canadian tech kiddies. Plus the value of the USD has been declining quickly, makes for nice salary arbitrage (roughly +9% in pay last month).

Sure, but Californians also have absurdly-low property tax rates and sales taxes as low as Texas. Prop 13 made it essentially impossible to structure taxes the way other states do, so Californians pay lots of income tax and little property tax (which is what most normal states use to fund things like schools, police and libraries).

In this case, I think the point is to protect people from being hurt financially. As best I can tell, he's essentially trying to make sure that schools live up to certain standards.

Yeah, nothing screams counter-culture like charging $19,000 for 3-month courses.

>It's a big terrified nanny state where everyone in charge seems to be too scared to let anyone do anything cause it might hurt them emotionally or physically.

California is quite left of center, a bit of America becoming like Europe. At least, for now, you can still fire, and therefore hire at will, so they haven't gone completely over the edge.

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