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California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

propublica.org

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Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#201

Post by gumby »

ashkankiani wrote: post #186
Kapura wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, I am blessed with friends who have already made the jump, in many different directions, so I have firsthand testimonies of the pros and cons of moving to a variety of different countries. Japan sounds nice.

Unless you're fluent in reading and speaking Japanese, don't move here. It's a nightmare. Pick a country where you know the language. And consider renouncing your citizenship to avoid taxes if you have the prospect of attaining new citizenship.

> And consider renouncing your citizenship to avoid taxes if you have the prospect of attaining new citizenship.

There are few countries where the taxes are lower than the US Federal ones. Thus though you will have to file a tax return, in most cases you won't owe any additional taxes.

What makes the US more expensive is all the non-tax fees that are included in those foreign countries' taxes (e.g. medical costs). So you still save.

Perspective: not a US citizen through currently living in California.

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#202

Post by CyberDildonics »

ashtonkem wrote: post #187
CyberDildonics wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would becoming jaded to corruption come before corruption?

Someone lying about corruption or the capability of the government to do any good, obviously. But see my prior comment.

I saw your prior comment when I responded to it the first time. Repeating yourself more forcefully doesn't explain your thought process.

You think journalists have been lying about corruption and minimized consequences for so long that people are unsurprised by corruption AND that in turn caused corruption? Also who is talking about "the capability of the government to do any good"?

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#203

Post by ianhorn »

legulere wrote: post #20
Justin_K wrote: post #18

The sad part is that CA remains a one party state and this will just get swept under the rug. The power is too unchecked.

As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US. The states should be independent enough to introduce one for themselves, and there are also referendums.

I firmly believe that better voting systems are the highest ROI changes we can make to government. Unfortunately the people the current system over-favors are the ones who need to do it. It’s a microcosm of the whole problem of politics :(

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#204

Post by robocat »

cosmodisk wrote: post #154
Kapura wrote: post #123

It feels like I live in a country where every level of government is unbelievably corrupt, but also completely unfixable. How are you supposed to address the sorts of issues that lose $200,000,000 of state money if the people who try to do so get fired? I don't see a way out of this mess, and it makes me want to move somewhere... better.

The problem is there is no better. Countries,names and organisations may differ, but it's more or less the same everywhere

> The problem is there is no better.

Ouch: “America is #1” is such an insidious belief system.

Have you really opened your eyes to how some countries have much, much better governing systems? Many Scandinavian countries have a higher population than most US states, yet somehow they seem to function better in so many dimensions.

I am from New Zealand and the worst interaction I have had with a government department for many many years was a breeze to deal with: competent phone help talking to a real person, emailing directly with staff, issue resolved. I am very confident the problematic process will be fixed properly within the next few years, because my experience is that every system in NZ I have ever had to deal with eventually gets fixed. For example tax returns are a breeze, and get easier each year. New Zealand has a higher population than 50% of the US states, and we are in the boondocks of the world transportation wise, yet somehow we manage to get our shit together.

Of course NZ has problems of overruns, collusion, defalcation, bribery, and corruption. Yet somehow they seem to be becoming less common... it seems to me our government keeps improving on multiple dimensions. The biggest disappointments I have had with my government have been due to pressures from the US (five eyes, copyright “reform”, trade interference, political interference, war on drugs, propaganda). I regularly read a story about the US where a structural problem just never gets resolved, or even worse, it is decaying year by year.

I have travelled the world, and you can cherry-pick areas where the US is resoundingly better than NZ (or the Scandinavian country of your choice)... I am talking about an overall measurement of functioning governance and society.

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#205

Post by wizzwizz4 »

gotoeleven wrote: post #195
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixing the voting system wouldn't solve the American Populism problem (where promising to “pull the ladder up” is a guaranteed win among most people who've already climbed it, and even some who haven't), but it would render that possible.

Did some new NPC software update go out recently where populism is now supposed to mean "pull the ladder up"? Im seeing this all over the place now.

We tend to call them “memes” here, since they affect protagonists and background characters alike.

Anyway, I got it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25552418 – but I don't think populism means “pull the ladder up”; rather, somebody observed that a lot of US populism at the moment is of the “why support any policy that doesn't directly benefit yourself?” variety.

Edit: Though there might be a little Baader-Meinhof in it, now that I think about it. There's no reason people shouldn't've been describing this aspect of US populism before.

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#206

Post by hnruss »

refurb wrote: post #77
hnruss wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the states that I have lived, the voter information pamphlet lists who supports and opposes every initiative. Every time that a new regulation on the ballot would benefit the public at the expense of business, it’s always the same: on one side are Republicans and some multi-national corporations, the other side are Democrats and public-interest groups (environmentalists, etc). I don’t think that public-interest gr…

Yet democrats are taking back room bribes to approve new construction. Huh! The regulation enables the corruption. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/sf-publi...

I’d bet that the dollar amounts involved where appointed officials corruptly use regulation to solicit bribes in the U.S. is orders of magnitude smaller than the amounts involved in “campaign donations” to elected officials to prevent and remove regulations.

The amount in question in that article is $5,000.

For comparison, the amount in question here is $34,000:

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/12/alaska-republican-senato...

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#207

Post by hnruss »

refurb wrote: post #75
29athrowaway wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deregulate the environment and you will be drinking polluted water, and breathing polluted air. Your food will be likely exposed to pollution too. Deregulate labor and you'll have exploited workers working 100 hours per week, being constantly harassed by their employers, people being discriminated at the workplace, as well as people exposed to poor safety conditions where they can get injured or killed. Deregulate co…

You’re only looking at one side. Regulations can also encourage corruption - if I can’t even open my doors unless I get a permit, well, that’s plenty of incentive for whoever control that permit to ask for something to “sweeten the pie”.

Is that form of corruption a systemic problem here in the U.S.? I don’t think that it is.

On the other hand, campaign contributions are common, legal, and involve large sums of money (especially to PACs).

Systemic corruption of elected officials, resulting in de-regulation in order to benefit wealthy shareholders at the expense of the public, is more concerning to me than the possibility of low-level officials seeking bribes.

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#208

Post by zepto »

robocat wrote: post #204
cosmodisk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is there is no better. Countries,names and organisations may differ, but it's more or less the same everywhere

> The problem is there is no better. Ouch: “America is #1” is such an insidious belief system. Have you really opened your eyes to how some countries have much, much better governing systems? Many Scandinavian countries have a higher population than most US states, yet somehow they seem to function better in so many dimensions. I am from New Zealand and the worst interaction I have had with a government department fo…

“I have travelled the world, and you can cherry-pick areas where the US is resoundingly better than NZ”

The entirety of NZ has a population comparable to the size of a large metro area in the US. It seems like the cherry picking is being done by you.

It’s completely meaningless to compare it to the US as if it were similar.

If you compare the US to Europe as a whole, you’ll find just as many problems, and the comparison with individual smaller states would be equally meaningless.

You’ll find this is even true with things like Covid.

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#209

Post by ashtonkem »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #202
ashtonkem wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone lying about corruption or the capability of the government to do any good, obviously. But see my prior comment.

I saw your prior comment when I responded to it the first time. Repeating yourself more forcefully doesn't explain your thought process. You think journalists have been lying about corruption and minimized consequences for so long that people are unsurprised by corruption AND that in turn caused corruption? Also who is talking about "the capability of the government to do any good"?

I mean, I genuinely don't care which came first. That's why I posted it. I'm not terribly interested in arguing about first causes when I've made it very clear that in my opinion first causes don't matter in this case.

Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M

#210

Post by ardy42 »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #168
GavinMcG wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's factually incorrect. The vast majority of voters on both sides viewed Trump's election as legitimate. [0] There is a substantial difference between claiming that you lost for reasons that are problematic (i.e. propaganda and the structure of the electoral college) and claiming that you didn't lose at all, despite being behind by 7 million votes, because of a massive conspiracy so powerful as to make our democr…

> The vast majority of voters on both sides viewed Trump's election as legitimate In 2018, 66% of democrats believed it was “probably true” or “definitely true” that Russia “tampered with vote tallies” to help Trump win the election. That’s a majority of voters on one side. Note this poll was taken a year and a half after the poll you cited. This emphasizes the point that the media drove this issue as a wedge through…

> In 2018, 66% of democrats believed it was “probably true” or “definitely true” that Russia “tampered with vote tallies” to help Trump win the election.

It's worth noting that (at least with the phrasing you're giving) that does not necessarily imply a belief that Trump did not in fact win in 2016.

Also, given the amount of legitimate criticism that electronic touchscreen voting machines have gotten in the tech community for decades, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd have gotten a similar result in a poll of technology professionals & enthusiasts.

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