71–80 of 107 posts
Sometimes i wonder... Washington doesnt have the income tax, but it feels much better there. Am i imagining this?
California lacks a planning structure. Until recently it was pretty much a land of misfits from the east coast. They should have consolidated local governments long ago and drawn urban growth boundaries. Instead the path they took has resulted in an utter mess.
Somehow I feel this is not only a California problem but the whole US. The country seems to be incapable of or unwilling to address fundamental problems. Instead you are getting endless political fights while infrastructure is falling apart. The contrasts in Silicon Valley and LA are extreme. You have some of the richest people in the world living in beautiful mansions with cities around them full of homeless people,…
Yeah, I'm concerned that what we're seeing around the country is institutional decay. We've been increasingly replacing competence with people who tell us what we want to hear. Entertainment over substance. Short-term, feel good solutions over thoughtful long-term solutions. Now the results of that are starting to manifest.
Sometimes i wonder... Washington doesnt have the income tax, but it feels much better there. Am i imagining this?
Well the population is about 20% of CA's and it's much greener and cooler. California lacks a planning structure. Until recently it was pretty much a land of misfits from the east coast. They should have consolidated local governments long ago and drawn urban growth boundaries. Instead the path they took has resulted in an utter mess.
As much as I want to say that Farhad is wrong, I can't. He is right. We can't continue to live the way we have. We are seeing the results of kicking the can, also known as the fix, down the road. We hope that things will get fixed eventually but not now. We feel that somehow it will be easier to fix by the next generation. Unfortunately, it only gets harder. We'll just have to suffer more when the fix is finally made…
Fixes which have winners and losers become lost in electoral arithmetic. An example of this struck me some years ago when a friend who lived in Louden County (W. Virginia) said they were subject to frequent power outages which caused catastrophic loss of the goods in the freezer, but the local authority kept losing the vote for increased local taxes which would pay for fixes to the electricity distribution issues: Pe…
To paraphrase James Carville, "It's the people, stupid". It seems like there's a lot of Californians who talk about sustainability, but then turn right around and vote in people who continue to promote suburban sprawl, single family houses, zoning that doesn't promote density, and lack of investment in public transportation.
I think part of this is national politics pushing out state politics. Every statewide California race recently has felt like a foregone conclusion. Either the Democrat beats the Republican by a huge margin, or one Democrat beats another Democrat while the two agree on all policies. California just doesn’t have the one-party-against-another politics that make democracy work.
Sometimes i wonder... Washington doesnt have the income tax, but it feels much better there. Am i imagining this?
It's definitely better here in WA in many ways. We left CA last summer after 15 years, and I would never go back. That said, I've heard that the biggest issue in this state is old infrastructure and buildings that would basically disintegrate in the next big earthquake. Seismic retrofitting wasn't a thing here until pretty recently. I've been reading a book about the Cascadia fault that is fascinating and terrifying:…
I think in other industries we might have seen these problems arise much sooner. But the utilities are slow, colossal beasts that take decades for changes to really take affect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the population is about 20% of CA's and it's much greener and cooler. California lacks a planning structure. Until recently it was pretty much a land of misfits from the east coast. They should have consolidated local governments long ago and drawn urban growth boundaries. Instead the path they took has resulted in an utter mess.
To me california has a bunch of problems that seem to be growing over time. Makes you wonder where that tax money is going. I am all for paying more taxes for the common benefit, on things that makes sense, but homeless problem, fire problem, infrastructure all seem utter mess...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fixes which have winners and losers become lost in electoral arithmetic. An example of this struck me some years ago when a friend who lived in Louden County (W. Virginia) said they were subject to frequent power outages which caused catastrophic loss of the goods in the freezer, but the local authority kept losing the vote for increased local taxes which would pay for fixes to the electricity distribution issues: Pe…
There is no county Louden in West Virginia. There is a Loudoun County Virginia. It was largely rural until recently. It is now a suburb of Washington DC. Part of Dulles Airport was built in Loudoun County.
To paraphrase James Carville, "It's the people, stupid". It seems like there's a lot of Californians who talk about sustainability, but then turn right around and vote in people who continue to promote suburban sprawl, single family houses, zoning that doesn't promote density, and lack of investment in public transportation.
No offense, but your thinking here is actually a bigger part of the problem. There is nothing fundamentally unsustainable about suburbs, single family homes, low density, or cars. 50% of the USA is totally uninhabited, and it is possible today to build a totally off-grid and sustainable single family home / suburb in the majority of it. You can even capture carbon in concrete. Don't prescribe solutions just because y…
Sure, fundamentally nothing is sustainable because eventually the useful energy gradients where life can thrive will run out as the universe expands into a cold dark empty vacuum.
But before that let's try to spend the already fixed tax income a bit more efficiently. Compact cities can be more efficient than the endless sea of cul-de-sacs and occasional golf/sports fields.
That said, I have no real horse in this race. If the people of those particular cities want to live like that, let them live like that. Self-determination is important. If they feel that they don't want better mass transit and less sitting-in-traffic, no worries.