71–80 of 116 posts
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All our GDP is in software. We don't know how to make anything except AI and web apps. We wouldn't know what to do with a nuke.
Incredibly wrong. Hollywood is still a thing. Manufacturing, yes manufacturing. Agriculture. The Bay Area is a fraction of that GDP, and a small geographical part of California.
It's funny that the list includes both California and the US. It would be interesting to compare economies of the same scale, regardless of legal status: If you are considering the US and China, maybe you should include the whole of the EU. And if you are looking at Germany, Japan, ... It makes sense to not only include California, but also to split up other countries. I'm curious how high up Guandong or Shanghai wou…
The EU is very frequently included in data comparing nation states, along with it's individual members. It's the only supranational organization usually included on those kinds of lists, though sometimes you'll see groups like the G20.
It's also the only thing that can work in Europe. Anything smaller would make Europe irrelevant on the global stage, and something much more invasive would erase Europe as we know it.
The current mood in smaller European countries is that even though many are skeptical of French and German influence, our interests align most of the time, especially now that the US has succumbed to fascism and stupidity.
California’s GDP is now twice as large as Russia’s. Yet the President of the United States seems to spend a lot of time trying to make Russians happy, and zero time making Californians happy.
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Incredibly wrong. Hollywood is still a thing. Manufacturing, yes manufacturing. Agriculture. The Bay Area is a fraction of that GDP, and a small geographical part of California.
Hollywood is becoming irrelevant fast. At least that’s been the trend as of late.
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Tying economic output to political power gets hairy pretty quickly. You incentivize states to put economic outcome before the wellbeing of the citizens and give states with rare natural resources more power than those that rely on value produced by a workforce.
Tying population to political power definitely makes sense though.
For example, each Maltese member of the European Parliament is elected by 90,000 voters in Malta. Each German member is elected by ~878,000 voters in German, meaning each Maltese citizen has about 10x more power than each German citizen.
In this case, the German "bloc" is still vastly more powerful, but the disproportionate representation is important to ensure the loyalty of small nations, who are always incentivized to navigate much narrower interests.
It's funny that the list includes both California and the US. It would be interesting to compare economies of the same scale, regardless of legal status: If you are considering the US and China, maybe you should include the whole of the EU. And if you are looking at Germany, Japan, ... It makes sense to not only include California, but also to split up other countries. I'm curious how high up Guandong or Shanghai wou…
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Tying population to political power definitely makes sense though.
I wouldn't say the US Senate and Electoral College make much sense.
The electoral college is flawed but I also find it better than the alternative. It's important that the president should represent a wide variety of perspectives in the country, not just pander to the population of the n biggest cities and call it a day. The people living in small or unimportant states deserve to have a president who gives a damn about them, too. Ultimately I think both of these mechanisms are important ones to ensure that the country doesn't turn into a classic tyranny of the majority, which is something I value quite a bit.
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I have probably never felt more insecure (and disgusted at the same time) in a Western country, the way I felt on the streets of LA. Not all of them, of course, some are obviously well guarded - which in turn makes me think the government and city council is not doing a great job really. Is the situation as bad in San Francisco?
LA is gigantic. There are more safe streets there than most major cities in the world.
I was going to use some numbers but because Japan doesn’t really do street names it wasn’t really comparable.
Tokyo has 25k km of streets. LA has 9k miles.
Edit: Missed the ‘most’, sorry.
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I don't want the US to break up. But I wonder if it wouldn't be more healthy for you if the states grew a bit more independent. It would give the president less power to decide exactly how schools and universities should be run or would open up for social welfare reforms in the states that want it.
It would absolutely be more healthy. One of the big problems facing our country is that we have centralized so much power in the federal government (which wasn't meant to have it), that everything the federal government does becomes super contentious. The election of a president should be, in a better world, relatively boring because the real action is happening at the state or even local levels. But instead, the pre…
A lot of it is. For example the California housing shortage? It’s all state and local. But the same single family zoning pattern played out in many places.