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I've lived in two developing countries in my life, and its interesting how CA is morphing back into that. Small enclaves of super-rich, very high price communit
by _red 7y ago
I've lived in two developing countries in my life, and its interesting how CA is morphing back into that. Small enclaves of super-rich, very high price communities where everything works, surrounded by large swaths of shanty towns where nothing works.
- claudeganon 7y agoAfter living in LA for a few years, it certainly does feel exactly the way you describe within the city. But those juxtapositions are literal blocks apart from each other. The Google campus is next door to a shanty town in Venice, and their security sic the police on them for any minor infractions (or just made up ones). Very similar situation with the redevelopment downtown. It really does give you a bleak portrait of the tolerance for inhumanity within the context liberal Capitalism. California is ostensibly as “wacky leftist” as the US gets and it’s a bleak, cruel place in many regards.
- maxaf 7y agoAmerican liberals are always yelling for more “humanity”, but they keep quiet about the requirement that humanity must come at someone else’s expense. Yes, we need cheaper housing - but not here. Yes, guvment must build better jails - but not here. Yes, please run more buses - but not down my street. Yes, we must accept more refugees - but put them somewhere far away, certainly not anywhere near my child’s route to school. Liberalism and NIMBYism are joined at the hip. Liberalism is loud and ostentatious, while NIMBYism is prosecuted quietly via the court system, lobbying, and political donations. There’s a certain poetic beauty to how both seem to coexist in the same group of people.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- fallingfrog 7y agoHumanity must come at someone else’s expense? Just meditate on that thought for a minute. Think about it carefully. In your mind, on whose backs do you suppose that wealth was built?
- maxaf 7y agoYes, that's what the liberals are saying. They're yelling for more humanity, but they want it to come at someone else's expense. This isn't my principle; it's the liberals'. I'm not the one who should be meditating on anything, as I'm also not the one preventing affordable housing from being built.
- fallingfrog 7y agoWrong answer. The wealth of those you want to protect from taxes is and has always been built on the backs of the poor who you want to deprive of public services. They built your homes, they tend your gardens, they raise your children, they guard you while you sleep. Yet you whine and complain when they want buses that run on time and a place to sleep.
- maxaf 7y agoWho am I protecting from taxes again?
- roenxi 7y agoThere is a two-step process here for your builders, gardeners, nannys, security guards, etc. First the things they want must be produced, then they have to secure access to those things. There is no question that tax-and-redistribute can make step 2 happen. However, the problem is that the plan for step 1 is usually some variant of 'Massive taxes aren't going to change what gets produced. What's gonna happen, people gonna stop working on important things?'. That plan often doesn't work because it turns out massive taxes change what gets produced, often much for the worse. You can get morally outraged if it makes you feel better, but your comment inspires no hope in me that you've thought your solution through. There is substantial evidence that, economically speaking, going for a big pie unevenly shared is a much better solution than going for a small but evenly sliced pie.
- NCWV 7y agoThey won't stop working on important things. What is their alternative? Sell everything they own and move to Canada? Just sit around and drink beer all day?
- jakelazaroff 7y agoI’m not sure where you get those ideas? Where I live in NYC, they recently shut down a major street to cars so buses could run more easily — and the furthest left want to expand that. The left leaning people I know want to close jails, not build better ones elsewhere. We opposed an Amazon campus in our backyard specifically because it would drive up rents — and the furthest left want rent control. Liberals are obviously not a monolith of only ethically consistent people, but I definitely don’t see the pervasive NIMBYism.
- eli_gottlieb 7y agoThe Left in New York City are largely socialists by now, who had enough of a long-standing working-class tradition to avoid allying with liberal NIMBYs. He's honestly pretty spot on about liberals, as the spot on the spectrum in between conservatives and social democrats.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoMaybe so, but I don’t read the original comment as a critique of centrist Democrats in particular. (I also don’t think centrist Democrats are alone in the gap between their professed values and their actual ones.)
- maxaf 7y agoI live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Here the same people who yell for affordable housing also go to court to block construction of new towers. The same people who complain about buses stuck in traffic on W 86th St also prevent the introduction of universal metered parking and congestion pricing. But my original comment was mainly addressing the NIMBYism in California. Look at SF: it's a low-rise city of sky-high demand and prices. Who's preventing new construction? The same local NIMBYs who enjoy rising property values due to severely restricted supply of land that can be built on.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoI until very recently lived downtown, where congestion pricing would actually take effect, and the people most in support were again the furthest left. SF does seem to be more NIMBYish, but I’m not sure why you think it’s a microcosm of liberalism.
- jtmcmc 7y ago"Liberalism" is the "hipsters" of modern leftist politics...
- dmode 7y agoI think you are conflating entirely two different concepts. NIMBYism is a unique California value and closely related to California history rather than a true left ideology. In fact, leftist policies are for more denser urban development, public transit etc as you can see in European countries
- rayiner 7y ago> It really does give you a bleak portrait of the tolerance for inhumanity within the context liberal Capitalism. California is ostensibly as “wacky leftist” as the US gets and it’s a bleak, cruel place in many regards. Maybe that means that “leftism” isn’t actually the thing that makes for more tolerance for humanity? Leftist policies haven’t prevented California from having the highest poverty rate in the country, the highest income inequality in the country, sprawling homeless encampments, etc. Many places in the US are considerably less “leftist” but also considerably less bleak. Homelessness rates, for example, are much lower in West Virginia and Mississippi than in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/homelessness-california-population-states-comparison.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/homelessness-californi....
- acollins1331 7y agoAs a person from West Virginia this is because you can rent a garbage trailer for like $200 a month there. There's also no jobs or hope, but plenty of meth. Yay!
- habnds 7y agoI'm consistently confused by what people mean when they say "leftist".
- rayiner 7y agoThere are a wide range of “leftist” policies, but they generally include things like higher taxes to support more social services, strong support for labor unions, higher minimum wages, higher government regulation of various aspects of the economy, various social policies including deemphasizing traditional families and religious institutions, etc. California may not be “socialist” like Sanders wants (and frankly, no country in the OECD is “socialist” anymore the way Sanders wants), but it’s certainly more leftist than the rest of the US. It’s got the highest taxes, among the highest social spending, much more government regulation of the economy, higher percentage of union workers than the US average, the highest minimum wage, etc. If should be doing a lot better than other US states.
- philwelch 7y agoI would take away the opposite conclusion. Left-wing government isn’t the solution in California any more than it is in developing countries and failed states; it is the problem.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ncmncm 7y agoPublic utility districts have been very successful in places they have been permitted to operate, including in the state capital, Sacramento. Of course PGE spends millions every year lobbying against them.
- kolmogorov 7y agoIt’s the same in Brazil. We are basically converging to become Rio de Janeiro minus the natural beauty. Well and the shantytowns in rio have better views.
- ariwilson 7y agoCan you describe the basis for your "Google sic the police on the homeless" comment? There was a shitty local magazine article about this but my personal experience does not match this perception at all.
- claudeganon 7y agoI’m friends with housing activists in LA who work on these issues. There was a similar thing with Google Maps cars conveniently showing up right after violent camp dispersals in my old neighborhood. Here’s an article about it from back in 2015: https://pando.com/2015/06/22/we-got-geeks/ https://pando.com/2015/06/22/we-got-geeks/
- cobweb1 7y agoCalifornia has one of the lowest average IQs of any state. If you remove the tech workers and the old-time republicans, there's not many big brains left to go around.
- maltalex 7y ago[Citation Needed]
- Consultant32452 7y agoThis was the first google result. California is 48th. And that of course includes all the smarties in silicon valley who I assume bring up the average. https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/we-compared-average-iq-score-in-all-50-states-results-are-eye-opening.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/we-compared-average-iq-sc...
- devtul 7y agoNothing personal, but this kind of comment really grind my gears. When I read a claim like the one made in that comment, I take that as a lead and am grateful that someone brought light to that POV so I can explore more, e.g. freaking google it. The [Citation Needed] approach would make all comments boringly long and harder to write, all conversations white-paper like, which isn't bad of course, but has its place. How many times I felt lazy and just dropped my comment because I knew that the [Citation Needed] comments were bound to come, and while I have a good insight about the subject, I had no will to spend more energy on that nor any inclination for taking flak from lazier unconstructive commenters.
- microcolonel 7y ago> Small enclaves of super-rich Indeed, and these same people often constantly prattling on about progressive politics.
- mtbcoder 7y ago> high price communities where everything works, surrounded by large swaths of shanty towns where nothing works. This isn't something that's only attributable to CA. Economically depressed towns relatively close to highly concentrated areas of wealth are all over America. Also, the scale of poverty in places like the south, Appalachia, the rust belt, rural America often meets or exceeds that of third-world countries.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoOh there's other poor places, it's okay guys. Let them keep shooting up and shitting in the street. When you dismiss it like that, you're giving up on a solution and letting it fester.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- grawprog 7y agoThis never goes over well when I say it but, on my most recent trip through America driving across 5 States, much of what we drove through did not look like what I would consider developed. For hundreds of miles the only towns we'd come across had nothing but fast food places a gas station and usually multiple churches and then just houses, no schools, no grocery stores, no hospitals or doctors, though usually a pharmacy, and not much else for at least a hundred miles in any direction from these places. Between these would just be highways dotted with billboards telling you not to kill yourself or smoke meth. You could always see the 'towns' coming about 50 miles away though, first you'd see the massive McDonald's sign in the distance, then maybe a Burger king sign or a gas station sign, a massive monolith spiking 100m into the sky. A lot of it felt really bleak.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoI wonder why that never goes well, because it's an incredibly offensive and out of touch statement. Yes there are schools, pharmacies, and grocery stores, you just didn't see them because you were passing through. That is nowhere near the level of homeless shooting up in the street, it's just a small community. Of course you see signs and gas stations, because you are driving through the towns on the highway...
- scruple 7y agoAnd, where else are people "driving through" supposed to get fuel, exactly? If not for the towns they pass through? Good grief...
- vineyardmike 7y agoOh please. Fuel? Fast Food? Its right next to the highway, so you can pass through without spending too much time in town. The statement was offensive, and they were called-out. Lets not nit-pick unnecessarily.
- grawprog 7y agoWell they must have been hidden from the mapbook and Google maps too, because couldn't find them there either.
- dmode 7y agoThis comment makes no sense. In developing countries power gets shut off, because there is not enough of it. CA actually over produces power. The shut off is a result of acute climate change and dry conditions that have affected the state. And unlike a developing country, a corporation in a developed country is responding to legal risk and shutting power down. This is exactly opposite of a developing country, where corporations face no legal risk of their actions at all
- augustocallejas 7y agoPower consumers won’t make the distinction between both scenarios; their power is off in both cases.
- dmode 7y agoThat doesn’t equate to “developing country” like living standards as the OP was suggesting. There is a distinction. As someone who actually was born and raised in India, this is not even remotely the same thing. It is like saying traffic jams in NYC are like Mumbai, therefore NYC is like a developing country
- corodra 7y ago>The shut off is a result of acute climate change and dry conditions that have affected the state. No, no, nope. They are shutting off power to aged infrastructure. This is the one time a global warming culprit is using global warming to gain sympathy. They refuse to update extremely aged and damaged power lines. The same lines that can fall due to normal hazardous weather. Newer ones are not in as much risk. Look at a map of the blackouts. They aren't large grids. They are specific small areas.
- plughs 7y agoConversely I find it interesting how quickly discussions of California quickly morph into the implication that there is little worth considering outside of the specific economy of 'silicon valley'. I can think of no one - from the people I've known since Kindergarten from the people I've met in the last few months at my new job - who can be described as 'super-rich' or living in 'shanty-towns'. There are plenty of working class folk living quite comfortably but their stories don't fit into our 'outrage culture' so they are conveniently ignored.
- himeexcelanta 7y agoYa except Mill Valley and Sausalito in Marin county both experienced blackouts during the most recent shut down. Both of those cities being rather wealthy.