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Well, that was quick. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22828354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22828354 Today it is pandemic resolution. I fear that

Well, that was quick. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22828354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22828354 Today it is pandemic resolution. I fear that tomorrow, it might be economic ties, lockstep voting at the federal level, and National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning, where the West Coast slowly splits away from the rest of the country, with other states teaming up and following suit. This isn't the end, and it's the only appropriate response to a federal government that cannot or will not execute on behalf of all states. It is, however, a reflection of the true state of our Union, and a sign of things to come if we don't reconcile our national identity. I'm saddened, but not surprised, that a step like this was necessary given the circumstances.

spankalee 7y ago
> I fear that tomorrow Why fear? This is my dream! The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. The smaller less populous states aren't going to just give up their outsized power voluntarily. California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.
- yingw787 7y ago
  Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. In a country with the second most nuclear weapons in the world. With a federal government already looking to adversaries for cooperation. You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas, or mutinies aboard our SSBNs, or Russian troops landing en masse in South Carolina to offer foreign assistance. It will mean the Balkanization of the country, where California has to station permanent garrisons in the Sierra Nevada mountains to ward off invasions from Texas or Mexico. You're not talking about a 40% drop in GDP this quarter, you're talking about famine and starvation, and complete international irrelevance after the dust settles. If only tens of millions of Americans die, that probably counts as a win. "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
  - onychomys 7y ago
    Why would the US government nuke cities they're trying to take back?
    - yingw787 7y ago
      Maybe they don't want to use troops as an occupying force. Afghanistan / Iraq already proved how difficult it is to occupy territory, it'd be a lot easier without insurgents resisting. A war of attrition would suck up a lot of blood and treasure the government would need to ward off threats to a much-weakened U.S. Maybe the half life of radioactive isotopes is acceptable enough to relax habitation restrictions in a short enough period of time. People do currently live within the restricted zone of Chernobyl, they just have shortened lifespans, but they are functioning properly. You can probably garrison troops after nuking an area six months after doing so, as long as you cycle them out on a regular basis. Maybe white-collar service workers are less valuable than blue-collar laborers, especially if they're already demoralized. You can torture a blue-collar worker to create output, albeit slower and lower quality and with Byzantine faults. You can't torture an asset management consultant to give you a high ROI. The brain doesn't work like that. So at that point he or she is just another mouth to feed and you can get rid of him or her. Extrapolate to an entire city. Maybe it's just pure hatred. Most cities are highly Democratic and liberal, which today apparently labels someone as less than yourself, as someone less than human.
  - jMyles 7y ago
    > Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. You begin your comment with this thesis, but without explanation. I think secession, in my lifetime, is likely. I think civil war is vanishingly unlikely.
    - tom-thistime 7y ago
      The last time we had secession, we had civil war.
      - spankalee 7y ago
- votepaunchy 7y ago
  > California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime. Someone needs to secede so the rest of us can divest our tens of trillions of national debt.
- ericd 7y ago
  The idea of secession is a horrific nightmare that no one should wish for. There are conceivable ways that things can be fixed - constitutional convention.
  - spankalee 7y ago
    A constitutional convention opens the doors to at least as much disruption as a few states seceding. Absolutely everything can be relitigated.
  - username90 7y ago
    40 million people is more than enough to be an independent country, why would it be so horrible? Peaceful secession has happened before and can happen again.
- fleekonpoint 7y ago
  The last time that happened, it started a civil war.
  - spankalee 7y ago
    The last time states tried to secede it was to preserve their "right" to enslave people.
- rlt 7y ago
  Instead of California succeeding, maybe it should be broken up into to smaller states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_and_secession_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_and_secession_in_Cal...
- r00fus 7y ago
  > The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. This is untrue. We could simply add more Senators by admitting more states into the Union. Kinda like we did with Alaska and Hawaii. Millions of citizens in DC are without Senatorial representation not to mention Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Guam or many other "protectorates". It can be done without dissolution of the US. It requires a simple majority vote in the Senate and House and Presidential approval.
- frank2 7y ago
  Structural unfairness in the Senate is a weak argument for splitting the Union. Once the Union is split, Russia, China and probably other countries start playing one fragment of the former Union against another. The reason the Chinese government is trying so hard to stop China from splitting (beyond the existing mainland-Taiwan split) is to avoid a repeat of the bad old times when Japan and European powers were able to play one Chinese-language-using polity against another.
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
If the Fed had done the right thing by raising interest rates, and the government didn't interfere in the market with massive spending, USD could have remained the reserve currency for the foreseeable future. But nobody in Washington has the guts to do the right thing. Especially the Fed. Also, if this "pact" leaves the United States, that is when I'll be leaving the shithole called CA. I'm not paying for the free riders anymore.
- nawgszy 7y ago
  It's a bit funny to see capitalist corporations making obscene amounts of money violating laws and ethics and trickling a bit of that ill-gained wealth down to software engineers, who then turn around and say everyone should have wealth like them and not need gov't assistance when their own company is one of the drivers of inequality...
  - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
    That's due to excessive regulation. Regulations benefit large incumbents, as opposed to smaller competitors/startups. The real driver of inequality is the government. Usually through excessive regulations, bailouts, and inflation. In a truly free market, prices go down, as competition is fierce. Perfect competition and pareto efficiency are concepts everyone on here should have knowledge of, if only at a surface level.
bpodgursky 7y ago
It's not going to happen, if nothing else, because CA is going to be grasping for federal budget bailouts later this year. Lockdown is going to crush state budgets.
- yingw787 7y ago
  I hope so, man, for our country's sake. Every day we're together is a second chance at making things right.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  CA has a pretty big rainy-day fund. It'll be exhausted eventually, but I'm not sure it will be this year. The most recent sources I've found suggest the state has around $20bn in reserves, which probably is enough to buffer us through a bad year unless tax incomes completely drop to 0.
  - bpodgursky 7y ago
    The budget for the year was $208 billion, so you only need a 10% haircut to need help. And the budget is HEAVILY funded by (1) Silicon Valley IPOs, and (2) Hollywood. Both of those are going to generate $0 near-term. Not to mention retirement funds which are going to be obliterated, but that's a somewhat separate issue from the budget.
_bxg1 7y ago
> National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning That seems pretty far-fetched. Much more likely (and welcome) would be a sort of "legal coup", where the states that still have functioning governments band together in the task of reshaping the federal government through voting and legislative power. We're certainly approaching a breaking point in the dysfunction of the federal government and its inability to do its job and serve a society; something has got to give. But I still think any kind of civil war scenario remains far, far out of the question.
- yingw787 7y ago
  Maybe. I mean, I would acknowledge that given post-9/11 deployments of National Guard troops to active combat zones, all you would need to do to mess up any planning would be to deploy those troops separately and randomly far away. Then it wouldn't matter if the governor called up the National Guard in self-defense and if they wanted to obey despite being federalized, because they wouldn't be in-theater. You'd have to raise fresh troops and train / arm them and by that point it'll already be far too late. Not to mention the firepower of existing federal garrisons in-state, complete air supremacy by federal air assets, and existing tensions between urban/rural areas preventing a retreat to the hinterlands. Whether these facts will change remains to be seen, but secession today is impractical. I think the situation we're in right now is pretty much a "legal coup" by a motivated minority. It'll be a slog to get back to representative democracy. I read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb recently, and he mentioned how his home country of Lebanon went from diverse paradise to all-out civil war in six weeks, or 1.5 months. About the same time as "just a flu" to today. For all our sakes, I hope to God I'm wrong and I hope to God you're right.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    At the very most we might see Hong Kong-like civil unrest or something. But I see no path for any states to assemble a standing army under the nose of the federal government. Even if they tried to use the national guard; who's to say it would be more loyal to the state than to the fed?

spankalee 7y ago

> I fear that tomorrow Why fear? This is my dream! The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. The smaller less populous states aren't going to just give up their outsized power voluntarily. California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.

yingw787 7y ago
Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. In a country with the second most nuclear weapons in the world. With a federal government already looking to adversaries for cooperation. You're talking nuclear missiles or chemical weapons fired against San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle from land-based silos in the Dakotas, or mutinies aboard our SSBNs, or Russian troops landing en masse in South Carolina to offer foreign assistance. It will mean the Balkanization of the country, where California has to station permanent garrisons in the Sierra Nevada mountains to ward off invasions from Texas or Mexico. You're not talking about a 40% drop in GDP this quarter, you're talking about famine and starvation, and complete international irrelevance after the dust settles. If only tens of millions of Americans die, that probably counts as a win. "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
- onychomys 7y ago
  Why would the US government nuke cities they're trying to take back?
  - yingw787 7y ago
    Maybe they don't want to use troops as an occupying force. Afghanistan / Iraq already proved how difficult it is to occupy territory, it'd be a lot easier without insurgents resisting. A war of attrition would suck up a lot of blood and treasure the government would need to ward off threats to a much-weakened U.S. Maybe the half life of radioactive isotopes is acceptable enough to relax habitation restrictions in a short enough period of time. People do currently live within the restricted zone of Chernobyl, they just have shortened lifespans, but they are functioning properly. You can probably garrison troops after nuking an area six months after doing so, as long as you cycle them out on a regular basis. Maybe white-collar service workers are less valuable than blue-collar laborers, especially if they're already demoralized. You can torture a blue-collar worker to create output, albeit slower and lower quality and with Byzantine faults. You can't torture an asset management consultant to give you a high ROI. The brain doesn't work like that. So at that point he or she is just another mouth to feed and you can get rid of him or her. Extrapolate to an entire city. Maybe it's just pure hatred. Most cities are highly Democratic and liberal, which today apparently labels someone as less than yourself, as someone less than human.
- jMyles 7y ago
  > Dude...if we're talking about secession, we're talking about civil war. You begin your comment with this thesis, but without explanation. I think secession, in my lifetime, is likely. I think civil war is vanishingly unlikely.
  - tom-thistime 7y ago
    The last time we had secession, we had civil war.
    - spankalee 7y ago
votepaunchy 7y ago
> California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime. Someone needs to secede so the rest of us can divest our tens of trillions of national debt.
ericd 7y ago
The idea of secession is a horrific nightmare that no one should wish for. There are conceivable ways that things can be fixed - constitutional convention.
- spankalee 7y ago
  A constitutional convention opens the doors to at least as much disruption as a few states seceding. Absolutely everything can be relitigated.
- username90 7y ago
  40 million people is more than enough to be an independent country, why would it be so horrible? Peaceful secession has happened before and can happen again.
fleekonpoint 7y ago
The last time that happened, it started a civil war.
- spankalee 7y ago
  The last time states tried to secede it was to preserve their "right" to enslave people.
rlt 7y ago
Instead of California succeeding, maybe it should be broken up into to smaller states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_and_secession_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_and_secession_in_Cal...
r00fus 7y ago
> The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. This is untrue. We could simply add more Senators by admitting more states into the Union. Kinda like we did with Alaska and Hawaii. Millions of citizens in DC are without Senatorial representation not to mention Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Guam or many other "protectorates". It can be done without dissolution of the US. It requires a simple majority vote in the Senate and House and Presidential approval.
frank2 7y ago
Structural unfairness in the Senate is a weak argument for splitting the Union. Once the Union is split, Russia, China and probably other countries start playing one fragment of the former Union against another. The reason the Chinese government is trying so hard to stop China from splitting (beyond the existing mainland-Taiwan split) is to avoid a repeat of the bad old times when Japan and European powers were able to play one Chinese-language-using polity against another.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

If the Fed had done the right thing by raising interest rates, and the government didn't interfere in the market with massive spending, USD could have remained the reserve currency for the foreseeable future. But nobody in Washington has the guts to do the right thing. Especially the Fed. Also, if this "pact" leaves the United States, that is when I'll be leaving the shithole called CA. I'm not paying for the free riders anymore.

nawgszy 7y ago
It's a bit funny to see capitalist corporations making obscene amounts of money violating laws and ethics and trickling a bit of that ill-gained wealth down to software engineers, who then turn around and say everyone should have wealth like them and not need gov't assistance when their own company is one of the drivers of inequality...
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  That's due to excessive regulation. Regulations benefit large incumbents, as opposed to smaller competitors/startups. The real driver of inequality is the government. Usually through excessive regulations, bailouts, and inflation. In a truly free market, prices go down, as competition is fierce. Perfect competition and pareto efficiency are concepts everyone on here should have knowledge of, if only at a surface level.

bpodgursky 7y ago

It's not going to happen, if nothing else, because CA is going to be grasping for federal budget bailouts later this year. Lockdown is going to crush state budgets.

yingw787 7y ago
I hope so, man, for our country's sake. Every day we're together is a second chance at making things right.
kevingadd 7y ago
CA has a pretty big rainy-day fund. It'll be exhausted eventually, but I'm not sure it will be this year. The most recent sources I've found suggest the state has around $20bn in reserves, which probably is enough to buffer us through a bad year unless tax incomes completely drop to 0.
- bpodgursky 7y ago
  The budget for the year was $208 billion, so you only need a 10% haircut to need help. And the budget is HEAVILY funded by (1) Silicon Valley IPOs, and (2) Hollywood. Both of those are going to generate $0 near-term. Not to mention retirement funds which are going to be obliterated, but that's a somewhat separate issue from the budget.

_bxg1 7y ago

> National Guard drills, deployments, and contingency planning That seems pretty far-fetched. Much more likely (and welcome) would be a sort of "legal coup", where the states that still have functioning governments band together in the task of reshaping the federal government through voting and legislative power. We're certainly approaching a breaking point in the dysfunction of the federal government and its inability to do its job and serve a society; something has got to give. But I still think any kind of civil war scenario remains far, far out of the question.

yingw787 7y ago
Maybe. I mean, I would acknowledge that given post-9/11 deployments of National Guard troops to active combat zones, all you would need to do to mess up any planning would be to deploy those troops separately and randomly far away. Then it wouldn't matter if the governor called up the National Guard in self-defense and if they wanted to obey despite being federalized, because they wouldn't be in-theater. You'd have to raise fresh troops and train / arm them and by that point it'll already be far too late. Not to mention the firepower of existing federal garrisons in-state, complete air supremacy by federal air assets, and existing tensions between urban/rural areas preventing a retreat to the hinterlands. Whether these facts will change remains to be seen, but secession today is impractical. I think the situation we're in right now is pretty much a "legal coup" by a motivated minority. It'll be a slog to get back to representative democracy. I read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb recently, and he mentioned how his home country of Lebanon went from diverse paradise to all-out civil war in six weeks, or 1.5 months. About the same time as "just a flu" to today. For all our sakes, I hope to God I'm wrong and I hope to God you're right.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  At the very most we might see Hong Kong-like civil unrest or something. But I see no path for any states to assemble a standing army under the nose of the federal government. Even if they tried to use the national guard; who's to say it would be more loyal to the state than to the fed?