Roman Empire never fails until it actually does. I want things to get better in California and be the best place on planet earth to live. The first step in doin

Roman Empire never fails until it actually does. I want things to get better in California and be the best place on planet earth to live. The first step in doing that is actually admitting that things are getting worse and there is a dire need to change things. At some point your argument won’t hold anymore. The decline is real and the arguments made in the 90’s stood on a different truths than today. This defense hides the fact that people are still believing the falsehoods and instead of introspecting, they're not even believing the facts presented in the article. The first comment on top is an ad-hominem attack on the credibility of the Economist instead of its substance. We need to take a hard look at what went wrong. Imagine if we're a team trying to do a post-mortem of an outage in our company. We'd dig into what the real root cause is. Here, Californians like myself are fed up with decline and all you see is people getting into tribal "Us vs Them (Texans)" game. That's what I see on HN.