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, roads full of potholes and power outages. Same for health care. No matter if you like socialized medicine or free markets, nobody should be able to justify the current state of things but nothing gets done.
Sometimes it feels like the whole country is just turning into a weird reality show.
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.
What fundamental problems? Compared to the majority of human civilisations and most of human history the US is a utopia. It isn't perfect, but the people claiming they are 'trying to to fix fundamental problems' are potentially more of a threat than the problems themselves.
But predicting the end of times is fun and I'll throw in a take. The US as a nation is fabulously wealthy. That obscures the importance of wealth creation and people are distracted from it as a goal. The US political and social narrative is clearly shifting to focus more on wealth/power distribution than wealth creation. There are good reasons for that but it is a lot less fun that the 60s/70s/80s/90s where ultra-rapid wealth creation was the order of the day.
If big policies are adopted or persisted in that destroy wealth, and I cite things like the endless wars & associated loss of liberties or the response to to '08 financial crisis, then the situation will deteriorate.
Would you not call the health care situation a fundamental problem? A large portion of society is at constant risk of financial ruin if they have a serious illness, a lot of of people stay in their jobs mainly to keep their insurance which reduces entrepreneurial activity and a lot of people can’t afford any health care. I would call that a problem that other countries already have solved.
I don’t like it when people are told how good they have it compared to other countries or people in the past. It sounds very condescending. This line is also never used to tell wealthy executives or shareholders how good they have it and they should maybe stop trying to concentrate wealth on themselves. Only the little guy gets to hear this.
Nowhere is perfect, but I definitely think California is uniquely bad for the US.
My pet theory is that small units govern themselves nest, and I'd support splitting California into as many smaller states as possible.
Of course, a state where building a 4 story housing building takes on average math.inf will not get it together to dissolve itself in anyone's lifetime.
So I guess things will just continue on this track.
it's funny because what you describe sounds accurate of the megametrapolis of the global south. Terrible public infrastructure the rich avoid, and the poor suffer through. Sad the U.S. seems to be moving that way having lived on the investment of the 30-70s.
Yes, it's important to remember that the Gini coefficients of Florida (leans red) and California (blue) are 46th and 47th most unequal in the country respectively (0.485 and 0.490). Texas (red) isn't much better, at 39th with a Gini of 0.480. Inequality isn't a liberal/conservative, blue/red, or California-specific issue: it's a U.S. issue.
People in US are allergic to putting money into common pools (be it taxes, healthcare, licenses, insurance, infrastructure), even if the aim is better quality of living for everyone. Its EVIL as long as someone else has potential of gaining anything from said payment.
F you I got mine, mah freedoms, communism, handouts, those are the recurring 'arguments'. Take this YT dude learning that in order to run business you need to ... actually get permits, license and pay taxes, and all the comments under the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR5n3v9Sih8 Its a never ending stream of "move to another state", "bad government", "stealing from small guy" while dude hacks Salvage title wrecks on his curb (or illegal condemned structure) and flips them to unsuspecting victims. No license, no registered business, no insurance, no liability. 6 months later he is still at it, whining about receiving permanent injunction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XNHVKSjzOY and contemplating car raffles (apparently being taken down for running illegal gambling sounds better than paying taxes) and tax dodging schemes (charities, non profits).
I just mentioned in another thread that The most fundamental issue US needs to solve for inequality in the US is....whether US can continue to allow corporations to reap the benefits of a strong democracy coupled with the most vibrant economy, while at the same time, bankrupt the communities by continuing to ship jobs overseas and avoid paying any sort of taxes back to the communities where they make a profit.
There are only two parties in the US right now. And one is for globalization. And the other is for stronger US labor unions.
I don’t think there are actually two parties but more like two factions of the same party. One is a little more right leaning maybe but neither is willing or has the courage to address inequality.
It's funny because having lived outside of the US, it has always blown my mind how extraordinarily well California/the US handles natural disasters like wildfires. The worst wildfire season ever in a state of 40M people, 18,000 buildings destroyed and fewer than 100 people died?!?
Similarly the infrastructure/public services are quite incredible in the US. I grew up with daily 6 hour blackouts and water brought in by truck because there the city didn't have a working water supply network.
We shouldn't be content with how things are and the article makes some valid points that I'm not trying to diminish, but it doesn't hurt to have a little appreciation for what incredibly high standards we have here before calling California a 'dystopian apocalypse'.
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 you prefer them, set incentives and goals to favor the right outcomes and let people decide and optimize how to do it.
Your urban utopia is my hellscape, and my suburban utopia is yours. The good news is, this is America, and we can both live here. Good fences make good neighbors.
P.S. most of the $2 trillion real estate market in the Bay Area where I have lived for 12 years exists precisely because our politicians DON'T promote further development, sustainable or otherwise. Most of what's here is decaying, old, unsustainable, whether it is high or low density, and nobody can afford to improve it because all the tradespeople got priced out and left years ago.
Paving our best farmland is not sustainable, nor is deluding yourself that we can capture carbon at anywhere near the rate needed to prevent severe change in our weather patterns.
US suburbs are heavily subsidized with federal dollars[1], this is a huge reason why PGE can't effectively maintain the infrastructure in California. The ratepayers & tax base cannot afford to repipe a suburban neighborhood when the water service lines hit end of design life, let alone repaving, maintaining gas, electrical service, telecom & cable[2]. This is also why Fiber buildouts are so uncommon in suburbs (for-profit companies won't make their money back within a decade).
We have designed an extremely expensive mousetrap of suburbia where you get degrading public services (as maintenance & replacement bills accrue and go unmet), nearly mandatory car ownership, and higher rates of health problems caused by the poor design of these neighborhoods[3].
> P.S. most of the $2 trillion real estate market in the Bay Area where I have lived for 12 years exists precisely because our politicians DON'T promote further development, sustainable or otherwise. Most of what's here is decaying, old, unsustainable, whether it is high or low density, and nobody can afford to improve it because all the tradespeople got priced out and left years ago.
While I think the rest of your response is orthogonal (albeit valid), I think this is the heart of the matter relevant to the article. Californian infrastructure is aging and politicians have only made it more difficult over time to build new anything, whether that's power, water, internet, transport, or housing infrastructure. I just wish I knew what the solution was.
The incentive is already set, city limits are already set, eventually they will fill up and then people will be motivated to build up a bit.
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.
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.
"the one-party-against-another politics that make democracy work"
Where have you seen this happening in practice?
A political science professor first showed me 25 years ago something I still see in US national politics: a "winner-take-all" voting system that creates a polarizing dynamic, typically resulting in a roughly 51:49 split -- with the potential for radically different outcomes hinging on tiny pockets of voters.
Also, both parties are institutionally corrupted by the dominance of money (cf Lessig on "Fix Congress First", highlighting campaign finance as a fundamental threat to democracy).
But only one of the parties is exhibiting blatant, explicit, direct opposition to the principles of democracy (eg voter suppression, rule of law, etc) from the highest level on down.
The degree to which state politics are tied to the characteristics of the national party makes it difficult for powerful governors or even mayors to deviate from party lines.
Don't get me wrong; the idea of a free marketplace of ideas and the positive value of principled opposition are things I'm sure we'd agree on. But that's not what we have. Wish I knew how to fix it.
The weird part is how the California's Republicans have yet to tack to the left. Per Durverger's Law, it has to eventually happen, right? I'd love to know why it's taking so long.
Is this a symptom of one party governance? It's certainly not because of a lack of money or progressiveness. If anything, I would expect that the California state government would be leading in all of these issues.
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.
A lot of tree trimming and removal. Lots of heavy equipment. Firebreaks a mile wide. More full-time Cal Fire people and equipment. Recycled 747s as water tankers (there's already one.) More underground power lines. Not really that hard.
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: People don't want to socialise the costs, at personal loss of disposable income.
I predict that no measure of substance which demands people pay more to socialize fixes will get up without a fight. I also predict that rational simple fixes applied in other economies (I am thinking of europe mainly) simply won't be considered, because "socialism"
True, we seem to want everything but aren't willing to pay for it.
This situation is similar to the country going to war. Where the political leaders are the ones that must convince the population that we must act or lose the war and our way of life. It really does come down to leadership.
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.
Part of the issue is definitely that California is the biggest, most influential, and one of the wealthiest states. The federal government is less incentivized to help us out in some ways, because theoretically, we can afford it.
But in aggregate, this is really what the people of California wanted. Suburbanization is popular at the voting booth, as are low property taxes. Californians wanted to freeze time in the 80s and that's what they got.
There's a certain smell of absurdity in the air in California.
Ban on plastic straws - garbage on highway shoulders on 280 and 101 in San Francisco county
Strictest car emission laws in the Union - fires poison the air to the extent that people die, equivalent to multiple involuntary cigarettes per day
This list can go on and on. Those working for large companies like Google and Apple are protected for now: like in the fortresses. If you are trying to strike here on your own- probably too late- no affordable garages anymore.
Maybe it's a consequence of one party system?
I came here in 1999 to go to Stanford. Perhaps it's time to pack up.
It's interesting to observe the length of time it has taken for a power utility to crumble. I believe the disintegration we're seeing now began with the governmental deregulation of utilities during the Regan administration. The current state was predicted by losers in that round of voting. We are now seeing the tipping point of those regulatory changes.
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.
Readit News
Sometimes it feels like the whole country is just turning into a weird reality show.
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.
Deleted Comment
But predicting the end of times is fun and I'll throw in a take. The US as a nation is fabulously wealthy. That obscures the importance of wealth creation and people are distracted from it as a goal. The US political and social narrative is clearly shifting to focus more on wealth/power distribution than wealth creation. There are good reasons for that but it is a lot less fun that the 60s/70s/80s/90s where ultra-rapid wealth creation was the order of the day.
If big policies are adopted or persisted in that destroy wealth, and I cite things like the endless wars & associated loss of liberties or the response to to '08 financial crisis, then the situation will deteriorate.
I don’t like it when people are told how good they have it compared to other countries or people in the past. It sounds very condescending. This line is also never used to tell wealthy executives or shareholders how good they have it and they should maybe stop trying to concentrate wealth on themselves. Only the little guy gets to hear this.
Dead Comment
My pet theory is that small units govern themselves nest, and I'd support splitting California into as many smaller states as possible.
Of course, a state where building a 4 story housing building takes on average math.inf will not get it together to dissolve itself in anyone's lifetime.
So I guess things will just continue on this track.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/too-much-government-i...
Among other things, that would just replicate CA's legacy of inept representation in the Senate many times over.
F you I got mine, mah freedoms, communism, handouts, those are the recurring 'arguments'. Take this YT dude learning that in order to run business you need to ... actually get permits, license and pay taxes, and all the comments under the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR5n3v9Sih8 Its a never ending stream of "move to another state", "bad government", "stealing from small guy" while dude hacks Salvage title wrecks on his curb (or illegal condemned structure) and flips them to unsuspecting victims. No license, no registered business, no insurance, no liability. 6 months later he is still at it, whining about receiving permanent injunction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XNHVKSjzOY and contemplating car raffles (apparently being taken down for running illegal gambling sounds better than paying taxes) and tax dodging schemes (charities, non profits).
There are only two parties in the US right now. And one is for globalization. And the other is for stronger US labor unions.
Similarly the infrastructure/public services are quite incredible in the US. I grew up with daily 6 hour blackouts and water brought in by truck because there the city didn't have a working water supply network.
We shouldn't be content with how things are and the article makes some valid points that I'm not trying to diminish, but it doesn't hurt to have a little appreciation for what incredibly high standards we have here before calling California a 'dystopian apocalypse'.
Perhaps because these fires are closer to the big city power centers, but I'm sure also "practice makes perfect"!
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 you prefer them, set incentives and goals to favor the right outcomes and let people decide and optimize how to do it.
Your urban utopia is my hellscape, and my suburban utopia is yours. The good news is, this is America, and we can both live here. Good fences make good neighbors.
P.S. most of the $2 trillion real estate market in the Bay Area where I have lived for 12 years exists precisely because our politicians DON'T promote further development, sustainable or otherwise. Most of what's here is decaying, old, unsustainable, whether it is high or low density, and nobody can afford to improve it because all the tradespeople got priced out and left years ago.
US suburbs are heavily subsidized with federal dollars[1], this is a huge reason why PGE can't effectively maintain the infrastructure in California. The ratepayers & tax base cannot afford to repipe a suburban neighborhood when the water service lines hit end of design life, let alone repaving, maintaining gas, electrical service, telecom & cable[2]. This is also why Fiber buildouts are so uncommon in suburbs (for-profit companies won't make their money back within a decade).
We have designed an extremely expensive mousetrap of suburbia where you get degrading public services (as maintenance & replacement bills accrue and go unmet), nearly mandatory car ownership, and higher rates of health problems caused by the poor design of these neighborhoods[3].
1 - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/we-have-always-...
2 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/27/a-texas-sized-...
3 - https://www.webmd.com/women/news/20040927/suburbs-may-be-haz...
While I think the rest of your response is orthogonal (albeit valid), I think this is the heart of the matter relevant to the article. Californian infrastructure is aging and politicians have only made it more difficult over time to build new anything, whether that's power, water, internet, transport, or housing infrastructure. I just wish I knew what the solution was.
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.
Where have you seen this happening in practice?
A political science professor first showed me 25 years ago something I still see in US national politics: a "winner-take-all" voting system that creates a polarizing dynamic, typically resulting in a roughly 51:49 split -- with the potential for radically different outcomes hinging on tiny pockets of voters.
Also, both parties are institutionally corrupted by the dominance of money (cf Lessig on "Fix Congress First", highlighting campaign finance as a fundamental threat to democracy).
But only one of the parties is exhibiting blatant, explicit, direct opposition to the principles of democracy (eg voter suppression, rule of law, etc) from the highest level on down.
The degree to which state politics are tied to the characteristics of the national party makes it difficult for powerful governors or even mayors to deviate from party lines.
Don't get me wrong; the idea of a free marketplace of ideas and the positive value of principled opposition are things I'm sure we'd agree on. But that's not what we have. Wish I knew how to fix it.
I predict that no measure of substance which demands people pay more to socialize fixes will get up without a fight. I also predict that rational simple fixes applied in other economies (I am thinking of europe mainly) simply won't be considered, because "socialism"
This situation is similar to the country going to war. Where the political leaders are the ones that must convince the population that we must act or lose the war and our way of life. It really does come down to leadership.
Dead Comment
But in aggregate, this is really what the people of California wanted. Suburbanization is popular at the voting booth, as are low property taxes. Californians wanted to freeze time in the 80s and that's what they got.
Deleted Comment
Ban on plastic straws - garbage on highway shoulders on 280 and 101 in San Francisco county
Strictest car emission laws in the Union - fires poison the air to the extent that people die, equivalent to multiple involuntary cigarettes per day
This list can go on and on. Those working for large companies like Google and Apple are protected for now: like in the fortresses. If you are trying to strike here on your own- probably too late- no affordable garages anymore.
Maybe it's a consequence of one party system? I came here in 1999 to go to Stanford. Perhaps it's time to pack up.
Deleted Comment
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.