As a Californian I have to disagree. The only reason you think it's being run just fine is because of the success of the private sector. The only reason California would be the 4th/5th largest economy in the world is because of the the tech industry and other industries that are in California (Hollywood, agriculture, etc). It's not because we have some awesome efficiently run state government.
We don't need to look at other countries, just look at other States. California is quite poorly run by the standards of other States. I'm a California native but I've lived in and worked with many other States. You don't realize how appallingly bad California government is until you have to work with their counterparts in other States.
It isn't a red versus blue thing, even grift-y one-party States like Washington are plainly better run than California.
Here's an example, took the money and delivered mostly an infeasible version of battery swapping with probably their existing factory install tech lightly modified: https://centerforjobs.org/?p=4600
I think California might have a better run government if it had an electable conservative party. The Republican Party is not that, being tied to the national Trump-Vance-Orbán axis. A center-right party could hold Democratic officers accountable but it’s not being offered and moderates gravitate to the electable Dem side. An independent California would largely fix that.
As a lifelong California Democrat, I realize that my party does not have all the answers. But the conservatives have all gone AWOL or gone batshit so we’re doing the best we can without the other half of the dialectic.
I think the Republican Party’s positive reputation for handling the economy and running an efficient government is entirely unearned.
Closing down major parts of the government entirely (as Project 2025 proposes), making taxation more regressive, and offering fewer social services isn’t “efficiency.”
I don’t know if you know this but you’re already in the center-right party. The actual problem is that there’s no left of center party, as well as the general need for a number of aspects of our democracy to be reformed (like how it really doesn’t allow for more than two parties to exist, or how out of control campaign finance rules have become).
Democrats (especially in California) are somewhat to the right of socialist parties in Europe, and of course they’re neoliberal. But on most non-economic social issues, they’re quite far to the left compared to most European countries. So it really depends on what you consider more important to the left.
You could consider my definition of “left” and “right” to mean economic policy in this case.
Considering that the economy is supposedly to be the number one concern to most US voters, there really isn’t anything very far left available to vote for in that area.
California republicans are extremely moderate (or at least, there have been moderate candidates for governor of california almost every year), so I have no idea what you're talking about. The last GOP governor of California was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is a moderate republican by basically all standards.
Some of them are very moderate, some of them have become more radical. But all of them are tied to a national brand which is not particularly electable here. Christian populism cannot win a majority here, yet to secure the right of their party all of the Republican candidates must say they support Trump. The national party is an albatross around their necks.
Do you mean to say that the government was deeply underwater a few years ago? And the state marred by forest fires that it was frightening to see if it could ever come back ?
But what are the long-term side effects? You don't get something for nothing. There is no such thing as a magic pill that makes you magically lose weight without any consequences.
If that were true about the human condition in the same way that it’s true for conservation of mass, we wouldn't be living longer and healthier lives than our forebears. Yet here we are.
Of course we should be aware of side-effects. But there’s no law of nature that says there have to be any serious ones.
we wouldn't be living longer and healthier lives than our forebears
Take out infectious disease, post-partum maternal deaths, no sanitation, and obvious lifestyle choices like smoking, and are we really living healthier lives than prior generations? I'm not so convinced.
This shares energy with: "All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Those things you list are the bits which made our lives healthier. Just because you can list them doesn't mean they didn't happen.
Quality of life and amount of life as a healthy adult has actually increased astronomically. Are you saying we just throw out all our medical discoveries and advances and returned to “if he dies, he dies” mentality? Most people used to work from dawn til dusk in a patch of dirt just to keep food on the table.
Not sure why you're getting down-voted, it's a common meme for people to think everyone just died by their 40s. It seems like if you made it to 40 you often could be living into your 70s [1] throughout much of human history.
Now I'll take our modern scientific advances over not having them. Give me modern sanitation, surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines for sure. But I'm not sure I'd call the way many American elders around me are living in their 70s to be healthy lives. Many lack mobility, are obese, are on a fistful of prescription drugs daily, and have constant pain. Except for the ones that ate well and in moderation, didn't drink much, and exercised their entire lives.
I just hope people take these GPL-1 drugs but also get their bodies moving (particularly strength training).
I agree, but I also think that in most cases people are more likely to be able to transition to an active, healthy lifestyle with moderate eating if they have help taking weight off. Being heavy makes exercise painful, exhausting, and often more dangerous.
I think we need a huge investment in physical therapy. Everyone who is obese and working to reduce their weight and increases their activity needs PT, and we need PT specialists who know how to work with heavy people. I know a lot of fat people (including myself) who get injured and discouraged trying to follow workout advice intended for people in substantially better physical condition, and also a lot who have had trouble finding trainers or physical therapists who know how to work with them.
Oh absolutely, which is why I said I hope people can take these and add some sort of resistance training as they lose the weight.
And also totally agree that we need to invest in PT and educating PTs on how to work with people in larger bodies. As a formerly unhealthy person who only found exercise in their 30s, it's ridiculous to me that my high school gym requirements didn't teach me how to safely lift weights or use a gym. They would just let us use a barbell without any proper training, and the first time I tried to bench press with some friends (because we probably saw someone in a movie doing it) I injured myself. Every high school student should be learning how to use a gym, get through a yoga class, learn some calisthenics, etc. Set them up for their life so it's not so intimidating as an adult. Instead, at least for me in the 90s, it was a lot of playing basketball and baseball, nothing to keep me healthy on my own in my life.
The old saying goes: abs are made in the gym, revealed in the kitchen.
Not saying it’s easy, and no it isn’t as simple as calories in, calories out, but it is close to that simple. Working out, running, weightlifting, all that can happen later. Eating “right” and just walking a lot can induce a lot of positives.
Yeah, it's wild how much you need to pay attention to diet to get those abs to show. I don't work out for aesthetics, but I train pretty hard for my age (40 -- muay thai a 2-3x per week, kettlebells a couple days, ashtanga yoga a day or two, and I'll throw in 5 mile runs here and there in a week).
I'm always around 12-13% body fat, but to get them to show, absolutely, it's all diet. I'm vegetarian, so that probably works against me, but I've never had that 8% body fat ripped look even with all the activity I do in a week.
I guess I'm cherry-picking but I'm always impressed that 200 years ago you had founding fathers living 80+ which is higher than today's average male American lifespan (76).
In any case, long-term obesity leads to (and is worsened by) decreased exercise, which results in decreased bone density and muscle loss. There might be an argument for avoiding GLP-1 agonists for slightly overweight people, but for obese people it seems unlikely that the risks outweigh the benefits.
Yeah, because there's a (previously observed) paradoxical effect where decreasing blood glucose levels can accelerate the progress of diabetic retinopathy.
It’s actually chemistry, and given that we don’t really know how a lot of the human body subsystems interact in 2024, it’s closer to witchcraft than medicine.
GLP-1 drugs have been studied for decades and the side effects are incredibly low/small.
The bigger problem is frankly the reaction you display, that even if the side effects were actually zero that people feel that’s “unfair” and that others shouldn’t be taking a pill to do something their personal body chemistry doesn’t do properly.
Your thyroid medication is really a moral failing, you see. Just eat less and your weight will remain healthy.
A version, or two, ago they've introduced their own rating system where you can thumb's up/down certain criteria (which elude me, right now. but, of the "ambiance", "food quality", "service", etc. variety). So, I imagine they're looking to ween off of Yelp for their rating's system.
Elon is not giving Trump $45 million per month. Musk denied this in a recent interview with Peterson. He did say created a PAC though. [1]
I know it makes Musk an easy target and easier to attack when a report comes out saying he's donating $45m to Trump but seriously people need to stop believing blindly what the media says about anyone (and Musk especially) without fact-checking first. When I first saw the article about it in WSJ I was skeptical. There were 0 sources and it was sus.
"Oh WSJ said it so it must be true!"
WSJ's source: "according to people familiar with the matter." [2]
Where do you see he donated $45 million to it? Legit source please? Not WSJ "someone familiar with the matter"
Yes the PAC may support Trump but I don't think he's pumping 45 mil a month into it. WSJ put that article about it without any sources and Musk denied it.
You believe everything Trump says? His staff told him that after reading business insider. They didn't even bother checking their actual accounts to see if Elon's super PAC donated $45M this month.
This is a large problem in industry: defining away some of the most important parts of a job or role as (should be) someone else's.
There is a lot of toil and unnecessary toil in the whole data field, but if you define away all of the "yucky" parts, you might find that all of those "someone elses" will end up eating your lunch.
It's not about "yucky" so much as specialization and only having a limited time in life to learn everything.
Should your reseacher have to manage nvidia drivers and infiniband networking? Should your operations engineer need to understand the math behind transformers? Does your researcher really gain any value from understanding the intricacies of docker layer caching?
I've seen what it looks like when a company hires mostly researchers and ignores other expertise, versus what happens when a company hires diverse talent sets to build a cross domain team. The second option works way better.
If other peoples work is reliant on yours then you should know how their part of the system transforms your inputs
Similarly you should fully understand how all the inputs to your part of the system are generated
No matter your coupling pattern, if you have more than 1 person product, knowing at least one level above and below your stack is a baseline expectation
This is true with personnel leadership too, I should be able to troubleshoot one level above and below me to some level of capacity.
> I've seen what it looks like when a company hires mostly researchers and ignores other expertise, versus what happens when a company hires diverse talent sets to build a cross domain team. The second option works way better.
I've seen these too, and you aren't wrong. Division into specializations can work "way better" (i.e. the overall potential is higher), but in practice the differentiating factors that matter will come down to organizational and ultimately human-factors. The anecdotal cases I draw my observations from organizations operating at the scale of 1-10 people, as well as 1,000s working in this field.
> Should your reseacher have to manage nvidia drivers and infiniband networking? Should your operations engineer need to understand the math behind transformers? Does your researcher really gain any value from understanding the intricacies of docker layer caching?
To realize the higher potential mentioned above, what they need to be doing is appreciating the value of what those things are and those who do those things beyond: these are the people that do the things I don't want to do or don't want to understand. That appreciation usually comes from having done and understanding that work.
When specializations are used, they tend to also manifest into organizational structures and dynamics which are ultimately comprised of humans. Conway's Law is worth mentioning here because the interfaces between these specializations become the bottleneck of your system in realizing that "higher potential."
As another commenter mentions, the effectiveness of these interfaces, corresponding bottlenecking effects, and ultimately the entire people-driven system is very much driven by how the parties on each side understand each other's work/methods/priorities/needs/constraints/etc, and having an appreciation for how they affect (i.e. complement) each other and the larger system.
> There is a lot of toil and unnecessary toil in the whole data field, but if you define away all of the "yucky" parts, you might find that all of those "someone elses" will end up eating your lunch.
See: the use of "devops" to encapsulate "everything besides feature development"
Used to do this job once upon a time - can't overstate the importance of just being knee-deep in the data all day long.
If you outsource that to somebody else, you'll miss out on all the pattern-matching eureka moments, and will never know the answers to questions you never think to ask.
They are not recovering it this time. Once they demonstrate that it can achieve a controlled "landing" at sea, then they will move on to trying to land it back at the launch site.
Booster is designed to land directly on the launch mount, but that won't be attempted until they are confident it won't blow up the whole base.
Starship is designed to land on any flat surface (earth, moon, mars) but again they won't attempt ground landing until they feel confident in the design.
They don't right now, because they are still testing. They can't risk bringing the booster or the ship back over land, because they don't know yet how well and precise they can steer and maneuver them. When they've figured that out, we will see the first landing of a super heavy booster for recovery and that will be pretty spectacular I bet …
I have Tesla FSD and I've started to use it more since v12 came out. It really does drive like a human and is impressively good. The only reason I don't use it all the time now is because every 15-60 seconds you need to nudge the steering wheel (or change volume or speed) so it knows you are paying attention. Elon said they are going to be removing that nudge in the coming weeks. Once they do that I'll be using it a lot more and it's going to be like having my own Waymo car to take me places.
Ironically when you are not paying attention, it is the least safe to disengage FSD. Ideally all drivers not paying attention would have FSD safety features auto engage to stop them from causing accidents.
The point the OP is making is that FSD allows you to stop paying attention. If you don’t even have to so much as hold the wheel it stands to reason your attention is more likely to drift.
What's the point of self driving if you have to babysit it?
Paying attention != nags. You can be staring into traffic and holding wheel and still not paying attention (which nags do help with). Nags when you are paying attention is super annoying tho.
Being on your phone, etc is completely different category. That is distracted driving.
Unfortunately this will be inevitable, and this one we can chock up to human biology.
The average person isn’t going to close their eyes and take a nap, but the average person will start spacing out, will start seeking their phone out to kill boredom, etc.
If you can't stop paying attention, what's the point? I don't see the advantage of having an untrustworthy driver assisting me. It's just a liability, or at least another responsibility.
The lying is bad enough to turn me away regardless of the performance. If you call something FULL. SELF. DRIVING. then explain that it is not in fact fully driving itself, I'm not interested in your product. FSD means I should be able to talk to my watch and have the car arrive to pick me up like I'm Michael Knight.
My jokey conspiracy theory is that humanity has had full self driving cars since the late 80s. "They" just let you think that you're really driving your car, but every move is actually made by the AI. It only diverges from your input when your input would have otherwise caused a crash. Meanwhile, you're so distracted by the narrowly avoided car crash that you don't notice that an AI took over.
However, you can't save everyone because then people would get suspicious. So "They" calculate social scores for everyone and people with a sufficiently low score don't get saved when they mess up.
The real punchline here, though, is exactly what you say:
> If you can't stop paying attention, what's the point?
Why would anyone actually want a full self driving car that you have to pay attention to all the time outside of a shadowy cabal from a half-baked conspiracy theory? I'm really not sure.
> The only reason I don't use it all the time now is because every 15-60 seconds you need to nudge the steering wheel (or change volume or speed) so it knows you are paying attention.
I often drive with my elbow on the top of the door, hand on the side of the wheel. The weight of my arm is enough that I frequently go many minutes without needing to nudge.
Otherwise, I agree. The nudging is so annoying that it's "more fun" to just drive.
As a Californian I have to disagree. The only reason you think it's being run just fine is because of the success of the private sector. The only reason California would be the 4th/5th largest economy in the world is because of the the tech industry and other industries that are in California (Hollywood, agriculture, etc). It's not because we have some awesome efficiently run state government.