Cities can compete against each other to attract businesses - no? If businesses can deal with a patchwork of sales taxes and building codes, they can handle other bylaws just fine. These laws have the hallmark signs of a partisan power-grab as they are limited to a number of on red-meat issues.
> Cities can compete against each other to attract businesses - no?
We've seen this with Walmarts. They get cities to compete for their stores. Amazon did it for HQ2. The problem is the winner's curse. The winning city will often bid so low they take a net loss.
I mostly agree with you, but let's be honest: this is not the motivating factor for republican state legislatures grabbing power from cities. If it were, the legislatures would be getting rid of tax rebates and tax holidays cities offer to attract businesses, and instead have a uniform tax structure across the whole state for "uniformity"
> SF is being gutted because the only equipment a programmer needs is a computer
I think that's only half of it. The other half is a lot of people were only in SF for the money. When given the opportunity to leave and make the same money, they did.
I'm sympathetic to concerns that some kids (mostly girls) are doing it because it's a trendy thing to do. I'm worried things like The Genderbread Person send the wrong message by gendering clothes and activities. It tells a boy wearing pink and playing with barbies he's a girl.
If my kid's LGB, I'm glad they found what they're looking for, and if they change their mind, that works too. The trans bit worries me because it's permanent.
I think both sides have gone too far on this issue, and find California and Florida equally scary.
Absolutely anything to distract folks from class identity. I'm 50-50 on whether or not the intergenerational conflict articles[1] are part of a psyops program.
1. The sort of "Boomer hate Millennial" or vice versa or "Zoomers have no idea what a record player is"-type clickbait.
School shooters (let's be precise, as that is what people are talking about when talking about mass shootings, not gang violence or other stuff) want to look cool, and ARs are cool looking and everyone markets them up on both sides.
Which is why my simple modification to solve it all is mandate that all firearms be hot pink with a hello kitty logo.
> Some of their stats resemble third world countries.
Have you walked through the TL?
Comparing California and Texas can be interesting because the states are both dominated by a single party, so you see how both ideologies can go wrong. With Texas being like a developing country, I'm reminded of the winter power outage. They love free markets. It's not worth it to harden the electric grid for an event that rare that only lasts a few days. Picking on California, its K-12 education is in the bottom quartile.
I live in the SFBA and have far worse uptime and far higher prices than Texas. The smugness from Californians wrt/grid does not make any sense to me. I would trade for Texas electrical grid performance in less than a heartbeat.
There was a five hour long outage on Monday while the weather was perfectly lovely. And more than a week cumulative outage in March when the weather was merely a little wet.
Sorry, I didn't really mean to direct the comment at yours, but rather intended to build upon it. I meet a lot of folks around here who point to the Texas grid failure and snicker about how much better California is at regulating the grid. Yet I routinely put up with outages longer than Austin's under less-severe conditions.
Most of the SF Bay Area gets its power from PG&E, which is an investor-owned utility. Palo Alto and Santa Clara are exceptions; they have municipal power companies.
Conservative hobbies are like hunting, fishing, NASCAR, watching football, going to church, a lot of that is regional. A conservative in Saudi Arabia is going to have different hobbies compared to one in Utah.
Yours is a naiive position positioning itself as enlightened
Firearms are worthless without organization and there is no actual revolutionary force in America even at the seed stage that is approximating anything near even Taliban levels of insurgent capabilities.
Your 2A “movement” has neither the coherent holistic political philosophy nor the competent leadership needed to actually create a viable social structure
So no, you’re cosplaying as a hollow copy of the Taliban with none of the threat, risk or even dedication to a real cause.
It is so weird how you guys belittle those that appreciate 2A as though it's not useful until we have "Taliban-levels of capability and organization" but if we did, you'd immediately cry "insurgency! This is too dangerous for our democracy!"
There's no winning with you people. That's why the 2A movement is progressing finally. You're impossible to please.
> No area is thriving right now thanks to the recession
We're not really in a recession. Tech was probably in a recession in 2022, but Google and Meta both had good earnings reports, so maybe we're through that. Finance is having its own issues. Everyone else is a little nervous, but doing ok, except for inflation.
What he meant to say was "they pay sticker price"