If we look at the evolution of legal action in the Western democracies over the last 60 years, especially comparing nations like Germany to USA, we can generalize a bit and say that every society has some conflict, and can choose to deal with that conflict either using the judiciary or the executive branch of government.
In short: it's lawsuits or edicts, and each nation picks its favorite poison.
In the Anglosphere countries, with legal systems that trace back to Common Law, there has long been a tendency to use the judiciary more and the executive less, relative to most European nations. The trend intensified in the mid-20th Century, when a new and expansive definition of "due process" aggressively expanded how many actions or behaviors could be considered violations.
I'm personally wary of our culture of lawsuits, and I'm personally wary of an aggressive interpretation of "due process." I understand that one of the goals was to try to atone for a long history of racial injustice, which is certainly a noble goal. Did lawsuits actually end racial injustice in the USA? I think we can ask whether this expanded understanding of due process is really achieving its goals.
I personally would like to see lawsuits limited, but I'm also aware that turning away from the judiciary would then very likely expand what is controlled directly by regulations by the executive branch. Every human society has internal conflicts, and the more complex our society gets, the more conflicts we have, and so the more that people turn to some branch of the government in hopes of getting some kind of address of grievances.
In other words, I'd like to see lawsuits limited, but I'm aware the need for some kind of conflict resolution will manifest in some other ways.
This is a complex topic, and I plan to write more about it at some point, but I cannot delineate a full theory in a comment on Hacker News. On my weblog, I plan to write on this topic later in the year, but for now I am still doing research.
> The story also turns out to be in part about why California, which had a growth streak dating back to the gold rush, saw it broken in 2020, when the population shrank by 182,000 and caused a first-ever loss of a congressional seat.
Everybody seems to have a personal theory about demographic change in California. My conservative parents think it's woke social justice warriors, my activist friends think it's the lack of housing, and apparently this author thinks it's legal bureaucracy run amok. It would be really nice to see some evidence the next time this claim is made...
> My conservative parents think it's woke social justice warriors
I know you aren't claiming that's true, but for anyone who thinks it is true, and since you asked for evidence, here are some bits of it.
Demographic change in California isn't really different than other similar states. California's racial and ethnic demographics are [1] pretty similar to Texas [2]. Most of the west and southwest is getting less white, with few exceptions.
Both states' populations (and population growth) are primarily concentrated in their cities, with rural areas continually emptying.
The only difference is overall population growth rate, which has declined in CA, due mostly to economics, and specifically the very high housing costs, which tend to inhibit immigration by lower and middle income workers more than higher income workers.
I don't see how housing could cause a net migration away. The number of houses keeps going up. Unless you think that house inventory is shrinking (because growth of vacancies, etc outpace construction) at most housing prices should just determine who lives there.
I think likely the number of people living in existing housing stock is going down. I read somewhere that more than half of the rent controlled 3 bedroom apartments in San Francisco are occupied by a single older person (why leave your $1500 per month 3 bedroom apartment?). I've noticed that the single family home neighborhoods I've lived in have gone from 1-2 parents and 2-3 kids in the house to older couples or single people living in the house. And it's not just people that stay due to prop 13 -- when houses go on the market they often get bought by single people.
This is a good point. I’ll also add that California is not one big city. There are parts that are doing really well economically, and other parts that are doing terribly. Housing may be somewhat cheap on those economically deprived areas, but they’d be cheaper still in other states with better job prospect. Or, someone who grew up in California may end up leaving the state because their chosen career path wouldn’t allow for them to ever purchase a home here.
Though I agree with you about housing, if you are making an argument for bureaucracy you'd probably assign bureaucracy as the cause of a large portion of high housing costs as well.
Hi I just left CA. SOCAL is turning into a 3rd world country with trash and homeless everywhere. Policies that allow naked homeless machete waving people to kidnap people from the street biting them in the neck and then released the next day. Want to have a gun to protect yourself? Too bad there’s a war on guns so only the criminals seem to have them. Call the police on somebody meandering into your home? They probably won’t come. And don’t protect yourself because the state might charge you. The woke SJW is getting out of control. Some other state is now getting my tax money. The weather was great, though.
I feel like he had something to say here, and I feel like I might even agree with him, but he dances around actually saying anything so much it's hard to understand what he's actually getting at.
There are a lot of words here that don't relaly say a lot but here are two immediate problems.
First:
> The story also turns out to be in part about why California, which had a growth streak dating back to the gold rush, saw it broken in 2020, when the population shrank by 182,000, causing a first-ever loss of a congressional seat.
It seems disingenuous at best (and intellectually dishonest at worst) to talk about what happened in 2020 without even mentioning the unprecedented pandemic, Not a great start.
Second, using the DEFH lawsuit against Activision-Blizzard as any kind of example of government overreach is on very shaky grounds. For anyone unfamiliar iwth the case, let me recount some highlights:
1. Employees engaged in cube crawls where they'd get drunk and go from cube to cube harassing female employees;
2. One female employee was in a relationship with a superior. That superior showed a photo of her vagine at a company offsite. That woman committed suicide;
3. Breastfeeding mothers would store breast milk that they would pump while at work in a fridge they shared with beer for some reason. They complained that their breast milk was being stolen without any action taken.
The state spent 2 years investigating these claims.
To me this is exactly what the government should be doing so you have a pretty high bar to meet to show this lawsuit is evidence of any kind of state wrongdoing.
No idea what’s true and what isn’t, but part 2 of that article talks about various questionable accusations against them. For example, the lawsuit says a female employee complained about “underdressed women dancing on poles” at a company outing. In reality they had just hired cirque du soleil to perform
> 3. Breastfeeding mothers would store breast milk that they would pump while at work in a fridge they shared with beer for some reason. They complained that their breast milk was being stolen without any action taken.
That is categorically insane. Who was stealing the breastmilk... like why?
