> analogy is quite misleading, because, in addition to California, there is also Wyoming, with a population of less than <600k
Wyoming has the population of Malta [1][2] but the GDP/capita of the United States and Norway [3][4]. It should be expected we'd have a different optimal solution from California.
Sure, but fighting the impulse to solve problems at the Federal level that could/should be solved at the State level doesn’t preclude individual states from building multi-state solutions together.
It's the general knee-jerk reaction that's brought out whenever people try and have modern ideas for the US, like modern healthcare or high-speed rail. "B-but, it's so big!"
Scalia was right in saying that the checks and balances slowing things down is a feature, not a bug. The Framers were right about protections against faction. I’m not sure they understood how badly malicious schemers could deliberately manipulate the system. Things just aren’t getting done, and it is killing people.
Half of the problem with American politics these days is people from blue and red states trying to force the entire country to become one giant blue state or one giant red state.
It's too big for one-size-fits-all answers. Every state should be able to largely do its own thing as long as it isn't violating the Bill of Rights.
If you look at some of the more controversial bills being passed in the states, they're also being more or less lifted out of national political action committees and think tanks. Extreme in-state gerrymandering (supported by national party organizations) has effectively nationalized big parts of state politics in those states.
I've spent the majority of my adult life in Washington State and I've witnessed this firsthand. This place used to have a unique vibe that was more purplish-blue "granola hippies with guns that just want to be left alone." Progressivism mixed with an Old West libertarian streak. There was a GOP minority, and the red east and blue west played off against each other and kept things reasonably center-left.
Now it's a one-party state, and the legislature might as well be the state Parliament, taking its marching orders straight from the DNC. The Governor is just as all-in on drinking the blue Kool-aid, and the state Supreme Court seems like it only exists to validate what the other two branches decide. And looking at places like Texas and Florida, seems like the same is happening on the other side of the aisle.
What's infuriating is there are conservatives in blue states and liberals in red states getting just steamrolled to the point of "why should I even vote or participate, when I'm just going to get told to sit down and shut up?" That's not healthy for democracy. The rights of the minority exist for a reason and you can't just vote things away because you have 50.01 percent of the vote.
Yeah, it seems very unfair. If Party A has 60% of the seats in the state legislature, and Party B has 40%, then intuitively it feels like Party A should get 60% of what it wants. But as you said, Party A actually gets more like 100% of what it wants.
This is a thing where having more parties would really help. If there were (say) 4 parties, each with ~25% of the seats, then they would have to bargain with each other and form coalitions, which I think would be a really healthy process for democracy.
> This is a thing where having more parties would really help.
Using a "first past the post" voting system structurally results in a two party system, because if there are more than two viable parties then the two parties most similar to each other split the vote and both lose to the third, which gives the first two an overwhelming incentive to merge with each other.
Score voting or STAR voting fixes this and allows you to have multiple parties. (Avoid IRV or similar systems, nearly anything is better than FPTP but if you're going to do it at all then do it properly.) Any states that could enact this via referendum are encouraged to do so.
Our first two presidents, Washington and Adams, both envisioned a system that could really only work if we had a large plurality of parties.
Washington in particular despised political parties and called them inherently self-serving.
Adams said that a two party system would destroy democracy, because such a system encourages despotic tribalism, in which party dissension inevitably focuses around revenge politics.
Except that the plural of anecdotes is definitely not data, because without controlling for confounding variables and sampling biases, you will get garbage.
Based on my limited understanding of analytics, the data set can be full of biases and anomalies, as long as you find a way to account for them in the analysis, no?
The accuracy of your analysis becomes limited to the accuracy of how well you correct for the biases. And it's difficult to measure the bias accurately without lots of good data or cross-examination.
Garbage data is still data, and data (garbage or not) is still more valuable than a single anecdote. Insights can only be distilled from data, by first applying those controls you mentioned.
Or you can apply the Bezos/Amazon anecdote about anecdotes:
At a managers meeting "user stories" about poor support but all the KPIs looked good from the call center so Jeff dials in the number from the meeting speaker phone, gets put on hold, IVR spin cycle, hold again, etc .... His take away was basically "if the data and anecdotes don't match always default to the customer stories".
Sorry, but a VAT is paid for by the final consumer. US suppliers paying taxes would be a manufacturer's sales tax (MST), but they went out of style decades ago. If any states are dumb enough to still have an MST, maybe they should start there.
Except that all the people using left-pad weren't paying for left-pad, and didn't have a contractual relationship with the author. IANAL, but I'm doubtful the courts would find there is enough of a relationship for the author to be liable.
No, they aren't. Even in the most liberal interpretation of the new laws, there's nothing specifying that you need to continue making your open-source package continually and indefinitely available.
I don't mean THESE new laws, just new laws in general.
> nothing specifying that you need to continue making your open-source package continually and indefinitely available.
There's a difference between making it available, and deliberately causing harm and untold productivity loss in a single day. This was a case of the latter.
Someone deleted a publicly accessible file off the internet, and it broke workflows of people with whom they have no existing contract. Good luck proving that was done to deliberately cause harm.
In this case, they freely admitted to doing it with the intent to harm. A person slapping me in the face doesn’t have a contract with me, but they are still liable for that harm. This isn’t rocket science.
You shouldn't compare the unemployment rates between countries. There are different criteria for "unemployed", so measures in different countries don't measure the same thing.
Labor participation rates are more comparable. The US rate is worse than the EU rate.
Actually, lots of circuits can be built with components specified to within 20%, perhaps with some key components specified more tightly. Good designs are robust against component variation.
Agreed, got my degree in BME and it was probably evenly split between Bio, EE and Mech E. Went on to work in industrial automation, which a lot of people look at me with a questionable stare, but actually makes perfect sense.
I remember going to a career fair senior year right after doing a physio lab where we directly studied feedback systems. The company I ended up working for was demoing their software, which was control graphics. Looked a lot like the diagrams we were using in labs.
