“Quality of services in many cases declined. It’s clear, for example, that there was a shift in fire protection away from professional fire departments and toward volunteer fire departments in some parts of the state.
It hurt the schools. School finance has continued to, of course, increase in California as it has elsewhere in the US, but California used to be at the top in terms of quality of education in primary and secondary education and in terms of school spending. And now it’s definitely not.
It has hurt the quality of infrastructure — potholes in the roads, response times of first responders. It has shifted the state tax structure onto income taxes, which means that the tax system in California is really swingy — in a boom, a lot of money might flow into the state’s coffers, and in a recession, the state budget really suffers. During the financial crisis, this meant that local governments that could no longer rely on a lot of property tax revenue were especially vulnerable to bankruptcy.
It has also created all kinds of unfairness — new unfairness, rather unlike the old system. Now you might actually pay a lot more tax than somebody else in your neighborhood who has an identical home worth the same amount of money, just because they bought their home earlier than you did. And they might agree that that’s unfair, but they might not vote to change it because it’s an unfairness that allows them to stay in their home.”
Small modular nuclear reactors may not have a large enough market to gain from the advantages of mass production, especially when there are multiple companies trying to do it around the world, splitting the market further.
Renewables combined with storage may be getting cheaper faster than progress on making small modular reactors profitable.
The ships and crews that Trump is blockading are not just Iranian ships and crews. Is the US going to steal or sink foreign ships? What if Pakistani or Chinese military vessels escort their ships? Will the US start a war with these countries to enforce the blockade? Ships’ crews can lock themselves in the bridge and engine rooms, which will stop boarders from controlling the ship, what will the US do then?
Democrats have a difficult media arena because Republicans have a synergistic bullshit ecosystem that globs onto the same messages and is naturally integrated from biased news to biased think tanks to biased pundits and influencers. It even ropes in people whose content isn’t focused on politics, but they fall for the bullshit, and then become bullshit spreaders themselves, like Joe Rogan.
People say don’t clickbait, but they only click the clickbait, so they are voting with their clicks.
Human-caused climate change has been studied for many decades, and the common sense alternative explanations have already been studied and don’t explain the warming.
Trump may have gotten the US into a trap. He left the deal Obama made with Japan, and similar ones were on the offer, but he rejected them and instead chose war. Now the US may be stuck between either a massive ground invasion of Iran or Iran as a new great power.
The US really needs to up their game when it comes to mass, cheap, attritable drones.
Many US methods are obsolete and America’s industrial base is not prepared to mass produce drones. Russia and China are already ahead of the US in drone warfare.
The US needs to work with Ukraine to learn from their experience.
Big Trump supporters ignored a lot of bad things about Trump, but then when they get into fights with him, they are suddenly open to criticisms of Trump and start voicing them. They say something like ‘I just have to say the truth here’ as if they regularly do not tell the truth, which seems to be the case.