dumbotron

> [cheating] was a cultural difference that had to be respected

What he meant to say was "they pay sticker price"

I'm not being smug about CA's grid. It has rolling blackout on hot days. Its problem is it doesn't let anyone build power plants.

> 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.

> Having everyone lock themselves inside and exclusively interact via video chat is not a good thing, IMO.

Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.

There's an argument that you want consistency across the state. Having snowflake jurisdictions is a headache for businesses.

> 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.

You're confusing misdirection for divide and conquer. Divide and conquer would mean the US splits up so China can be the superpower.

I'm surprised mass shooters all love ARs. A cheap plastic 9mm pistol with hollowpoint rounds is plenty deadly.

> 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.

> my hobbies tend to be populated mainly by the conservative demographic

What are conservative (and liberal) hobbies?

> 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.

This joke's getting tired. Jersey Shore did just fine, and that was a decade after The Real World showed MTV they should downplay the music. They just didn't have the next big thing, and now kids are into TikTok dances.

Next you're going to tell me "why's it called Coca Cola when there's no cocaine in it."

People like to criticize subscription models, but this is why you actually want them. It's easier to keep everything mostly up-to-date than do a big migration every decade, and if the pricing is set right (it usually isn't), it works out to the same amount in the end.