All we have is the weather? California is the largest agricultural producer of any state, and it's not even close. Plants like growing here for the same reason people do.
You act as though California is no longer one of the largest populations or one of the largest economies.
The “snowball fallacy” is a fallacy because there is no reason California s can’t swing the regulatory pendulum back the other direction if there is too much economy / freedom impacted.
When I took a machining course, the instructor sat in the corner and showed us YouTube videos in Mandarin with English subtitles to teach us the equipment.
You are making lots of projections from a single anecdote and conflating a state’s policies/economy with that of a country of 25x the population.
Detroit was once one of the US’s largest population cities, at nearly 2.5 million residents in the late 1960s, falling to less than 1 million by the 2010s. On this scale, California is still in the peak days of the 1960s, but we aren’t showing any current signs of shrinking. Maybe AI will be the catalyst for massive job losses, but that’s for the future to unfold.
Machining is a low value part of the economic supply chain, like sweat shop clothing. While I don’t want to lose it, it’s being dominated by countries (China, Taiwan) which are willing to throw MASSIVE money at the industry. TSMC was literally a whole-of-country effort to centralize the entire world’s supply chain of cutting edge semiconductors on one island. China is winning because they have cut-throat competition between companies and they don’t slow down for legal concerns such as regulation or intellectual property. That is only going to last for a certain amount of time before people will demand better living environments (which is partly why they have such a terrible fertility rate).
China probably caught up the same way starting 40 years ago. Watching VHS tapes in English (or German, Japanese, or French) with Mandarin subtitles*. Clearly "never" is untrue because it's been done once already.
IMO this is all cyclical.
* This is metaphorical. Obviously there were also textbooks and research papers and technical manuals and everything else. The point is much of it came from abroad and they learned it all to the point that they're the experts today.
Is it really the moderators that make a community special? They are vital no doubt but I have never came here for the moderation.
For me the magic of a niche community like a subreddit or HN is when a 99th percentile expert in the subject shows up and gives everybody a brilliant lecture on the actual truth of things. These are not 99th percentile in Reddit use or post count or any of those things.
The moderators (and the algorithm they support and tune) are why the conversation on HN is compelling enough to attract 99th percentile experts on just about every subject.
Moderators are the invisible hand pruning the garden weeds. You might not always see them working, but they allow the space necessary for the good conversations to grow and thrive. Their absence would be felt quickly.
I don't know. I actually find it harder and more stressful to write code in a way that does not meet a certain quality level. it require me to actually think more.
It's king of weird, but I have tried over the years to develop a do-just-what-is-necessary-now mindset in my software engineering work, and I just can't make my mind work that.
For me, doing things right is a way for me to avoid having to hold too much context in my head while working on my projects. I know the idiomatic way to do something, and if i just do it that way, then when I come back to it I know it should and is architectured.
I was floored when watching the recent documentary about the Grenfell fire that residents who called 911 were told to stay put and if they needed to evacuate a fireman will come.
These poor people, inside an inferno, losing their last chance to escape, because they listened to the official state policy. An animal knows to run from a burning barn but here we are, trained to ignore that instinct.
“ After controlling for socioeconomic and other differences, the researchers found that the rate of Lewy body hospitalizations was 12 percent higher in U.S. counties with the worst concentrations of PM2.5 than in those with the lowest.”
It is both strange, fascinating but also wired and scary to watch all of these unfold in real life. Not just on the internet.
In pre 2010 era, we all knew Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Storage was marketing and no one believes it. There is some sort of limit, and as long as we dont get caught it is fine. Free "forever" offering, Unlimited were all best effort. And It isn't just tech, but also politics. I mean they all say it but most wouldn't believe it.
And then we have a whole new generation of people who dont have this as norm anymore. They do believe everything should be free and could be free. Utopia is just around the corner. The cost of anything is so abstracted and muddled they have no idea why anything is priced as such.
You are right but this is a fairly new development, driven by activist lawsuits. It doesn’t have to be this way, these sort of changes are not irreversible.
It’s equally crazy to me that we are spending time and money to eliminate opportunities for our kids. My school district in SFBA has done the same thing to their gifted program.
If this is really about equality then we would be strengthening these programs because gifted kids from wealthy families will continue to have access to accelerated education. It’s the poor and middle class who are losing out.
For a long time, it was jobs and the promise of a better future for your family. By killing that all we have is weather.