The recent surpluses have been driven by recent policy changes (mostly huge tax increases) which have had the natural consequence of changing the behavior of the population (if people did not react to changing conditions, they'd be idiots) which has in-turn created the major deficit which MIGHT be the "new normal". The tax increases are not going away, in fact they're scheduled to get worse, so the taxpayers (both individuals and businesses) who have departed for better states are unlikely to return. This is a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "killing the goose that lays the golden egg".

Just looking at "the data" always sounds smart to people who live in a world of data, as many Slashdotters do, but it's often important in life to look beyond the numbers and examine how people react to those numbers. Human activities, both individually and en masse, sometimes have effects that take time to be reflected in the numbers and by then it can be a little late to take account. It's also true that it's both easy and common for people to mislead with "the data". Numbers rarely speak for themselves; they're generally gathered and organized and presented by interested biased parties. There's reason why so many are familiar with phrases bout lying and statistics. There's an entire field of political abuse of data/information and how it's presented: spinning.

For the government of California to be shocked by the current huge deficit (remember: states, unlike the federal govt, cannot print money as a way out) is a bit like a guy who was been abusing his wife for years being suddenly shocked when she leaves him; it shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness and concern for others on the part of the abuser.

Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002, then the Ford Focus Electric from 2011 to 2018 before switching to the Mach-E. They are not "new at it". They're just bad at it.

To be fair, I have a lot more hope for Ford than GM, as Farley seems to actually understand the critical importance of turning things around and the limited timeframes to do so, unlike GM, which still seems to only care about press.

"Well sorry thats how fucking markets work." - Nope. That's not how MARKETS work, it's how government-distorted markets work. You seem to presume that any degree of government intervention in a marketplace, including seizing private property and/or manipulating values by manipulating money supplies and inflation etc, has no distorting effects. I doubt very much that you would make that very same presumption on the relationship between anything you LIKE and government intervention. Incidentally, you seem to also erroneously assert a link between Prop13 (the "don't tax the elderly out of their homes" proposition), and NIMBYism (the don't do stuff I don't like near my home attitude). These are two distinctly, and not necessarily overlapping, concepts.

"I didn't need the history lesson." - You clearly DO. You also appear to be in rather desperate need of lessons on economics, taxation, etc as you appear to have no grasp of the difference between realized gains and unrealized gains. The fact that an asset has apparently increased in value over time does NOT mean that the owner has a huge pile of cash; if the asset has not been sold, then the owner does not have that added money in-hand. The owner would also be a moron to take out a loan on that supposed increased value in order to pay the taxes (presuming some bank would be idiotic enough to make said loan) because the asset can also go DOWN in presumed value! Nothing says that an asset valued at $1 million today won't be valued at only $30K next year - just ask owners of ENRON stock. Home values ON PAPER go up and down based on the economy, laws, and government policy among other things.

You have a strange fixation on some false but presumed link between Prop13 and "public housing or dense development" opposition. Are you a supporter of such development who wants to get rid of opposition to it by taxing any nearby objectors out of their homes and then grabbing their homes on-the-cheap? That's a special kind of evil in which persons who disagree with a policy are tageted and destroyed. So much for freedom and liberty...

There are plenty of countries on Earth where that sort of thinking (and policy) is in effect. If you like that, you are free to go to one of those places. There's only ONE nation on Earth run by the US Constitution with its structures that offer protections for the individual in the face of government power and majority tyranny, and those who prefer those protections thus have nowhere else to go.

I, for one, cannot see the future and don't know when technological advances will put so many people out of work they cause major economic upheaval. But I think this makes little difference. We should want technological advancement anyway.

I don't think "it will put humans out of work" is a good reason to make tech illegal or to avoid researching it, mainly because "putting people out of work" means "eliminating the necessity of tasks that are so unpleasant we have to pay people to get them done." Eliminating labor is ultimately a good thing in-and-of itself.

When our economic model can no longer function within our technological landscape, then we will need to adapt our economic model. That's how we make life better for everyone. Maybe it is not an easy thing to do. Ok. It is still the right answer.

I don't think we have to get ahead of ourselves and start changing our modern system to accommodate the climate we imagine will result from new tech. It still makes sense to wait and see.

We DO have a homelessness problem right now. Some percentage of the homeless have mental diseases and/or drug addictions that prevent them from being able to get and hold a job, even though there are jobs that would be otherwise available to them. I don't know what that percentage is though. If it is high, then that suggests that there are enough jobs available to cover the populace, and as such tech is not putting everyone out of work. If that percentage is very low, then we may need to look at how many jobs are available and the reason why the homeless population isn't obtaining them. Is it some kind of educational failing, for example? Might there be things we can do to address that? Yes, and a serious effort at doing so is the logical next step, not some sort of alarmist panic reaction to every new tech that shows up.

The biggest privilege group is women. Visit family court if you want to see it in action.

You might also look up "spermnapping". Supposedly there is a how-to on TikTok about using the contents from a condom to self impregnate, thereby locking in that wonderful child support plus all those government benefits.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

Developing uterine replicators will never happen in the West, so it's up to the Chinese and North Koreans, although the South Koreans may get desperate enough to do it as well.

Copper is not "the last mile". It's the last five meters. If that. When people talk about "the grid", they're not talking about the wiring in your walls. Which you don't have to redo anyway for adding an EV. Nobody has to touch, say, your kitchen wiring to add an EV charger.

"The grid" is the wiring leading up to your house. Those conductors are alumium, not copper. Occasionally the SER/SEU cable will occasionally be copper, but even that's generally alumium these days. And that's only to the service connection point (not even to the transformer - to the point of handoff between grid-owned and the homeowner-owned, generally right next to the house), e.g. after the service drop line with overhead service that descends down to the building. The "last mile" is absolutely not copper. Approximately zero percent of modern grid-owned wiring is copper, and even the short customer-owned connection from the drop line into the house is usually alumium.

Grids are not copper. Period. This isn't the year 1890 here.

And no, grid operators don't make money selling power. They make money providing the grid through which power is sold.

I have never seen a single utility that charges a flat grid access fee to residential consumers, anywhere on Earth.

Distinction can be hard to grasp for someone utterly ignorant on the subject

Says a guy who thinks that there's a mile of copper leading up to your house.

It's going to use a RTG.

One of the high technology parts of the French TGV trains is that they are capable of running on old track at non-TGV speeds. BrightLine really should do the same, the train slows down a lot, but does continue on to Union Station after stopping at Rancho Cucamunga. There should not be a need to change trains.

The era when California politicians were stealing money from the taxpayers so fast, and their appetite for taxes was so extreme, that they were grabbing the homes right out from under frail, elderly citizens who had worked their entire lives, lived responsibly, and paid taxes?

I remember what the Democrats [sorry this is partisan, but it WAS the Democrats doing it, not some space aliens] in California were doing to the elderly right before Prop13 passed and it was REPULSIVE. It was EVIL. It was armed robbery, and the voters of the state tried to get the politicians to ease-off a bit but they refused, so the public FORCED them to back off with Prop13. We had people in little run-down homes they'd bought decades earlier for maybe $20K or $30K, who were now frail and elderly and on very constrained incomes, juggling buying medicine or food or paying utility bills, who just wanted to live their remaining years in their homes, and the state was saying "we think your home is worth half a million dollars, so you now owe us taxes on a half-million dollar home! These people had very little money and were forced to sell (often for less than the state said those homes were worth, given that the market did not want to pay that mush for a little run-down home that was re-assessed and would have high taxes). Some were ending up in retirement homes, others had to move far away from friends and family and their preferred doctors and churches/synagogues to find other places they could afford.

If Prop13 is repealed in an effort to grab more taxes from the citizens so that the politicians can keep spending mountains of money on illegal aliens, this state will COLLAPSE. The budget is already a total mess as Gavin and his party spend billions of dollars per year more than they have, while failing to do the basics (like maintain and grow the roads, provide adequate water and energy infrastructure and good schools etc) that the other party handled just fine with less cash under then-Governor Reagan. Repeal of Prop13 would mean homeowners would want to sell to escape the prospect of skyrocketing taxes, and new buyers would dry-up in a whirlwind of race-to-the-bottom panic selling. New buyers would turn away because they would see that the (purchase + rising interest payments + rising California insurance rates + ever-increasing and uncapped taxes) make the purchase too expensive. There are not enough foolish gullible millionaires in America who would be willing to move to California and spend millions of dollars on average 2 or 3 bedroom homes. People on the left never seem to understand that there are limits to how much you can suck out of an economy before you stall that economy.

The Miller Test is a terrible standard of enforcement, as it puts juries in the impossible position of trying to determine what has "literary or artistic value" which is an entirely subjective call. Some people can claim that the human body is beautiful and depictions of it are automatically artistic. Others will claim that any nudity at all qualifies as "prurient" and utterly lacks artistic value. There is no way to be objective about this, as these are entirely a matter of opinion.

The intent here is to filter out "patently offensive" cases. But that's still a problem, as different people have completely different ideas about what qualifies, making all enforcement arbitrary.

The bit about "community standards" is a total trap too as any jury can contain people who live near one another but come from completely different religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, and as such have completely different ideas about what the standards of their community even are. Everyone's idea of what the "average person" considers offensive is entirely biased by their own ideas of what is offensive, and that will swing widely from person to person even within the same community.

So, in short, it's crap, and it leads to uneven enforcement. It sends people to jail for content that is milder than content held by others who walk free, right from the same courtroom. I realize that we need some laws to prevent the distribution of harmful content, but we absolutely need something better than this.

Charging the EV at home is a match for work from home. Charging from solar power at night is an issue ;-)

I don't think the nova of T Coronae will be helpful.

Ouch. My Basic Charge, the same as your electric delivery charge) is 57 cents a day.

America will always do the right thing, once all the alternatives have been exhausted. -- Churchill

A meter is almost exactly the length of an M16A2 assault rifle.

The grid is not made of copper. You thought it was? Copper is for home wiring, if that. Up to that point, it's alumium, bundled with steel on major lines for tensile strength. Does it look like copper to you?

As for the article: grid operators don't build out grids on a lark. They do it to sell power, because they make money selling power. If people want to buy more power because they want to charge an EV, then that's more money available for them. EVs are a boon to grid operators. They're almost an ideal load. Most charging done at night, steady loads, readily shiftable and curtailable with incentives, etc. Daytime / fast charging isn't, but that's a minority. And except in areas with a lot of hydro, most regions already have the ample nighttime generation capacity; it's just sitting idle, power potential unsold. In short, EVs can greatly improve their profitability. Which translates to any combiation of three things:

1) More profits
2) A better, more reliable grid
3) Lower rates

    * ... depending on the regulations and how competitive of an environment it is.

As for the above article: the study isn't wrong, it's just - beyond the above (huge) problem - it is based on stupid assumptions. Including that there's zero incentives made for people to load shift when their vehicles charge, zero battery buffering to shift loads, and zero change in the distribution of generation resources over the proposed timeframe. All three of these are dumb assumptions.

Also, presenting raw numbers always leads to misleading answers. Let me rephrase their numbers: the cost is $7 to $26 per person per year. The cost of 1 to 5 gallons of gas per year at California prices..