> And what happens is that in the next budget cycle, they say, "Hey, there's all this money over here. We don't need to fund that anymore. And now there's a shortfall again.

I do not know how to parse this sentence.

This isn't intended or designed for ongoing funding. This doesn't factor into the state budget. It's a completely separate fund specifically to shore up health care and education systems that have been neglected due to recent/chronic underfunding. None of this impacts their normal operating budgets year over year,

The best analogy I can think of is a bond. When the government wants to raise money for a project or investment in the future, they will often issue and sell bonds to raise that money. Bonds mature and pay back with some interest, and are not recurring or factored into the normal budgeting. This is functionally the same thing, except instead of borrowing via bonds and paying back with interest it's just a straight up tax on billionaires.

> Absent actual, careful reduction of wasteful spending

I'm willing to bet that there's far less "wasteful spending" than you think there is, and it's just a matter of you not understanding what is being paid for and why. See also: DOGE "savings" and how we're suffering the consequences of cutting "wasteful" spending on programs that were actually really important but not in obvious ways.
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> You both can't be correct.

We can be, because shortfalls and deficit spending are not the same thing.

The new CA budget for this year is, reportedly, balanced. $0 deficit.

But $0 deficit this year does not magically erase the past several years of falling behind due to insufficient funding, e.g. shortfalls. This is why it's a one-time tax, and why I described is as a catch-up. I say "over the next few years" because the tax is expected to raise about $100B but only $25B/year can be withdrawn.

The full text of the bill is linked in the article summary, by the way.
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> First off: In CA we have prop 13, which prevents CA assessor from taxing your home

Aw gosh too bad there's no way to change a law with another law huh? Oh wait... this Act modifies Article XIII of the state constitution - the same Article that you refer to as "prop 13" - to allow the assessment and tax. Turns out it's rather easy to change a law with another law, 'cause the thing you cited has been amended at least nine times so far.

"The taxes levied by this Act are not "ad valorem taxes on real property" for purposes of Section 1 of Article XIIIA. To the extent any provision of Article XIIIA would otherwise be construed to limit, restrict, or apply to the rate, base, valuation, or imposition of the tax authorized by this Section, that provision shall not apply to, and is superseded by, this Section."

Womp womp, Mr. Moneybags.

> Second, If you've been through IPO you would know this:

And how is that anyone's problem but the billionaire's? Okay, so you can't liquidate stocks for a few months... that does not change your net personal wealth assessment, and it's your net wealth that's being taxed not each specific asset, nor is each specific asset required to be used to pay its own apportionment of the tax.

> Those nice fat numbers will drop considerably

"For all publicly traded assets, the fair market value of the asset shall be presumed to be the asset's market trading value on the valuation date..." ""Valuation date" means December 31, 2026"

So as far as stocks go, whatever the market value is on December 31st of this year is what your tax assessment will be based on, along with the value of everything else you own on that specific date. Market volatility doesn't factor into anything when the valuation is based on a one-time snapshot on a specific date.

Nothing of what you said is applicable because you do not understand what is being proposed nor, apparently, the existing law.
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> The big problem is that it's a one-time windfall that might trigger recurring spending proposals.

No? This is purposely a one-time tax to fund with very clear and specific uses, and the law creates that fund entirely separate from the general government funding. The money raised is specifically to cover shortfalls in health, education, and food security programs due to lack of federal funding over the next few years (expected to last 4-5 years).

There are no recurring spending proposals. There are no spending proposals at all. This effectively creates a catch-up fund to replace all the money they were already promised but never received because you-know-who is petty dipshit.

That said, yeah I'd love to see some sort of tax on loans with stocks as collateral. That's a much harder framework to create though since there are lots of reasons where it would be beneficial to encourage people to borrow against their assets especially for the purpose of enhancing those assets, such as home equity loans or business loans. It's not easy to draw a line with what should or should not be taxed without creating loopholes tat would make the whole thing pointless. A flat tax on net worth is a lot harder to skirt around.
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If they can borrow money against those "unrealized gains" - a major source of wealthy people's cashflow - then they can tax those "unrealized gains."

The tax is structured precisely because billionaires play shell games with their assets to avoid paying taxes.

> we need to change the rules to stop them from accruing the wealth to begin with.

And how do you do that, if not through taxes? Oh your stock/property holdings have a market value of $10B? Nope California law says they can only be worth $1B? That's just not possible to implement. The only realistic way is to tax those assets as they accrue and force them to exchange that "unrealized gains" for cash.
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> The reason no one else has done this

The reason no one else has done this is because it's the first to use solid state batteries. It's not the first all-electric crewed aircraft. Not even close. Small fixed-wing aircraft (2-6 people) have been commercially viable for a few years now. They've been using all-electric (retrofitted DHC-2) commuter planes in Canada since 2019.

I wouldn't say the DHC-2 is "like building a bicycle out of cardboard" - it's a robust and proven commercial aircraft.

> You want to impress me

Suddenly it's like 2012 and electric cars again... lol.
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Let me help you out with that.

"If Texas were connected to either of the national grids, they would have been [in] compliance with federal standards for their infrastructure and would likely not have had the failure in the first place."

There. Let me break it down for you a bit more;

If { connected to the national grids } then { federal compliance = true }

If { federal compliance == true } then { reduce_disaster_probability() }

I then go on to explain that the entire reason they are using the HVDC interlink is to avoid needing to fix their shit in accordance with federal standards.

So again, where did I even imply that the HVDC link would solve anything? I'm being pretty explicit that the HVDC link will NOT solve anything, but it WILL saddle their neighbors with more troubles.
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> where you started: no, neighbors were not going to help in Winter 2021

Please quote where I said such an interconnect would have had any impact on the 2021 disaster. What did I say to make you think that's my position.

What I said was, to quote myself, "leech off their neighbors when shit inevitably goes sideways again." You do realize that rolling blackouts are like an annual thing there, right? Despite being a "net exporter" they still can't always meet demand? That the *entire premise* of this /. article is they are trying to manage load shedding because they have ongoing problems maintaining a stable grid? YOU are the one that brought up the 2021 disaster, and I've only been continuing to reference it as an example of how mismanaged and intentionally neglected the Texas infrastructure is - which is a fact.

Everything else you wrote is moot because it's predicated on something I never said and a position I've never held. *shrug*
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Thanks for demonstrating my point.

ERCOT suffered nearly double the shortfall of their neighbors. Now, if you continue to read that paper there's another key point:

"On the supply side, Texas has undertaken some efforts to protect its grid against more common summer weather demand spikes, but it has done little to protect itself against rarer winter freezes. However, these happen often enough that more winterization is warranted. Texas was advised to winterize by FERC after the 2011 freeze led to similar, albeit less catastrophic power outages of 4 GW."

They were warned to fix their infrastructure as an important part of preventing future problems. They did not. They still haven't. And instead of investing in robustness which is obviously and sorely needed, they are setting themselves up to lean on their neighbor's potentially strained (but not nearly as strained) infrastructure in a way that specifically lets them avoid those needed investments. This is what I mean by "making their problem everyone else's problem too."

Here's some other choice quotes;

"In spring 2021, in the wake of the winter freeze, Texas experienced days of high temperatures and heavy demand that tested the ERCOT grid again, at a time when significant power generation was offline for maintenance and in some cases to repair damage from the storm." (Read; they don't maintain their shit properly)

"However, some politicians are worried that increasing interconnections between Texas and other grids could lead Texas to be subject to FERC regulation. Former Texas governor and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry signaled strong opposition to such an idea, arguing that âoeTexans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.â" (Read: We'd rather our citizens freeze to death or die of heat stroke than invest in our infrastructure, because "freedom")

"Demand side strategies in buildings and investments in energy efficiency throughout the state could reduce the need for electricity during periods of extreme cold or heat, thereby avoiding some of the strain in the first place. Texas consumes the most energy of any state in the country but ranks 29th in the country in terms of energy efficiency of its buildings. Investments in heat pumps, LED lights, drill-and-fill insulation, among other measures could diminish energy demand in Texas buildings, particularly important for low-income communities and communities of color" (Read: We don't really care about solving the problem, because "freedom," and also maybe just a pinch of classism/racism.)

I guess it's also worth noting that since this paper was published, the Southern Spirit HVDC project has increased from 2GW to 3GW.
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> Those are vastly outweighed by the inefficiencies that apply when an ICE engine is running under variable load

They absolutely are not an that's why nobody does it that way. Your "near doubling of efficiency" because of "optimal RPM" is an outright delusion. Maybe stare at a specific fuel consumption chart for a while until you notice specific fuel consumption is not very sensitive to RPM at all.

> And where is the power coming from to recharge the battery in the i3 or LEVC when it reaches that lower level? The engine!

The engine but only indirectly, because the engine does not charge the battery but provides supplemental power to move the car along. The correct answer is "regenerative braking" is what recharges the battery. This is important, because the vast majority of the power the engine produces goes to the useful and desired purpose of moving the car, rather than being wasted recharging a battery for... what purpose exactly? Why would you burn fuel now to store than energy in a battery to use later, when you could just use the fuel later as you need to? Something for you to think about.

> I *think* youâ(TM)re attempting to play some weird semantic game in which you say that unless the battery SoC actually increases, the battery is not being charged.

That's literally the definition of charging.

Also you might want to head back up tot he start of this thread and understand exactly where this conversation started before you decided to join.

> The tap is filling the bath at the same rate as the bath is draining, but it's absurd to say the tap isn't filling the bath.

Except that's not what's happening. A better analogy is you are actively pumping water from the bath into a bucket, and when the water in the tub gets too low you decrease how fast you're pumping out of it and start supplementing the bath water flow with a garden hose instead so you can keep filling the bucket at the same rate. You are replacing one source of water with another, completely different source.

Now imagine that if you tried to fill the bathtub from the hose you'll always and unavoidably spill about 20% of the water. Also, that hose water is really expensive compared to the bath water.

When you're done playing, you dump what's left in the bucket back into the bath even if some or all of that water originally came from the hose. That's your regenerative braking.
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> That is, the property may be privately owned, but retail businesses and the parking lots which are operating on private property are considered public spaces for all sorts of legal situations

If they can tell you to leave, and if you don't leave have you arrested for trespassing, then it's private property as it applies to recording laws. If they say "you can't film on this property" then you can't film on that property.

You seem to understand this and yet you're insisting it's not a thing.

> What do you mean by "right" in this context?

I mean you are not entitled to do it and doing it after you've been told not to by someone who has the authority to tell you (e.g. the property owner) the cops show up to have a chat with you.

Filming on private property without permission is illegal. Just because the official charge is trespassing doesn't mean it isn't - it's the reason you were trespassing. It is the cause of the trespass. Tresspass is more tan just physically being there, too; If you decide to stand across the street on a public (read: government owned) sidewalk and continue filming what's happening on that private property anyway? Potentially still trespassing. Because it's the act of filming that is the root cause, not where you're standing at the time.

That's why you don't have a "right" to do it.
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> It's not "leeching"; it's bilateral trade that benefits reliability and markets.

So what would you call it if you say, joined in a carpool group where you took turns driving with your own vehicles, but one member had a notoriously unreliable car that you had to take extra turns in your vehicle to cover for?

This isn't about normal ebb and flow of energy. Texas gains a lot more out of this deal than anyone else, because their grid has lots of problems with their poorly maintained generation capacity. So rather than fix and maintain their shit, just rely on their neighbors to cover their ass.

> You're also ignoring that during the 2021 ERCOT outage, many of the neighboring states had severe outages and problems of their own.

[citation needed]

I mean, there's a difference between outages and a total collapse that leaves 32 people dead. Texas's problems were entirely predictable and avoidable - and I say that confidently because the exact same shit happened in 2011 for the exact same reason. Even before then they were warned their infrastructure wasn't properly prepared for a winter storm but those warnings went unheeded. Then after the 2011 storm the final report was like "Yeah maybe you should fix your shit properly?" and they didn't do it, so 2021 was another disaster. Guess what they still haven't done? Go on, guess...

Don't waste your time whiteknighting these dipshits. They're been told to winterize their infrastructure. They've suffered the consequences of not doing it multiple times. Now instead of fixing their problem, they're going to make it everyone else's problem as well so they can make more money.
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> The big collapse in Texas involved about 30GW of generation going off line. Even if Texas were connected to the Eastern grid, it is unlikely that there would have been 30GW of spare capacity and 30GW of available transmission to draw on.

If Texas were connected to either of the national grids, they would have been i compliance with federal standards for their infrastructure and would likely not have had the failure in the first place. The only reason Texas hasn't joined the rest of the nation is because they don't want comply with federal regulations.

The HVDC interconnect - which Southern Spirit would be the third and by far largest - allows them to trade power with everyone else while still avoiding federal oversight for their own operations. They will continue to mismanage their own infrastructure and leech off their neighbors when shit inevitably goes sideways again.
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> What are you *talking* about? EREVs are common and are extremely efficient, because the small engine can be run at an optimal RPM for efficiency while recharging the battery

It will always be less efficient to convert the engine's power output into electricity, then charge the battery, then discharge the battery back to electricity to drive a motor. Every time the energy changes form you lose a chunk of it.

For example;

> The i3 had an EREV variant

The i3 aux power unit (the "range extender") did not charge the battery. Instead, the APU would generate electricity to supplement the remaining charge in the battery; the engine does not run if you aren't driving and it never produces more power than you are consuming for any length of time.

> LEVC taxi is an EREV

Don't know much about this vehicle but according to LEVC's own description it works with the same a the i3; the engine maintains the battery charge but does not charge the battery. Probably because that's bad for efficiency. You drive on pure battery until it reaches a lower limit of SoC, then the engine kicks in to supplement the battery decrease the rate of discharge.

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> Legal to record in public in USA

It's not so clear-cut. First, what you probably meant to say is "there is no expectation of privacy in public" which is absolutely not the same as "legal to record in public."

First, obviously, you must be in a public space. The moment you enter private property - which includes all businesses and even spaces like most parking lots - you have no right to record there. If a person has "a reasonable expectation of privacy" at a location, even if it's a public space, you generally do not have the right to record them. Many government facilities also have policies that prohibit video recording even if they are technically public spaces.

If your video recording has audio as well, then you may be subject to wiretap laws. If your state is a two party consent state, then all parties involved in the audio recording must be aware of and agree to being recorded, even in a public space, if that conversation can reasonably be assumed to be private. So if we're in a two party consent state, and you engage me on the street and strike up a conversation with me specifically, and try to record it without my permission, congratulations you're doing a crime... likely a felony.

If you are recording for commercial purposes, such as filing a movie or tiktok video, you may be required to have every person in that recording sign a release giving you permission to use their likeness.

And of course, nobody who plans to record video for honest and upstanding purposes should be worried about hiding the fact they are recording to begin with. The only reason to do this is to be a little shit about it.
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