Still near record lows. Minor variations from year to year are not a trend.

Why would that be "far more logical"? Crime rates vary from year to year. You need to average over five or ten years just to have a number you can do anything with. Your approach involves comparing two noisy values, so you're getting noise as the output.

Most Oakland crime rates are in about the same range as they have been for the last decade or more. Car thefts are up, presumably because of gentrification.

Thus far, there's no indication that the decision to reduce planned funding increases for police and divert it to other agencies that help people in crisis has had a meaningful impact on the crime rate, unless you think that somehow more police would have prevented car thefts, which isn't all that likely. You can't be everywhere at once.

Citation needed.

Similar cohorts in Florida don't have California's cost of living or building maintenance. Spending twice as much in California as Florida is, on a cost-of-living-adjusted basis, spending about the same amount. And this assumes your similar cohorts really are similar. Because of that cost of living difference, they probably are not so similar, because their parents have to work two jobs in California to keep a roof over their heads.

A lot of California's problems are directly caused by affordability.

California's homeless population was growing at a faster rate in the 2010s than in the 2020s. So it certainly sounds like those "solutions" you're complaining about actually were solutions, at least to some degree. They haven't solved the problem, because housing costs too much, but they're a start.

Meanwhile, Florida still has the nation's third largest homeless population even after that 40% drop. That's not exactly doing well. It's really all about cost of living.

Yes. It was a stupid idea, and a lot of us said it was a stupid idea at the time. But it has very little to do with homelessness, except insofar as arresting people for shoplifting has a tendency to put them in jail, where they would no longer be homeless. That's not a solution for the homelessness crisis. It is largely orthogonal. Most homeless people are not shoplifters, though they do shoplift more than average.

The reason we passed the ballot initiative is because that idiotic prior law change created a huge surge in car break-ins from people stealing things. As long as it was under $1,000, the police weren't willing to investigate it, and so you ended up with this huge organized crime network breaking into cars all over the Bay Area and pawning off the stolen goods. This was all entirely predictable.

The idea behind the original law change was well-meaning, but it ignored human nature.

Citation needed. If you mean the story about being fined for damaging an endangered plant species during power line maintenance in SoCal, they did the maintenance. They were fined for bulldozing the trail that led up to the work area without properly doing the environmental study and avoiding the endangered plants, not for clearing brush under the lines. Even if the endangered species had been under the lines, they still could have gotten permission from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to transplant it away from the lines. They just would not have been allowed to blindly bulldoze it.

The critical reservoir was left empty because of scheduled maintenance. Infrastructure has to be repaired sometimes. If you don't repair it, worse things happen. And they did it during winter when fires don't usually happen. I wouldn't call that bungling. I'd call that incredibly bad luck. Maybe the maintenance took longer than it should have, and if so, there should be answers about why that is the case, but it doesn't seem like it was down because of any sort of general policy problem.

In Southern California? There were planned reservoirs in the Central Valley that have been pushed back because of that sort of problem, but that's hundreds of miles away. The only reservoir that could have helped was the one that was down, and only by providing water pressure. If they had been able to fly helicopters (the weather prevented this), they would have just scooped up water from the ocean. It's a lot closer than any reservoir would have been.

Fraud has nothing to do with hurricanes.

I never said it did. But you're saying Florida is great on crime, whereas it's actually a place where the elderly to go get preyed upon by scammers. You're saying California is bad because of natural disasters while Florida is great in spite of them. See why I'm rolling my eyes now?

I don't disagree that the "defund the police" movement resulted in many cities going too far. But the point remains that the crime rate hasn't gone up *that* much in most of California, even with those questionable decisions. And that was my point. You're giving a sky-is-falling narrative that just doesn't match reality.

As for Miami, there's no reason to believe that "defunding" versus not doing so was the reason Miami's crime rate dropped. Looking at some of the graphs, I'm pretty sure Miami's crime rate has been trending down faster than the national average for decades.

Post hoc ergo proper hoc is still a fallacy.

Even if that first part true (I haven't checked), that has approximately nothing to do with the state of Florida as a whole. And no, the Republican governor was most certainly NOT reelected in a bipartisan way. See below.

We can't know about previous centuries. We only know recorded history. It's not a timeline trick. It's the only data we have.

No, he wasn't. 59.4% to 40% is not a bipartisan landslide when only 31% of registered voters are Democrats. From those numbers, it looks like, to within the margin of error, approximately no Democrats voted for DeSantis, and slightly more independents voted for him than voted for Trump (56%).

...unless your definition of "bipartisan" means "Republican and Libertarian", in which case, maybe.

Blue dogs plus a handful of Republicans who served on the January 6th committee, neither of whom are still in office, and maybe some RINO-Libertarians that run as Republicans, such as Rand Paul. But yeah, most of the actual Republicans that I have any respect for either died or left the party a long time ago.

Percentage-wise, it's about 1% of the known cases, which while less than, for example, polio, is still rather alarming. And during the pre-vaccine period, it was several times that high.

The biggest problem was that hospitals couldn't keep up with the rate of incoming patients and didn't know how best to treat them, often making things worse instead of better with unnecessary intubation. Your risk of dying from COVID was way worse during that initial surge than afterwards.

There were some things wrong with the response, sure. In particular:

• Multiple U.S. government administrations failed to replenish the national medical stockpiles.
• A whole bunch of idiot politicians encouraged people to not comply with mask mandates, which made the spread worse.
• Common sense rules, like requiring all restaurant and retail workers to have N95 masks available to them at no cost (and to mandate that they wear them while on the job) were ignored.
• Lockdowns were mostly trying to get the horse back into the barn, rather than preventative, which meant they were often useless. A swift and immediate two-week worldwide lockdown probably could have prevented the pandemic entirely, but nobody was willing to do that at the time. By the time most states and countries acted, too many people were infected, which meant you had the economic harm from the lockdown, but still got almost as many deaths as if you had done nothing.
• Delays reporting the existence of the virus made containment difficult, if not impossible.

None of those had anything to do with the WHO. There's really not much that the WHO could have done beyond what they did. They can't force China to be more open. They can't force countries to react quickly to an emerging pandemic. They can't force knee-jerk reactionaries to stop ignoring science in the name of protecting their right to get other people sick. The evidence is pretty clear that it wasn't the specific policies that affected COVID mortality, but rather the willingness to adapt to new information. Areas that adapted more quickly and followed the rules, whatever they were at the time, had statistically significantly lower mortality, with a high degree of confidence. And the likely reason for this is because those areas reacted sooner, before the case count was ridiculously high.

Besides, this hasn't ever been about the WHO screwing up, because apart from not being more critical of China, they really didn't screw up. Trump is mostly mad because the U.S. provides such a big chunk of the WHO's budget and other countries don't pay their fair share. While a legitimate complaint, shutting off that funding just means that a whole lot more people are going to die from preventable illnesses around the world. It's a really dirtbag thing to do.

No, the tech bros want there to be only a few big players, just as long as they are those players. The leaders of those companies don't want government regulation, but most of their employees probably do.

"requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content: Sounds good to me."

That's because you forgot about selective enforcement

"What exactly are you hoping to accomplish by throwing insult soup at Republicans on a website where most commenters skew left anyway?"

It's been a long time since that was true. The Reich wing low information boot lickers post here just as much as anyone now. I find that moderation is still slightly in favor of reality based comments, but only slightly.

I have and they all worked fine. Some of them I didn't even install the drivers first. They came up with basic drivers and I was able to install the drivers afterward.

This is false. I've migrated several real installs of windows from 7 on to KVM without ever using sysprep and they all worked fine.

We need a trump vaccine. One that works, not the Constitution, which apparently doesn't.

But the vaccines were not Trump's accomplishment. He reduced testing requirements as he was asked to do, as any president would have. But he ordered ZERO doses up front, which means he applied ZERO dollars to the problem. Dolly Parton literally did more to promote a vaccine than Trump did.

"Let's have CDC and NAID stop ALL research investment on foreign soil"

Pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist and nothing that happens there can harm us? Great plan

You still don't understand that having more infected people come into the country faster meant a faster spread, so no. There is no chance that people will understand how this works.

No, he fucking well did not.

Trump prohibited FOREIGN NATIONALS from coming into the country from SOME COUNTRIES. He did NOT close the border, ever.

You traitors have only lies to work with, and we can all see them.

"think" isn't the right word, but sure, he believes it

I see that you pretended there that over half of price inflation wasn't caused by increased corporate profits.

What does that have to do with the discussion at hand?