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.

Tell that to the federal government, which controls fire policy on federal lands, where almost two-thirds of California's wildfires start.

California can only fix what California controls.

Also, it isn't really practical to clear out all of the underbrush on 33 million acres. Conservatively maybe 20 to 30 person hours per acre, you're looking at about a billion person hours. I mean sure, if you could give every person in California a tractor, you'd be done in three days, but in practice, you'd be talking about spending 6% of California's budget on it even if you paid everyone minimum wage. At more realistic salaries, you'd be talking about spending approximately all of California's budget on clearing brush every year for all of eternity, and that's before factoring in equipment costs.

I just don't see how that could realistically be practical. If you only do it around big cities, yeah, but statewide, probably not.

Total for the entire U.S. is something like 3.6 million class 8 trucks. So not all that many. California has a ninth the population and a ninth of the trucks. Imagine that.

ROFL. No. Your math clearly sucks.

A typical battery-electric vehicle (car sized) contains about 183 pounds of copper. There are 1.47 billion cars in the world. That's about 135 million tons of copper to replace every car in the world, which is equivalent to the world's copper mining for a little over five years.

There are only 4 million semi trucks in the entire United States. There are 15.9 million trucks in California, but most of those are pickup trucks, and most of the rest are much smaller than a semi. So most of those are going to contain closer to 183 pounds of copper than to 815 pounds. And I'm pretty sure that at least the pickup trucks are included in that 1.47 billion number.

There are about four million class 8 trucks in the U.S., which likely means there are under 100 million in the world. That's 41 million tons, which is less than the world's copper production for two years. And this is likely to be a high estimate by a factor of two or three.

So you'd likely need less than 176 million tons of copper spread out over 20 years, which is only about 40% of the world's copper mining for EVs. That's a lot, but it isn't beyond the realm of possibility.

Pro tip: If the industry is telling you that something is possible and your math is showing that it would take orders of magnitude more raw materials than are available, you probably mixed up pounds and tons.

Citation needed. Oh, you can't provide one, because other than affordability, everything you just said is wrong:

• California's crime rate is at record low levels on a per-capita basis. Yeah, there are a lot of crimes, but only because there are a lot of people. The violent crime rate has dropped from being one of the worst states in 1979 to being somewhere in the middle.
• California's K-12 schools are only ranked lower than the rest of the country because California has a much larger non-native speaker population. When you exclude scores from people who are still learning English, it is pretty much average.
• California's homeless population grew by just 3% in 2024. The national average was 18%. California is doing way better than most of the country in that area.
• California would love to prevent wildfires, but they can't stop you from driving your gasoline-powered cars and contributing to the climate change that is fueling the droughts that have turned the state into a tinderbox. And although they are forcing power companies to improve their power lines, it takes time.

Also, almost two-thirds of wildfires in California start on federal lands, where California has no control over the fire management. This is not accidental. California has been complaining about federal fire management for decades. There's only so much you can do when the deck is stacked against you.

How's that? The hurricanes seem to be getting worse and more frequent, and it has the second-highest rate of fraud in the country, behind only Georgia. (In most years, Florida has been the worst.)

How is DeSantis popular on a bipartisan basis? He has only a 10% approval rating and a 72% disapproval rating among Democrats according to a poll from a month ago.

If you want a state with a governor that is actually liked by both parties, try Kentucky.

And intent is a requirement of the criminal statute, which means that they did not find enough evidence to warrant prosecution. If the evidence were there, they would have prosecuted, I think... and they should have.

Note how different that is from Trump's stolen documents case, in which there was abundant evidence of both wrongdoing and specific criminal intent. That did (and still does) warrant prosecution.

You seriously don't think falsifying business records should be a crime? No, it's typically not a felony, but when it's used in furtherance of another crime, the felony enhancement seems sensible to me.

The victims of the other crime that was furthered. The other crime, in case you're not aware, was illegal campaign contributions. The victim of that crime was the American people, who likely would have made a different choice at the ballot box in 2016 had Trump's payoff and falsified records succeeded in hiding the affair from them. Or maybe they would have made the same choice; that's really not relevant. The point is that it's really bad for democracy to allow candidates to commit crimes to hide information from voters, regardless of whether or not it would influence the outcome of any specific election.

We have these campaign finance and disclosure laws for good reason. Of course, this really should have been prosecuted by the FEC, rather than left to NY state. The story of why that didn't happen, even though the FEC attorneys who looked at the facts recommended it should, makes for sad reading.

No, the Republicans are not serious. They're completely incapable of governing, they've stopped even pretending. The evidence is abundant, but the mere fact that Senate Republicans are considering confirming Trump's laughably unqualified cabinet nominees is sufficient.

This is very true, and well-stated.

What we have right now is a Democratic party that is too afraid of its progressive wing to call bullshit on the insane ideas they've been pushing hard for the last couple of decades, and a Republican party that is a cult of personality to a malignant narcissist suffering from rapidly increasing dementia and far more interested in "owning the libs" than in making anything better. The sensible people in both parties, who are capable of rational debate and compromise, are too afraid of negative blowback from their own parties to do it. The Democrats can't say, for example, that there are two sexes, and the Republicans can't say that Trump lost in 2020, or that January 6th, 2021 was actually a bad thing. Those aren't the issues that we need debate and compromise on, but they're emblematic of just how much control the extremists in both parties have gained.

I'm less concerned about that than about the fact that these coins and DJT stock provide near-perfect vehicles for bribes to the President of the US. Trump has already demonstrated that he can be bought with the TikTok flip flop. That only cost the TikTok CEO $18M... though leveraging it through Trump's memestock increased Trump's net worth by more than $2B.

Understandable, but I've family history photos that include potentially identifiable features where I cannot identify the location. An AI tool that can offer suggestions would be very helpful to me.

That's the summary. The actual text of the law says "SALE OF CERTAIN THREE-DIMENSIONAL PRINTERS. 1. ANY RETAILER OF A THREE-DIMENSIONAL PRINTER SOLD IN THIS STATE WHICH IS CAPABLE OF PRINTING A FIREARM, OR ANY COMPONENTS OF A FIREARM, ..."

So that covers all 3D printers, short of someone coming up with a way to magically determine whether something is or is not potentially a component of a firearm and preventing printing it if it is.

https://www.symmetrymagazine.o...

The distribution and quantity in the primordial universe (the amount of dark matter was still increasing as the stellar era started) implies a later start.

It also simplifies some of the physics.