I can't read the article, it's paywalled.

What's the theory? How does better recordkeeping reduce recidivism? Does this enable, say, better interactions during parole? Or does it help make better decisions about who to parole? What facility to confine prisoners in?

I'm all for better recordkeeping but I don't see how exactly that will help.

Every little bit helps, especially when building your credibility. I think what you're trying to say is you don't mind paying your taxes but you'd like other people to be happier paying more so other people (and perhaps you but you haven't said that) get more services.

I am grudgingly willing to pay my taxes because, for all its flaws, I think democratic government is the best and our democratic government had decided what I owe. I'm not thrilled because I think the California government is very wasteful in its spending. If it was more careful about how it spent my tax dollars to provide social benefit as efficiently as possible, I'd be less grudging. Is that nuanced enough for you?

Having actually read some history books (see your ask below), I'm skeptical charity was always inadequate. Americans are extraordinarily charitable, now and historically. What the increased welfare spending of the last 100 years has done is crowded out charitable activities. Americans historically used charity to great effect. But you also need to view those efforts in historical context. Charitable giving in 1900 was never going to bring poor people to today's standard of living because that was entirely impossible. JP Morgan himself didn't have today's standard of living in many ways. No kidding poor people of 1900 didn't have a car and air conditioning.

Americans are also extraordinarily self-supporting. We, and I assert you, seem to forget that. For most of our history, it was assumed that government's purpose was to set the conditions that allowed people to provide for themselves, not to do the actual provisioning. There are tremendous advantages to that arrangement. When we get in a situation. About 1 in 7 Californians use SNAP. The War on Poverty, started 60 years ago, was supposed to lift people out of poverty so they wouldn't need food assistance ("A hand up, not a handout"). Perhaps it's time to reconsider whether social welfare spending is actually achieving its goals or perhaps we might need a different approach.

We have two different visions of what a civilization can be. My view is one where people live happy, productive, and independent lives, free to make their own life choices and responsible to themselves for the consequences of those choices. Life is complicated, dynamic, and unpredictable so I think we need millions of daily experiments to figure out what works for each individual person. I'm quite confident that most people, over time, will figure out a life path which works well for them, and that you and I can't figure that out for them. I also think there will be a very small number of people for whom they're never going to be able to support themselves and as compassionate, sociable people, we ought to provide for them. I expect I think that number is much, much smaller than you do. Finally, I think there are a large number of people in a grey area, where they can't really provide for themselves now but quite reasonably could given the right support and incentives. These are the hand up/handout people referenced above. The Clinton era welfare reforms really targetted updating social spending along those lines and that was, IMHO, a great move. We seem to have forgotten that approach.

Let's keep personal insults out of this, although I assert you're the one with the naive attitude. "I want free stuff and I want mommy and daddy to pay for it" isn't especially mature or nuanced. At least I provided citations with data. Please do the same.

I minored in US history. I've read some of Senator Warren's writings and near as I can tell they're riddled with economic misunderstandings. But I'll also throw a recommendation at you, The Triumph of Economic Freedom by Senator and Doctor Phil Gramm (did you know Phil Gramm is a PhD Economist? I didn't.) and Professor Don Boudreaux.

Cool. If you live in California you can voluntarily pay extra money to the state. Most of that money goes to pay for Medical, not billionaires.

Virtually no one ever does that so I don't actually believe you.

I'm lost. How exactly has Jensen Huang (CEO of Nvidia) ripped you off? What did he trick you into buying for more than it was worth? How did Tim Cook snooker you into buying an iPhone you didn't actually want?

You know who's ripping you off? The California government. They can force you to give them money and squander it on overpriced low income houses, trains to nowhere, and numerous other boondoggles.

Cool. Let's have an informed conversation about how much taxes Californians pay and what we get for it. Let's start with California's budget. Do you realize the inflation-adjusted California budget has roughly doubled in the last 10 years while the population has been more or less constant? I don't see us getting twice the value from Sacramento compared to 10 years ago.

But perhaps I'm blind. I don't have a reference but my understanding is a huge chunk of that came from expanding MediCal. I'm not poor so perhaps I don't see how much that benefits people. But I find it difficult to believe that many people were able to get by without aid in 2016 compared today.

I'm also at a loss how a one-time cash infusion (this tax is a one-time deal, right?) will solve a long term budget hole. Spen toding is growing on an exponential curve. Seems we need a long term answer, not a one time patch.

Let's address the "fair share" argument. Huh. What exactly might "fair" mean? I found this interesting article, breaking out tax burden by income bracket. We see that sales and property taxes already more heavily affect lower income brackets than higher income ones. This makes some amount of sense, especially sales tax. Income taxes are already quite progressive. The overall burden is much flatter than I expected (although the fine article points out that California is fourth most progressive of all states, go figure). Perhaps there's room to just increase the income tax brackets?

(Note, I think it's pretty important to look at these figures using income after transfers. If I pay $1000 in taxes and get a $1000 MediCal subsidy, I've effectively paid no tax. I don't know if this report accounts for that.)

Every time there's a recession and the stock market drops, California suddenly has a budget hole. Every time pundits point out that most of California's revenue comes from wealthy people and it's fiscally dangerous to so heavily rely on a volatile tax source. And yet we want to tax the wealthy more, making the state's income even more precarious. Is that really a wise plan?

I'm happy to have a nuanced discussion of taxes and spending in California. "Make the rich pay their fair share" isn't nuanced. Neither is "abolish all taxes" or "cut spending by 50%". But to have a nuanced discussion, perhaps we should both know the basic facts about what taxes California collects and what it spends it on.

Really? You don't use Google, YouTube, iDevices, Instagram, AIs? Do you think those things just sorta happened? I'll give you a hint: they wouldn't exist without founders and C-suite people.

I'll repeat the off-repeated statistic: founders capture something like 2% of the value they create. Customers get the other 98% by way of products which are more valuable than sales price. Maybe we should tax that too: Google searches don't cost you anything but clearly have more than $0 in value. You should pay tax on that value you got without paying.

...that Roku really will be an open-access platform for competing networks.

The temptation is going to be really big at Fox to make Fox content more prominent. The comfort of Roku is it isn't tied to any one content provider. OTOH, I used to work at EMC when it owned VMware and we managed to not screw up VMware by making it only work with EMC gear.

Ah well, my current Roku stick has worked great for over five years. I've got my money's worth out of it. If I have to buy some other vendor's streaming client because it's become better than a Roku, I'm not going to shed many tears.

Yup, that's what I use it for. Streaming Spotify to my sound system too.

Eh, I use the Roku Channel now and again. My wife and I like to watch some shows which we can only get by subscribing to a niche channel and it shows up in the Roku Channel app. I'm not sold on the service and will use whatever gets me the shows.

I've wondered about this for a while. I was considering getting solar panels and a home battery and this is an option there. But then I thought, I'm buying the battery to tide me over a blackout. If power drops, I want that battery topped off at all times. I don't want to use it as a grid smoothing device because that's just leaving me vulnerable to not having the power I bought it for.

Same thing for an EV. I still have range anxiety. I want the battery always at 100% full when I leave my garage. You'd have to pay me a significant amount to let you drain my car's battery to handle the late afternoon AC surge.

I know, I know, I don't need the full range on the EV every day. It still would cause me anxiety to not have it topped off.

I dearly hope the gold was hidden in the now traditional freezer.

But you do got to wonder. If I had $40 million, I'd be so retired to a tropical island without an extradition treaty. I just looked at a list and it's pretty slim pickings. The biggest problem is you're stuck in whatever country you pick. There's no way you're travelling internationally, at least, not without a good fake identity.

I can only imagine: "Hey boss, I need to buy some new server racks. The vendor only accepts gold ingots."

Snark aside, it was probably more of the form "Hey boss, I need to bribe some third world dictator with a funny hat so I need some untraceable gold."

Still, you'd think there would be some follow up. "So Dave, how'd that bribery scheme turn out? Did the 3rdWDwaFH do the thing we wanted?"

Wait, I'm lost on your reasoning. Taxis had a effective monopoly on transportation services. Ride sharing came along, out-competed them, and that was...bad? But to rein them in we want to bring in more competition?

I don't understand whether you favor competition or not.

Here's the thing. I have no idea what the right price for a driver's time is, nor the price for a ride. Maybe they're high enough to support someone at a reasonable living. Maybe it's only valuable enough to be a side gig which supplements a day job. How are we supposed to figure that out? I'll tell you how, free markets and competition. If the taxi company model really is the best, just wait. The ride sharing companies will run out of investor money to burn then collapse. Taxi companies will re-emerge to fill the demand. Or maybe ride sharing really is the best model but the equilibrium price just doesn't support it as a full time job. That's too bad if you were a taxi driver but sorry to say, that's life. Jobs disappear all the time, just ask any typist from the 1975 typing pool.

I confidently predict the biggest losers will be customers.

If the union negotiates higher pay, that's going to cause some combination of reduced profits, increased automation, and higher prices. From what we're seeing with tariffs, the bulk will be increased prices. There's also a bunch of empirical research showing that increasing labor costs doesn't lead to lower profit margins. Unions may be great for workers who keep their jobs but they're entirely anti-consumer.

I read an article yesterday. I don't remember where or the specifics. The gist was when the minimum wage for delivery drivers went up, demand dropped, supply rose, and tips dropped. Net net, drivers wound up making exactly the same amount as they did before the raise.

Hopefully this sorts itself out. You'd hope drivers in MA compare their unionized workload and pay against drivers in Rhode Island or Connecticut. We can speculate all we want, let's find out for sure.

It's /., you don't have to have facts, just a pithy assertion about "companies bad, public spending good."

That said, I'm surprised NV Energy isn't bound by a contract or regulation to supply residential power. One year to find an alternate supply isn't a very long time if you're not positioned to install an alternate at your home. I'm quite sure many of the customers built or bought their homes assuming they had some guarantee that power would be delivered over the grid. It's an interesting legal question though, what sort of actionable legal right do they actually have?

They're increasingly doing exactly that, building on-site power. I just checked. First Google hit said there were something like 46 projects in the works with on-site power. I see a continuous stream of stories about data centers being planned with conventional natural gas generation. Data centers are frequently mentioned as a natural market for the small modular reactors people have been dorking around with for a decade or so.

They're paying customers like everyone else. That's not leeching, that's competing for a limited supply. If they can pay a more compelling rate than homeowners, perhaps this is how we pay for more infrastructure.

Under any sane system, the power companies would be building new capacity at a furious pace. You (the power company) don't maximize your profits by pissing off existing customers.

If they don't have enough capacity to service both their existing and new customers, perhaps we should look at why they're not building more generators.