California Politics: Madame Senator, this is a morgue

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Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

GuyDudeBroMan posted:

So government regulations on water are causing an unintended consequence? Is this your argument?

Where do the prices for water come from? How are they determined?

I think the point that you're missing is that water isn't distributed the same way that it is in the city. In theory, if water was distributed solely by utilities, we could price water such that agricultural usage would decrease. In practice, that's not how water is distributed, and thus that's not a solution to the problem.

# ¿ May 12, 2015 20:40

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:55

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Kenning posted:

I said it when my friend posted this on Facebook, I'll say it again: gently caress Orange County.

Eh, it's a perfectly nice place to live and work, as long as you have good employment, at least.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 19:18

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

nm posted:

Goddamn, before I moved, I'd have killed to be less than 3 miles from a 99 ranch or sf.
Cheap produce, pork with fat in it, interesting ingredents and I'm white as hell.

Seriously! They're great stores and one of my favorite parts of being in Orange County.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 20:31

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Leperflesh posted:

I can walk to my local 99. I should go there more often, actually; right now we pop in maybe once every couple of months, when we're feeling like making ramen or sushi or something.

My only problem with them is that their meat can be overpriced. I generally go to an American supermarket for meat, one of a couple of other local Korean/Phillipino markets for fish, and 99 Ranch for general miscellaneous ingredients. They're all pretty close by, so it's a nice setup. There's even a fantastic Middle Eastern market nearby with great prices on most things, but obviously it doesn't sell pork.

I can't understand why people protest having new and completely different markets open up near them. They've all got new and interesting products, and they usually have better prices on certain goods.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 21:22

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Thunder Moose posted:

When have we jailed a bloc of people based on their ideology? Has this happened in recent memory? If you use marijuana as an example I will preemptively counter with being in favor of legalization does not get you in jail, smoking it does.

Not ideology, but we did inter a large number of Japanese Americans during World War 2. They were U.S. citizens at the time, and they were effectively denied their right to vote in that they were not provided with absentee ballots and were not allowed to return home to vote.

I would also not be surprised if there were some issues during the red scare under McCarthy as well with certain people being effectively denied the right to vote based on their politics.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 02:24

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Pohl posted:

I grew up in Idaho and I've stood outside and experienced electrical storms close up that wrecked poo poo everywhere.
Those were pussy storms compared to that storm. I was literally hiding in the center of my house and covering my ears.

gently caress humidity though. Half the point of living in southern California is that it's not humid for more than a few days a year. Cold and humid is fine, hot and dry is fine, but hot and humid is loving miserable. I don't know how anyone stands living outside of here.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 14:51

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Keyser S0ze posted:

Texas weather in the summer is horribly sweaty and inhuman and that's not counting the dust and smog.

Could be worse though. Could be Florida. That made Virginia feel cool and dry in comparison.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 21:05

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

computer parts posted:

No, in general rural people are characterized as incestuous simpletons.

Have you met any rural people?

# ¿ Aug 20, 2015 00:56

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

doctorfrog posted:

LA strikes me as one of the few places that has room for the Olympics, can competently host the Olympics, and both can absorb and deserves all the negatives of the Olympics.

And on top of that, traffic wouldn't even get noticeably worse!

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 15:58

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Bip Roberts posted:

Burritos are lots of things to many people however the Del Taco bean and cheese burrito might just be the best burrito.

This is horrifying on so many levels. Granted, I'm spoiled as all get out when it comes to burritos given how often I visit San Diego.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2015 05:47

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

e_angst posted:

Wait, isn't all of California just the Bay Area and LA, with giant swaths of meth labs deserts and weed farm forests outside of them?

What is this LA you speak of? I'm in Orange County, and while I theorize that there could be something north of me, the solid wall of traffic says otherwise.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2015 16:39

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Huge_Midget posted:

Because the rest of the states think y'all are loving crazy for living there in the first place.

If people think we're crazy for living in a place where the climate is fantastic for most of the year and there are very few bugs compared to everywhere else, then I'm not sure it's us who have the problem.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2015 18:14

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Leperflesh posted:

How do you not notice a leak big enough to bleed off $2700 of water in one month? That's many swimming pools' full of water, at least.

Honestly I'm in favor of simply cutting off residential water after X amount of water is used in a day where X is far higher than typical household use.

It would save situations like the aforementioned leaks from being a problem and only really impact people who are excessive consumers of water.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2015 01:33

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Leperflesh posted:

We should get rid of time zones completely and just have the entire world on the same 24-hour clock. Then you get up, start work, get off work, and go to bed at whatever time is suitable for your region and climate. Time zones and daylight savings time are all just totally stupid ways of arbitrarily adjusting people's schedules to meaningless numbers on a dial.

There's no special reason why a company has to open for business at, say, 8 AM instead of 18:00... as long as it's opening in the morning.

It's a hell of a lot easier if I can assume that 9am here is equivalent to 9am across the world rather than look up their local business hours. Frontloading the work with a timezone is easy and convenient to understand. It's also a lot easier on travelers since you can look at any local clock and know roughly what people will be doing.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2016 21:12

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Leperflesh posted:

I don't think it's actually that much easier. Instead you have to look up what time zone your colleague is in, and then use a converter or do a caculation to figure out whether or not he's awake right now. Actually you have to do that calculation anyway. And actually when you travel if it's not, like, midday on a weekday you may have to look up business hours anyway, because different regions have different standards for when businesses and locations are open.

The point anyway is just to get people to recognize that "I wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11 and I work from 9 to 5:30" are arbitrary numbers. What matters is when the sun comes up and when it goes down, and how your work and nonwork and sleep cycle are set by that cycle. Daylight savings time is stupid because businesses could just adjust their opening hours during the summer if they wanted to, or maybe opt not to. Same with schools, etc.

Checking time zones is really easy now - you can just Google "time in X" where X is a city, state, country, etc. Outlook will also do the work for you if your contact has location data set up properly.

I know what you mean about the numbers being arbitrary, but the nice thing about time zones is that it keeps the daily schedule consistent. 11am here is similar to 11am halfway across the planet, and I can be reasonably sure that most businesses are operating or will be operating at that time. It's much more informative for me to know the current local time than to have to backtrack to figure out what their equivalent global time would be to any given local time that I experience.

My point is that as long as we have arbitrary time, it's nice for that time to be arbitrary and consistent rather than a bit of a tangled mess.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2016 00:39

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Leperflesh posted:

Oh, I know. And yet, I have direct experience to suggest that tons of people still can't loving get it right. All the time. "Wait, do I add, or subtract the number of hours? Oh wait, it's tomorrow already there in australia, does that mean I need to add... oh, dang, no, subtr... wait" it's nuts.

If we're looking up time zones on an app anyway, the app might as well tell us "it's just before midday in Italy" or "it's still two hours before dawn in India" or whatever. Hell you can show that with a graphic, and some of the time zone websites do that.

Well yeah, people as a whole are kinda stupid. Software has been making scheduling meetings easier than ever before, especially since it'll convert the meeting time to your local time zone for you automatically, regardless of where it was scheduled. I do a lot of business with people in different branches of the company around the world, and Outlook makes it really easy to coordinate things.

Leperflesh posted:

Another advantage would be to help people who currently live or work very near a time zone line. It's stupid and disruptive to have to change what hour your clock reads, and deal with businesses and venues and appointments and schedules that change depending on which side of an invisible, arbitrary line you're standing on at the moment.

Look, I know there's basically zero chance of this happening. I'm not really serious about it. By advocating this, I'm at least helping people to recognize why daylight savings is stupid. Conceptually, the clock is a measuring device, and we live on a round planet, so the decision about where to place the ruler and what numbers it should show are arbitrary.

There will still be arbitrary points where businesses will open and close, and unless you have local/state/whatever laws enforcing/suggesting opening/closing times, you'll end up with a weird mish-mash. Would school start at 7:35 in one district and 7:37 the next district over? If we have those arbitrary points, people on the border will still be affected.

We are in agreement on daylight savings not being all that great.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2016 03:12

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

withak posted:

I was thinking more that a literal infant is a person whose sleep schedule has a significant effect on their life. An adult is a person who gets their poo poo done even if they got an hour less sleep than usual today.

vvv Like I said

You're clearly a robot who has never interacted with another person. Adults bitch and moan about the hour lost, and also make it to work on time. The two aren't mutually exclusive, so you might want to check your logic gates there.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2016 18:20

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Triglav posted:

Or you could take the quick plane ride to and from Vegas.

Imagine how much money a bar car could make if they sold drinks to and from Vegas on a train.

# ¿ May 23, 2016 19:02

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

cheese posted:

I-5 is ALREADY rough on weekends and downright awful at times during any big travel holidays. Try to go from the bay area to socal the day before Thanksgiving or Xmas or hell a three day weekend and you will grind to a half a number of times in the middle of no where. Its 2 lanes in long stretches and neck deep in tractor trailers.

Hell, the I-5 is terrible on the weekends even within socal. If I want to go from OC to SD on a Saturday, I had better be out the door by 10 or I'm looking at a 2 hour drive.

To be fair, most of that delay is because people apparently think the freeway is a demolition derby and get in accidents on such a regular basis that it's astounding.

# ¿ May 24, 2016 02:01

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Space-Bird posted:

Thanks. Yeah, this is kind of what I was wondering. There seems to be a problem with money trickling up into the private sector through banking, tax evasion and such, but taxing government jobs also seems weird, because the money literally comes from taxation, and I understand that money goes back into the economy as people spend it. I guess things are pretty heated though, when these kind of conversations come up. I'm not trying to make any value judgements, or like government employees are bad.

Taxing government jobs makes sense because people can have more than one job, be married, or have alternate income streams. Also keep in mind that government is not a monolithic entity. A federal employee paying state and local tax is effectively transferring federal funds locally, while local and state employees are doing the opposite (though, of course, local and state employees tend to spend the money they are paid in the state or locality they are employed in, which ends up with that money going back to the state or locality in part over many transactions).

# ¿ Sep 20, 2016 04:41

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Or you do it like smoking and shift our culture away from gun fetishists. If every new generation owns fewer guns than the one before it, eventually the problem will go away or at least be reduced to a reasonable level.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2016 20:02

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Dead Reckoning posted:

The phrase is totally apt, because 99% of the time it is used in reference to officers who have been disciplined or fired. No one says, "We have a few bad apples on the force, but fortunately they've been cleared of all wrong-doing and we're keeping them on."

You uh, don't pay much attention to the news, do you?

# ¿ Sep 25, 2016 17:23

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Dead Reckoning posted:

Drug companies probably would have spent a lot of money fighting a ballot proposition to put their California offices to the torch and to throw their shareholders in the stocks so that the poor could pelt them with rotten fruit, but that wouldn't make voting for it out of spite a good idea.

Can we vote for this instead? I feel like it's much less ambiguous.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2016 22:44

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Works for me. Discriminating on burrito fillings would be more difficult.

Nah, it's really quite easy. There's San Diego County and then there's people who are wrong.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 01:29

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Combed Thunderclap posted:

This is loving delicious.

And holy poo poo look at these socioeconomic benefits

Wait, how the hell are super high incomes getting a -% of money spent on health insurance?

# ¿ May 31, 2017 23:29

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

On the bright side, just about every engineer I know under the age of 35 is solidly liberal, so the demographics should be changing over time. Not quickly enough to actually change our current shitheads in congress, but at least there's some positive momentum.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2017 16:43

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

FCKGW posted:

It's pretty much the model and originator of the master planned community.

The Irvine Company owns 1/5 of all the land in Orange County, and it encompasses several cities withing it's control.

Coincidentally, these are the parts people think of when they thing of "lovely, republican Orange County"

If it makes you feel any better, in my experience a lot of younger professionals (~35 and younger) are much more liberal.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2017 08:22

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Leperflesh posted:

storms

You lost me. What is a storm?

# ¿ Jan 19, 2018 05:33

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Cup Runneth Over posted:

Neither is penal firefighting.

That just seems really inefficient. I mean, you're getting what, half a liter per person per day, with an extremely short deployment range? Surely there's a better way to do things.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2018 06:56

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Cup Runneth Over posted:

Lol at saying SoCal drags the state down considering that Twitter thread that just got posted. Don't even pretend that NorCal isn't full of some of the scummiest, most self absorbed people to walk the face of the planet since we decided it was our God given right to seize the state from Mexico

True, but also Irvine.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2018 17:47

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Cup Runneth Over posted:

This has nothing to do with stress. We are all used to doing 75 in tight clumps, nobody even thinks twice about it. It's just that nobody in SoCal values their life

That or they just assume that the fresh accident on the 405 north every day is something that happens to other people.

"The" accident?

I think there are perpetually 3 accidents between Orange County and San Diego County at all times whenever there's even mild traffic. As soon as one gets cleaned up, someone else crashes. It's like loving clockwork.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2018 05:49

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

punk rebel ecks posted:

Is there nowhere in California with cheap or even reasonable priced housing?

Welcome to California. Come here if you have a great job lined up, run like hell if you don't.

If you do have a good job though, it's a fantastic place to live.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2018 05:28

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

What if people have lived somewhere for decades and don't want to move because their house is suddenly Too Valuable through no actions of their own? That seems kinda

Tough poo poo? They make a lot of money off the asset when they move. It's a natural, if unfortunate, byproduct of an area becoming more desirable; housing prices increase, and as a result of that, property taxes need to increase as well. At the very least, Prop 13 is a major issue, because people who bought in when the market was cheap pay significantly less taxes than people who buy in later when the market is more expensive. That is complete and utter bullshit and needs to change.

There's also issues with old folks in California not moving because it'd be more expensive for them to move while they occupy housing in areas with great schools and close proximity to industry (the very reason they moved there so many years ago). Those houses should be occupied by younger people looking to start families (people who typically still have an income and who can afford to pay more for housing) while retirees should be moving to housing that is farther from good places to work and farther from good school districts since those are no longer major concerns.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2018 04:49

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

MarcusSA posted:

lol sorry grandma I know you've lived here for 50 years but you gotta GTFO now.

Grandma, I'm sorry that the asset you purchased 50 years ago when you and grandpa were working is now worth a cool million dollars more than it was when you bought it and now you cannot afford the taxes. You'll have to drown your sorrow in the million dollars of profit you made just for living somewhere and find accommodations with your newfound million dollars.

Seriously, people move out and downsize to different locations when they retire as a matter of course in most parts of the US. The house you want as a younger person with a new family is very different than the house you want as an aging octogenarian who cannot tend to a large garden and has increasing difficulty with stairs.

Also, if grandma were renting, she would have left long ago when her rent increased alongside housing prices.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2018 05:05

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Sydin posted:

I work right across the street from one of those. Thankfully, I don't drive.

That said I'm totally killing time during lunch looking for plate scanners and cameras today.

I live down the road from one. Thankfully I walk there more than I drive.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2018 21:11

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Yeah, the whole "workers can't be forced to sign a contract to not work for competitors is somehow not freedom" is very silly.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2018 01:24

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Annointed posted:

Voted all Dems at the polls. Here's to hoping Orange County finally loving flips Blue.

Fingers crossed! Did my part to help with that too, as did most people in my office.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2018 22:26

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

FMguru posted:

Fun little minifact about the Republican rout in Orange County

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1063775748320870400

e: and a fun article about the grim future of the California Republican party

https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1063809437079605254

I want nothing more than this to be true forever more, but as awesome as it is, this is an election with extremely high voter participation due to cheeto benito being just that awful. I'm not sure this will hold true in 4 years once the white house has been (hopefully) replaced by someone with more governing ability than a slightly warm jar of mayonnaise.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2018 18:10

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Jaxyon posted:

It's just red meat for his base.

Conservatives believe some hilarious poo poo about California.

My Trump loving family out in a rural area of the country literally broke down in tears trying to get me to leave California because of how awful they believe it is. Trying to explain that, no, I'm actually doing quite well for myself with a good engineering job landed on deaf ears.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2019 22:51

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:55

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Skippy McPants posted:

The fire comes later. Climate change is a mean motherfucker that hits you from every angle. California is predicted to see higher annual rainfall in the coming decades but constricted into a narrower timespan. That means more flooding, but also more fires because all the fuel sources that bloom during the wet season have plenty of time to dry out once the months-long droughts set in.

Literally drowning and burning to death at the same time.

Don't forget the mudslides!

# ¿ Jan 15, 2019 16:40

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