The electoral college is flawed but I also find it better than the alternative. It's important that the president should represent a wide variety of perspectives in the country, not just pander to the population of the n biggest cities and call it a day. The people living in small or unimportant states deserve to have a president who gives a damn about them, too. Ultimately I think both of these mechanisms are important ones to ensure that the country doesn't turn into a classic tyranny of the majority, which is something I value quite a bit.
Also works though
For example, each Maltese member of the European Parliament is elected by 90,000 voters in Malta. Each German member is elected by ~878,000 voters in German, meaning each Maltese citizen has about 10x more power than each German citizen.
In this case, the German "bloc" is still vastly more powerful, but the disproportionate representation is important to ensure the loyalty of small nations, who are always incentivized to navigate much narrower interests.
NIMBYs limiting growth.
Crazy crime handling policies in SF (which are getting reverted now).
Cities outside the main centers (SFBA, LA, etc) dying.
Complete political ineptitude for things like HSR
No wonder they're losing population
Austin is quickly building more housing though, which I am a fan of.
Is the situation as bad in San Francisco?
SF is worse. But SF is also tiny.
Purely anecdotal
I was going to use some numbers but because Japan doesn’t really do street names it wasn’t really comparable.
Tokyo has 25k km of streets. LA has 9k miles.
Edit: Missed the ‘most’, sorry.
Imagine if CA was run with the kind of efficiency that Singapore or South Korea was run. Clean, safe streets. Modern infrastructure.
Instead we get a state government that is going to waste the goose that laid the golden egg. The high taxes paid disappear in a black hole centered in Sacramento.
CA reminds me of New Jersey. Other states used to be jealous of New Jersey's economy, yet the riches were frittered away by an inefficient government.
California wouldn't be California if it was run like Singapore or if it had the 9-9 chaebol work culture like South Korea.
The police can force you to stay in a shelter, yes. But they have them available. Most very poor people in SG stay in subsidized housing.
In SF there literally are not enough shelter beds. If you were homeless today you would have to sleep on the street.
Yet the President of the United States seems to spend a lot of time trying to make Russians happy, and zero time making Californians happy.
Hollywood is still a thing. Manufacturing, yes manufacturing. Agriculture. The Bay Area is a fraction of that GDP, and a small geographical part of California.
The disproportionate power relative to its economic significance is a political choice.
It just can't be done economically, because yields of a nuke(pun intended) don't immediately map onto economical values. Not just immensely positive or negative, but actually tangential to the currency dimensions.
But I wonder if it wouldn't be more healthy for you if the states grew a bit more independent.
It would give the president less power to decide exactly how schools and universities should be run or would open up for social welfare reforms in the states that want it.
It's been a long process to get that much power in the federal government - it goes back at least to FDR (so, near a hundred years now), and I've seen arguments that it goes all the way back to the Civil War. But I do firmly believe that the centralizing of power is destroying us. We got away with it when the nation was more united in its values and culture, and even then it could be contentious. But today vast swathes of the country share little to nothing in the way of values or culture. Of course we can't get along when such widely disparate groups of people are tied together and a single government body is controlling large portions of their lives.
A lot of it is. For example the California housing shortage? It’s all state and local. But the same single family zoning pattern played out in many places.
He doesn’t have that power. But he’s taking it, and the parties who are supposed to be stopping him are uninterested in doing their job.
And the idea that you have to make 'Russia happy' because they have nukes, if fucking beyond dumb.
Russia, on the other hand, supports the President, so they deserve to be rewarded.
This won't last once the US population starts declining. We've been held afloat by immigration but even that's running out.
Japan was ahead of the curve in terms of modernity. Looking at them is almost like looking at our own future.
This is one of the reasons that nominal GDP isn't all that useful a metric.
It would be interesting to compare economies of the same scale, regardless of legal status: If you are considering the US and China, maybe you should include the whole of the EU. And if you are looking at Germany, Japan, ... It makes sense to not only include California, but also to split up other countries. I'm curious how high up Guandong or Shanghai would be for example.
The fact that the US and China show up as single countries (and not "continents"/regions) whereas the EU shows up as a bunch of "small" countries is source of a lot of inferiority complex in Europe.
It's also the only thing that can work in Europe. Anything smaller would make Europe irrelevant on the global stage, and something much more invasive would erase Europe as we know it.
The current mood in smaller European countries is that even though many are skeptical of French and German influence, our interests align most of the time, especially now that the US has succumbed to fascism and stupidity.
Surprisingly far down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first-level_administra...
California, Texas, England, New York, Guangdong, Jiangsu. Both with slightly smaller GDP than Russia, the 11th largest economy.
More interesting is the PPP table where Guangdong is close to California.
On the one hand, yes, you're right, the EU is more powerful economically as a whole than as individual states. But on the other hand the individual states are a bit less unified than the US or China. So they are a bit more individual in the first place.
EU countries still have:
- their own laws and constitutions
- their own foreign policy, embassies, intelligence services, armies, etc.
- their own taxation; there actually is no EU tax (though there is some pressure to create such a thing)
- their own policies for education, healthcare, social security, taxation, trade, etc.
- their own currency in some cases (e.g. Denmark, Sweden, Poland and many other eastern European countries)
- border disputes like Cyprus, the Balkans (several former Yugoslav countries are members or aspiring to be). And though not part of it, you might count Greenland here as it is Danish with a special status.
As a trade block, the EU is pretty large. And the sphere of influence also includes former soviet states not part of the EU, Turkey, Northern Africa, etc. But it doesn't speak with one voice like the US and China tend to do. Also there is a lot of division on topics like e.g. the Ukraine war, energy, and a lot of other topics.
- its own laws and constitution, search "Constitution of California"
- its own taxation (e.g. sales tax differs between states, just as VAT rates differ between EU countries; Americans pay income tax to their state as well as the federation)
- its own policies for education, healthcare (not sure about social security, and not for trade)
- some US states have border disputes with other states, e.g. Tennessee vs Georgia (Possibly the EU does not, they must be resolved before joining, though I can't find a good article on this).
- the USA as a whole has border disputes with Canada
The EU presents more division on more topics than the USA, but the USA isn't united on e.g. energy policy.
JP can still be 1/3 larger than california US compels them to appreciate. I think 140 is probably a good balance for JP exports (high tech) and imports (energy, commodities/inputs).
Or Trump makes USD weaker.
suraci•5h ago
atarian•5h ago
oblio•3h ago
hurray-sandbag•5h ago
Read about the "State of Jefferson" movement, etc. The Coastal cities in California are really a completely different place from the rest of the state, and the rest of the state is pretty dissatisfied with this union.
zippyman55•4h ago
oblio•3h ago
Surprisingly, those Coastal cities have a lot of people (common theme in the US).
swarnie•5h ago
suraci•4h ago
Mountain_Skies•4h ago
AngryData•4h ago
ninetyninenine•4h ago
VincentEvans•4h ago
wordofx•4h ago
platevoltage•4h ago
suraci•2h ago
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3306215/tai...
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E7%BD%B7%E5%85%8D (Chinese)
https://focustaiwan.tw/society/202503280015
ex-leper•19m ago
RobRivera•4h ago
I see what you did there.
kryptiskt•4h ago
derelicta•4h ago