California matters

I thought California was left enough to not go for these stupid Qanon-y "Think of the Children!" laws.

Well, I wouldn't say it's a think of the children law, either in goal or in principle.

It's a privacy law first and foremost, trying to adopt EU style privacy regulations for companies. Companies are already restricted with how they use data collected from minors, this would just be an extension of that. The law is trying to expand the data collection restrictions that protect minors to everyone by claiming that it's to protect the minors. Ostensibly, this is good for the consumer.

In principle, the law isn't about "thinking of the children", it's about ensuring compliance with preexisting laws about data collection. In goal, it appears to be an attempt to vastly extend consumer privacy protections using children as an excuse, because just straight expanding the protections to everyone may be able to be shut down by the FCC or some other group.

The problem is that this law doesn't really connect with other laws very well. The "destroying the internet" is an exaggeration, but it interacts with the world in such a way that it's not actually enforceable.

Remember, as is well known thanks to Hollywood California is a place where it is not legal for someone under the age of 18 to engage in sexual activity, no matter the age gap. This is not even a mainstream viewpoint in the USA let alone the wider Western world. And while I am not positive about this point, I think that other well-known Think of the Children! things like sex offender registries were also initially championed there. California has form on this area.

Dp, not sure if it's of interest here but History of earthquakes along the creeping section of the San Andreas fault, California, USA the part that is interesting is that apparently the "creeping" section has much fewer large earthquakes than south and north of it.

I keep hearing bad shit about San Francisco, that's an overpriced hypocritical shithole filled with homeless people shitting everywhere. But I have yet to hear something bad about San Francisco from a source I trust.

That's because most of the people saying it follow a very specific branch of American Christianity - one where God's favor is represented in how much material wealth someone has. Everyone along the hierarchy in their mind then are there because God wants them in that position.

So to see somewhere that more or less completely rejects conservative Christianity utterly and welcomes everything that they reject...well, it rankles these people. So they have to come up with all these ways that San Francisco and California in general aren't really so successful.

Because to admit otherwise would be to attribute success to a state that has so entirely rejected conservative Christianity.

San Francisco is pretty great, as places go. It's certainly not more expensive to live in than a normal city of just under a million people (per average income of course, nominally it is more expensive, but people make more money, so it's the same portion of household income. It's too much, but it's still the same portion as most cities.) They've got good food, almost no weather, and some good museums, if you're the kind of person who likes those.

Also a major reason california has a homelessness problem is because a bunch of the desert and midwestern municipalities encouraged (and still occasionally encourage) their homeless people to move out to california, up to buying one-way bus tickets for them. So it's just we don't dump our issues on other states.

So basically it's another "California has similar problems to everywhere else except when they're better about things which they often are, clearly this is the failures of communism." It's a convenient target for Fox News too, considering that California has really swung democratic hard over the past few decades, and is generally considered a no-hope state for republicans. It's also just so big you can look around and find a problem because we have an eighth of the US's population, so of course you'll be able to find a problem when there's more people in California than the entire mountain time zone to look through.

Well, that's not entirely the case. There's still a lot conservative Christians, but they currently don't have the same kind of political power as they used to, especially compared to other states where they've become much more entrenched.

Remember, voters chose to ban gay marriage twice, once in 2000 with Prop 22 (later overturned) and again in 2008 with Prop 8 (also overturned).

Flash flood leaves 1000 people stranded in Death Valley.

It hasn't flooded this bad in over a decade.

Scientists say megaflood risk has doubled for the next four decades.

Edited by CookingCat on Aug 13th 2022 at 12:59:45 PM

No they don't.

Don't misrepresent what your link says. It says the chances have doubled, but that's still not an enormous chance.

Now, will large scale flooding almost certainly happen at some point in the future? Yes. The Central Valley already is prone to flooding, and it had a really bad one in the 1800s. But nowhere in there is "inevitable in the next four decades". It says that statistically speaking, they went from being reasonably likely to happen once every hundred and fifty years to reasonably likely to happen every seventy to fifty years.

It's later on in the article that says "Although models show this megaflood is inevitable, experts say there are ways to mitigate excessive loss.", but I still edited it anyways.

Seems like between climate change and (in Europe) the gas crises, folks are belatedly rediscovering nuclear power: California lawmakers extend the life of the state's last nuclear power plant

dp since I want to know what the rules in California are about skateboarding in places like parking garages (or, equivalently, in Orange County, if the rules are set below state level)

It's dubiously legal to do it in parking garages in Orange and LA county. It's outright illegal to do it on a public roadway, but I don't know if parking garages count as public.

It's certainly a gray area.

I don't know if it's outright illegal, but I'm pretty sure I've seen signs disallowing it in parking lots at least. I assume it's the same for garages since there's less room and visibility.

Edited by Karxrida on Sep 4th 2022 at 3:24:26 AM

So, did anyone get any of the rolling blackouts the state was warning about? I luckily didn't.

My specific neighborhood hasn't, but the restaurant my mom works at got hit yesterday and today.

Not as of yet this year, though occasionally the power lines shut off abruptly for several hours because PG&E, characteristically, decided "burying the powerlines or doing basic maintenance is hard and doesn't give us large amounts of money, so we're just going to make them shut off any time anything is detected touching them"

Then because the part of the grid in question only serves a few hundred people, it's on the bottom of their list of priorities to figure out where a branch or squirrel touched the line and turn it back on.

Not in my area at least.

Not in my area yet. But one of the fires is right over the hill by my city, so I keep getting evacuation orders meant for other nearby communities.

#NationalizePG&E

Seriously, we've already seen how terrible a job utilities do when privatized. Prices keep going up, yet service and infrastructure never improves.

That's because you can't generally make utilities not work like a monopoly and for profit companies will invariably exploit and abuse monopolies they hold.

There was one for less than an hour last week, but none this week. If it does happen, it’ll be today or tomorrow. It’d still be awful, but better today than yesterday or Monday.

I have small pets that are sensitive to heat, so I’m hoping we don’t lose power. Had to leave a list at home of ways to keep them cool, in case the power went out when I was at work.