Have you ever spent serious time actually living in a developing country? Do you truly believe California, the richest state in the US, is on par with a developing country because of their high DMV fees? Please think of those living in truly oppressive situations, or in brutal poverty, before making such generalizations.

I grew up in a developing country. In some ways (e.g. quality of roads or number of homeless per mile) my home country is even better than California. Have you lived in a developing country? (Hint: It's not as bad as you think) The fact that it's kinda of comparable to California in some ways while California is collecting so much tax on top of federal budget is baffling.

I would imagine if we compared literacy rate, infant mortality rate, life expectancy, median net worth, retirement age, etc, we'd start to find some stark differences between california and a "developing country," though I'm curious what we define as "developing country."

This from my time living on the border of Mexico. Everyone always talked about how the roads on our side were as bad as on Mexico's side as a criticism of texan infrastructure. It's fair, by the way, American infrastructure is a mess. But then the life expectancy was like ten years lower just a couple miles away because of an invisible line (and a fence you could easily hop over with a ladder).

Did you know that life expectancy of Cubans is higher than that of Americans?

It’s most likely not. Doctors in Cuba self-report aggregate statistics and are penalized if they underperform. That tells you all you need to know.

https://www.econlib.org/about-that-cuban-life-expectancy/

Independent studies have shown giant anomalies in other metrics that suggest the favorable metrics are being fudged:

https://mobile.twitter.com/wwwojtekk/status/1233017228792082...

Also a lot of reports that women are pressured to get late term abortions if there are any potential issues observed with the fetus, as this will ensure it doesn’t count as a mortality and not hurt that clinic’s stats.

Careful with that argument though, some of this is based on US propaganda.

How so?

Yes, Hollywood’s vaccination rates are worse than South Sudan’s for example. No developing country would allow kids going unvaccinated. So in a sense California is worse than an average developing nation.

This smells of untrue American exceptionalism. Being a very well traveled person with a spouse from a developing country that we travel to often, I would expect so-called “poorer” countries to do better on nearly all of those metrics you list (the exception being median net worth, unless you correct for cost of living in which case California lags behind on all metrics listed).

This is where the definition of "developing" matters.

It's also worth noting I would never try to compare the USA to other nations typically lumped under the now-vague definition of "first-world." The USA fails at many things.

I agree with him. I grew up in a developing country but I cannot stand California. It does not matter if it is the richest state, what matters is how much a p50 person has on his bank account at the end of the month. Most of the wealth of California is in the hand of the top 1%. It is also one of the most expensive states of the US.

Plenty of brutal poverty in the USA, even California. Or haven't you smelt the stench of human shit rising off San Francisco? The First World pretty much consists only of western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada, New Zealand, and maybe Australia. Those are the countries in which the average citizen can expect a reasonable level of government service and public infrastructure without excessive corruption or partisan obstructionism -- table stakes for being considered "developed" in the 21st century.

The USA is distinctly, profoundly third world. Just because your rich ass is enjoying a pretty good life in the USA doesn't make that not the case; the rich enjoy good lives in many third-world countries.

I'm also from a developing country. It was California's similarities with my country that led me to leave California.

The system makes much more sense if you assume the goal of government corruption is a wealth transfer to for the (politically connected subset of the) upper and middle classes and assume high DMV fees are a sin tax.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

I'm not saying that welfare for a subset of the people who can pay their own way and high sin taxes on essential services are good government policy (I personally think the combination is farcically regressive), just that the system makes sense if you take that viewpoint.

I completely agree, government is primarily being used as a way to make transfer payments from one group of people to another these days.

i live in California and collect old (literally: project, mostly european) cars. The Cal DMV are a nightmare to deal with despite the vibrant local car culture which is slowly dying for all but the rich due to the DMV and other bureaucracy. There is a fee and a form every time you exhale, it's getting worse and you have wait hours to be charged at their offices.

Maybe the goal is just to get people to skirt the law and accept the legal ambiguity hanging over their head that comes with that? They're basically saying "fine, be a small time car flipper if you want but know that you are giving the state the authority to destroy your life at any time on whim". This is what police states that want to have the power of arbitrary enforcement do.

I'm not saying CA is there yet but if you look at asinine policies from all the various states and their level of compliance it seems pretty clear that huge swaths of "perfectly fine when done reasonably" normal and common behaviors are more or less impossible to do while being legally in the clear. At what point does an unenforceable at scale policy become a backhanded infringement upon people's property rights?

Reminds me of exactly the way the legal cannabis trade has gone in Canada.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/18/cannabis-can...

Stupidly high fees and requirements for production or sale licences, no real legal way to acquire initial stock, countless hoops to jump through and continuous fees, over top the exorbitant tax rates have made it fairly difficult for anyone without a lot of initial capital to even begin.

Despite the fact there was already and still is a thriving underground grey market that gets mostly left alone until somebody needs to be made an example of.

Also an older euro car fan, no longer a CA resident. What are you stuck with besides standard registration?

I know post 75 cars have to be smogged with factory equipment if using the stock engine (though I don’t know how the hell your average smog tech knows the factory setup for an 1980 Lancia Beta).

I had to sell my old euro car (to an out-of-stater) when I moved to CA because despite miraculously meeting strict CA smog guidelines it never had to meet in its decades of existence, it had non-approved (i.e. $CA stamped$) parts in it and failed the "visual". Clean-blowing, perfectly functional car, had to sell it anyway. I'm still bitter.

you have to prep carefully for the visual...

>What are you stuck with besides standard registration?

I've never done one for CA but some states make it hell to go from "car with no paperwork last owned by a dead person and last registered years ago" to "car with proper paperwork to sell/register" so for someone repairing old cars to flip that can cause a significant headache.

I literally get cars from junkyards with no paperwork. Example: a wrecked, rare 76 Jaguar xj6C coupe with no paperwork, plates, keys. You have to trailer it to the police station for verification, show bill of sale etc etc, then go through months of DMV forms and fees which typically require a professional who does this bureaucracy, otherwise you will spend tens of hours waiting to go to a DMV window to be given the next hurdles to jump over. Transferring titles from purchased out of state cars is painful too. The smog issues are relatively straight forward in comparison.