California is mismanaged and you don’t need to vote Red to fix it. We can do better as Blue State. Wake up. We’re losing to ourselves like an obese patient anemic to a diet.

I think it could be better run for sure. We need to look at things other states seem to do well (Utah - homelessness, Texas - K12) and push to improve.

The problem for me is that when you go out in the rest of the country the dislike bordering on hate for California is really common. It is insane to me that you can send Marines to Los Angeles and almost no one cares. California is a such a huge chunk of the US economy, not just tech but agriculture, trade and yes even manufacturing.

The partisanship is poison for everyone and it holds back reform in California. We're all the same country.

>Texas - K12

Uh..

I'd do Massachusetts K-12. Texas is pretty bad.

Massachusetts consistently ranks in the top 10 in the world on PISA. An exam which removes all the political "BS"-ability from the results and comparisons. It's just your students taking the same test as all the other students in the world, and the resultant scores being ranked.

Texas K-12 is horrible. Lived there from Katrina to a few years past Harvey. Our PISA scores were consistently horrible when we were ranked internationally.

Though, curiously enough, we were not "horrible" if you only compared us to the same test results in other US states. We were nowhere near Massachusetts. But we weren't Alabama/Florida/Mississippi either. Which means education in general in the US is pretty bad outside maybe the top 3 to 5 states by performance on the PISA exams.

Massachusetts is unusually good though, probably because of the high concentration of elite universities in Boston, which is also the capital of the state, which means politicians there take education most seriously - and don't forget the demographic effect of the number of professors and other highly-educated professionals.

Texas, California, and Florida are all fairly similar, with California doing somewhat worse than Texas and Florida. Unfortunately, the dedication of California to effective education is going down over time, while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up.

>while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up

Well their PISA scores haven't been going up. In fact they've been going down. So if their education is getting better, it's not showing up in the ability of their students to answer questions that other students seem to be able to answer.

That's kind of what I meant by PISA removing "BS"-ability from the equation. For some reason, on American standardized tests, all our children do great. Then we take PISA with all the other kids in the world, and the truth comes out.

That's also why I think we should all just take Massachusetts' education curriculum and implement it across the nation. Because you talk about demographics, but even when you control for income and race, kids in Massachusetts just flat out do better than our kids. Even just taking all kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts, they are still doing better than kids at the median of the rankings of many, many other states. (And think about the demographics of kids at the bottom in Boston, Brockton, or Springfield. Come on, admit it man. I'll try to stay politically correct here and just state that those very likely aren't professors' kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts.)

Massachusetts is so far ahead of all of us that I think I'd be comfortable just saying that they seem to have gotten it right, and we should simply copy it. Because right now, the gap is just getting wider and wider with every round of PISA testing.

Could you link where you're getting the PISA scores from? I've seen references that PISA was not conducted in all 50 states, at least recently. Also, I can't get a breakdown of "US States and Territories" for 2022 on the PISA website at https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/idepisa/report.aspx

Texas K-12 performance has decreased significantly in recent decades, largely due to massive poorly-educated Hispanic immigration.

You kind of do need to vote Red - or, more precisely, make Red competitive again. Because Californians don't vote Red often enough, most of the candidates in the Republican Party in California are completely unserious. This has allowed the more impractical progressive side of the Democratic Party to increasing set the direction of the Democratic Party in California, to the detriment of governance for everyone.

Personally I hope that the two Republican candidates in California both win the jungle primary - maybe that will lead to some soul searching on how bad the Democratic politicians have become in the state.

Your comment was better without that edit.

It’s an appeal to absurdity that falls flat because nuclear plants and oil refineries have been built near population centers in the US (including in California) without problem.

California had had more issues from under investment in industry (see it’s ancient electrical infra that lit the state on fire) than from collocation of industry and people.

Both of the largest ports are right in SoCal and that’s going pretty well. Building another one would never make it past the permitting stage in today’s California.

> Why can’t we build a new nuclear plant in Manhattan

We should, it would replace significant amounts of natural gas usage for space heating. Not doing so is literally cooking the planet.

I think a nuclear plant in Manhattan would cost far more than just building the plant in outer NY, and then running a big power line in to Manhattan. Sure, the power line would take up space, but so would the nuclear plant's cooling system.

The space heating is the cooling system.

So's a turbine. Sometimes people don't want heating, but you still need to cool down the plant. And while I'm sure the nuclear plant will have a great emergency stop button (the type where paying $1k per press is absolute peanuts), the systems used daily to turn the heat up/down will either need a buffer, or have a delay on taking the heat up/down. That'll take up space. Remind me why power lines aren't an option?

Manhattan is an island. It's surrounded by cooling fluid.

> Sometimes people don't want heating, but you still need to cool down the plant.

You can turn it down or off.

> Remind me why power lines aren't an option?

It's more economical not to waste half the plant's power output. 1 GW of heat comes out the reactor, 50% becomes electricity (with heat pumps you can make that 2x heating) and 50% is low-grade heat sufficient for space heating. You get 1/3 more heating for the same cost.

Or, just turning back on the one we mothballed in Peekskill.