California Must Be Doing Something Right Despite Trump hating it so much

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Noah Abrams

Golden Member
Feb 15, 2018
1,041
109
76
Noah: here’s a challenge. Quote here a single post you’ve made that you think has given this board an intelligent insight.

There could be one, I don’t know. I’m interested to see if you can do it though!

Why would I ever want to do that? I am perfectly okay with you or anyone else think of anything of me.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
85,632
50,853
136
Ok, I admit it. But again, how do you know if this is a genuine admission or I am just stroking your ego?

Dummy, did you not see the point where I don’t care what you think? You can’t stroke my ego because I don’t care what you think.

I’m very interested in people who make smart arguments but so far you’ve been terrible.
 

Noah Abrams

Golden Member
Feb 15, 2018
1,041
109
76
Dummy, did you not see the point where I don’t care what you think? You can’t stroke my ego because I don’t care what you think.

Again you missed my point. You may not be interested in what people think of you (though that most likely is happening at unconscious level and you are not aware of it). But you are interested in what you think of me. These two are not separate.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
85,632
50,853
136
Again you missed my point. You may not be interested in what people think of you (though that most likely is happening at unconscious level and you are not aware of it). But you are interested in what you think of me. These two are not separate.

‘You are interested in what you think of me’ is one of the more vacuous statements I have read recently.

lol.
 

Noah Abrams

Golden Member
Feb 15, 2018
1,041
109
76
‘You are interested in what you think of me’ is one of the more vacuous statements I have read recently.

lol.

There was this Moonbeam post in reply to a question on this forum - where it basically came down to the futility of discussion when two people can't understand each other because they are coming from different experiences and patterns.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
85,632
50,853
136
There was this Moonbeam post in reply to a question on this forum - where it basically came down to the futility of discussion when two people can't understand each other because they are coming from different experiences and patterns.

There are certainly places where two intelligent people talk past each other because they lack a common frame of reference. That’s why I asked you to provide literally a single post that indicated you were such a person.
 

Moonbeam

Elite Member
Nov 24, 1999
73,286
6,351
126
It’s endlessly baffling to me how people argue ‘why should people who made millions on an investment pay taxes on their winnings?’
I like how you lock yourself into a position by selectively framing of an issue. Only property speculators buy their homes as investments. Most people own just one as a place live. You can live in a million dollar home and struggle financially if you hope to give a child the same chance when your gone. How much better for your sleep, I’m sure, to see it as the rich trying to avoid investment gains. You can end that by passing laws that prevent selling for no more than 2 percent a year over what was paid.

But ask yourself who the hell you are to screw over people who have a rather common desire to belong someplace and have pride in ownership of their own home. Everybody on the planet would have invested in properties that have wildly increased in value if they had the faintest idea what a spectacular investment it would be. The problem with that is that nobody would have been able to buy them then because that investment potential would have been figured in. Why not just say you want to rip off lucky people who happen to own valuable antiques.
 

Moonbeam

Elite Member
Nov 24, 1999
73,286
6,351
126
Yes, but I wonder where does the "cleverness" (for lack of a better word, because intelligence most certainly is not it) of the city people come from? The rural people don't seem to have that generally and it is quite refreshing.
I am not exactly sure what you mean by cleverness except to think you mean something that develops out of the far greater exposure people in cities have with variety. Do you know the song, ‘How ya gonna keep um down on the farm after they seen Paris’, or some such. I would speculate that the more and different the kinds of environmental impacts a person is exposed to, the more receptive they may be to having them, and that might train a brain to seek an arousal level that only balances for such a person at a higher degree than for folk in the country need.

What interests me is understanding why people score on a moral scale city or rural people differently. How does being one or the other make somebody better, when what you are is environmental. In order to feel that whatever one happens to be is better than what somebody else is seems to me to imply some emotionally experienced sense of need.
 
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Noah Abrams

Golden Member
Feb 15, 2018
1,041
109
76
I am not exactly sure what you mean by cleaverness except to think you mean something that develops out of the far greater exposure people in cities have with variety. Do you know the song, ‘How ya gonna keep um down on the farm after they seen Paris’, or some such. I would speculate that the more different kinds of environmental impacts a person is exposed to the more they may receptive they may be to having them, and that might train a brain to seek a balanced arrows all ever that folk in the country.

What interests me is understanding why people score on a moral scale city or rural people differently. How does being one or the other make somebody better, when what you are is environmental. In order to feel that whatever one happens to be is better than what somebody else is seems to me to imply some emotionally experienced sense of need.

It is the opposite actually. I am a city person and see something precious in rural folks which I don’t have.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
111,133
30,084
146
Yes but CA is a bit more extreme because it relies heavily on very progressive income taxes which tend to plummet precipitously in bad times. Rich Californians fuel booms when they cash stock options, etc. during good times. And in bad times they often harvest stock losses which reduce their taxable income. It's not like I'm making up the boom/bust thing to make CA look bad as recent experience from other recessions has shown. It's not inherently good or bad, just something to be aware of.

And Texas is the big dog of all boom/bust states. It relies on oil.

And only on oil. Good luck.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
111,133
30,084
146
I was in San Francisco a few months ago, and the amount of human feces and urine on the streets surprised me, especially because I didn’t recall it being such an issue last year. Did you know there is a sidewalk poop tracking app? Saw a few needles, lots of broken glass and parked cars with smashed in windows.

SF has its neighborhoods. If you were there for a weekend or small trip, it's likely you were only "DT" SF, which is a complete shithole. It's really shittier than any shithole I know in this country....but it isn't the whole city. There are of course some uber fancy neighborhoods that you likely wouldn't recognize as the same city, but you kinda have to be there for reasons, like, living there.

I'm no SF fan, and I'm completely guilty of judging it by 1 or 2 square miles of market street, the wharf, and Powell areas, but that is such a tiny part of the city. ...OK, the Haight is still pretty gross, but that's like the gross parts of any other interesting city. Totally acceptable because it's kinda worth it for all the stuff that is there. Just keep your head down and to the side to dodge the live piss streams when they appear. :D
 

Moonbeam

Elite Member
Nov 24, 1999
73,286
6,351
126
It is the opposite actually. I am a city person and see something precious in rural folks which I don’t have.
I edited my post to make it clearer, I hope. My Ipad thinks it knows what I want to say when I misspell something.

What you are describing is that the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence. You PMed me about what I mean by how language is at root of our mental state of delusion. Perhaps I can deal with that here. If you notice you think in language, probably English in your case. We use works to talk to ourselves as well as others. Take the put downs that have been directed at you in this thread. They are zeros and ones that print out on a screen and are distinguished by your eye which has been trained to see those works. You hear in your head what the words are and next comes the emotional effect. You know right away they are insulting and for whatever reason others may tell themselves as to the justification for delivering them they carry an implied hurt. How do we know this. It is because language, words, carry emotional associations that evoke our past experience with them. Language then is memory of the past, and in the case of put downs memory of emotional pain. We have all been subjected to humiliation by words. A dog will read your body language and know you may be about to hurt him, but you can never make a dog hate itself. A dog can learn that some words may be followed by punishment and anticipate pain, but he will never feel that pain by thinking negative thoughts about himself in his head. He will always be present in the now reading only what is happening in the present.

This is what I believe the story of the Garden of Eden is all about. The information we acquire in building our tree of knowledge is our experience our memory of the past with all the emotional experiences that go into the learning. In this way we created the notion of good and evil, as if those were real things. They are concepts that have no reality without thought and thought has no reality without words and language. Only humans can tell other people they are bad or evil, by creating pain to go with the lesson, which creates the kind of thinking that can anticipate a future to fear. Without words there can be no thought and without thought there can be no comparison, no division of things into say good and evil, no separation of the self from all that is. It is thought that takes into the future or the past and out of the now. In the now, in presence, the state we were born in, we were one with the universe. Occasionally people awaken in the now and realize all of this. You can talk about it. You can practice techniques the wise have figured out will bring one to this, but you can't know the state of presence, something different than duality, without experiencing it. We always look for it by thinking how to get it or pretending it doesn't exist.
 

Starbuck1975

Lifer
Jan 6, 2005
14,698
1,909
126
of course things like geography are very big - especially considering since American capitalists sold our souls to China, we need to import everything from over there.

I'm just fairly convinced that I've heard from moderates and conservatives in the past that California is just some liberal shithole country. And look at Cali fly fly fly.

So I'm pretty sure you can't have it both ways. Unless the argument is that California is thriving under myriads of progressive laws and ideas but only in spite of them.
California is far from a shithole, but its not utopia either, and some of those progressive ideas are more parasitic than economic enabling.
 

Starbuck1975

Lifer
Jan 6, 2005
14,698
1,909
126
SF has its neighborhoods. If you were there for a weekend or small trip, it's likely you were only "DT" SF, which is a complete shithole. It's really shittier than any shithole I know in this country....but it isn't the whole city. There are of course some uber fancy neighborhoods that you likely wouldn't recognize as the same city, but you kinda have to be there for reasons, like, living there.

I'm no SF fan, and I'm completely guilty of judging it by 1 or 2 square miles of market street, the wharf, and Powell areas, but that is such a tiny part of the city. ...OK, the Haight is still pretty gross, but that's like the gross parts of any other interesting city. Totally acceptable because it's kinda worth it for all the stuff that is there. Just keep your head down and to the side to dodge the live piss streams when they appear. :D
Fair, but Californians will try to convince you that those piss streams are a water feature.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
85,632
50,853
136
I like how you lock yourself into a position by selectively framing of an issue. Only property speculators buy their homes as investments. Most people own just one as a place live. You can live in a million dollar home and struggle financially if you hope to give a child the same chance when your gone. How much better for your sleep, I’m sure, to see it as the rich trying to avoid investment gains. You can end that by passing laws that prevent selling for no more than 2 percent a year over what was paid.

But ask yourself who the hell you are to screw over people who have a rather common desire to belong someplace and have pride in ownership of their own home. Everybody on the planet would have invested in properties that have wildly increased in value if they had the faintest idea what a spectacular investment it would be. The problem with that is that nobody would have been able to buy them then because that investment potential would have been figured in. Why not just say you want to rip off lucky people who happen to own valuable antiques.

Because what I want is affordable housing for everyone, not special tax breaks for millionaires. You apparently feel the opposite. Price controls as you are now advocating will just further worsen the scarcity problem.

If you want to give everyone the opportunity to help their kids as you describe and not just rich people, prop 13 needs to go. Do you want that or not?
 

Greenman

Lifer
Oct 15, 1999
20,936
5,560
136
And why would they have to sell their homes? Is it because they increased in value by hundreds of thousands or millions? That poor middle class.
And there it is, the fuck you attitude of an extremest.
There is no justification for forcing people on fixed income out of their homes. There is no justification for forcing the working poor out of their homes. That's what was happening prior to prop 13 and it was wrong by any measure.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
85,632
50,853
136
And there it is, the fuck you attitude of an extremest.
There is no justification for forcing people on fixed income out of their homes. There is no justification for forcing the working poor out of their homes. That's what was happening prior to prop 13 and it was wrong by any measure.

I have to wonder just how badly some people have lost it where they think having the same laws apply to everyone is ‘extremist’. Also, you’ve got an interesting definition of working poor that apparently includes people who have become so enormously wealthy from the appreciation of their assets that the taxes on them have become burdensome, lol.

Prop 13 harms the working poor vastly more than any one individual it might help. It’s a way to transfer money from young, poor people to old, rich ones. If you want to make sure rich people have more money that’s fine but at least have the courage to own it instead of pretending a law that massively hurts poor people is actually there to help them.
 

MrSquished

Lifer
Jan 14, 2013
23,079
21,201
136
I have to wonder just how badly some people have lost it where they think having the same laws apply to everyone is ‘extremist’. Also, you’ve got an interesting definition of working poor that apparently includes people who have become so enormously wealthy from the appreciation of their assets that the taxes on them have become burdensome, lol.

Prop 13 harms the working poor vastly more than any one individual it might help. It’s a way to transfer money from young, poor people to old, rich ones. If you want to make sure rich people have more money that’s fine but at least have the courage to own it instead of pretending a law that massively hurts poor people is actually there to help them.

around here we had a sudden increase in property taxes on very nice homes in the trendy downtown area of Jersey City when the state mandated a reval. And yeah, a bunch of older folks that lived here when the place was a lot more dumpy and took the arrows that now live on fixed incomes and own their homes outright, are facing tax increases of over 10K a year if not more. How do you propose they deal with that? They obviously have to sell. Sure their brownstone is worth a lot of money now but maybe that was their retirement plan. To die where they lived and pass on their home to their kids. Or whatever. So they will be punished.
 
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ivwshane

Lifer
May 15, 2000
32,548
15,424
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I have to wonder just how badly some people have lost it where they think having the same laws apply to everyone is ‘extremist’. Also, you’ve got an interesting definition of working poor that apparently includes people who have become so enormously wealthy from the appreciation of their assets that the taxes on them have become burdensome, lol.

Prop 13 harms the working poor vastly more than any one individual it might help. It’s a way to transfer money from young, poor people to old, rich ones. If you want to make sure rich people have more money that’s fine but at least have the courage to own it instead of pretending a law that massively hurts poor people is actually there to help them.

I'm not following you. Prop 13 does a couple of things, it stabilizes property tax rates and it limits how easily taxes can be raised in general. Which part are you saying hurts poor people?

If a poor person is wealthy enough to purchase a house, how can having a property tax that can vary greatly from year to year be a good thing? If wages are stagnant but property values are increasing how does uncapping a property tax rate of 1.1/1.2% and allowing it to go to 4% help them?
 
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Moonbeam

Elite Member
Nov 24, 1999
73,286
6,351
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I have to wonder just how badly some people have lost it where they think having the same laws apply to everyone is ‘extremist’. Also, you’ve got an interesting definition of working poor that apparently includes people who have become so enormously wealthy from the appreciation of their assets that the taxes on them have become burdensome, lol.

Prop 13 harms the working poor vastly more than any one individual it might help. It’s a way to transfer money from young, poor people to old, rich ones. If you want to make sure rich people have more money that’s fine but at least have the courage to own it instead of pretending a law that massively hurts poor people is actually there to help them.
How is what you are saying logical. Rising property values were driving the poor out of their homes. That was why 13 passed. It was the fact that it passed that people with incomes that couldn’t afford those increases got to stay in their homes, the ones who had still hung on up to that point at least.

So 13 passed and the value of their homes soared while incomes for the working class pretty much froze after the election of Raegan. But inflation keeps moving as well as prop 13 property tax so today many many have still been forced to sell and more will be in the future. You can’t eat the value of your house. Those who are so fabulously rich because of their house value may be living on social security. Their wealth is meaningless to them. Their real wealth is in living in a community they once could afford to buy into and they demonstrate where their real values lie by not selling. So kind of you to use your reasoning skills to decide what is best for them. Prop 13 makes housing affordable for those who have it.

If you want equal laws set taxes where they were for all properties when 13 passed. As I said, you have no sympathy for the property rich under 13 because your focus on injustice in one area blinds you to a different form of it. It would be nice since you care so little what others think, that you personally tell those who will lose their homes they must move if 13 is revoked. I know they will appreciate a chance to thank you. You live in your head without attachment to place. For others their lives are their place. Logic not rooted in human connection can be cruel and yet appear so logically convincing. You focus on injustice and fail to see a whole range of other moral goods.
 
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