[Heisenberg]

California is practically run by and for Google, Facebook, and Apple. It's a state where Elon Musk lives 10 minutes away from actual shanty towns. If that is "socialism", then the term literally has no meaning.

[Drlee]

The words "socialist" and "liberal" are words that modern conservatives use without having a clue as to what they actually mean.

By their definition all US states are "socialist" and Tennessee is one of the very worst.

But that is the thing. Modern conservatives have bought into this deliberate Fox News creation and can't even begin to imagine what these terms really mean. They lack the education to know and the intelligence to find out. These are, for them, just swear words.

[Hindsite]

California is practically run by and for Google, Facebook, and Apple. It's a state where Elon Musk lives 10 minutes away from actual shanty towns. If that is "socialism", then the term literally has no meaning.

WHY $15B CORP FLEES CALIFORNIA …

For Tax Purposes. What Else?

A study conducted by Joseph Vranich, president of Spectrum Locations Solutions, a consultant firm in Irvine, Calif., quantified the trend of companies fleeing California and determined how, and to what extent, it is caused by California’s “hostile” business environment.

Using publicly available records, mostly media and government reports, Vranich searched for what he calls “California divestment events” — business decisions to shun the state.

These come in three types: companies that left the state entirely; companies that expanded in other states rather than in California; and a few companies that had planned to grow in the Golden State but changed their minds.

Vranich found records of 1,510 divestment events occurring in California between 2008 and 2014.

Yet, according to a report in the National Review, that number is an incomplete accounting of the situation.

As Carly Fiorina ably pointed out during the GOP debates, big government tends to benefit big business.

To no one’s surprise, Texas was the main beneficiary of California divestment events during each year of the study.

Following Texas, the top destinations for “escaping” California businesses were Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia.

California’s elected officials do not appear to care too much about businesses leaving the state. Yet the problem is real.

Add Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. to the list.

One of the world’s top engineering and architecture firm, Jacobs has approximately $15 billion in revenues.

Yet despite all the evidence, Governor Jerry Brown has made several public statements denying a “mass exodus” of California businesses.

Brown reportedly has a long history of making excuses when businesses reject his state.

When Toyota announced it was uprooting three California plants and consolidating its headquarters in Plano, Texas, the Wall Street Journal quoted Brown as saying, “We’ve got a few problems. We have lots of little burdens and regulations and taxes. But smart people figure out how to make it.”

The Journal’s reply: “California’s problem is that smart people have figured out they can make it better elsewhere.”

OK, so Silicon Valley has enjoyed a boom in the last few years. However, as The Economist noted last year, “whereas venture-capitalists and coders may be rushing to California, others cannot wait to leave,” as the state still faces substantial problems of its own making.

http://www.calbizjournal.com/whybusines ... alifornia/

Other companies that have left, or are pricing moving van rates, are Nestle (leaving Glendale to reboot its U.S. headquarters in Rosslyn, Va.), Nissan North America (left for Nashville a decade before Carl’s Jr. did), Jamba Juice (traded San Francisco for Frisco, Texas), Occidental Petroleum (prefers Houston over Westwood for its headquarters), Numira Biosciences (Irvine, no – Salt Lake City, yes) and Omnitracs, a software firm (goodbye San Diego, hello Dallas).

Carl’s Jr. didn’t move its corporate operations to Nashville because of California’s climbing minimum wage. But increasing employment costs were a factor in the decision to stop opening new restaurants in California and a reason why franchisees are opening “very few” here, outgoing company CEO Andy Puzder says.

So that means fewer job opportunities for entry-level workers, who, like companies, will also have to flee the state’s ugly business climate, joining the 250,000 workers at all levels who, according to federal data, left in 2013 and 2014 alone.

http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2017/0 ... alifornia/

It’s not all bad. The Spectrum report notes that California offers a variety of incentive programs to help businesses, many of which are administered through the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. Those include tax incentives for aerospace companies, California Film Commission incentives, employment training panel incentives and California Energy Commission incentives.

Some of those incentives are hefty.

Tesla, a Palo Alto-based makers of electric cars, received $15 million in tax credits last year. And Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., a Redlands-based international supplier of geographic information system software, received $2 million in tax credits.

But those incentives are still somewhat overshadowed by the businesses that have left California. The report shows that manufacturing firms accounted for the largest swath of businesses (562) that went looking for greener pastures, followed by pharmaceutical companies, makers of medical devices, biotech firms, health and dental businesses and veterinary businesses.

Other sectors that ranked high on the list included online retailers, e-commerce businesses, makers of communications equipment, and distribution, warehousing and logistics firms.

H.J. Heinz Co. shuttered its Chatsworth condiment plant last year and moved those operations to Mason, Ohio, a move that resulted in the layoff of 145 workers.

RifleGear, a Fountain Valley company that sells a variety of firearms, moved its corporate headquarters to Plano, Texas, this year and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts plans to transfer manufacturing of costumes for the company’s theme park workers from Fullerton to Orlando, furloughing 85 employees in the process.

https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2016/0 ... an-answer/

[Brother of Karl]

So it appears that the most socialist state in the union has the worst quality of life, which seems kinda predictable. When you raise time-preferences through state intrusion, you are bound to cause economic and social problems.

This study should be a master class for "how to lie with statistics".

I read your study, and their metric for "quality of life" is pretty much their miscellaneous category for things that didn't fit in the other
important" categories. Pretty irresponsible of US News to call it "quality of life". It was made up of 50% natural environment and 50% social environment. Natural environment was broken down to number of water quality violations per person, pounds of industrial pollution per square mile, risk of health problems from industrial pollution, and urban air quality. Note that other than water quality (which California scored in 13th place), none of these other metrics varied by more than 10% between the worst state and the best, so hardly significant.

Social environment was broken down to reported scores (out of 6) of the quality of the state's community engagement (all states scored between 2.8 and 3.4) and social support (ALL states scored between 3.8 and 4.2), so hardly any major difference between the worst and the best. The third metric was voter participation rate, which is hardly a good metric for quality of life. I have no idea how North Dakota scored so high on quality of life, since their highest single rank on any metric was only 3 and they scored in the 20s for most of them. To be honest, as someone who has lived in North Dakota, there is no way in hell it has the best quality of life in the US. Any ranking that doesn't put Hawaii in first place is just wrong

As far as metrics that actually mattered, they were in other categories of the study, and most of them actually varied A LOT between the worst state and the best. Suicide rates in California are 12 per 100k, compared to over 20 per 100k in Utah and 26(!) in Alaska. New Jersey was the best at preventing suicide, with only about 7.5 suicides per 100k.

The best state for 4 year college graduation rate was Delaware with 74.8%. California was in 7th place with 68%. Pretty much all the states you would expect had pitiful scores for this, with Alaska coming in dead last with a horrific 30.6%

I almost choked on my wine when I read that North Dakota came in first. That state is a disaster. It is in the middle of an oil boom. You had better hope you own a house already. And it is the definition of boring.

To be fair, it does have one of the lowest GINI indexes. That's mostly because pretty much no one who actually gets rich there would ever want to live there. Also, the oil boom ended in early 2015. Most of the jobs already left and the population has been going down.

California is practically run by and for Google, Facebook, and Apple. It's a state where Elon Musk lives 10 minutes away from actual shanty towns. If that is "socialism", then the term literally has no meaning.

Amazon is actually headquartered in Washington, not California. Nonetheless, those three companies have a combined 2017 revenue of $517 billion, and California's GDP is $2.45 trillion, only 5 times greater than the revenue of those three companies combined. A significant portion of that revenue does pass through California, but nowhere near all of it.

[Hindsite]

Quality of life scores run along racial lines in California

Latinos in Los Angeles County earn half as much as whites, with a median income of $21,314, compared with $44,929. An Asian American baby born in the L.A. area today can expect to live 11.3 years longer than an African American baby. Asian Americans score the highest quality of life index at 7.29 out of 10, while Latinos score the lowest at 4.11 out of 10.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california ... story.html

How can a place with 58,000 homeless people continue to function?

Across the city, drivers exiting freeways routinely encounter homeless people on the off-ramps shuffling from window to window requesting money. Libraries, train stations and public parks have become refuges for homeless people. In many residential neighborhoods and commercial districts, encampments have become a seemingly immutable fact of life.

As homelessness spreads across Los Angeles County — the official tally shows a 46% increase from 2013 to 2017 — it is drawing two conflicting responses, at times from the same people. There’s sympathy and a desire to help, but there’s also a sense of being invaded and perhaps even endangered — in terms of both physical safety and public health (see, for example, the state of emergency California declared last year over a hepatitis A outbreak that spread among the homeless, or the Skirball blaze that was sparked by a cooking fire in a homeless encampment). There’s an unavoidable, often unspoken, fear that the city around us may be in a state of irreversible decline, and a suspicion on the part of some that the rights of homeless people have trumped the rights of everyone else.

Some contend that the police are handicapped in their dealings with homeless people by criminal justice reform measures such as Proposition 47, which downgraded some nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, and court orders that, for the time being, give homeless people the right to spend their nights in tents and blankets under the stars. Yet a Times investigation found that as the homeless population grew from 2011 to 2016, arrests of homeless people went up significantly — largely for petty crimes relating to quality-of-life issues.

If the police really backed off on arrests, there’s nothing in the criminal justice reforms that compelled them to do so. Nor is it a crime to be homeless. And moving homeless people from one street or neighborhood to the next is no solution; it just moves the problem to someone else’s property. Yet that’s how private security officers deal with an uncooperative or problematic homeless person.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editoria ... story.html

[Rugoz]

A liberal state with a nice climate is basically doomed to attract the homeless of the nation.

[Hindsite]

A liberal state with a nice climate is basically doomed to attract the homeless of the nation.

And a liberal state without controlled borders is doomed to attract Spanish speaking illegal immigrants through Mexico to cash in on the socialist policies adopted by the state and its sanctuary cities.

[anna]

I was born in California. Never lived anywhere else, never plan to.

[SpecialOlympian]

And a liberal state without controlled borders is doomed to attract Spanish speaking illegal immigrants through Mexico to cash in on the socialist policies adopted by the state and its sanctuary cities.

That’s not how it works and also, even if it were, California dwarfs the economy of every other state.

Sounds like socialism works, maybe the other states should try it.

[4cal]

That’s not how it works and also, even if it were, California dwarfs the economy of every other state.

Sounds like socialism works, maybe the other states should try it.

The report (I will assume it was well thought out) differs greatly from what the situation is on the ground. Everything is crowded in California. One would think there would be plenty of vacancies if the life quality were so poor. Not the case.

[blackjack21]

Pretty irresponsible of US News to call it "quality of life".

News outlets haven't been particularly responsible for quite some time. People who would pay for a story like that are middle and upper middle class. So they have to at least cater to people who can pay them. News is a business after all.

The best state for 4 year college graduation rate was Delaware with 74.8%. California was in 7th place with 68%.

That's a decent argument. However, look at what's happening in primary schools. Calfornia has some great colleges and universities. It used to have great public primary schools too. Now, we can thank maybe Mississippi or Alabama for keeping us from being dead last. That picture changes if you include private schools, but poor people can't afford them.

Latinos in Los Angeles County earn half as much as whites, with a median income of $21,314, compared with $44,929.

That's how the Democrats and establishment Republicans want it too. One of today's greatest ironies is that if you oppose ethnic or racial economic exploitation, then you are called a racist, xenophobe or bigot. It's truly remarkable, but also a somewhat predictable Orwellian state of affairs.

That’s not how it works and also, even if it were, California dwarfs the economy of every other state.

Sounds like socialism works, maybe the other states should try it.

If socialism is about creating a massive gap in wealth between haves and have nots, then socialism in California works pretty darn well.

[Drlee]

If socialism is about creating a massive gap in wealth between haves and have nots, then socialism in California works pretty darn well.

Funny you should say that. The GINI index for Florida, Alabama and Louisiana is higher.

[Sivad]

California is not run by socialists.

Not even social democrats. It's run by neoliberal shitheads.

[SpecialOlympian]

The report (I will assume it was well thought out) differs greatly from what the situation is on the ground. Everything is crowded in California. One would think there would be plenty of vacancies if the life quality were so poor. Not the case.

California definitely has problems with rental prices because it is such a popular and heavily populated state. There's still plenty of rural places where living is cheap though, but the cities have problems. Glad I bought my home at the absolute bottom of interest rates.

Anyway, it definitely took too long to happen but we passed a ballot initiative to issue bonds to fund a statewide effort to combat the homeless problem. It's maybe 1-2 years into it and they're making decent progress, but anything on a California size scale is going to take time. We've got a higher population than most European countries.

[4cal]

California definitely has problems with rental prices because it is such a popular and heavily populated state. There's still plenty of rural places where living is cheap though, but the cities have problems. Glad I bought my home at the absolute bottom of interest rates.

Anyway, it definitely took too long to happen but we passed a ballot initiative to issue bonds to fund a statewide effort to combat the homeless problem. It's maybe 1-2 years into it and they're making decent progress, but anything on a California size scale is going to take time. We've got a higher population than most European countries.

Just to expand on the point a bit (this will be off topic) but those who are actually tackling the problems as opposed to those cowardly just commenting on them without any compassion for those involved in finding a solution face pressure to yield answers when there is no easy or definitive answer available. As you put it, the scale of problem solving has never been tried before in many cases; i.e. what works with a few thousand test subjects in one environment doesn't work as well with a few hundred thousand subjects in a different environment. Climate change is a good example. Has anyone undertaken the sheer scale of mathematical equations needed to forecast how much Humans have effected the environment much less the outcomes of such effects? Another example is the FEMA response to major disasters. They never get the bottled water in fast enough. Again, has anyone tried to set up a response profile that accommodates 1-3 million people at one time?

Those on the response side should be realistic about what they know and what they can predict with any certainty. It only hurts their case when their predictions do not come to fruition (although in most cases; you're glad the gloom and doom researcher was wrong. But they are usually called upon before their work is finished.

California has it's problems like any other state. I doubt you'd find many who would want to change places with a North Dakotan though.

[Hindsite]

California has it's problems like any other state. I doubt you'd find many who would want to change places with a North Dakotan though.

That is probably because they would have to learn to speak better English.
HalleluYah.

[Drlee]

Better than who? You? That should present little problem.

Got any more racist comments to make?

Praise Hillary Clinton. Praise Bernie Sanders. Alleluia.

[Hindsite]

Better than who? You? That should present little problem.

Got any more racist comments to make?

No, because I a not a racist.
Praise the Lord.

[Doug64]

http://people.com/home/california-has-the-worst-quality-of-life-in-the-country-says-new-study/

The study upon which the article is based is here:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings

Happy to see Utah come in at #3 overall.

For California, awhile back I adjusted the states' median income by comparative cost of living, and California came in 49th with $24,163.11. Only Hawaii had a worse median income/CoL, at $19,006.88. Still, California did better than France, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, and Japan. (The UK and Germany did better than California by only a few hundred dollars, and did worse than the other 48 states) And all fifty states did better than Spain, Israel, Portugal, and Greece.