Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

California’s GDP is now twice as large as Russia’s.

Yet the President of the United States seems to spend a lot of time trying to make Russians happy, and zero time making Californians happy.

View on HN

On a per capita basis, California still has some work to do. Washington, Massachusetts, and New York are all significantly higher. No one should get bonus points for having a large population.

Especially not China.

California should acquire some nuclear weapons then.

They should promise him a cut.

All our GDP is in software. We don't know how to make anything except AI and web apps. We wouldn't know what to do with a nuke.

Ask Nevada.

Incredibly wrong.

Hollywood is still a thing. Manufacturing, yes manufacturing. Agriculture. The Bay Area is a fraction of that GDP, and a small geographical part of California.

Hollywood is becoming irrelevant fast. At least that’s been the trend as of late.

That's transitioning to streaming services which still have studios.

Agriculture is essentially a rounding error on California's GDP, <$60B or <2%. There are individual companies more economically significant than the entire agricultural industry.

The disproportionate power relative to its economic significance is a political choice.

Something is seriously broken with this world now that completely normal and well educated person like GP is not realizing his words aren't making sense. Apple Park to LLNL is under an hour's drive. You guys can probably achieve nuclear independence in a day if needed.

It just can't be done economically, because yields of a nuke(pun intended) don't immediately map onto economical values. Not just immensely positive or negative, but actually tangential to the currency dimensions.

In that case, all of Russia GDP is oil and natural gas

Which you can turn into energy, TBD if you can do that with a web app.

You definitely can turn cryptocurrency into heat. That's thermal energy.

It seems my sarcasm was not detected. Maybe I should have said AI.

I doubt its realistic for powerful states like California to cecede. Is there a path from here to a near (think 50 years) future, where California and the US, sans California, exist?

I don't think cessation was the implication

Secession.

Thanks, long day.

Why secede when we can just get our state sold to Denmark?

I doubt its realistic for powerful colonies like America to declare independence.

I don't want the US to break up.

But I wonder if it wouldn't be more healthy for you if the states grew a bit more independent.

It would give the president less power to decide exactly how schools and universities should be run or would open up for social welfare reforms in the states that want it.

Fun to see people derive Federalism from first principles.

I mean, a United States of America would be better. But not the Bickering States of America that exists. Might be better to have them all go their own way.

Yes, this was the pre-Civil War intent. There's a vast archive of history here that elaborates in great detail about how the Founders expected the country to be run. All that changed in the late 19th century, and was codified in the early 20th.

It would absolutely be more healthy. One of the big problems facing our country is that we have centralized so much power in the federal government (which wasn't meant to have it), that everything the federal government does becomes super contentious. The election of a president should be, in a better world, relatively boring because the real action is happening at the state or even local levels. But instead, the president has so much power to affect things that the elections become a desperate fight as people perceive it to be an existential threat if the wrong person gets elected.

It's been a long process to get that much power in the federal government - it goes back at least to FDR (so, near a hundred years now), and I've seen arguments that it goes all the way back to the Civil War. But I do firmly believe that the centralizing of power is destroying us. We got away with it when the nation was more united in its values and culture, and even then it could be contentious. But today vast swathes of the country share little to nothing in the way of values or culture. Of course we can't get along when such widely disparate groups of people are tied together and a single government body is controlling large portions of their lives.

> the real action is happening at the state or even local levels

A lot of it is. For example the California housing shortage? It’s all state and local. But the same single family zoning pattern played out in many places.

> It would give the president less power to decide exactly how schools and universities should be run

He doesn’t have that power. But he’s taking it, and the parties who are supposed to be stopping him are uninterested in doing their job.

But it is the same with the department of education that DOGE is threatening to close down.

This may actually be a good thing (although they missed the chance to gain some confidence by doing it in a chaotic way).

I am certain that California could run their own DOE.

> “But I wonder if it wouldn't be more healthy for you if the states grew a bit more independent.”

Land borders and water rights. I don’t see it working out.

Water rights have been regulated across borders forever. And same thing with land borders. EU has it, and people don't move as much as you expect.

or some kompromat

Nuclear weapons aren't a magical cloak that when you put it everybody has to do what you say. Its one of many consideration in foreign policy.

And the idea that you have to make 'Russia happy' because they have nukes, if fucking beyond dumb.

Supposedly there are hundreds in Concord.

California is anti-American and disloyal, because they voted for the other party. /s

Russia, on the other hand, supports the President, so they deserve to be rewarded.

Plus they helped and continue to help the president dismantle or incapacitate his own government.

>Russia, on the other hand, supports the President, so they deserve to be rewarded.

You forgot the /SS [Not being historical, damn autocorrect, i mean hysterical, but comments; comments, they're a beautiful thing, comments - i meant /sarcasm, sarcasm. Beautiful sarcasm, they had sarcasm-such a beautiful word - two hundred years ago...etc, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com