Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "What Went Wrong With California?" video.

  1. Not as much as overdrawn existing water rights and NIMBY politics preventing denser car-optional developments.
    3
  2. Consumer-driven "recycling" itself was a marketing campaign by plastics producers who both knew their products was economically unrecoverable, but didn't want to take responsibility for all the waste and damage they were creating. Hence they shamed us into thinking we can do something about it, instead of sticking to the more containable glass, metal, and paper packaging we had been using before.
    2
  3. Dubai makes even Hollywood seem super chill, the lack of petty crime in public areas makes the people (migrants included) even more selfishly obnoxious. South Korea and Shanghai aren't too far behind in their form over function mentality -- apparently a bit of personal danger keeps people focused on what's real.
    2
  4. Lack of housing limited by a policy preference for detached single-family homes, already occupied by long-lived owners with a well-established occupation/pension who don't want to let go of their low Prop 13 property tax rates.
    1
  5. Democrat renters dominated by conservative homeowners who chose to be born some decades earlier and could buy when houses were still affordable, who spend now spend all their free time defending their real estate-based wealth and "character of the neighborhood" in city councils.
    1
  6. Sadly that also discourages people from moving out to better opportunities, including living in the same area in a denser environment per popular demand. A lot of California's housing crisis is explained by older established bungalow owners refusing to move on from the Cold War.
    1
  7. That's the tradeoff for not building up, instead opting to sprawl out 1-2 storey wooden McMansions into wildfire territory. But doing what the rest of the world figured out would ruin the "character" of your neighborhood at the cost of the masses of potential California taxpayers who are still dying to move in.
    1
  8. HOA doesn't pay for schools and emergency services. Also the biggest source of homeowner stress is often the HOA.
    1
  9. Particularly the older established bungalow-owning retirees who dominate local politics (and thus land use policies), benefitting themselves at the cost of everyone else who's dying to move in.
    1
  10. Yeah not so much "freeloading" as having some supplement, where you still need to hustle to make up for the rest of your living expenses.
    1
  11. More like not enough employees processing the backlog of applications, along with a shortage of construction workers who have skills beyond balloon-frame bungalows. Regulations exist because they're written in blood.
    1
  12. We still need meat though. It's not hard to find the health issues associated with veganism, and cutting out animal products would compel us to evolve into the mindless inefficiently-digesting cows we're "saving". Even durable vegetarian diets still rely a lot on dairy and often eggs too.
    1
  13. Inheriting over a century of entrenched conservative interests that they're still trying to negotiate around, especially after Reagan's governorship.
    1
  14. Yeah at least immigrants work. The homeless Americans that other states quietly bus in not so much.
    1
  15. Democrats inheriting the interests of a more conservative and wasteful history.
    1
  16. It already is an agricultural powerhouse. Thing is we're selling off the limited water reserves that California farmers can realistically access as exports to multinational corporations and out-of-state markets, one which the scarcity-driven prices and historically unlimited usage rights only encourages more of.
    1
  17. There's also the fact that the Sierra Mountains trap smog, which compelled California to use a more detergent-heavy blend unique to the state. If you thought LA Smog is bad now, you should have seen the air quality from before even when less people were on the roads.
    1
  18. Look a bit harder at Google Earth and check out how not-flat and fire-prone the terrain is where it's connected to the places people actually want to move to. Agglomeration Effect is a real thing especially if you enjoy consistent compensation.
    1
  19. If the answer was that simple, he wouldn't waste a half hour plus production time explaining it.
    1