As a young oncologist, I learned that no matter how hard I try, folks will die of their cancers. I’ve had, over the years, patients sent to me with slow-growing, huge lung cancers, totally untreatable, which grew under the eyes of their PCPs who did nothing because of the patients’ other poor-prognosis problems.

You can’t fix the unfixable. You must deal with it early to even have a chance. That time has passed for CA, long ago.

The Schadenfreude side of me hopes Gov Moonbeam wins. The self-wrought suffering needs to continue under the folks that they elected these last 40 years. A modest bailout now under Whitman is not what CA deserves.

But what about the loyal Americans here? We’re stuck with Moonbeam, who wrought more than his share of damage the first time around.

I don’t want CA bailed out, regardless of who is governor, but I certainly don’t want that cretin Brown back in office. We’ve got to start moving in the right direction.

Oh I remember. From the jokers who have been running my state for the last 25 years. Probably why it is such a train wreck.

this from the comments section:
Conservative or Libertarian: Have you studied economics?
Liberal: Yes, I’ve read Robin Hood several times.

It also explains why they have become a mecca for legalized drugs and prostitution. A lot of actual Dutch people really do not like what their country has become but since their culture is to tolerate, they can’t not tolerate it, not to be too tautological about it. Similar phenomenon to New England in a way.

So that might explain why there are still “normal” Dutch people despite other weirdness.

have a theory about that. I think that as people are squeezed together, they are forced into more “cooperation” amongst themselves..meaning doing things for the good “of the whole” rather than being independent and responsible for the results of their own actions.

My conjecture: high population density predisposes citizens to assume that someone else of the myriad other residents will deal with any problems that arise, and that they therefore need do nothing, nor assume any responsibility for their surroundings (from litter to murder), so ultimately no one does anything (the Kitty Genovese effect). Residents of smaller communities tend to identify more strongly with those communities, and to realize that each such resident has a role to play in shaping how the community functions.

As a corollary, I think cities tend to attract highly specialized people (e.g., concert musicians, poets, and playwrights) whom smaller communities cannot afford to support, and the more outre minorities (e.g., homosexuals), where they can achieve critical mass as a subcommunity. (No gay bars in towns of a few thousand, for example.)

Last and certainly least, parasites such as muggers, drug dealers, conmen, pimps, and prostitutes who suck the blood of the productive also seek out cities. Parasites want a large host population both as inventory and also for anonymity. Such people in smaller towns would rapidly gain a reputation with both citizenry and police that would impede their nefarious efforts.

The effects of crowding are heavily influenced by culture. Japan and Holland have very high population density and very little interpersonal violence.

I think the conjecture above accounts for this observation; in these countries everyone is crowded in together, so there’s no self-aggregation taking place. Also, in the case of Japanese culture, the extreme crowding has placed a cultural premium on elaborate politeness, possibly as a way to mitigate interpersonal friction.

“And the Trees are all kept Equal
By Hatchet, Axe, and Saw!”

Back in 2007 I did some work for a guy from California that had moved here to Texas. He was suprised that the electricity stayed on all day in the hot summer. I later thought about well, thats because Texas isn’t a third world state like California. lol

The problem is, our electric demand is growing-our population exploding- but the enviros have been blocking new coal plants in Texas from being built- so we are heading that way. There are winds farms in the west- Texas has been the largest wind power state for a while-but the major populations centers are in the Eastern and southern parts of the state-a long way to transmit electricity.

“… They fail to grasp that the reason their original home states became shitholes was…because they were there. So they move on, the same problems arise, yet don’t make the connection: it’s their attitudes that cause the problems.”

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Oooh, good one!

William F Buckley Jr made a similar point 30+ years ago in a National Review article.

I think he was talking about immigrants from Ghana specifically; but the point was that when immigrants come here they MUST be required to adopt American customs and to follow American laws, otherwise you wind up NOT with “Americans from Ghana”, you wind up with “all the miseries of Ghana transplanted into America”.

In this case, California wound up with “all the miseries Liberal-Progressives create”. (But unfortunately, individual states can’t prohibit immigration by citizens from other states. Bummer.)