Exactly $0 of high speed rail infrastructure was funded by sales taxes. State dollars came from prop 1a and cap and trade funds. About 12B over a decade and a half for heavy engineering, land acquisition etc. if that money was not spent it would have a negligible impact on your taxes.
Everything the California government does has a negligible impact on my taxes. However, the sum of it is not negligible. I'd rather them not waste money because it's "negligible".
please count how much money california (and SF specifically) spent on "homelessness" and what does the California has to show for it? its 24 billion with a giant B.
That is OP's point. The underlying technology has gotten faster but the computer you use feels the same as 20 years ago because the software that utilizes it does a lot more too.
tangent: ridiculous that a site called designbloom has such an atrocious user experience. popovers, things that take over your reading space, and just general shiftiness all over the page that's unrelated to the content you are reading.
It is stunning, particularly so if you read up on the history beforehand and then see all the elements in the painting. It’s the first time I was able to appreciate a Picasso for all the complexity he put into his paintings.
I was similarly stunned by one of the Anselm Kiefers at the Bilbao Guggenheim. Some paintings can only be appreciated in person.
If a country enters and leaves accords and organizations on a whim, at what point does it become a liability to have that country be at the table at all?
That’s an odd comparison to make. The ‘school system’ isn’t a monolithic system that is actively refusing to acknowledge or take action against sexual predators. Is there an example of a school district that has been shielding predators on an ongoing basis and refusing to take remedial action?
I'm an atheist and no fan of any church (or, y'know, sexual abuse) but I don't love this line of discussion because it's a real case of whataboutism.
The Cathlolic church's actions w.r.t. sexual abuse are certainly worth talking about. Their views on euthanasia (which I disagree with) are too. I don't know that they can be meaningfully discussed simultaneously within the same discussion.
It's also crazy that people are buying into the idea of 'Founder Mode' when Airbnb is one of the companies that is very much riding on the moat it created a while back while not doing anything much that can even remotely be called customer-obsessive (which is the lesson they could really learn from Steve Jobs)
I would argue that, when you get to the scale of an Airbnb, or Amazon, which is where I think the "customer-obsessive" terminology comes from, you need to move beyond focusing solely on your customers. Your business is having a social impact. The house next door to me right now has had contractors going in and out of it for the past three weeks to remove and replace the entire interior because of damage done by a short-term renter. Construction has absolutely boomed around me but nearly all of the new units are becoming short-term rentals. The neighborhood is either empty most of the time, or full of drunken idiots making a bunch of noise, getting the police called on them at 3 AM, and leaving the streets and sidewalks full of trash and broken bottles.
Airbnb may very well be making its customers happy, but when so many of those customers are 21 year-olds looking for party houses they can trash and fundamentally changing the character and safety of entire neighborhoods, is that really the most important thing? Even as the founder or executive or both of a business, you're still part of a human community and you have a duty to that community not to worsen the lives of countless bystanders in order to delight the few who happen to pay you. Make products that are valuable in general, to everybody, not products that are valuable only to your customers at everyone else's expense.
Airbnb being customer obsessive would involve much higher labor expenses and liability, which would be counter to the goal of its investors (especially investors from pre-IPO days).
The goal is to make a business out of the higher margin parts that scale easily, and leave the lower margin customer-obsessive parts to others.
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