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deletedNov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022
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Who is this why is this on my feed

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Umm…ignoring the text of the document in favor of the norms prevailing at the time is *not* originalism.

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The flavored tobacco ban is mostly a ban on vaping; the vast majority of vape products are flavored, while most cigarettes aren't.

I'm personally voting no because screw tobacco, I want people to vape instead.

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Per the WSJ (and L.A. Times), Prop. 29 is a labor union thing:

>The measure is backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, which has tried unsuccessfully to unionize the industry. The same union pushed dialysis initiatives that failed in 2018 and 2020.

WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/union-coercion-on-the-california-ballot-prop-29-dialysis-providers-seiu-uhw-big-labor-11665770524

LAT: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-10/skelton-proposition-29-dialysis-california

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Pretty funny….oh lord I’m really not looking forward to this. I’m a Bay Area California voter and it’s depressing. Pelosi hasn’t had to campaign in years. And if the east coast has a black Whoopi Goldberg certainly we deserve a black Malia Cohen 😉

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Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022

If you had bothered to look at Bruce Dahle’s website, as I did for 2 minutes, you would see he prioritizes removing regulatory barriers to new housing. Those include the expensive solar panels mandated for every new home by Gov. Newsom.

I can’t recall why I signed up for this newsletter and hardly read it. But if this is an example of your thought process, it was clearly a mistake.

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NB: Lance Ray Christensen is also opposed to the California Math Framework which would make California math education totally suck. See, for example, this post and links for why it sucks: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6146. One part of the Framework you might like is the assertion that people are better at math when neurons in different regions of the brain are more connected, so the math curriculum should draw connections to other subjects. Tony Thurmond does not seem troubled by any of this, and has been in charge while the Framework was being developed. So I consider this an additional reason to support Christensen.

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If you support Newsom because he's being YIMBY, I really think you should support Bonta because he is backing Newsom's YIMBYism forcefully. I highly, highly doubt you'll see that sort of cooperation from Hochman, and without it a lot of this falls apart.

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I voted NO on 30 because I hate jamming multiple different things into the same Prop, and electric vehicles are a red herring in dealing with climate change. I had no idea it was sponsored by Lyft, that's really interesting haha.

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Also FYI for the Controller section you're including an explanation of the Board of Equalization for some reason.

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I voted NO on all the propositions, even though I was sympathetic to #1 and am all for relaxing control on gambling. But my reading of #27 was that it, too, had a poison pill in it, as does #26, funding law enforcement crackdowns on non-sanctioned activities. I didn't vote for any candidates, left them all blank except wrote in Nobody where that was an option. And voted No on all judges.

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“ This proposition would mandate the California legislature to devote $1 billion more to public schools, earmarked for arts and music, than it is doing already.”

With potential amendments like this why bother even having a legislature?

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"Usually people who become a major party candidate for President have some positive quality that has helped them get that far. Donald Trump is a master showman and figured out how to tap a vein of populist anger no one else could."

Saying that the ability to tap into populist anger is a "positive quality" is, um... uh... well, it's certainly an opinion!

[Insert gif of Emperor Palpatine saying: "Good... Good! Use you aggressive feelings, boy! LET THE HATE FLOW THROUGH YOU!!!"]

Yes, I understand that you're using "positive quality" in an instrumental sense, like, "Utter ruthlessness is a positive quality when trying to become a mob boss," but it's still striking.

Other than that, thank you for an interesting writeup and for making me lol at your description of the Zombie Kidney Proposition.

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Apparently Jewish pirates of the Caribbean were in fact a thing:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001FA0JNW/?tag=charity48-20

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I would guess that Newsom doesn't have a candidate statement because they're only allowed for people who accept campaign spending limits, see https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/candidate-statements. Which means he's spending over $9.7 million on this election.

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Hm, Proposition 1 it seems to me goes much further than keeping abortion legal. Maybe you should vote YES on it to prevent California from, say, banning human genetic engineering. :)

(Granted, genetic engineering is something of a scary technology, but it seems likely to me that the helpful uses would take off before the harmful uses...)

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I will use this opportunity to once again plug Garret Jones' book 10% Less Democracy, which persuasively argues that the US should have less random elected offices, and more appointed ones. Treasurer, Insurance Commissioner, Attorney General (!), Controller and Secretary of State should be boring appointed bureaucrats, and not elected offices. In general law enforcement/judicial functions should absolutely, positively not be incentivized to play to the public. Fun fact, for a long time the US was the only country in world history to ever elect judges (we have since been joined by Bolivia in 2011).

For one thing, these offices aren't really 'accountable' to the public because for the most part 98% of voters don't know the differences between the candidates. The whole theory of democracy breaks down when you offer voters 57 different options for different offices- you hit decision & information fatigue.

In some Southern states the coroners are popularly elected. I'd love to know what issues are discussed during the campaign!

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Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022

Was the time that you spent studying these issues and candidates in an effort to make the best utterly meaningless decision that has zero effect on anything well-spent?

I vote NO.

I also don't vote, for the same reason. Whether they realize it or not, most people vote because it's the liturgy of our civic religion. Already having a religion, I don't need Our Democracy. And while my prayers might not affect the material world one bit, neither does my vote.

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"Meanwhile, Brian Dahle is a farmer and California state senator. He seems nice, he is moderate by Republican standards, and I enjoy the way he generates artwork from prompts"

Nah, I'm writing in a vote for GPT-3.

Also, does the kidney one account for good versus evil kidneys?

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Mostly this just makes me glad I don't live in California. The idea of needing to navigate, at each election, a bunch of propositions which are all called "Proposition Support Fluffy Kittens" but which inevitably turn out to be an incomprehensible maze of legalese designed to benefit some bizarre confluence of shadowy special interests, seems awful. I think I'd just vote no to every proposition on principle.

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"Somehow Chen has endorsements from the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury. I don’t know if this many California papers have ever endorsed a Republican before."

Every cycle I've followed, they seem to find one non-Democrat to latch onto and endorse. In 2014 it was Republican Pete Peterson for Secretary of State. In 2018, it was independent (and ex- Republican) Steve Poizner. I'm curious if this is because they want to encourage non-one party rule, or just because their endorsements of other Democrats are more credible if they include one Republican in the mix.

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Re: Secretary of State - do either of them discuss mail-in ballots? I have read enough historical accounts of machine politics and other shenanigans around voting to view our current system as dearly won and not to be sabotaged, and it’s very clear the new system has no safeguards at all against any of the standard methods of vote-buying or otherwise compelling specific voting patterns. I am very uncomfortable with the unwillingness of our current California political establishment to admit this might be a problem and would probably go single-issue over it for Secretary of State. Any sign the challenger thinks it’s an issue?

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Is there anyone who does this for Massachusetts?

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Is the missing period at the end of the paragraph on Howell deliberate?

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The 1872 anti-gambling clause refers to "cards, dice, or any device"; how is a slot machine not a device?

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>He wants to “investigate” Fauci and the CDC

There's a case to do that re: gain of function (though that's more the NIH than CDC IIRC).

Whether that's what Meuser intends to investigate them for, I know not.

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I take a firm stance to not get involved in the democratically determined political choices of another population, at least as applicable to that population's domestic affairs, so I try not to care what shenanigans CA is pulling (except where they attempt to drive choices for the whole nation) in any particular year.

But this was both amusing and a useful reminder that Scott is still reflexively a Bay area liberal even when I would rather he was not.

I second the request for contributions from commentariat in other parts of the nation.

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It woulda been a fairer control group to actually fill out my ballot before reading this post - but at least from what I knew before reading (looks like not much info changed since the summer elections?), I'm over 90% confident that I'll end up bubbling almost all the same bubbles as Scott. Only disagree is on 27 - my version of "vote to indicate level of mandate for inevitable victory" also includes not endorsing misleadingly-named-and-advertised things. (The "Inflation Reduction" Act also pissed me off for same reason.) This doesn't extend so far that I'd actually vote against an on-the-merits good thing just for the bad messaging, if it looked like it might be competitive...but as you note, #CAVotingLol, so whatever.

On that note, genuinely conflicted regarding Governor. I voted for Dahle because "well obviously Newsom will win anyway, doesn't matter, useful to signal support for the rare shiny Sane Republican when opportunity presents". But now the dog's actually caught the car, and I'm like oh, huh. Odds for Newsom are still good anyway, but I genuinely don't care much for Governor Vacuous Greathair. On the other hand, housing is so critical that I'm pretty willing to overlook various deficiencies if it means encouraging a YIMBY champion. (I feel this same way about Senator Scott Wiener). I'd likely vote for Dahle again in the counterfactual where some other Democrat had somehow beat out Newsom.

>The sponsors of this proposition have vowed that Californians will never know peace until it passes: our choice is surrender, or binding our descendants to a war that will last through generations.

Hey, this worked pretty well for The Legend of Zelda franchise. I'd play TLoZ: The Kidney One.

Anyway, thanks for giving me the perfect excuse to get off my ass and go fill out that damn ballot right now instead of Real Soon Now.

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Two points:

1) It's silly to address a subject which will interest only Californians. I'm in Australia. What's the point?

2) This was disarmingly funny and smart and high-quality humour, I chuckled a lot and would vote for it in an awards ballot. You should do it for the other 49 states and Puerto Rico too, as well as Australia's six states and two territories and its federal elections.

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Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022

Rob Bonta is the single most YIMBY person in the CA executive branch right now, for whatever that's worth to you. He set up the CA AG office's Housing Strike Force, and has used it to good effect.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/california-housing-rules-17188267.php

He also entertainingly smacked down Woodside when they tried to declare themselves a "mountain lion sanctuary". (To be fair, I think they would've lost that fight no matter what... But Bonta took them down _with style_.)

https://twitter.com/agrobbonta/status/1490401800905580549

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-06/bonta-woodside-mountain-lions-housing

It's a damn shame that Malia Cohen ended up as the Dem on the ballot instead of Ron Galperin, the LA Controller, who was running on an "abundance liberalism" type platform. He's been harshly critical of how LA is wasting affordable housing funds, and his ideas of what they should be doing about it are good. (He just hasn't had cooperation from the Mayor's office or the city's legislative branch.) He'd be a solid future candidate for Gov.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/23/opinion/los-angeles-homelessness-affordable-housing.html

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Big whiplash on that Newsome turn.

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Overall comment. The discussion here is very thoughtful and informed. But the Propositions and candidate platforms are not written as if the electorate were thoughtful and informed. If we assume the writers knew what they were about, then this enjoyable bit of democratic deliberation is not representative of how the whole system works. It’s fun for hobbyists, but it might distract or fool you into overestimating the quality of the democratic decision process.

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What about your local ballot? I’d be really interested to hear what you thought of all the candidates running for Oakland’s Mayor.

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If you accept that housing is by far the most important issue in California - and it is - then you should vote to re-elect Rob Bonta.

Why? Every eight years California has a process where some incomprehensible formula assigns every city in the state a certain number of housing units, and then the cities have to create plans for how they’ll get that many units built. This process is called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA).

However, historically cities would just bullshit their plans - claiming that ludicrous housing projects would come to fruition. For example, they might claim that a church is going to be demolished and replaced with 200 units of low income housing with 100% certainty, despite the fact that the church had no plans to actually do that. The state would simply rubber stamp all these plans.

But in the last couple years, new state laws have dramatically ramped up the RHNA requirements and the penalties for violating them. Planning for the next eight year cycle is concluding right now (different areas have deadlines which differ by a few months) and the state department responsible for reviewing these plans has done a 180 and is now reviewing them with a fine tooth comb, rejecting the vast majority of them.

The Attorney General is responsible for suing cities who refuse to cooperate - something Rob Bonta has done a number of times already while publicly signaling that these lawsuits will continue. If the AG didn’t want to support team YIMBY, he could let these cities off the hook and crush much of the progress we have made liberalizing housing development in this state.

So for that reason alone I am willing to look past everything else Bonta has done and, even though I usually vote Republican, cast my vote for him.

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Well, if Newsom really wants to run in 2024, he's going to spend the next two years moving as far right as he can, so he has a prayer in any state other than California, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois.

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I get posting an article to get people to vote since you have actual influence. Not sure why almost anyone actually votes, though. It’s as casually efficacious as pissing in the wind.

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I. Am. Dying. The Kidney One write up made me lol 5 times. It’s like that scene in Young Frankenstein where Kemp rallies the villagers.

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Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022

In regards to prop 28 Scott Says:

"Its supporters say again and again that it will definitely not increase taxes, but provide no explanation for how this could be."

Isn't it that 1% minimum of revenue that schools receive music now go to music, dance, visual art drama etc? This seems like they would be shifting how money is used, rather than increasing overall funding for schools. I am missing something? Edit: After reading about California budgeting I figured out that prop 28 would indeed require more money to be spent on education. But the news sources often make it seem like the money would come from existing education funds. Shifty.

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re: prop 30

"Proposition 30: Tax The Rich To Fund Electric Cars And Wildfire Prevention

Taxpayers will pay an extra 1.75% on income above $2 million, and the money will go to electric car stuff and wildfire prevention."

Does anyone even make more than $2 million annualy in taxable income? Isn't that level of riches already all about stock appreciation or owning a company? Seems maybe symbolic.

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I always enjoy this, not for the specifics since it's irrelevant to me, but more for the insight it gives into your decision process.

I honestly wish more people, including me, put this much thought into our own ballots, we'd presumably be doing democracy better.

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Random related thought from another state entirely. Michigan has a similar amendment on the ballot which enshrines the right to an abortion in the constitution. But Michigan also has a nineteen thirties law forbidding abortions that was put on hold while Roe was in effect. This amendment is an attempt to nullify that law. I'm voting 'yes', incidentally.

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Prop 30 is sort of funny to me: get more electric cars and cut back on wildfires. I say that because these are contradictory goals. I’m doing some consulting for a fire retardants organization, and the fire retardant guys are scared to death of electric cars. Apparently they are very flammable and nearly impossible to extinguish when they do catch on fire. Maybe prop 30 is there to help mitigate the risk from the cars.

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Prop 29 appears to be funded by SEIU, ie the union for the people who do the dialysis without a nurse/doctor on site.

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Late abortion. Abortion rights advocates tell us over and over again that the casual elective late abortion that anti folks wave about as a boogeyman is not much of a thing. Late abortions occur for one of two reasons: 1) medical crises that arise late in pregnancy and threaten the woman's health (or that of the other twin in the womb), 2) women who wanted an abortion earlier but were impeded by anti-abortion laws.

I'm sorry to see Scott fall for the boogeyman. He also uses the term "partial-birth abortion" which is a catchphrase of the anti folks. It's not a term that makes much sense medically and is not used there. That the exact same medical procedure is used to remove dead miscarriages is what makes the term misleading.

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Re Malia Cohen, I did a little digging. Her grandfather had the absolutely priceless name "Bishop Cohen" (https://casetext.com/case/cohen-v-cohen-in-re-estate-of-cohen). He was a longshoreman from Galveston. His own father was Frank Cohen, a farmer originally from Alabama. When he died in Galveston in 1939, his widow named his father as "Henry Cohen," but wasn't sure where he was born. We can find Henry in the 1880 Federal Census, a Coffeeville, Alabama laborer (probably in a sawmill).

Henry is listed as a "mulatto" born in Alabama in 1845, so it's at least possible his father was a white slaveholder. You can find an online family tree connecting Henry to the family of Solomon Cohen, a prominent Jewish South Carolingian, but based on five minutes of review and several years of experience, there are serious problems with this family tree. But--great family to do a Y-DNA test on! If you get a common Jewish haplogroup or even the "Cohen modal haplotype," you've got a compelling clue.

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An example of "The Myth of the Rational Voter."

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"The argument in favor is that in a world where you can already buy stocks and crypto, I’m not sure sports gambling makes things any worse."

I have a real feeling of dread about how legalized gambling is suddenly ubiquitous (thanks, Supreme Court!). It's such a destructive and addictive activity with no redeeming social utility I can imagine. (At least alcohol and drugs are fun; gambling is almost as bad of facebook in terms of the dismal empty quality of the emotional experience it offers.) Like, one participates in gambling *precisely* to the extent that one's rational self-interest is circumvented; or, in Aristotelian terms, it's the antithesis of eudaimonia.

Or as a wise man once said, in an essay called "Meditations on Moloch":

"So we have all this amazing technological and cognitive energy, the brilliance of the human species, wasted on reciting the lines written by poorly evolved cellular receptors and blind economics, like gods being ordered around by a moron.

Some people have mystical experiences and see God. There in Las Vegas, I saw Moloch. "

All this to say, I'm not sure "people are gonna gamble so we might as well allow it in any form or venue whatsoever" is all that persuasive. Making things easier to do tends to encourage people to do them. For better or worse - and I mostly think it's fine - it seems that weed legalization has led to more weed consumption. With gambling I think that's not so fine.

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founding

yes! voting as a protest! probably how Brexit passed.

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My moderate Republican gentile neighbors gave their son the first name Cohen. My area is incredibly Jewish, used to have a derogatory name rhyming with the actual abbreviated name in reference to that, and this has been moderately controversial among the neighborhood gossips.

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Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022

I'm going to stay away from the abortion one because that is a deceased equine. What interests me is the dialysis clinic one, since my late father was on dialysis for the last decade of his life.

What horrible tangle of red-tape bureaucratic over-regulation do the promoters of The Kidney One want, I wondered?

"SUMMARY Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures

Requires physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant on site during treatment. Requires clinics to: disclose physicians’ ownership interests; report infection data. Fiscal Impact: Increased state and local government costs likely in the tens of millions of dollars annually."

That's it? "Hey, if you're running a dialysis clinic, at least have a qualified nurse on the premises"?

That seems both anodyne and obvious. Am I to take it from this that there are clinics in California that don't have one of "a physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant" on site during treatment?

Surely there must be more to this sinister proposition, else why vote "no" on it? The Kidney People even have a website touting their terrible opinion:

https://www.yeson29.com/

Quoting piecemeal from their dreadful plan to over-regulate the perfectly safe dialysis clinics of California:

"(2) In California, nearly 80,000 people undergo dialysis treatment.

(3) Just two multinational, for-profit corporations operate or manage nearly threequarters of dialysis clinics in California and treat more than 75 percent of dialysis patients in the state. These two multinational corporations annually earn billions of dollars from their dialysis operations, including close to $450 million a year in California alone.

(4) Studies have found that compared to patients at non-profit dialysis clinics, patients at for-profit clinics are less likely to get kidney transplants, more likely to be hospitalized, and more likely to die.

(5) Many dialysis clinics are operated as joint ventures between for-profit corporations and physicians. A physician who owns a stake in a dialysis clinic may also be serving as the kidney patient's primary doctor, creating a potential conflict of interest. More transparency is necessary for researchers to study the impact of physician ownership on patient care and whether these ownership interests influence decisions regarding dialysis care approaches, patients' choice of clinics, and when to start or discontinue dialysis.

(7) The dialysis procedure and side effects from the treatments present several dangers to patients, and many dialysis clinics in California have been cited for failure to maintain proper standards of care. Failure to maintain proper standards can lead to patient harm, hospitalizations, and even death.

(8) Dialysis clinics are currently not required to maintain a doctor or other advanced practitioner on site to oversee quality, ensure the patient plan of care is appropriately followed, and monitor safety protocols. Patients should have access to a physician or advanced practitioner on site whenever dialysis treatment is being provided.

(9) Dialysis treatments involve direct access to the bloodstream, which puts patients at heightened risk of getting dangerous infections. Proper reporting and transparency of infection rates encourages clinics to improve quality and helps patients make the best choice for their care.

(11) Dialysis corporations have lobbied against efforts to enact protections for kidney dialysis patients in California, spending over $100 million in 2020 to influence California voters."

I can speak to the risk of infection, my father got several infections in the catheter, which is a known risk:

"Prolonged catheter access can lead to multiple complications, the most common of which is infection. Even with excellent placement technique, bacteria can enter the bloodstream directly through the catheter during dialysis. Bacteria from the skin can also move down the catheter and enter the bloodstream. With catheter infection people develop high fevers and chills and need prompt treatment. Generally physicians must remove the catheter so the body can fight the infection."

He also had problems with blood clots. So it was a good thing the dialysis clinic was in our local regional hospital.

Okay, so I need to go back and look at the Proposition 29 Official Voter Information Guide:

"WHAT YOUR VOTE MEANS

YES A YES vote on this measure means: Chronic dialysis clinics would be required to have a physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant on-site during all patient treatment hours.

NO A NO vote on this measure means: Chronic dialysis clinics would not be required to have a physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant on-site during all patient treatment hours.

ARGUMENTS

PRO Dialysis patients deserve protection under the law. Prop. 29 will help ensure they receive safe treatment in dialysis clinics under the care of a doctor or another highly trained clinician in case of emergencies, without risk of infection, and without discrimination.

CON Join dialysis patients, American Nurses Association\California, California Medical Association and patient advocates: NO on 29—another dangerous dialysis proposition! Prop. 29 would shut down dialysis clinics and threaten the lives of 80,000 California patients who need dialysis to survive. California voters have overwhelmingly rejected similar dialysis propositions twice. Stop yet another dangerous dialysis proposition."

What I take away from this is NoProp29 is saying "lots of patients are getting dialysis in clinics that don't have medical personnel on hand for any complications, but if we close them down, there's nothing to replace them. Half a loaf is better than no bread - better a dodgy clinic than no clinic".

That, to me, is not a ringing endorsement of the safety of dialysis clinics in California. In fact, I am going to be an extra bitch here and say it sounds like "If poor people need dialysis, these clinics do the job. But don't worry, if you have good enough medical insurance and/or are rich, you will be treated in a hospital so you won't be exposed to the same level of risk. Vote 'no' and your nephrologist consultant can continue to give you private care of high quality while he makes money off the chain-store clinics".

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I'm actually pretty upset by the Newsome situation. Gavin is going hard on all the good leftwing positions and I am not a Gavin fan. But no one else is doing housing reform and insulin and various other things that he is doing. Do I have to vote for him in the 2024 primary now? Rough days for leftists.

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"Lanhee Chen has a PhD and JD from Harvard and does public policy at the Hoover Foundation at Stanford. He was apparently Mitt Romney’s economic policy advisor and served on some board of important experts that decided things about Social Security. He is against Trump and apparently wrote in Mitt Romney’s name on his 2016 ballot, which, mood."

Scott is pro-Mitt? I'm thinking BASED!

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Serious remark, no more a 'bait' question than anything else posted on the internet, but I remain perplexed by the apparent tension between fears of "republican vote-rigging" and disdain for people who "challenged the 2020 election".

People cheat when they can, this isn't controversial. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to presume that our team is significantly less 'evil' or 'unethical' than the other team. But if the stakes are high to the point of existential, why should good or ethics even enter into it? If some folks who mistook Trump for Orange Hitler threw away some ballots in 2020, good for them! If some folks who mistook Hillary Clinton for a murderer and child-trafficker threw away some ballots in 2016, good for them!

People who still have bumper stickers on their cars that say "Bush stole the election and no, I'm not over it." are to be commended for their consistency. People who fly flags below Old Glory on the poles in their front yards that say "Trump Won!" are to be commended likewise.

I really don't get this one.

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How comes the "or any device" in the 1872 constitution doesn't apply to slot machines?

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All of my professional gambler friends are extremely extremely anti prop 26 because it gives the indian casinos a monopoly on sportsbetting and creates a lawfare mechanism for people to harass the Indian casinos' main competitors (California cardrooms, which are not operated by Indians). It's a very blatant attempt by a special interest group to use government power to crush their competition. Perhaps there should be some kind of meta-constitution that prohibits this sort of racket.

The professional gamblers are split on prop 27, but I'm against it. On the one hand it finally legalizes online sports betting, which is something we have wanted for a very long time. On the other hand, it does it on shitty terms that will create a high regulatory barrier to entry, empowering a small group of large corporations at the expense of their competitors and the public. It also has this terrible clause to go after individual people who bet at offshore/unlicensed sportsbooks:

"Provides New Ways to Reduce Illegal Online Sports Betting. Proposition 27 creates new ways to reduce illegal online sports betting. When people place online sports bets with any unlicensed entity, the proposition requires those people pay the state a penalty. This penalty equals 15 percent of the amount that they bet. The proposition also allows for a $1,000 penalty for each day this money is not paid. These payments would go into the COSBTF. Additionally, the state’s new regulatory unit could take certain enforcement actions. These actions can include requiring unlicensed entities provide the names of people placing bets with them and blocking online access to these entities."

This could theoretically be used to go after anyone who bets on blockchain-based or offshore prediction markets. 15% of every bet is extremely steep and would make it impossible to turn a profit. The 1000/day penalty could bankrupt people who weren't expecting it. It censors the internet and tries to impose US rules on foreign companies that aren't even supposed to be under US jurisdiction.

In practice they'll probably be unable to enforce it. There are a lot of states where online gambling is illegal in theory, but I know lots of people who do it anyway and no one who has ever been penalized in any way. (except back in 2011 when some offshore bookmakers had their assets siezed by the US, but after that all the offshore bookmakers that accept US customers were careful to keep their funds where the US can't touch them) If California demands a list of customers from some offshore sportsbook now, it'd be like King Arthur demanding the grail from the insulting French castle guy in Monty Python. And that's the way it should be, because the US doesn't have the right to dictate what foreign companies do, or prevent wagers across borders between consenting adults.

IMO we should just drop the pretense of being able to stop people from betting at offshore sportsbooks, because we can't, if they can figure out how to use crypto to get around the financial censorship. Just legalize it all and federally repeal UIGEA.

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I do not like your choices and your reasoning is in most cases anything but rational. Done with this.

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Rob Bonta's pro-housing actions are more than enough reason to vote for him IMHO.

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Frankly this seems as good a voter’s guide as any and I’ll probably use it, with one exception: the pro prop 27 side has annoyed me with an unrelenting avalanche of advertising that I’m voting against it to send a signal that being that annoying is counter productive.

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"a friend convinced me that most of California’s problems are downstream of high land prices"

Consider this the lazy attempt to shoehorn Georgist advocacy into a post that has very little to do with it on the face. There must always be at least one.

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"...I enjoy the way he [Brian Dahle] generates artwork from prompts."

This took me a minute to get, but then I laughed out loud. Well done.

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I'm surprised you didn't comment on the gematrial implications of a contest between candidates called Cohn and Cohen.

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Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022

On Prop 1 - TLDR: as a supporter of abortion rights, this replaces CA's good existing abortion law with a morally repugnant one.

I think the logic of Roe was awful even if the implementation results were in practice positive, and I despair at the movement to re-implement the "privacy-based" right to abortion. I don't want to open the can of worms about whether we should have kept Roe or not. But since it's gone now, we can and should do better. In California, (not an expert but AFAICT) we already have broadly sensible laws regulating access to abortion; it's allowed unconditionally until fetal viability (~23 weeks), and conditional on medical necessity after that (citation: https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/laws/abortion-laws/).

This is how abortion laws should be written! You might disagree with the specific timings, but I think we must pick some medical/physical/developmental criteria. I find idea repugnant that the law should enshrine a mother's right to privacy as the only determinant, rather than recognizing that at some point the unborn child has rights. An elective "abortion" at 30 weeks should not be allowed, nobody thinks it should be allowed, and nobody wants to allow it. It would be a terrible thing to do. So it should be (and under CA law currently is) illegal. Under the logic of Roe, we have nothing to say forbidding this, except "in practice nobody would do that" -- which is just apalling, and conservatives rightly castigate liberals for this position. It's a ludicrously weak position from which to try to argue for abortion rights, and there's no reason to maintain it.

Resolving this issue requires us to make a decision around when we actually allow abortions, which is fraught, technical, and difficult. But it's the morally right thing to do. And indeed, it's what California law already does. In general we should say "abortions are allowed until the Xth week, unless there is some medical justification, in which case X+Yth week". This is what pretty much every other developed country does, for different values of X and Y.

I take this position nationally, too; I strongly oppose writing Roe into federal law. I think the right solution is to recognize that states disagree strongly on exactly how this should be regulated, but there actually is quite broad agreement even among conservatives that first-trimester abortions should be allowed and third-trimester should not. The disagreement within the non-fundamentalist 90% of the population is about where in the late-first-to-second trimester the restrictions should be. Re-implementing Roe is not politically feasible, but you could perhaps put something broad into place federally, like "Abortions must be legal until N weeks" where N is the lowest value you can get agreement on, perhaps as low as 6-12, and states are free to make this higher, and "elective abortions are not legal after M weeks" with some high value that everybody agrees on like 24 (or whatever is negotiated), with states free to pick some stricter value that is greater than N. Given that the vast majority of abortions are first-trimester, I'm more interested in securing broad protection for womens' right to access the abortions they actually need and use, than protecting some abstract (and actually morally repugnant, if taken to its logical conclusion) concept of privacy or forcing an aggressive relatively-late term abortion limit onto conservative states. So, basically a hybrid states-rights-on-the-details with federal guardrails approach.

I understand why politically most Democrats want to pretend that the logic of Roe was great, since to do otherwise is to admit that one was intellectually contorting to preserve a flawed but pragmatic solution, but now that it's gone, we should let it die. We would do more benefit to the national cause by promoting and strengthening CA's existing sensible and morally defensible legal framework for abortion, rather than replacing it with Roe's flawed logic.

[Citation on public opinions on abortion timings: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23167397/abortion-public-opinion-polls-americans]

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"The Kidney One" literally made me LOL.

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> "Thurmond is the incumbent and touts his record of getting money to put lots of computers in California schools, despite research showing this is useless. "

As an elected municipal representative in a small European country where municipalities set school budgets, this interests me. I couldn't find any previous writing on this on a quick googling, and education research is a very messy jungle to sift through. Does anyone have any reading to recommend on this?

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As an Englishman, this was eye-opening simply because you vote for so many different positions on one ballot. Obviously the USA is a federation which the UK isn't, but you still vote for so many different positions. It's refreshing in a way. We get to vote for our MP, local councillors and police commissioners (though I don't know how much influence or authority they have). Enjoyed this for the reasoning behind your votes and for an insight into democracy in America. Thanks!

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Nov 4, 2022·edited Nov 4, 2022

Okay! So I did some Googling about what the state of dialysis clinics in California is (are they good, as Scott's sources claim, or are they bad, as the Prop 29 crowd claim?) and couldn't find much.

There was a 2017 segment by John Oliver (which immediately puts me off, as I think Oliver is as funny as a toothache) which didn't rate them much:

https://www.seiu-uhw.org/press/hbo-exposes-problems-plaguing-dialysis-industry-as-ca-bill-seeks-to-improve-patient-care/

"During the 24-minute clip, which has been viewed more than 900,000 times on YouTube, host Oliver highlighted the dialysis industry’s practice of boosting profits through alleged schemes that resulted in million-dollar legal settlements for fraudulently billing for drugs and failing to disclose risks of medication. It also mentioned federal regulations that allow for woefully low staffing levels at dialysis clinics, and included excerpts from a dialysis company video in which the CEO compares his management of dialysis clinics to that of Taco Bell restaurants."

Yeah but that's John Oliver, a dumb wokie comedian who's the cut-price Jon Stewart. Anything better out there?

An article about the inspection backlog (clinics may only be inspected once every six years or so) from 2010 so perhaps things have improved in the meantime:

https://www.propublica.org/article/led-by-california-inspection-backlogs-weaken-dialysis-oversight

The clinic in this article is or was owned by one of the two big chains, DaVita.

Looks like a separate bill about dialysis clinics is being backed by someone mentioned in one of the races above, the (allegedly) scandal-ridden Lara:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/28/dialysis-centers-california-bill-proposes-to-improve-staffing-inspections/

"But Senate Bill 349, carried by Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, is being fiercely opposed by a coalition of doctors, patients, rural clinics and dialysis centers.

Opponents of the measure argue that federal data shows that California’s dialysis clinics are currently ranked among the highest in the nation for quality of care and clinical outcomes."

Scandal-ridden senator versus nephrology consultant in that article, but then again the doctor also works for two clinics, one owned by each big chain, so conflict of interest there.

There's the union, of course, from 2019 but there's that problem of bias again:

https://www.seiu-uhw.org/press/dialysis-industry-breaks-national-record-by-spending-110-million-to-oppose-california-ballot-initiative-protect-profits/

"The dialysis industry officially broke a national record by spending more than $110 million to oppose California’s Prop. 8, an initiative on last November’s ballot that would have improved patient care in the state’s dialysis clinics, according to a Jan. 31 report filed with the California Secretary of State’s office that is a final accounting of how much the industry spent.

...Dialysis workers and patients have reported seeing mice, cockroaches, bloodstains and broken equipment in dialysis clinics in California. In fact, the California Department of Public Health documented more than 1,400 deficiencies during inspections at dialysis clinics in fiscal year 2016-2017, and more than 4,400 dialysis patients in California died from infections in the last five years, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services."

Well, if nothing else, looks like there is indeed money in running private dialysis clinics. Anybody both sides can agree is some kind of almost-neutral on this?

There's a glowing recommendation from some bunch called DialysisIsLifeSupport, who turn out to be the people Scott mentions plus a whole bunch of others:

https://dialysislifesupport.com/about/

https://dialysislifesupport.com/ab-290/#coalition

Their Facebook page says "Paid for by Patients and Caregivers to Protect Dialysis Patients

Sponsored by the California Dialysis Council" and their press release for 2021 describes them as "A coalition representing dialysis patients, doctors and dialysis providers"

So I'm very confused. Is this just a "union shakedown" as the press release claims, or why is it that a request to have "requiring clinics to have at least one physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant - with at least six months of experience with end-stage renal disease care - onsite during patient treatments" would mean the clinics would all have to close down?

Is it really to do with the requirement to "requiring clinics to provide patients with a list of physicians with an ownership interest of 5% or more in the clinic; requiring clinics to provide the CDPH with a list of persons with ownership interest of 5% or more in the clinic" because the doctors don't want their revenue streams made public, or is it the union trying to muscle in and make it unprofitable to run a private dialysis clinic because of their unreasonable demands about wages and conditions?

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Hi I’m just exploring tonight and found your substack, thanks for this rundown of California! Local politics are fascinating, especially from a distance here on the east coast. I’m intrigued by Newsom as a presidential candidate - but I have a hard time conceptualizing what he “is.” Interesting that you too seem to find him kind of charismatic but mercurial?

Here in PA we have a battleground between Fetterman and Oz for Senate, as everyone who follows politics (and cares about preserving democracy) knows. I tried to post some words of reassurance as a real physician (unlike what Oz has become) that despite Fettermans verbal challenges, he is still up to the task:

https://mccormickmd.substack.com/p/fetterman-vs-oz-senate-debate

For governor we have a more traditional Republican who participated in the insurrection, denies the legitimacy of our election process, wants rape victims to give birth, and dresses up like a confederate soldier at parties… you know, the usual. Nightmare.

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I heard or read somewhere that the "Kidney-1" is about some union trying to unionize dialysis techs, and their tactic is to keep forcing the employers to spend money to fight this stupid referendum every cycle until they are completely worn down and just cry uncle about some card-check thing or whatever to make it easier to unionize.

Source: my imperfect memory

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One sneaky thing you might not have taken into consideration - "human trafficking" can also include those who bring undocumented migrants/illegal immigrants into the country, so Hochman's stance is essentially an attack on undocumented migration.

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The only direct experience I've had with either Meuser (R) or Padilla (D) is that I once heard Padilla interviewed on the radio. He struck me as blandly fatuous to the point that I couldn't stand listening to him. I certainly don't want to vote for a Republican for Senator, but neither do I want a Senator who doesn't seem capable of thinking.

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I'd also add that Prop 30 would reduce General Fund revenues as rich people reduce their income, move out of state, and decline to move in to California. By my estimates using elasticities from the literature, it would cost at least $1 billion per year, mostly via migration. That means ~20-30% of the tax is effectively a diversion of funds from programs like healthcare and education to cars. https://vote.maxghenis.com/2022/11/california.html#tax-analysis

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How do propositions that increase taxes work? IIUC it's not the Constitution of California that specifies tax rates, so what precisely gets added to the constitution? "Taxes shall be no lower than <the increase>"? "Taxes shall be no lower than they were in 2022 increased by <the increase>"? Something else? If this simply introduces a new tax of that magnitude, how is legislature prevented from decreasing the "normal" income tax to compensate (unless they intend to spend less than <the increase> on electric car subsidies and air pollution prevention, they can then also play the money shell game to make this totally toothless)? Am I missing something obvious?

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> Since roulette existed in 1872 but slot machines didn’t, the Constitution banned roulette but not slot machines, and that rule has continued to the present day. Now if slot-machine-filled casinos want to also have roulette, they need a Constitutional amendment.

Something's off here. The problem I see is that, although slot machines didn't exist in 1872, they are clearly covered by the text of the law anyway: they are percentage games "played with [...] any device".

At least, that is the inevitable implication of the definition of "percentage games" given here: https://www.egattorneys.com/illegal-gambling-penal-code-330

> A percentage game is described as a game of chance where the house collects money calculated as a portion of the bets made.

Slot machines are literally defined in terms of the percentage (note!) of bets they return to the gambler. The remainder is, obviously, kept by the house. How would we avoid considering slot machines to be percentage games?

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“This is the third time a labor union, Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, has put a kidney dialysis measure on the ballot. As CalMatters notes, "The union says it wants to reform the booming industry and increase transparency, while dialysis companies that spent millions to defeat the two prior measures say it’s a union ploy to pressure clinics and organize dialysis workers."

SEIU has long sought to unionize dialysis workers, an effort that the companies that run the clinics have quashed again and again. Dialysis companies say the ballot measures are an effort to pressure them to come to the negotiating table in order to avoid costly ballot measure campaigns.” - Robert Garrova for LAist.com

“They don’t have to invest any of their money to support it, but the other side has to spend tens of millions because it would be a disaster if it were to pass.” - John Logan, director of labor employment studies at SFSU

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I get a lot of electoral spam, print and email. There were two candidates, both local, who I voted for because of it. In each case, what persuaded me was a message attacking them.

One mayoral candidate reported that her opponent, in his previous private business, had dealt with the NRA, thus proving that he was soft on gun control. I don't approve of that sort of guilt by association, and if he is soft on gun control that's a reason to vote for him.

The other was a candidate for some school position, possibly school board. The body he was on had a resolution saying they were against hate, entirely irrelevant to the job they were doing. He voted against the resolution, which they claimed showed he was in favor of hate. I'm not in favor of hate but I am against organizations wasting their time with irrelevant feel good statements, so I voted for him.

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I coming late just to say that despite all the problems with democracy in the USA, it's still amazing that you are asked to vote on so many different things.

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Probably too late to influence anyone’s decision, but…

Before reading my voter guide my priors were that I should vote YES on 27. The summary and arguments did little to dissuade me from that. And then I read the text, and it changed my view completely.

I can’t remember a ballot proposition that created a bureaucracy that seemed so ripe for corruption. The regulatory and enforcement committee is structured for super easy capture; 8 of 17 seats are allocated to company reps and reps of the tribes they have contracts with. Another 2 or 3 (apologies for the imprecision, it’s been a few weeks) are reps of non-gaming tribes who get a cut of the take. There’s also no conflict of interest protections. Committee members are not restricted from participating in sports betting, and there are no recusal requirements. It would be completely legal, AFAICT, for one of the companies to extend lines of credit or guve committee members “promotional credit” to buy votes.

The geolocation enforcement seems entirely punitive. No sports betting on Indian lands seems entirely designed to hurt gaming tribes who don’t want to contract with one of the big companies. Worse, the penalties for using unlicensed sports betting companies fall entirely on the consumer. There is no penalty for offering unlicensed sports betting, only using it. The details of the enforcement seem more draconian to me than on 26. I find it hard to believe that this could provide a legal basis for prediction markets, but I’d like to be wrong about that. Scott if you have more details on your thinking there, would love to hear them.

There’s also some factual claims on both sides that are false (or at least very, very unlikely). The con side says that age verification is not required. In fact, “commercially reasonable” age verification measures are required. Which is a bit weaselly, but this is CA. No doubt the courts will interpret something above “tell us your age and please don’t lie” as commercially reasonable. On the pro side, they claim this will increase tax revenues along with the very expensive license fee, but the license fee is creditable against those taxes. So only in cases where sports betting profits (less federal taxes and “promotional credits”) $200 million a year (just from CA) in the first five years does the state even get the entire license fee each year, let alone any additional taxes.

It’s an extremely one-sided proposition. I’m voting against it.

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I am happy to use abortion as a litmus test for "generally respects human rights". If a candidate would force women to carry a fetus for 9 months against their will, I don't trust them to make other decisions that benefit all of their constituents.

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The Prop 27 summary says it taxes 10% of revenues but all the pennies-on-the-dollar arguments refer to it as 10% of profits. I'm not a business economist, but I'm pretty sure those are different numbers, and 10% of revenues is a lot more than pennies on the dollar when it comes to profits. Can anyone with a better read of the law (I think the relevant section is 19775) and maybe more background in business/taxes tell me what the tax would *actually* amount to in practical terms?

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> Until now, Proposition 22 (make it hard for Uber and Lyft to do gig employment) ...

Isn't this backwards? Uber and Lyft *supported* Prop 22, which gave them an exemption to Assembly Bill 5, which had required them to classify drivers as employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22

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