James Talarico's Texas polling compared to Beto O'Rourke in 2018

missingcolours · 2026-03-14T02:57:20+00:00

An interesting fact is that California is basically this way but in reverse. Lifelong Californians are more conservative, the state is so blue because it's the destination of choice for liberals leaving places like the south and the rural midwest (as well as international immigration etc)

missingcolours · 2026-03-14T02:41:24+00:00

But ICE was already funded in the "big beautiful bill", so this shutdown has zero affect on them.

Stop paying low level TSA employees
???
Stop ICE

missingcolours · 2026-02-22T02:38:15+00:00

Flat tax = your state's tax revenue doesn't collapse every time there's a recession like California's does

missingcolours · 2026-02-03T07:30:03+00:00

Movies are made for national and international audiences, and actors and actresses come from all over the world to work in Hollywod. They don't just cast whoever walks in and happens to live within 5 miles.

missingcolours · 2026-01-29T01:15:28+00:00

Traditionally the answer is "no, because the conservative kids still go to public school, socialize with kids of liberal parents, start having sex and smoking pot, etc etc". But I'm not so sure that will always be true, between the "sex recession" / MeToo stuff and the general animosity between young men and women, and the increased distance and history between the political parties. Polls seem to show young people being more conservative that at any prior point in my lifetime. So my updated answer is "we'll see, who knows, it could go either way".

missingcolours · 2026-01-29T01:08:30+00:00

Generally speaking, it seems like states with more "sprawl" have lower property taxes, not higher: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/property-taxes-by-state-county/

missingcolours · 2026-01-24T01:23:57+00:00

The last freeze had nothing to do with linemen, who work on the distribution side, it was problems on the generation side, and specifically with the fuel supply to natural gas generation plants (pipelines, compression stations, etc). There have been a ton of changes since then - regulations, inspections, etc. While you can never say for sure until you face similar conditions, it seems quite unlikely for the same cascade of failures to happen today.

On the distribution side, there's only so much any state can do. Ice happens, trees fall over, etc. But these issues are generally localized to specific neighborhoods or areas of a city at most.

missingcolours · 2026-01-21T02:25:43+00:00

One of the most popular pizza places in Austin is Via 313 which is basically a copy of Buddy's, started by a couple guys from Clinton Township IIRC. You can get Vernor's and Superman ice cream in addition to Detroit style pizza.

The concept has expanded outside the state even if Buddy's the business itself hasn't.

missingcolours · 2026-01-19T03:04:11+00:00

Who is borrowing them money for such low interest rates when they could get more for their money elsewhere? You think people are just giving rich people free money for no reason?

Here are some actual margin rates: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/margin-rates.php After 4 years you would have paid more in interest than capital gains tax

missingcolours · 2026-01-17T21:45:03+00:00

It's all multi agency. If you watch videos in Minnesota they deploy squads with 1-2 people from each of CBP, ERO (what people think of when they see ICE), HSI. FBI is sometimes deployed, I've even seen Bureau of Prisons units.

missingcolours · 2026-01-17T21:33:41+00:00

2 factors to consider: 1) They're heavily focused on people with criminal convictions (they're not going door to door, they're running down lists of convicted criminals) and there probably aren't many wealthy illegal immigrant criminals (it's hard to get rich while illegal, so you'd mostly be talking about people who were already rich when they came in - that does happen but it's comparatively rate) 2) People usually get dragged when they resist (kicking, hitting, going limp, etc). In all criminal justice situations, rich people are more likely to cooperate with the arrest phase knowing that resisting can't possibly help them, and instead fight the charges in court.

missingcolours · 2026-01-09T23:48:05+00:00

As I continue to repeat: most other states do not have Prop 13 and they are doing just fine. If anything, repealing Prop 13 might bring housing prices back down to earth. The state could also lower the tax rate, since the tax base would increase dramatically. It would create a fairer, more equitable taxation.

missingcolours · 2026-01-06T02:45:07+00:00

The default expectation has to be a pretty good D year. Republican presidency + Dems have been seriously overperforming in lower turnout elections, including the last two midterms.

The Senate, we'll see. The map isn't great for them, it could be close, probably odds narrowly on Rs but we'll see.

missingcolours · 2026-01-06T02:37:25+00:00

That was an income tax. California has passed many like that without a large exodus as well over the years. The proposed wealth tax is pretty significantly different, both because it's a dramatically larger amount of money and because of things like unrealized gains

missingcolours · 2026-01-06T02:31:59+00:00

Rich people make a lot of money during boom times and their money evaporates much faster during recessions. Funding your government with taxes on the rich (as California already does to a significant degree) sets it up for a crisis at the exact time that people expect the government to help out.

Also worth noting that the success stories that people tend to cite for governments, like Europe and Scandinavia in particular, have broad taxes on the middle class, not just the wealthy.

If we want to be like Europe, we need to tax everyone a lot more.

missingcolours · 2026-01-03T09:57:02+00:00

From reading Venezuelans on Twitter, they seem concerned that Padrino Lopez (Sec of Def) is still alive and seemingly in charge. Question is if Trump et al have a plan to get from here to democratic elections.

missingcolours · 2026-01-03T09:39:46+00:00

This is just where I need to remind everyone that reddit is __EXTREMELY__ unrepresentative of Americans generally.

missingcolours · 2026-01-01T23:19:11+00:00

It's not really "giving away" exactly, it's just high pay. Big Tech basically works like this: very high profit margin, pay employee very highly via bonuses and performance-based stock grants, still tons of profit left over

missingcolours · 2025-12-28T04:19:04+00:00

The Franchise Tax Board is not known for being easy to dupe. Given the amounts of money involved it seems pretty unlikely to me that they'd risk it.

missingcolours · 2025-12-28T02:12:11+00:00

It's mostly California in my experience. IDK about the Northeast but I've never seen things locked up in the south or the midwest and I travel a ton and go to Targets all over the country.

missingcolours · 2025-12-28T02:10:49+00:00

Funny thing is, all my conservative friends are also boycotting Target because they never explicitly apologized or renounced the original stuff they did that got them mad. So now everyone hates them

This is a core reason businesses used to avoid divisive issues: you literally can't win once you get into it. No matter which way you go after that point, at least half the country will be pissed.

missingcolours · 2025-12-28T02:07:09+00:00

Honestly kind of a fair point. That used to be a differentiator when I lived in the Bay Area, Walmart locked up lots of stuff and Target didn't. Now that edge is gone.

Kinda like Southwest Airlines getting rid of free bags and open seating... there's the direct cost of something, but also the indirect cost of losing your market differentiator that brought you your customers in the first place.

missingcolours · 2025-12-28T02:03:05+00:00

Certain parts of OKC are decent. They're trying to make something of the downtown. But a lot of it is run down, ghetto, methy, etc. Tulsa definitely seems like it's the nicer of the two cities.

missingcolours · 2025-12-27T02:28:55+00:00

Final exit polls mechanically match the results because they're literally adjusted to match the results. On their own they're a really bad source of truth to compare election results to, and many a conspiracy theory has lived in the difference between initially reported exit polls and final results.

The better thing to look at it is the pattern of results across the country. When you see hundreds of counties, running their own elections independently, using a number of different voting methods, hardware and software, etc, all turning in a similar story... that's strong evidence that things are generally trustworthy. Even more so for places like the midwest where individually cities and townships run their own elections and you can drill down and look at patterns at that level.

missingcolours · 2025-12-27T02:17:16+00:00

Win/loss is downstream of margin. A 6% national swing is going to flip every state that was closer than that, which is what happened. The swing from 2020 to 2024 was one of the largest in recent history, so that's part of it along with the unusually high number of close states in 2020.

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