I like Tildes for more nuanced conversations. It has the reply box all the way at the bottom of threads, which is a subtle discouragement of replying before reading the existing comments. It’s also just smaller and slower paced. It’s not immune to pile-on bubble-views, but it’s significantly toned down.

The first two links are different outlets reporting on the exact same study, which talks about a nationwide increase in death rates, not just California, and both have this quote from the study author early in the article:

Some of the increase in the mortality rate may be attributable to county death records keeping better track of who is homeless, Fowle said. Other than that, he and his team aren’t sure what else is behind the rising death rates — more research is needed, he said.

The third link is entirely about efforts to have better reporting, in order to figure out what policies might help. It has no policy recommendations or criticisms of current policy.

The fourth and fifth links are about suicide rates among transgender people nationally, not specific to California.

I am not tracking how any of these reflect on specific policies advocated for by Newsom.

The examples you give aren’t popular enough, in enough right places (since legislative representation is uneven) to get the 60 Senate seats of support required to make them law. At least in part because the donor and lobbying class opposes them as currently framed, but enough voters are swayed by donor-class-funded messaging to prevent voting in sufficient supportive legislators.

I believe a piece of it that real solutions a)take a long time to come to fruition (often decades - solar power was proped up by subsidies for a generation before it became economical on its own) and b)have costs (eg making housing more broadly affordable makes it a worse investment) and many people aren’t going to take that shit. Solutions next year at no cost (or only at a cost to “other” people) or die.

So any politician who proposes real solutions that can work can’t get votes. Politicians who propose fantasy solutions get voted in over and over, because even when their solutions don’t pan out, “at least they are trying.”

When one of my grandfathers died, none of his children or ex-wives wanted anything to do with a funeral or burial arrangements. My parents found a place that accepted his alcoholism-ravaged body, and they took care of things. I’m not sure of the details, and seems likely it wasn’t a medical school, but some organization took the body “last minute”.

The cost is a big turn off for most people. At grocery stores near me, the Impossible and Beyond products are more than double the price of the meat products they are imitating. In part because livestock feed is hugely subsidized by the government.

If the plant-based meat alternatives could gain efficiency through scale and experience to lower the cost below animal meat, we would see way more people trying them and finding what dishes they work best in, which would feed back into scaled market demand. But I don’t see that kind of explosive growth potential at current price levels.

Growing meat cells in a lab and selling them as food is illegal in the states you reference.

What Beyond does in processing plant material into something that resembles some meat products is still legal everywhere.

It’s a war of attrition at this point, with Ukraine providing almost all the people to become casualties but highly dependent on foreign aid for weapons, ammunition, intelligence, and continued sanctions enforcement on Russia. If either the foreign support or the domestic supply of soldiers falls short before the Russian economy collapses, Russia gets to keep the occupied land. If the first break is the ruble tanks to the point desperate poor foreigners stop signing up en masse to be cannon fodder in the Russian army, Ukraine could realistically take back the territory they lost.

An economic podcast I listen to has covered how much foreign investment the US net trade imbalance has led to, for exactly that reason: foreigners had dollars from US entities buying more stuff than they sold, those dollars had to come back to the US, and investment ended up being a huge way that happened. If the trade imbalance actually reduces, likely that investment rate will be the first thing to drop. We’ve already seen hints of it with softened demand for Treasury bonds.

The US has had relatively steady population growth for so long, all our normal ranges for economic indicators have an assumption of a growing population baked in, including what a healthy amount of GDP growth is - enough to both cover the prior GDP per person for the new people, and also have some productivity growth.

This year with all the immigration policy changes (and maybe some emigration pattern changes), projections are for a population decline. Which means potentially GDP could maintain or slightly improve on a per-capita basis, and yet decline overall.

The current policies are doing damage that will last at a minimum of decades, but I think it’s important to try to sort out the real damage from the weirdness of massive change. If we manage to get a majority of elected officials who actually want to do repairs, good analysis will be important to figuring out best bang for resources to focus on.

It was weirder than that. Hawley was pitching income-based check distribution (full amount for annual income below $75,000 then phased to lower amounts up to $200,000 or something like that). Then he stated that this policy of income restrictions would ensure everyone who got a check would be Republican (meaning, no Republican makes more than $200,000 a year) and would prevent Democrats from getting checks (meaning, all Democrats make more than $200,000 a year). It breaks my brain.

Different people and relationships can have different solutions that work for them. That’s OK!

I could use some history learning to give me hope for a more progressive future. Do you have some examples of corrupt parties burning out I could research?

Once we are confronted with a situation that extends past our moral gray area and into firmly awful territory, nothing beyond that point is any deeper shade of gray - it is all equally morally black. So person A with a wide moral gray area sees a thousand people on the path to senseless death, and an alternative path of senseless death for two thousand people, and finds one thousand deaths a reasonable choice given bad options. Person B with a narrow moral gray area sees the same options and no moral difference - both choices are equally morally black. They rail against the options and see no value in trying to reduce the deaths by one thousand, because that’s not enough to bring the situation into their moral gray zone.

“We need to be cautious!” would be much more compelling if the standard medical approach to trans minors was not already immensely cautious.

The standard may be cautious, but a significant number of individual clinicians are not. But pointing out that a concerning number of care providers have looser-than-standard medical approaches gets the speaker attacked as a traitor to the cause.

Bolding mine, quite from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/transgender-youth-skrmetti/683350/

When red-state bans are discussed, you will also hear liberals say that conservative fears about the medical-transition pathway are overwrought—because all children get extensive, personalized assessments before being prescribed blockers or hormones. This, too, is untrue. Although the official standards of care recommend thorough assessment over several months, many American clinics say they will prescribe blockers on a first visit.