alt Hacker NewsThey're sitting at the centre of a web of software services that coordinate some unreasonable amount of the internet. They've definitely done something right, California might be hosting one of the most impressive economic clusters outside of China.
But that doesn't tell us much about the relationship between that thing and their regulations. The regulations might be supporting the thing, or the thing might be so successful that the damage being done by the regulations becomes tolerable. It's entirely plausible that if other states attempted that level of regulation they'd crumple like tissue paper because they don't have the economic power of California's IT sector to balance out the excess demands being placed on businesses.
"Past performance is no indicator of future success."
They did something right fifty years ago. Now? No. They're doing nearly everything wrong.
Top-two elections coupled with rigged ballots so voters can't really choose, and no one can prove anything (and it's against the law to try). Government program after government program that fails to solve basic problems because the money seems to up and disappear, and when the public calls for an audit the person doing the stealing gets to say "No."
187,084 homeless in California in 2024. 181,934 homeless in California in 2025 after 2024 spending of more than $2.5 billion (with a B) on homeless programs. They would have done better if they had just given every homeless person $13,363. It's the same expenditure.
Instead they spent $485,437 per person helped (5,150). The median household income in California in 2024 was $100K. So they spent four times the median household per person helped. Those are bad results.
They're driving out businesses. They're destroying the infrastructure that let them build the economic juggernaut of agriculture and tech (reservoirs left dry, water management mishandled deliberately, forest mismanagement contrary to decades of evidence).
Generally speaking, I've liked their food and consumer product safety regulations, and most of those have been emulating Europe, but most of the rest they've gotten wrong. They're still rich because of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but they're driving away tech, and while Hollywood has a long way to tumble, it's on its way to doing that to itself.