Just some essential facts which have not been reported amid the partisan bickering:
In 2024, President Trump received 56% of the popular vote in Texas. Republican congressional candidates did a bit better, with 58%. If the electoral map were created so that all votes were approximately of equal weight, Republicans would have won 22 of the 38 Texas seats in the U.S. House of Representatives
Republicans actually won 25 of the 38 seats (66%) thanks to creative redistricting. Democrats are thus underrepresented by three seats relative to the actual number of Democratic voters. The new Republican plan is designed to give them 5 more seats, raising them to 30 out of 38 (79%) of the seats from 58% of the voters.
Texas is not unique in this lack of proportion, and Republicans are not the only ones to benefit from it. Democrats won 77% of the seats in California, although they received 60% of the votes.
If you look at the percentages in the two paragraphs above, you’ll see that the new Texas plan (79% of seats from 58% of voters) is not at all out of line with California (77% seats from 60% of voters.)
Looking at California another way:
5.928 million Republican voters get 12 House seats – one seat for every 494,000 voters.
9.138 million Democrat voters get 40 house seats – one seat for 228,000 voters
California Republicans are 39.23% of the state, which means they would get 20 of the 52 House seats if the seats were allocated proportionally. In reality, they get 12. In the mind of Republicans, this means they are getting cheated out of 8 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and they try to make that up elsewhere. In Texas, they would have 22 seats in a scenario of proportional representation, and the proposed redistricting is designed to produce 30 – that’s exactly the eight they need to offset the California factor.
Is the system “fair”? No. Is the whole system an exercise in deception? Yes. Texas is trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. But that is the system, they are within their legal rights, and that system is here to stay for a while, so both parties will continue to pull every last rabbit of that crooked hat.
That brings us to the Texas Democrats trying to prevent the redistricting. They are drawing, and will continue to draw, attention to the issue, which is a good thing that might eventually lead to change, but I think they have less chance of success than Don Quixote had against those windmills.
Man, the only thing that I’m really tired of is both sides generating outrage about the other side doing things that they themselves also do. Both parties engage in redistricting any time they are in power. This is nothing new. Just wish there was some way to enforce a “no getting upset and screaming about shit on the internet without actually reading a book” rule.
Exactly!!!!
The difference with California, which has a non partisan redistricting commission, is that while every one of the 25 Republican districts in Texas are safe Republican – the lowest Republican still received just over 60% of the vote, in fact the only two competitive districts in Texas are Latino majority districts held by Democrats, the Democrats won 7 districts in California with less than 55% of the vote (as did 2 Republicans.)
You can also clearly see that California used a non partisan redistricting commission in that the Congressional districts adhere as much as possible to county lines. The problem with California Republicans isn’t any unfairness in the districting but that national Republicans keep attacking California.
I’m not as familiar with the Texas redistricting in 2020 other than the state gained two House districts and Republicans used that redistricting to shore up vulnerable Republicans as prior to this there were four or five districts in Texas held by the Republicans that were competitive. Many of these districts were in and around Austin which in 2010 the Republicans split up into 5 or 6 districts so that despite being a heavily Democratic city, most of the city was represented by Republicans. In 2020 the Republicans put Austin back into just two districts that were both easily won by the Democrats. My understanding is this mid decade redistricting partly involves splitting Austin back into a whole bunch of districts again. I know the Republicans did the same thing in Utah with Salt Lake County as part of Salt Lake County is now in every House district in Utah.
Whatever you may claim about California, dividing cities like this (what are referred to in politics as ‘communities of interest’) may not be explicitily undemocratic, but it certainly puts the interest of the Republican Party ahead of the interests of the voters. Texas is where the Congresspeople choose their voters, in California it’s still where the voters choose their Congresspeople.
Do you honestly believe any redistricting commission, regardless of state, is non-partisan? That statement is an inherent fallacy. In order to be non-partisan, you would have to have 50/50 on the commission. But that would lead to nothing. So, like they did here in AZ, registered independents are added to the commission. Depending on who selects the commission, that determines who has control, ans the independents selected anre independent in name only. Illinois, California, Texas, it doesn’t matter. There is no such thing as a non-partisan redistricting commission.
You would be incredibly naive to think anything differently.
Yawn, mindless cynicism. In fact, millions of people don’t think of everything in partisan terms or are mindlessly cynical and, can in fact, handle a professional job like redistricting in professional and not partisan ways. Again, the attempted adherence to county lines makes it quite clear that California used a non partisan redistricting commission.
There can obviously be complaints around that, that in many ways county lines no longer reflect ‘communities of interest’ but that isn’t a partisan concern and the attempt to adhere to county lines can benefit either party.
If you have any actual evidence of partisan concerns regarding the California redistricting, then you certainly can show it and don’t have to rely on general cynicism.
Seriously? When was the last time you looked at the California map? Let me throw some districts out to you, and you can tell me how these adhere to county lines: 45, 42, 41, 23, 49, 25, 4, 9, 5, 21, 13.
All of these districts blend across multiple county lines. When this happens, and discretion is used to determine just how much to blend, that’s where politics intersects with reality.
This isn’t cynicism. It’s reality. I accept it. “To the victor goes the spoils.” What I can’t stand is when one side tries to say the other does it while acting like they don’t do it as well.
California 45th is meant to be a ‘minority Asian district’ and it’s in just two counties Orange and Los Angeles County
California 42nd is entirely in Los Angeles County and is centered around Long Beach. Los Angeles County is home to 10 million people so it’s obviously going to be divided into multiple House districts. It’s also a majority Latino district.
California 41st is entirely in Riverside County, and is meant to be a ‘minority white district’ (though I’m not sure that would be admitted) and is a Republican district. Again, Riverside County is home to about 2.5 million people so will make up about 3.5 districts, which is exactly what it does. When a county is home to more than one Congressional district, it’s not a surprise it might look funny (but they don’t blend multiple county lines) to include the population centers in the area.
This gets to a couple more points:
1.Scoopy is wrong in seemingly believing that winning a state with 60% of the vote should mean winning 60% of the districts. A first past the post system tends to multiple the winner so that winning with 60% of the vote often means winning 3/4 of the districts. It depends on how the vote share of the parties are spread.
In the case of California, Republican voters are concentrated in three areas: rural Northern California which is not really agriculture rural (this is where all the big redwood trees are), Parts of Eastern California like in Riverside especially around Nevada, and parts of Central California, especially rural central California but I believe Bakersfield is now the biggest Republican city in the United States (the home of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.)
Even much of rural California like the Napa Valley and Sanoma County are fairly heavily Democratic. So, it actually isn’t hard to draw a fair map that results in the vast majority of districts being Democratic.
Your comment about California 45 proves the point that it is not “non-partisan”. There was a political motivation to that district.
On the point about the party that wins a state normally getting a greater share of the seats than of their percent of the vote, this is why I said that I wasn’t familiar with Texas redistricting in 2020 other than what I said.
I’m aware that New York was redistricted in 2020 to make it more favorable to Democrats. I believe at this time that Andrew Cuomo was looking at running for President and realized that his favoring Republicans wouldn’t look good to Democratic Primary – for a long time while he was Govenor (and before that) the New York state senate was majority Republican even though the state is fairly heavily Democratic. I’m actually not sure how it was gerrymandered to be that way. I believe that was a concession he made when he was running for renomination.
However, Cuomo, had his limits and still tried to please the Republicans. For instance, Long Island could be easily redistricted to make it 4-0 Democratic (not including the New York City parts of Long Island) by including the New York City parts in the Suffolk and Nassau County based districts, but Cuomo wouldn’t allow that.
Of course, this Rethug Partisan redistricting has kind of come full circle now since it was the Rethugs who kicked this off back in the early 2000s in Texas with a mid decade redistricting. Until that point, the Democrats had been implementing non partisan redistricting commissions.
The Supreme Court mandated ‘majority minority’ voter districts like Asian majority districts (though Asians make up 38% of the population, they are the largest population cohort) and the goal was not to be partisan but to group identifiable communities of interest.
You are continuing to demonstrate that all you have are factually incorrect mindless cynical arguments.
I’d have to check more into California 23rd. California 4th contains parts of San Diego and Orange Counties, specifically the northern suburban/exurban parts of San Diego County and the southern suburban/exurban parts of Orange County. Again, it seems to adhere as much as possible to county lines given the size of the counties while also taking into account an identified community of interest of these cities being mostly exurban.
Paul loses on the commission which is a vast improvement over prior redistricting in California. Plenty of Dems have been unhappy over the results from the commission’s work. That indicates they’re doing a decent job to me.
That should say California 49th.
California 25th contains all of Imperial County and parts of Riverside and San Bernadino County. It’s meant to be a majority Latino district (a community of interest consideration mandated by the Supreme Court.)
The 4th contains all of Lake County and Napa County and most of Yolo County. I’m not sure why it does not include all of Yolo County, but to get up to the required population the district also includes parts of Solano and Sonoma County.
Most of the remaining districts you mentioned contain entire counties and parts of another county or parts of two additional counties where there is a population overhang in the county (meaning it has, for instance, a population of 1 million, whereas a Congressional District has a population of around 750,000.)
There is no evidence of a partisan districting where a city, like Austin, is broken up into five or six districts.
Adam…per your comment about majority/minority districts, anytime you create a district for any reason other than strictly numerical reasons, you are interjecting non-partisan reasoning. It doesn’t matter if it is altruistic (which I believe that decision to be) or not. There is a level of partisanship that has been utilized to make that district. And if it’s been done once, it stands to reason it was a part of more decisions.
Again, the Supreme Court may reverse it, but right now it’s the Supreme Court that mandates ‘majority/minority’ districts as a ‘community of interest.’
You are correct that most counties don’t adhere to population numbers whereby they comprise exactly one Congressional district, and, in the case of California there are many counties for more than one district, especially Los Angeles County that has the population numbers for about 13 Congressional districts.
So, after county lines, non partisan redistricting commissions look to the idea of ‘communities of interest’ as a way to draw a district. The Supreme Court mandates majority/minority districts as a community of interest, but is silent on others. An example is the 49th as I mentioned that combines the mostly exurban parts of two counties as one district (with both counties having too large a population for one district.)
This is different than a partisan commission that is now able to look at voters in such granular detail that they can say ‘if we take this side of the street in a city, we’ll add in 503 Republican voters, but if we take in both sides of the street, we’ll add in just 212 Republican voters.’ (And yes, this is exactly what partisan redidstricting commissions do.)
Forgot to mention: non partisan commissions state the communities of interest up front before redistricting and so allow the partisan makeup of the district to fall where it may. Partisan commissions do what I said.
There will always be several communities of interest that a commission can consider in redistricting in general and when drawing the map of a specific district, however, that does not make them automatically partisan considerations.
Figaro…my comments are not about whether the current commission is doing a good job or not. The reality is that if Dems are mad now, it means they probably were ultra partisan in the 2010 redistricting.
My comments were about the fact that anyone saying republicans are the only guilty members of gerrymandering are blind to reality. Moreover, it is impossible for humans to keep their personal biases out of a political event with such massive implications.
The commission is designed as 5 Democrats, 5 Republicans, and 4 “non-affiliated” persons. The non-affiliated people have all the control.
The non partisan commission was brought in before the 2010 redistricting. The Republicans at that time complained that while the commission was non partisan that the Democrats gamed it through having speakers at the hearings who claimed to be independent experts in the district who were actually partisan Democrats.
The Democrats did indeed cheat by doing that, but ultimately the decisions were made by the commission. Everybody can decide for themselves the degree of Democratic cheating there.
In 2022, the Republicans in California won three House seats that they lost in 2024. So, was that really the commission or the voters who decided to elect Democrats?
None of that changes the math. Republicans feel that they are hosed out of eight seats in California, and they’re looking to place a thumb on the other side of the scale.
Except Republicans aren’t. I also doubt that they feel hosed and are looking at any rationale for their idiot voters, if they need one. Governor Abbott has even said multiple times that the only reason for this is to gain additional Republican seats.
I will say it’s possible these days in that Republicans feel that anything that doesn’t automatically favor them must be unfair. This isn’t just in the United States though but certainly is also an issue with right wingers in Canada, and, as far as I can tell, much of Western Europe as well.
What is so great about dumb ol’ Texas anyways?
These days, absolutely nothing.
Brisket
I lived in Texas longer than I have lived anywhere else, and I found many great things. First and foremost – no state income tax. All the other great things are really about Austin, and not the state in general: cultural diversity (whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians – all in large numbers, and many Europeans at UT), great BBQ, excellent university, SxSW, Alamo Draft House, tremendous music scene, great winter weather.
I enjoyed many great years there.
I miss Austin. (Most of the year, but not in summer.)
I went to UT ‘98-02. Austin is one of the greatest cities ever. I still have a blast when I go there, and it’s still a great city, but it definitely has lost some of the quaint charm it used to have when west campus had a 3 story maximum.
I spent 12 years in Texas …in Austin and Houston. Property tax is nasty in Texas. I’d never move back and don’t miss it in the least. Both cities are hell holes in summer which can last 6 months
It’s a police state…some folks love that.
How about Texas just cedes since they want their “independence” anyway? Problem solved.
False equivalency: the cornerstone of all conservative “logic.”
Math, by its nature, is not false.
And I, by my nature, am not conservative.
(At least not by the current definition.)
If you pretend California and Texas are one big state, the combination of the existing California districts and the new Texas redistricting would mean that both parties would be represented exactly fairly!
California + Texas Democrats represent 13.5 million voters and would get 48 seats (40+8)
California + Texas Republicans represent 12.2 million voters and would get 42 seats (12+30)
While both states are “unfair,” their sum comes out where it should.
Republicans are underrepresented by eight seats in California, so they look to offset it in Texas in order to get a voice in Washington proportionate to their actual numbers . Both sides are doing so in a manner totally legal (unless the Supreme Court says otherwise).
Should the process what it is? Not in my opinion, but my opinion doesn’t alter reality.
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To be fair, some of those Texas districts are ridiculous.
This is a fair system under proportional representation but first past the post doesn’t work like that and rarely produces results like that. If you and the Republican Party want results like that, then implement proportional representation. Under the present system, California produces a fair result based on a non partisan districting first past the post.
Doesn’t matter. What’s relevant is that the playing field is fair
1) the Texas/California superstate will produce a result that is completely fair for both parties
2) the maps in both states are completely legal
Are the Texas districts laughable? Yes. Laughable, but legal, and they restore the Texas/California superstate to a fair playing field, whereas Republicans are now underrepresented. I know that you really, really really want the math to be otherwise, but math doesn’t bend to our whims.
Who came up with this idea that California and Texas should combine to one superstate for Congressional districts and not include anywhere else?
This is absurd, seems to be entirely in your head and has nothing to do with math.
I’m not sure, but with some of your comments here, I think you might be trolling.
I think it’s important to note Scoopy that if you are serious, you’re referring to a DEI type of fairness in referring to Equity of outcome rather than equality of opportunity which is what the non partisan redistricting commissions try to achieve.
As well as Diversity of political ideas and Inclusion of Republicans. I know you’re no longer a Republican, but it’s interesting how woke you and the Republicans are being on this.
Between the two states, 13.5 million Democrats get 48 seats and 12.2 million Republicans get 42 seats. (With the new proposed redistricting in Texas.)
As I said, I know you really really really wish math didn’t exist, but it does, and the result could not be fairer.
The Texas plan offsets a natural Democratic bias created in the other big state. It’s totally legal and it produces a fair result.
I’m sure the next conservative move will have to be to figure out to offset the five seats they are underrepresented by in Illinois. My guess is that they will try to redraw Florida to get more than 20 of the 28 seats. I think they can siphon democrats out of the 23rd and 25th districts with some creative shenanigans.
The bottom line of all this redistricting is that ultimately every seat will be safe for one party or the other. The downside of that is that the most extreme liberals and conservatives will have opportunities they would never have in a competitive district, where moderates do better.
The country is already so polarized that I hate to see anything that makes it even more extreme. Marjorie Taylor Greene wins her elections with 75% of the vote. She could come out pro-KKK, and still win her district. Jim Jordan, probably Trump’s co-conspirator on January 6th, pulls almost 70% in his district. Yet I, a moderate, can’t even imagine anyone who would vote for such people.
Sure, if equity of outcome is fair. Why don’t we also divide up GDP at the end of the year so that everybody winds up with the same amount of income? That’s math and the results could not be fairer.
Oddly enough given how mathematical and fair it is, I haven’t seen anybody make a serious case for this since George Bernard Shaw.
“Every person gets equal representation” is not the same as “every person gets an equal income.” One is simply democracy. The other is an extreme form of socialism.
Norway had something almost like the latter when I lived there in 1991-92. A promotion at Norske Shell left one in the same size cubicle as everyone else. There was a small salary bump, but it was nearly meaningless because Norway had such a high progressive tax rate that everyone ended up making about the same salary, which means that a promotion earned a tiny raise with much more responsibility. Only the CEO (almost always a foreigner from Shell International) got special privileges.
The system was majorly fucked, as I witnessed first-hand. For the Norwegians, the system squelched all ambition. Some people wanted to do a superlative job because that’s how they were made. Their pride drove their advancement. They were exceptions. For most people, making approximately the same living with less responsibility was their happy place. That basically meant that there was little ambition or drive. On a nice summer day, I would sometimes run into nobody else in the office except custodial staff.
There is a happy ending. Norway had a massive, highly necessary, tax reform in 1992. It brought both income taxes and capital gains taxes more in line with the rest of the developed economies, thus stimulating investment while incentivizing ambition.
Man, I could ramble on forever about the weird elements of life in Norway. The whole country was filled with illegal immigrants in summertime, but the government looked the other way, because the Poles worked for less than half of the minimum wage, which made it possible for farmers to get their berries picked and sell them at a reasonable price. That was a win-win, because the Poles would return to Poland with enough money for a major upgrade in their lifestyle.
(Remember in Eurotrip, where the waiter gets a 5 cent tip, slaps his obnoxious boss and says, “I don’t need you any more. My tip was a nickel. I can open my own hotel.” That was the Poles returning to Poland after working the summer in Norway.)
All of that was fine with me, and with most Norwegians. What was not so fine is that all of the green spaces were filled with encampments of makeshift tents and old cars and people with insufficient toilet facilities.
In other words, it was California North.
Far north.
As I said though, if the Republicans were really concerned about ‘fairness’ they could propose an amendment to the Constititution to bring in a proportional representation type system instead of the current first past the post.
In addition to producing fair results (the percentage of votes is mirrored in the number of seats) it would allow for more than two parties.
Sure, but the point is that every person gets equal representation through getting to vote to elect a representative (except for residents of D.C, but I digress) not through representation of their party. What that refers to is equity of outcome similar to equity of income.
Everyone doesn’t have to have equal salaries, but it could be agreed that a teacher barely making ~$40,000 in one area and the richest man in the world with nearly half a trillion is completely ridiculous.
This is a bizarre world where the only two alternatives anyone can think of is Stalin/Mao esque communism or extreme corporate dystopia. Especially when those billionaires could be Thanos snapped out of existence tomorrow and no goods or services in any supply chain would stop.
Also to note:
“The system was majorly fucked, as I witnessed first-hand. For the Norwegians, the system squelched all ambition. Some people wanted to do a superlative job because that’s how they were made. Their pride drove their advancement. They were exceptions. For most people, making approximately the same living with less responsibility was their happy place. That basically meant that there was little ambition or drive. On a nice summer day, I would sometimes run into nobody else in the office except custodial staff.”
I’ve worked at Fortune 100 companies where highly paid individuals showed virtually no effort except appearing on a Zoom call, and contractors from offshore or off the street showed 10 times as much knowledge or effort. What you’re describing is the workplace in general. I’ve seen more office politics driven by the terrible VP/subject matter expert getting paid to do nothing or do their job poorly than anything else. I’ve seen the opportunist gravy train career-er who got his promotion for being at the right place at the right time, who’s a couple decades in, waiting for an early retirement offer in a giant corporation shows less ambition and effort than anyone I’ve seen.
When people work menial jobs with kids and barely survive paycheck to paycheck based on high cost of living where there’s some oligarch on top siphoning money on their Zoom calls, it doesn’t motivate them to do any better. They’re drained and tired, barely making it day to day. If they actually had a survivable wage, maybe they COULD have the bandwidth to do something better and more valuable for society as a whole. People go into a cycle of work, survival, and coping for decades. There’s no framework even presented for the person to improve, and whatever they have to offer to society is extinguished before they even have a chance.
The irony is how it’s always framed in society: Musk just got a $28 billion dollar pay package, and society must give all its resources to the most greedy who already have the most excess otherwise they won’t have motivation to work. Meanwhile, give the poorest nothing, otherwise they won’t have a motivation to work!
What you describe in America is not something I ever witnessed in decades in corporate America. I worked in the marketing department of a big corporation where everyone gossiped about you if you didn’t work weekends, where 14- and 16-hour days were commonplace, and where people were afraid to take their measly two weeks of vacation (compared to six weeks in Norway) for fear of falling behind. And these were upper-middle salaried employees who picked up the same paycheck no matter how much they worked.
I have heard of workplaces like those you describe, but they were in government institutions. My dad told me the post office was like that, but I never saw it in any company I worked for. Quite the opposite was true. People ignored their families and skipped vacations to keep up with the rat race.
Of course there were the J.D. Vance types who got ahead by “networking” and always agreeing with everyone at a higher level, but for the most part our goals were so high that anyone who didn’t give their entire life to the corporation was left behind.
I did see a corporate workplace like you describe in the U.K., where I, as a consultant, ended up making major decisions for a division of the world’s largest corporation (at the time), because everyone saw that I would take care of it, so they caught their trains and went home early. I found myself making decisions about every facet of store design and store openings because everyone else avoided making decisions. (No decisions = no mistakes). I often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t been there.
That said, the income inequality between minimum-wage workers and corporate CEOs is staggering. I was at a high level (in charge of strategic planning for a multi-billion dollar corporation) and the income inequality between ME and the CEO was staggering. I sincerely believe that I could have done his job better than he did (and history proved me right – long story), yet his salary alone (excluding stock options) was something like 16 times higher than mine. His total compensation was a still-higher multiple. CEO salaries are just absurd in a world where people with McJobs have to work two or three (for a couple, at least three jobs between them, maybe more) to stay above water.
In the 1950s, in the heart of post-war prosperity, every kid I knew came from a one-income family with a stay-at-home mom, yet every one of those kids lived in the family house, not an apartment. One blue-collar income was enough to produce a decent life. My parents worked three jobs (my ambitious mother was a educator by day, a singer by night), so we had a life that was more than comfortable.
America has regressed in some ways since then, and income inequality has widened, which gives me sympathy for the forgotten, everyday workers who want their leaders to “make America great again.” Unfortunately, they are electing the wrong people to do that. That won’t be accomplished by more tax breaks for the rich.
Well we have something in common, although I assume I’m younger than you. The UK experience you mentioned is commonplace in the IT world, when someone who takes initiative gets caught with the ‘you touch it, you own it’ scenario. I’ve never once found an archetype that describes the motivation of everyone, and everyone is different. I do think one thing common is the experience everyone gatekeeps positions for is a bunch of bullshit, because there’s a ton of people shining a seat with their ass who follow fairly rudimentary procedures according to a document or tribal knowledge.
I’ve seen people with senior architectural positions not lift a finger, or wonder how they even got to that position in the first place, leaving people like myself (or others) to take it over in the same scenario as yourself. There are very well paid people, working for the weekend or to be bothered the least and fill their Outlook calendars with WebEx or Zoom calls to throw in their two cents without much technical expertise or critical thinking.
If paying better rewards more knowledge, skill, ability, and effort I certainly haven’t seen it. The only correlation I’ve seen is people being in the right place at the right time for when a requisition opens up, and then they meet the limbo pole of staying under the radar enough to not do anything egregious to get fired. Once you meet a certain standard to get by, it seems as if everything past that point is determined by the roll of the dice.
Personally, like you, I think I could do some higher-ups jobs better than themselves, but its more interesting to work with a specific subject matter in the nuts and bolts, which is far more motivating than more metal and plastic things. Which is why money a motivator is someone ridiculous to me, if it is a motivation then you are self selecting for the wrong attributes. Removing barriers and investing in those lower in the workforce so they’re not up against paychecks to survival makes everyone better.
I worked in businesses where almost everything had an objective scorecard. It sounds like you didn’t.
Our product managers had to prove that their promotions were going to produce an increase in gross profit greater than the amount they spent – and greater than the returns if the company spent money on promoting other products, because the supply of money is not infinite. And when the results were in, they were graded on the accuracy of their predictions as well as the actual profits.
Our media buyers had to show that they had calculated the optimum number of views for the dollars they were budgeted.
Our line managers were measured, of course, by the actual sales and profits of their operations.
Our site acquisition people had to run their prospective purchases through an extremely complex mathematical model that required them to study pretty much everything about the surrounding area, from hourly traffic flow to the average age and income of people living in the area.
Etc.
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There wasn’t any room for slacking off, and when people did so, the results were soon apparent. You could goof off, but not for long.
Of course, there are always some places in every company where a slacker can hide and get away with bullshitting (human resources comes to mind), but for the most part everyone in the retail businesses I worked for had to pull his weight and work his ass off. (Or her ass, as the case may be.) Perhaps this is the result of working in an industry where net profit is less than two cents on a sales dollar. There’s not a lot of room for dead weight.
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It also sounds like your problem was the quality of the people in charge. They allowed an environment like that to exist. People will slack off if you allow them to. My bosses (and me as a boss) were more in the Elon Musk mold – tell me what you did today to make more money than we paid you. The environment was face-paced and cutthroat, and we loved it (and hated it). I’m pretty sure your office wouldn’t work like that with a good manager who spent a lot of time learning the strengths and weaknesses in his operation.
My expertise is on the technical side and isn’t typically business operations in the line of business, but support of infrastructure (like this running this site, if it were a part of a corporation).
Things are tracked in this area, but it’s very likely easier to fall within the cracks unless you really mess something up with business continuity. If you’re teamed with five people and the other four people sit on their ass, typically no one cares in this scenario as long as it gets done. And in a very large corporation, there’s a lot of red tape. Want to fire someone, you have to track what they’re doing, contact HR to provide a warning, quantify it, etc.
It’s much easier to quantify a business function like sales versus say, five people working on a project as part of IT infrastructure, networking, security, etc. Especially when the chain of command not a subject matter expert and reporting who does what falls into the noise of not knowing what a difficult task vs. an easy task is.
Another issue is you have individuals at a VP/Director level that have a sunk cost into bad decision making. I’ve come into projects with major fundamental flaws signed off on, and the minimum viable product basically out the door without even addressing business requirements. For example, contracts with entities that required only certain line of business positions to view specific data, yet no reliable system inside this gigantic corporation actually defined these business positions in a centralized system for this type of function. You would think the obvious answer would be to build it? Instead since bad or no direction was followed at the beginning by unqualified architects and contractors, once it was in motion and dates set, there was absolutely no backtracking because it would make them look bad.
Eventually seeing the writing on the wall and unable to get traction to do it the right way, I moved on to another position and the VP and Directors were sent packing later on, and that entire line of business was scrapped, likely due to that failed initiative. I’ve never found anything less than incompetence in a variety of departments inside a major corporation, with a rare few diamonds in the rough.
Maybe some places and areas are different, but modern corporations wish to turn anyone who is a boss into a “people leader” versus being a subject matter expert. At the very least, it should be understood how every function underneath a team lead/manager/associate director, etc works and I’ve never found that to be the case because of how corporate structures work. They want Zoom calls, one on one meetings, and Powerpoint summaries to send upwards. Lots of opining leader meetings talking about abstract concepts instead of fundamentals (see: Google search for corporate bullshit generator). Then they wonder when all hell breaks loose because those in leadership positions think they just need consultants and outsourcing to manage ‘widgets’, and don’t need to know jack shit about the ‘widgets’ they run.
There’s one difference between Texas and Cali that may be relevant.
There are some districts where there was a Dem candidate vs a different Dem candidate. I believe this is a quirk of California’s primary system that doesn’t exist in Texas.
Yes, California has a primary system where the top 2 candidates irrespective of party advance to the general election. In 2024 though I’m pretty sure the only district that was not Democratic vs Republican was a heavily Democratic district in the city of Los Angeles.
California has an independent redistricting Commission…I don’t see that in Texas.
So what?
The bottom line is that the proposed Texas redistricting makes the combined California/Texas superstate a completely even playing field. The 13.5 million Democrats get 48 seats. The 12.2 million Republicans get 42 seats. Almost precisely what it should be.
Is the system fucked? Sure. But the result is fair.
I suppose the next conservative cause will be to figure out how to offset their underrpresentation in Illinois, where Democrats basically hold 5 seats too many in the USHoR. (82% of seats with 53% of voters.)
Frankly I’m shocked by those numbers. Given the nature of Illinois politics, it’s hard to imagine how the party in control allowed the other party to have any seats at all. They only hold 14 out of 17. What a bunch of pussies, screwing up on those other three seats.
There are parts of Illinois that are heavily Republican and couldn’t be broken up without threatening the continued hold of Democratic districts.
Prior to this Illinois had been 13-5 (it lost a district) but at the beginning of the decade was, I believe, 10-8 Democratic as several Cook County suburban districts became more and more Democratic during the 2010s.
Illinois uses partisan redistricting and was made as Democratic is possible. The Democrats in Illinios did this in response to the Republicans in North Carolina who took a state delegation that is nearly 50/50 in voting and had a 7-6 House delegation and made it 10-4 Republican. Again, the rest of the districts are so heavily Democratic (obviously centered in the cities of Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham and Winston-Salem and, I believe, a heavily black rural area) that the Republicans could not split up those districts without making Republican districts potential very competitive.
You are trying to ground Illinois politics in reality!
I believe I have told the story many times about the Code of Ethical Conduct in the company I worked for. It said something like this:
No representative of the company may bribe a public official.
However, there may be places and circumstances where such bribery is the only way to do business. In such cases, although no immediate action can be taken, the situation must be reported to the head of the legal department, and the representative will await instructions from legal. Examples of such places would include Nigeria, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia and Chicago.
(In most cases there were legal ways around the problem. The company could make a “campaign contribution” or some such bullshit instead of a bribe. We did have one very high executive who faced a federal indictment on a bribery charge, but he somehow escaped both jail and termination. I don’t know how.)
Point being … Illinois … it’s Nigeria with day baseball – anything goes.
Since this is all about fair allotment, how about blue states keep their federal tax dollar surplus in state (rather than being allocated to rural GOP states), and big blue cities in states of any type keep their state tax dollars in their counties and municipalities instead of being reallocated to rural counties?
Maybe since it’s all about allocating representation, then the same should be done for tax dollars. Socialism is only for others though, according to Billy Bob. Hard to keep utilities, schools, and law enforcement without the evil liberal cities paying for it all.
Republicans + Math = big laughs. Every. Single. Time.
And nobody gives a shit what you call yourself when it’s so clear that not what you are.
Just a lot of hooey. Most of the extreme Blue states are already heavily gerrymandered to the point they can’t squeeze anymore safe Democrat congressional seats out of them. Heck, the Governor of Massachusetts is complaining and threatening to redistrict while every congressional seat in the state is already held by a Democrat.WTF!
States like California that have commissions/boards that draw them up, well, the people picked to head them are usually political loyalists. It doesn’t matter if the State legislature drew them up instead, except the veneer of ‘independence’ wouldn’t be there.
Yes, you have written a lot of hooey. The governor of Massachusetts never said any such thing, it was Trump who called for redistricting in Massachusetts so that the state would elect Republicans.
This is why political arguments are so stupid. Yes the government of Massachusetts went on camera and said this repeatedly. But I guess MSNBC didn’t show it so it “never happened.”
Fine then, if she said it repeatedly it should be easy for you to find a link for it.
No doubt, have ChatGPT chase it down for you. Because it exists, right?
Right but if what you’re saying is true then what’s happening in Texas isn’t really what matters. What matters is the number of seats gained by each party after every state willing and able to gerrymander their maps for one party have done so to maximum effect. This should be something fairly easy for an election pollster to project but I don’t see anyone out there doing the math. My big question would be the situation in Florida. They’re a state that’s historically been purple that only became solidly red in the past decade. Makes me think a good chunk of their map still hasn’t been carved up six ways from Sunday. I believe they have a Republican supermajority in the legislature as well
Florida’s Congressional delegation is 20-8 Republican. It’s (according to Scoopy) ‘fairly’ offset by New York which is 19-7 Democratic. The Republicans could likely squeeze 2-3 more districts out of Florida, and the Democrats could do so in New York, especially as I mentioned, on Long Island where the two Republican districts that are entirely based in either Nassau or Suffolk County could be split up further to add in New York City parts of Long Island to easily make them Democratic.
There may be another district or two the Democrats could squeeze out of Upstate New York as well, and Staten Island could also be easily divided into two or three Congressional districts to make Staten Island have several Democratic representatives.
My guess is that Florida will get even more unbalanced.
Just a guess … but you see how the country is going.
If the electoral college was fare the person winning the popular vote would also win the election.Five US Presidential elections have resulted in a president winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. Out of these five, four were Republican candidates:
Rutherford B. Hayes (1876) lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden but won the Electoral College after a disputed election decided by an Electoral Commission.
Benjamin Harrison (1888) lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland but won the Electoral College.
George W. Bush (2000) lost the popular vote to Al Gore but won the Electoral College after a contested election decided by the Supreme Court.
Donald Trump (2016) lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but won the Electoral College.
This bullshit gives me a rash. I’m not one to treat the Constitution like it was written on stone tablets and hauled down a mountain by Charlton Heston, but they were on to something when they specified doing this only every ten years.
If Texas and whoever else succeed in this mid-decade fuckery for that fat puke, it will be bad because once again, thumb on the scale for Donnie. But it will also condemn us to this shit never, ever stopping for a minute.
The good old US of A is not a democracy…
Your politicians select your voters…
It’s laughable…
hilariously idiotic undemocratic voting system you got going…
Does King Charles know you’re posting this hate speech on a porn website? That’ll get ya a few years in the slammer, mate.
What makes you think he’s from the UK?
Shot in the dark. The tone of his comment would lead me to believe he’s from one of those places (UK, Canada, Australia, most of Europe now) that seethes at the freedoms we have here in the US while looking over their shoulder for the Big Brother Internet Police to throw them in jail.
And we haven’t even mentioned the Senate, where something like 1/6 of the voters get the same number of seats as the other 5/6.
25 least populous states: 55 million people, 50 seats in the Senate
25 most populous states: 284 million people, 50 seats in the Senate.
The 21 least populous states: 38 million people, 42 seats in the Senate
California: 39 million people, 2 seats in the Senate.
The state of California has approximately the same GDP as Germany or Japan, but it has the same number of Senate seats as Wyoming, which has about seven people and 40 bears.
Our founders were great men, but they were not able to see the future. They created a system that (kinda sorta) worked in their time, and even then it was an awkward compromise.
Good point, and as I mentioned earlier, it should be noted how much of the federal tax dollars coming from blue states like California and New York end up paying for heavily rural GOP states like Mississippi and West Virginia. And not only that, but within GOP states (or even blue ones) how many state tax dollars come from these “evil” liberal cities that end up paying for public services inside of heavily GOP rural areas.
It’s just another instance of socialism for me but not for thee philosophy of rural voters. For all the law and order Trump tries to run on calling major cities disaster zones, MAGA sure wouldn’t like if the federal and state tax dollars were funneled back into the cities they came from.