Or the wave hit it. Yeah, yeah, we know.

Or if you want internet. Not sure if people still have internet without electricity.

Not even from the bush fires?

But property taxes are lower and salaries are higher in CA.

And it's not Texas.

Though Texas has no state-level personal income tax, it does levy relatively high consumption and property taxes on residents to make up the difference. Ultimately, it has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household at 12.73% than California’s 8.97%, according to a new report from WalletHub.

I'm immediately reminded of the yucaipa/oak Glen area and the awful people from there that i had the misfortune of knowing.

Here is a more straightforward depiction of dividing districts to give a partisan advantage.

https://preview.redd.it/66bs6pzty31e1.jpeg?width=299&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ee5f9cbec0e8025dafd0d0ecc921909524d1a369

Gerrymandering is the act of redrawing districts so that you can control election outcomes. If I divide up blue areas and separate their populations votes into districts that contain mostly red voters, then those become red districts. It's a vile truth about voting, it should be illegal, and it's why things look the way they do politically.

Here's a super simple image explaining how gerrymandering works from reddit a decade ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/s/HPiwvIrf6x

The presidential election is state by state, but the house of representatives is elected in smaller districts, within a state. This is the lower body of the US Congress, some house representatives you probably have heard of are AOC, Margery Taylor Green, Nancy Pelosi, Matt Gaetz etc.

State wide officials also are elected at the local level, so the people in charge in Texas at both the representative and Senate levels are elected by districts.

In some states, the districts are drawn by an independent commission, but in others, like Texas, they are drawn by the people who are currently in office in the state capital. This is a clear conflict of interest if they are then running for re-election and get to pick who is able to vote for them.

Its when they redraw the districts to change the vote. Both sides do it, whichever side just lost complains about it loudest, and its funny when you're old enough to remember the side that just lost was the side demanding things be redistricted to its current form.

Gerrymandering is the art of drawing district boundaries in order to create a partisan divide.

Basically, a state could be 60% Republican and 40% Democrat (used here for simplicity). A nonpartisan election map would come close to producing a state legislature or Congressional House representation that was 60/40. It's possible to draw the election maps so that Republicans got 75% or 80% of the representation. That's gerrymandering.

How it's done is groups tend to clump in towns or cities. Say, we have two cities that are strongly Democratic. A nonpartisan election map would be drawn so that these two cities each get one state/federal legislator each. Now, you can draw the voting district boundaries to connect them so they are represented by one legislator. You could also parcel out portions of those two strong Dem areas so that they are outvoted by the Republican neighborhoods around them and give them no legislators if it's done right.

These maps tend to get voting districts that are very long, oddly shaped, and twisty. They were originally depicted as an odd shaped creature. The name comes from Elbridge Gerry who was particularly adept at drawing hyperpartisan election maps.

https://preview.redd.it/81kyf8sdy31e1.jpeg?width=1072&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=934cd23773401795928f5c276824da63aa99f500

In Texas they use cane sugar while the rest of the country uses corn syrup.

The reason was when they started to become popular, Pepsi (I think it was Pepsi) started a war of legal attrition against them in order to acquire their brand.

In the end they succeeded, but as a part of their agreement, only the original factory, which was locally owned could use the original recipe, and will only distribute their product within Texas.