I think federalism is important. If doing a popular vote, why even have states? A representative republic? Going by popular vote seems like something youd have without states and with a direct democracy.
The Bay Area is absolutely worth visiting. The Computer History Museum alone is a must see if you're into that sort of thing.
The wealth inequality and housing crises don't make it a bad place to visit any more than New York, London, or any of the great cities.
People wouldn't complain about the changes in their home regions if they didn't love those places. There are many things about SF and the South Bay that make them really wonderful places: climate, natural attractions, cultural attractions, etc. And those things are very much available to tourists. The dystopia only starts when you try to find an apartment.
As someone who lives in NYC but visits San Francisco for work, the homeless there are a lot more visible. I see homeless people in NYC for sure, but the numbers in San Francisco are staggering.
I can’t name a neighborhood like the tenderloin.
That being said, I don’t feel particularly threatened generally (although I am a tall man), but it is depressing.
In NYC I don’t mind tossing out a buck here or there, but in San Francisco it just feels too innumerable to even start.
Somewhere in the instructions it says that your solution should run in less than a minute on ordinary computer hardware. Sometimes it's just as interesting to make your brute force solution more performant as it is to find 'the trick.'
The common thread is that robots look like people or animals. No one would call a CNC machine a 'robotic machinist' but an industrial robotic arm is still a robot because it is visually similar to a human arm.
