Yep. I knew about this because I spent maybe 2 hours on a weekend filling out my ballot and Googling shit as I went.
It’s really not that hard and we’d be living in what we’d currently consider a utopia if everyone dedicated a couple hours A YEAR to responsibly filling out their ballot.
This ballot initiative was so stupid. Voters should not be deciding funding for medical research. It should be governed by a non partisan comittee of scientists. Sending medical research funding through voters risks subjecting those sick with diseases both to a particularly perverse form of popularity contest and also to moral judgement about their illness. If voters had decided funding during the AIDS epidemic antiviral drug research would not have been funded.
Architected by a billionaire inventor to funnel billions into his own pockets. This is the exact kind of neoliberal corruption and collusion with capital that needs to be destroyed and criminally prosecuted, to prevent fascism and safeguard the future from psychopathic and sociopathic control.
The corruption didn’t start with fascism. The corruption gave fascism an attack vector to seize control of the political class and spread like the parasitic mental illness it is.
This is the exact kind of neoliberal corruption and collusion with capital that needs to be destroyed and criminally prosecuted, to prevent fascism and safeguard the future from psychopathic and sociopathic control.
It’s the kind of neoliberal corruption that gets plowed right back into the campaign war chests of rank and file Democrat Party campaign coffers.
I’m sure how it ends when it wins elections with 57% of the vote. You’d need a court to get involved and stop it, at a minimum. Good luck with that.
Surely the market will regulate this.
I voted no on this because I don’t like that part of it either, but since it’s nonprofit and UC-affiliated I’m hoping it won’t be that bad. I’m definitely more upset about 40.
“You voted? Cringe”
-All the pre-election botsVoting is gay. I say, while adding the gayest accents to my kitchen this evening after casting my ballot last week.
KEEP VOTING GAY
I’m gonna need at least one example of a gay kitchen accent, for science.
Our spice rack is pretty good. It looks a bit like this, but deeper, with rounded seatbelts for every container. (I don’t post any pictures of mine on the internet as I piss many people off, forgive me)
That is adorable! I don’t have the authority to certify it’s gayness, so I’ll take your word for it. Thank you!
Its pretty gay alright
Only 62% of votes are counted so far. Don’t trust anything claiming results in California for another week or two for any proposition
Yet another reason why California’s ballot initiative system is a bad idea.
They say the bond spending would pay for itself, since Prop. 38 ensures that 10% of the revenue generated from research would go back to the state’s coffers. And cures funded with Prop. 38 money must be cheaper when sold to California residents — 20% less than the average national price.
Source. If that was actually a good investment then the private sector would have provided the funds…
In the words of a blogger I like,
The great thing about California is that it’s not just a state where a few big special interests can money-pump the public. Anyone, no matter how small or humble, if they try hard and believe in themselves, can become a special interest that money-pumps the public.
Californians seem to overwhelmingly vote however the billionaires tell them to vote. It is heartbreaking.
Here’s an article about this.
Robert Kaplan is a senior scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine and co-chair of the No on Prop 38 campaign.
One of the key arguments of the No on Prop 38 campaign cites a CalMatters investigative report, which found that the highly specific criteria leave only one institution qualified to receive funding: the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, associated with UCLA and founded by Michelson.
“When I first heard of Proposition 38, I was excited about it because it provides more money for biomedical research, which I think is necessary,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan says there needs to be open competition between institutions and questions the limiting of funding to a single discipline, immunotherapy, when there is a wider array of biomedical research.
He is also concerned that the anticipated 10% of revenue generated by discoveries funded through the measure to repay the General Fund could take decades, given the uncertainty in the amounts and timing.
Link to the CalMatters story.
I misread this as someone wrote a piece of legislation that was so good, the voting public paid him $4.2 billion as an outsourced legislator.
I must be naive.
I thought the same thing. I figured, hey, if this guy can write a piece so good that it can’t be assailed by legalists I guess he deserves a cut of funding for services rendered.
For such a misanthrope, I sure am terminally optimistic. Must be some kind of undiagnosed brain damage.
I’m more or less the same; “prepare for the worst but hope for the best.”
I should put a few measures on the ballot.
You’ll need around 900,000 signatures. For the low low price of $8/signature you too can tantelize Californians with some silly bullshit
I’ll gladly pay you and 899,999 citizens $8 each once my $4.2B handout gets passed.
I can’t tell if California has this mastermind ballot writer that makes these things impossible to know which way to vote yes or no on, Or California has the lowest adult literacy rate?
The measures I’m hearing about are really fucking bonkers. Maybe I should ask the state of California if I can have 10 million dollars to research if video games make me violent.
The ballot very clearly says ‘half goes here, half goes there’.
The people I discussed this with stated that we should vote yes (I voted no) because cancer and immunology research has been gutted at the federal level, and at the very least this is something. I also tried to point out that (if my memory serves) a singular university qualifies for the other half, but that didn’t seem to register.
These are all people who are well educated and certainly don’t have issues with literacy. Classic case of bleeding hearts bleeding all over the place.
It’s not a California thing. I live on the other coast and I swear to god every ballot measure I read is worded in the most ambiguous or vague way possible. By that I mean the way it’s written on the ballot, not on the full text of the measure.
At least they didn’t accidentally tax the billionaires. /s
I can think of no better way to spend public funds except on non-profits, science, and health research.
But which specific programs do you fund and how much does each deserve? I don’t think this initiative system is the best way to decide that.
At a certain point, we can only hope that our elected representatives wrote it out. I regrettably didn’t read too much into this prop, and read more into prop 40 which, as far as I can tell, had little to no direction where the tax funds would go.
Me and my immediates generally trust the sciences. Personally I vote yes on any and all tax hikes, unless I see something glaring.
