In other words, yes.

Excuse? LOL.

Long before you'll ever master a civil discussion without adolescent put
downs.

Yes indeed, but California sees fit not to take any effective action, but
only to warn of a mysterious risk and to quantify it far more vaguely than I
did, leaving the public no better off than they were but merely more anxious
and confused. Would the lead be absorbed through the skin of the hand? What
action should the public take to deal with the supposed danger? Are people
in other states suffering from not knowing they are at risk unless they take
unspecified action? Simultaneously, a few yards away people were definitely
suffering progressive hearing damage en masse in the simple pursuit of
trying to get from one end of the facility to the other. Warn of vague
potential dangers but do nothing, then ignore well-understood injurious
conditions. Make sense to you?

Personally, I am rather well versed in the dangers of heavy metals -
particularly lead, mercury, and arsenic. I even knew of the toxicity of
polonium before it ever made the news. (Approximately as radio-toxic as
radium, it is roughly 100 billion times as toxic as cyanide.) I also know
that, despite the warning on the sign, cancer is not a major risk of lead
exposure... the neuro effects are much graver. And I know that lead glazes
are federally prohibited on the interior of food vessels because acidic
foods can leach the lead out, but the outside of food vessels may be lead
glazed because the risk was judged to be low by more knowledgable people
than I. California merely took the opposite approach, inviting the voting
public of uncertain education to weigh in on yet another technical issue.

I'll repeat:  "...Unless it was a situation were no drivers at all could buy
insurance, because there were absolutely no insurance companies
writing new policies..."

Is there some problem in your comprehension of this?

Did all insurance companies pull out?  No.  Then what is the problem?

Ahhh  OK here we go.  I get it now.  Your objection is that the insurance
companies that decided to stay in CA remained profitable by raising
everyone's rates.  You don't like this so your going to blame the state of
CA for this and call them rediculous and such.

Now, let me first say that what I'm going to say is NOT an endorsement of
any kind of "no fault" insurance but I am simply illustrating a point.

Suppose we have a state that allows very limited regulation of car insurance
but requires liability auto insurance.
The car insurance companies respond like you would expect car insurance
companies to do.  People that have ZERO accidents or tickets on their
records get very very low rates.  Everyone else who has more and more
tickets get higher and higher rates.

So, along comes blue collar Joe Schmoe who gets 3 speeding tickets in a 2
year
period.  The insurance companies jack his rates up sky high.  Joe can't
afford that but he has to drive to his job, so what does he do?  Simple, he
drives without insurance.  If he gets pulled over for a moving violation he
hands the cop an old proof of insurance and makes an excuse and 9
times out of 10 the cop won't write a non-insurance ticket (as a point of
fact here, I have done this myself, not intentionally, but when I checked
the
proof of insurance later that I had handed the cop I noticed that it's date
was expired, and no I didn't get ticketed for non-insurance)  or if Joe
doesen't
want to risk that he just simply uses a computer and prints up a proof of
insurance form with fake policy number and such.

No problem, everything is fine.  This goes on for a couple years.  One day
Joe T-bones a new Lexus and it's his fault.
No problem for Joe, he was driving a $500 beatermobile anyway.  Nobody
got hurt in the accident so when the Lexus driver angrily calls it into
the cops, the cops tell him to exchange information and quit bothering them
they have more important crimes to go out on.  (and yes that has happened
to me once, I was T-boned in a suburb, and the cops literally would not
come out, even when I and later my father, called)  Joe gives the Lexus
driver a
pile of fake insurance data and drives off with the front end of his car
caved in, or if his car can't run, just leaves it by the side of the road
where
the city tows it off as an abandonded vehicle a week later.  The Lexus
gets towed to an adjuster who totals out the $30,000 vehicle.

Who pays for the Lexus?  That drivers policy.
Specifically, the uninsured motorist clause of that policy.  Joe has no real
assets to speak of and the best the other insurance company can do is
garnish his wages if they can ever get a judgement against him, which might
be
difficult if he just skips town.

So what you end up with is you let the insurance companies jack rates
up on what they claim are not as good drivers, and you just get more people
running around without insurance.  And the people running around without
insurance are the most likely to have accidents.  So, the policies of
everyone
else end up paying, anyway.  To keep profitable, the insurance companies
have to raise rates.

And the end result is the exact same, either way you have it.  Everyones
rates go up.

Oh, I'm sure you can get some satisfaction that the people who get into
accidents and don't have insurance get a ticket for failing to have
insurance.
Big f.cking deal.  All that happens is the traffic court suspends the ticket
fine if the defendant can show proof of insurance.  So rather than paying
a fine the person just pays for an insurance policy that they show the court
and the ticket is dismissed.  An insurance policy that they should have been
paying for anyway.  Some deterrent!!

Now, I don't know the specifics of the rules that CA enacted (I've only
asked you for them 3 times) so I cannot say exactly what they were doing.
But I can say that there is only ONE way to get insurance rates down,
and that is to do 3 things.  First, regulate the companies and force them
to keep rates as close to their actual costs as can be to make a reasonable
profit.  Second, to get as many drivers on insurance as possible.  Last, to
prevent as many high-risk (people with DUI's etc) drivers as possible from
driving -at all-..  It is a catch-22.  Rates won't drop unless more people
get
insurance, but more people won't get insurance unless rates are lower, and
save physically confining people, you can't pry the steering wheel away from
them.

Obviously, CA must
have created these regulations you don't like that are forcing lower rates,
with these 3 things in mind, with the idea that it would help increase the
number of
policyholders.  Maybe it did, maybe not.  Maybe CA fell down on the
enforcement end of it, maybe not.  Maybe the implementation was f.cked
and so they had to abandon some of them.  I don't know because you haven't
given a reference in this discussion to point to this story of yours being
as you
told it.

But I think if you consider it more carefully
you will realize that the TOTAL rate cost in a given group like a state
that is passed on to the policyholders of that state is going to be the same
whether many or few people are on insurance, and whether rates are
equalized for everyone or are allowed to vary.  Total rate costs are
dependent
on what the insurance companies pay out, and that is dependent on
the rate of accidents in the group.  If you want to drop rates, then you
can only do it by decreasing the accident rate, and the quickest way to do
that
is to remove the high risk drivers from driving.  NOT from insurance -
because then the uninsured clauses cover them - but from DRIVING.

Mandatory 1 year jail time for DUI would probably go a long, long way
to doing this, you know.  Not practical for many reasons.  Do you have any
answers on how to keep people from illegally driving?

No not at all, that is an apples to oranges comparison.

What regulations?  Be specific.

Regulations can be reversed for a lot of reasons, including bribes to
politicians
(excuse me I mean campaign contributions)  The simple fact a reversal
happened
(a fact you still have not established) is no proof of anything.

Sure, and I can say that President Bush has never made a decision that
WASN'T stupid.  Am I going to have any credibility?  Not unless I
make a case for it.  Just like your statement that "CA does stupid things"
has no credibility unless you make a case for it.  Which you have not done
since you have not ever mentioned these specific regulations that you
claim are stupid and that were revoked.

What you have done is setup what is called a "straw man"

Humanity has always been at that point, at least in the conservative vs
liberal or whig vs republican or whatever you want to look at.  Review how
consensus developed on slavery, for example.  Uncle Tom's Cabin was
a pack of incendiary lies, most slaves were not treated that way - but it
dragged the country more liberal, so more and more people were willing
to countenance outright abolition.  The
South would never have succeeded from the Union if they had thought that
reasonable centrist discussion would have preserved the status quo.  Most of
the people in the South did in fact NOT want to succeed and regarded it
as only a last ditch effort to preserve status quo, and politicians on both
sides were frantically trying to broker a compromise right up to the day
the Civil war was declared.

Look again at the whole Gay Marriage thing.  For damn near 30 years gays
have
been trying to get some kind of civil recognition so they could do legal
things
like have inheritance of property, etc.  Argument after argument on fairness
and such was made, whereupon both the right and the left nodded their heads
and said I know what your talking about, it isn't fair, and we will do
something
about it.  Then of course, nothing ever was done.

Finally the gay community said f.ck it and started pushing ultra-left
agenda,
and managed to get some gay marriage laws in a few minor states.  Panic,
panic, oh God the sky is falling.  But guess what - now we have real action
on
the civil union legal recognition thing.  Never would have happened if not
for
the ultra-left.

Reaganomics did exactly the same thing, except from the right.  Taxes on the
ultra rich under Carter were so cockeyed that after a certain income level,
earning more income would actually reduce your take home pay below that
of someone earning less income.  So what was the point of continuing to
make more money?  The same thing was on corporations.  Ronnie and friends
realized to make a change they would have to argue from the rediculous
positiion
of let's get rid of all taxes entirely, on the rich that is, so that supply
side economics
would work.  Ultra right wing arguments intended only to drag the center
more
right, to get things back to functioning.

Yes but - the problem is that this argument has ALWAYS been used,
throughout history.

Undoubtedly the Romans used it when they built a road through the
provences.

It is nothing more than fundamental mental laziness.  People do not change
their opinions of anything without being needled into using their brain.
Politicians
use the 5 minute sound bite to get people emotionally worked up, so they
actually will get off their mental duffs and start thinking.

Look at the movie Farenheit 911.  Some facts wrapped in a huge amount of
emotion.  The classic 5 minute sound bite.  The conservatives were scared to
death it would swing the election, but in the end it didn't.  Or, did it?

Well, here's the deal.  What the movie did was suddenly start putting both
the hawks and the people that called themselves moderates into the position
of trying to defend against the seemingly wild accusations made in the
movie.
And it was that process of working up the defence was when the minds of
the hawks and of the moderates were opened, and they suddenly started
seeing things that didn't jive with their opinions of how things were.  So
the
defence when it came, wasn't solid and wholehearted.  In fact it was the
beginning of the end.  That movie was, in many ways, the modern Uncle Toms
Cabin.

Bill, I live in OR and there are land use regulations like this all over the
map.

For example, the state recently passed, via initative, the property
compensation law.  Meaning that if government does anything that
decreases property value - such as institute a new regulation that
for example bans building within 100 feet of a stream in order to
preserve habitat - that the property owner can sue for compensation
from the government.

So how does the state handle it if they want to prevent someone
from building 100 feet of a stream?  Simple.  They pass a regulation
that specifies where toxicidity levels must be measured in a stream.
Such as no more than 3 inches from the outflow of any storm drain
into the stream.  Then they measure the toxicity of the water at that
point and declare the entire stream contaminated.  Since federal
regulations prohibit building within 100 feet of a contaminated stream
the property owner has no recourse under the law to sue since
the new regulation did not directly limit the property rights.

And that is just a quick made up simple one.  I could dig up a lot
more interesting and complex ones with some time.  Some from your
own state, I'd imagine.

Government has learned it is risky to out and out ban things that
are permitted.  Such as, smoking.  But, you can ban things that
make the permitted activity almost impossible to do, and achieve
the same result.  Like banning smoking in buildings.  Or better yet,
set minimum smoke sensitivity levels for building smoke detectors
so high that any cigarette will set them off.

You want to limit handguns?  Sure.  Ban carrying them exposed (frightens
the public - New York has this ban) then never issue concealed weapons
permits without an extreme fight.

You want to limit the speed limit to 55Mph?  Sure - set the national limit
to 75Mph with the stipulation that the limit can only be 75 on a class -A
freeway - then underbuild roads so that the congestion on the only class A
freeway is so bad that the speed is limited anyway just due to that.

No, it wasn't.

It is my fervent hope that all people, black and white, turn their backs on
ALL
government efforts to rebuild housing in any of the under-sea-level housing
in
New Orleans, even if the government is giving away the housing for free.  I
would
be very contented to never hear again any pleas for disaster assistance from
New Orleans due to flooding there.  If the black advocates in New Orleans
had
any brains they would tell all their constituants to hold back, and let the
flood areas
fill up with poor dumb white crackers, then the next flood would get more
whites
than blacks.  But I will bet you money that they won't - instead, all the
groups
will go rushing back there like hogs with both trotters in the trough once
the free
money shows up.  Stupidity is just as prevalent among whites as blacks.

Ted