Unless you believe there needs to be a plan for CA to secede in the future and thus it needs to be self-sufficient, why does manufacturing need to be in CA? As you stated, the Impulse stove makes heavy use of outsourced manufacturing to other parties; as long as those parties are within the US (which I'm not claiming they are, but there are states like TX that are far less concerned about environmental impact than CA is and thus could pick up any such slack), why is there a security concern here?
As for the economic concern, it seems like this is backwards: I'd argue it's the HCOL that drives industry with the need for low-wage labor away to non-CA locations. There's nothing stopping non-polluting corporations from working and hiring large numbers of people in CA.
This is too strong of a statement. There are perfectly sensible reasons to NIMBY certain activities. For instance, burning wood is probably ok in general, but a horrible idea in heavily populated cities.
Obviously, California is not composed exclusively of heavily populated cities. But it does contain a lot of them! So it is not completely insane that the regulation is skewed in favour of this.
Of course, for things that are equally polluting no matter where you do them (like burning fossil fuels), moving production outside of the location but still buying produced materials is simply passing the buck. But it's not totally clear to me that's what's happening here.
That's exactly why the Bay Area Air Quality Management District exists (established decades before the federal EPA):
> Charged with regulating stationary sources of air pollution emissions, the Air District drafted its first two regulations in the 1950s: Regulation 1, which banned open burning at dumps and wrecking yards, and Regulation 2, which established controls on dust, droplets, and combustion gases from certain industrial sources.
> Much research and discussion went into the shaping of Regulation 2, but there was no doubt about the need for it. During a fact-finding visit to one particular facility, Air District engineers discovered that filters were used over air in-take vents to protect the plant's machinery from its own corrosive emissions! This much-debated regulation was finally adopted in 1960.
Fossil are not equally polluting. There's a difference between living next to a generator with exhaust at ground level, a properly designed smoke stack, and just being further away so the reactive emissions can dilute and degrade.
CO2 might be a long term problem, but it isn't the core health concern of living near combustion facilities - moving those away from residential areas isn't passing the buck, it's just good sense.
> It makes no sense to say "oh, we need to manufacturer this stuff... just not here." That's basically NIMBYism for electronics.
This statement doesn't acknowledge why NIMBYism is odious. The reason is that we all need housing, but new housing may devalue current housing. While some may wish to protect their housing values/community feel/etc, others wish and may rightly deserve, access to housing at the same levels of access as earlier generations.
The analogy to manufacturing does not exist—to suggest it does ignores the real negative externalities to people who live next to polluting facilities, especially those where the pollutant was not recognized during use.
They are not fundamentally different. The underlying hypocracy of NIMBYism is wanting the positive outcomes from something (more housing, factories producing goods) with someone else having to suffer the downsides. How obnoxious it is depends on that upside/downside risk, but fundamentally if you want a thing to happen but you want it to happen near someone else, you are part of the NIMBY problem. (Note that wanting it to not happen at all, or wanting a version that is more expensive but nicer to be near, is not the same, so long as you're happy to bear the outcome of that thing being more expensive)
I think it’s reasonable to want factories and pollution to be far from anyone’s dwelling, no? And for all factories to have appropriate pollution control.
But is that really California's stance? Or is it more "if you do it here, do it the right way" and then everyone uses the more polluting production methods in a state that doesn't care
The outcome is the same as long as only California does it, but the ethics of it and the outcome if every state acted like that is vastly different
The notion of comparative advantage says you don't. It's not NIMBYism. And it's not a good faith argument when it comes from folks who have a bunker in New Zealand.
Similarly saying “you can’t have slavery but you can buy stuff made by enslaved people abroad” is morally inconsistent. I don’t know the obvious answer to this though.
Why? Manufacturing,design and engineering need highly different skill sets it's just not feasible to have both in one location because of the workforce required. It's the same in every other country some parts are industrial hubs and some design/engineering.
And, yes, it's a really neat stove... for wealthy people. At an installed cost of ~$8k (more if you're having to replace a standalone oven/cooktop since you need the stand for it), it's competing with lower-end Viking gas ranges that include an oven, and those have an extensive service network that Impulse doesn't (yet) have.
I mean, that's pretty normal right. The product starts out as a bit niche and expensive, and then as it scales in manufactured volume, variants & competitors become available at lower price points.
I saw this being hyped on YouTube the other day. My main concern is that there is a large lithium ion battery in a machine that is designed to get things hot. You do not want thermal runaway to happen with a battery that large inside your kitchen.
Their website says
> We’re designing and manufacturing the stovetop, battery pack, and key internal components to comply with all relevant UL standards and other applicable compliance requirements.
but this device appears to be for sale, right now. Either it is designed for safety already or it isn’t. WHICH UL safety standards? Is there an emergency shutoff? A regular old fire extinguisher probably is not going to cut it.
> My main concern is that there is a large lithium ion battery in a machine that is designed to get things hot. You do not want thermal runaway to happen with a battery that large inside your kitchen.
It's an induction stovetop. It doesn't itself get hot, other than whatever heat gets transferred to the top of the stove because it is in contact with the hot pot or pan sitting on top. I don't know about this one specifically but with most induction stovetops that just makes it warm to the touch in the area right under the pot or pan.
That's not going to be hot enough to be a problem for the battery even if for some reason they mounted it in contact with the bottom of the top surface, which I doubt they did.
> That's not going to be hot enough to be a problem for the battery even if for some reason they mounted it in contact with the bottom of the top surface, which I doubt they did.
My point is that’s what safety standards are for. Do they do safe things or not? You might be surprised to hear how many manufacturers do dumb things for one reason or another. If they really do comply with safety standards then they should be able to say which ones. Why don’t they say?
This guy is just mad that Copper murdered them by making an actual product people can actually buy, partly because, I imagine, Impulse CEO was busy making visuals for his Libertarian propaganda campaign.
The Copper stove is made in Berkeley, California, by the way.
I am sure the 5th largest economy in the world is truly suffering under their draconian regulations. Everyone in California making the 5th highest median income in the country wishes they were working at a local oil refinery.
To your last point, I am somewhat doubtful that this website is being honest about automotive paint shops being banned in California. Am I to believe that the 3,000 auto body shops in Southern California sit on their hands all day? Was West Coast Customs just a fake TV show filmed in Texas?
If this website’s author is correct I’m supposed to believe that no paint gets applied to cars in Canada.
As another nitpick, let’s also not forget that nobody else is building oil refineries in the US. The newest one in the entire country was built in 1976. Oil demand in the US is relatively flat since decades ago; there isn’t a pressing need for new refineries.
I also think that readers in this thread should remember that California has strict air quality regulations because its geography especially in Southern California lends itself to bad air quality. These regulations are very much written in blood. Globally, almost 7 million people die prematurely every year due to air pollution.
To me at least this appears to be a smoking gun for the creator not being able to function in good faith. Whether that's intentional or self delusion, who knows.
From the page itself, "A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA." This point is trotted out and reframed multiple times on the page but it's literally self contradictory. It's not something you can't do in California, it's something you can't do without approval in the Bay Area Air District.
It's not a good place to be doing such an activity, as the area already can't successfully keep the air healthy enough to stay within federal limits due to environmental factors that trap particulate low to the ground. If you're at all familiar with the area you know concerns about air quality are not overblown and. Go further away from people or meet strict VOC regulations if you absolutely need to be doing that kind of work in the area, seems completely reasonable to me.
Is there any reason to assume that there's a dire need for more shops to apply paint in cars in California? If not, regulating to prioritize the air quality over increasing competition isn't unreasonable.
Is there any reason to assume that air quality standards can be maintained only by 50-year-old paint shops, and not by newer ones built to higher standards?
See also the counterproductive legacy of the anti-nuclear movement.
I think this requires us to buy the premise in the first place, which might be questionable.
Some guy’s website claims with big red scary graphics that this stuff is banned and these poor downtrodden business owners can’t operate.
I can’t imagine that nobody has opened an auto body shop in California in the last decade or two.
When it comes to businesses like large factories opening up that’s more of something that often gets approved on a case by case basis.
E.g., we can’t just say that the Chicago Bears are banned from building a new stadium in Chicago just because they aren’t willing to pay the costs required to do so and aren’t willing to meet the city’s requirements to get the approval vote they need.
There's reason to assume that _some_ paint shops are needed, based on the fact that the existing ones are staying in business, and reason to assume that more paint shops would mean more pollution, based on addition. There's not really any other way to limit the number of them other than regulation than gives the state the ability to prevent new ones, and while you obviously are against that idea in practice, I don't think it's nearly as obviously a bad policy goal as you're implying.
> Much like the other products we analyse, 1Password lacks
authentication of public keys. This trivially enables sharing
attacks similar to BW09, LP07 and DL02, something that the
1Password whitepaper...
> IMPACT. Complete compromise of vault confidentiality and
integrity. The adversary can read and decrypt all vault con-
tents encrypted after the attack, including passwords, credit
card information, secure notes, and other sensitive data stored
in the vault. Similarly, they can inject new items into the vault
after the attack.
REQUIREMENTS. The client fetches key material from the
server, for example due to the user logging in on a new device.
If executed on a non-empty vault, the attack results in the
client losing access to all items already in their vault, while
leaking any new items added to the vault after the attack took
place. If the attack is executed at the time of vault creation,
the attack is effectively undetectable by the client, since it
cannot distinguish between a ciphertext it created and the
ciphertext created by the server during the attack.
PROPOSED MITIGATION. A straightforward mitigation is to
have the client sign vault keys using the RSA private key in
the keyset before encrypting them with the RSA public key.
Ideally, two different key pairs would be used for...
I am bit disappointed they did not immediately jump on implementing the two straightforward recommendations:
> PROPOSED MITIGATION. A straightforward mitigation is to
have the client sign vault keys using the RSA private key in
the keyset before encrypting them with the RSA public key.
> PROPOSED MITIGATION. [...]
it would be easy for 1Password to prevent it entirely: the secret key can be used (with proper key derivation) to authenticate
the KDF parameters with a cryptographic MAC.
To be fair, these issues are not really impacting long-time users. I have hundreds if not thousands of items in my vaults, there's no way i'm not noticing if they dissappear (which would be a side effect of these attacks).
Overall, I think 1password can be proud of their architecture and product quality, but i'd love to see these improvements - and maybe something like a "signal verification code" for sharing?
Your advice there is really valuable. Thanks for providing it. I've always wondered how to post-process my night images, and this is a really good guide for that.
Love that technique with splitting B&W and colour, doing processing on B&W, then recombining. It's incredibly obvious in hindsight, especially with how common it is in digital art to draw in B&W and colour "in post". A fun little egg of Columbus that I'll be having some fun with over the holidays. Thanks for the link!
This was also back when you could walk into the library and get the email credentials of a random professor and then use it to hide behind when you took down a network of another in state university because an engineering professor didn't think computer science majors were as smart as he was.
Yeah, man, good times.
My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester.
Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.
It’s interesting that people pay close attention to one-size-fits all number (regardless of the pros and cons of the methodology used to derive said number). I find RT really useful for collating the reviews from “top” reviewers in one place: over the years, I know how my interests align with the tastes of particular reviewers, and I don’t have to look in multiple places to get a snapshot view of their opinions.
Given that it costs NN ~$5 to manufacture, and it's an effective drug that's an also-ran in the market, why still charge such a huge markup? NN should be selling it for $35-$50/month and buy the market share while feverishly working on a multi-GLP1 replacement.
They are milking the market up until the patent expires in Canada next year, at which point it’ll be imported into the US at scale. Novo’s already been beaten by Lilly with tirzepatide and orforglipron.
(I pay $350/month cash rate for my partner’s monthly tirzepatide)
The US list prices are, well, a complicated matter.
For non-US readers, it is important to note that 80% of the customers
(who has insurance) don't pay the list price, but rather an
much more reasonable over-the-counter price.
Due to the system of insurance companies and PBMs in the US
the list price is often high.
When PBMs a are negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies,
they have an incentive to keep a high list price. Let's say the PBMs
and a pharmaceutical company negotiates for the price of a drug X.
If the pharmaceutical company lowers the price of the drug X,
and there are other comparable drugs from other companies on the market,
then there is a risk that the PBM simply drops the drug X from their lists.
Instead, they make a better deal (for them) on drug Y.
For the company producing X, being omitted from the insurance companies lists,
is bad business.
As an outsider, it is difficult to understand that the US keeps the private insurance layer and the PBMS.
Now - the insurance companies also don't pay list prices.
They get a rebate. But they - and here my memory fails me - the
get some money from ... the government based on the list price.
Look at the congress hearings on the high medicine prices on YouTube.
Well, oral will be less effective (not a triple agonist like retatrutide) and might have greater side effects (the dose is larger since it goes through your digestive system) and you have to take it daily. But in any case, that will further box out semaglutide. Of course Novo has its own drug pipeline, but not clear if any of them are better than (or even equal to) retatrutide.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Note that to meet this definition, the following conditions must be met (among others):
1. Intent to destroy must be present.
2. The intent must be to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
3. The destruction can be serious bodily or mental harm, or it can mean creating conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part.
This means that:
- people that believe that genocide must be about a race is misguided (it can be about a nationality, and Palestinians identify as a nationality that is recognized by over 75% of the countries in the UN);
- the fact that there are Palestinians elsewhere (the West Bank and Jordan, as two examples) isn't relevant to deciding whether this is a genocide (since genocide can be about destruction targeted at a part of a group); and,
- there are many examples of Israeli ministers and government personnel stating goals that sound genocidal, which people interpret to affirm intent.
IANAL, and genocide is a legal term, so I am not weighing in on this with a personal opinion, but it seems reasonable that laypeople, at least, can read that definition and reach the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. The fact that various genocide scholars (including Omer Bartov at Brown); the Lemkin Institute (named after the Lemkin who coined the term genocide); HRW; Amnesty; MSF; and other institutions have called this a genocide is also probably helping laypeople believe the claim.
Finally, there is not just a moral imperative but a legal requirement under the Geneva Convention to feed people. Article 55 states that an occupying power is responsible for this.
Thank you for your opinion (stated as a fact, I'll add) that Israel doesn't occupy Gaza. Can you please state your source for this belief?
To state why I believe Israel is occupying Gaza, I'll point out that Israel’s continued status as an occupying power has been affirmed repeatedly by the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and human rights groups. Do you believe all of these entities are incorrect?
Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.
What is your source to justify your claim (stated as a fact) that Hamas is diverting supplies and then selling them? Here [1] is a recent article in the NYT this week quoting two unnamed Israeli military officials saying Israel has found no proof of this claim despite Israeli officials repeatedly stating otherwise, and that the UN had been largely successful (via UNRWA) in feeding the Gazan population.
Have you considered that your framing exposes implicit bias? It breaks posts down in a binary (pro- or anti-Israel) formation. It’s not that simple.
One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians. It’s also reasonable at this point to believe that Israel - for the last year, at least - is pursuing military action without a strategic goal or a long-term plan other than “encouraging voluntary transfer” of the civilian population.
To you, does the above paragraph immediately strike you as pro- or anti-Israel?
> One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians
And then extend that to believing Hamas are monsters, that whenever Palestine has--in modern times--had any power or leverage, it has used it to be a pest to its neighbors, and yet still believe that those people don't deserve to face starvation, bombing, economic ruin and forced displacement.
> are you saying that there is a scenario where it is legitimate for a person or group of people to believe that another group of people should be deserving of starvation, economic ruin, and forced displacement?
No, I'm saying the opposite. That you can be judgemental of Hamas and even suspicious of the motives of those claiming to speak for the Palestinian people while still condemning Netanyahu's tactics in this war.
I think the best thing you can say is that Hamas has a non-military arm that has provided enough social services that Gaza didn't collapse in economic ruin over the last two decades. The much more obvious thing to say is that Hamas has run a nihilistic campaign largely focused on the murder of Israeli civilians, and that they are Islamist in nature (and thus opposed to secular democracy). (I'll add my personal opinion that I hope many of them burn in hell for the calamity they've brought on Gaza.)
You are arguing for confirmation bias, unfortunately. It costs you nothing to understand Israeli perspectives. You don't have to agree, but you will elevate the discourse.
You (a) did not respond to my question and (b) now stated a claim that I'm arguing for confirmation bias without articulating an argument backing this new claim.
I would love to understand what you mean by my lack of understanding of Israeli perspectives. I talk to Israelis regularly. What perspectives do you believe I'm missing? If you're think I don't care about the safety and wellbeing of Israelis (and, to be specific, Israeli Jews), you'd be incorrect. I believe in Israel being a strong and prosperous state. If you think that means I should blindly ignore the fact that Israeli polls show that the Israeli public is unconcerned about the fate of Palestinians in Gaza and that this consequently leads me to believe Israelis are shortsightedly reducing their own security in the long term, then I wouldn't be able to agree with you. If you think I should similarly ignore that - under Bibi and Likud - Israel has deliberately acted against US policy to encourage the formation of a Palestinian state, and has created a defacto one-state reality which again reduces the security of the Israeli state, I wouldn't be able to agree with you either.
Solidly anti-Israel. Like "somewhat pregnant" there is no "somewhat pro-Israel". Either you believe that Israel has the right to exist, that its public statements are reasonably accurate reflections of its intentions, and that those goals and intentions are reasonable, and are thus pro-Israel; or you are anti-Israel. The rest is just decoration.
Polls about Israeli indifference to Palestinians is a non-sequitur.
Israel tells us all daily what its goals are and why, and how it intends to achieve those goals. Its actions then match those statements.
However, it is very difficult for most people, apparently, to listen to Israel and falsify its statements. Too much history, propaganda, false consensus, confirmation bias, and, frankly, anti-Semitism. Much easier for everyone to agree with each other that Israel bad, to attribute motives, to assume the worst, to believe Israel's enemies. Those people think it's reasonable to say something like "while I agree that Israel has the right to exist, that does not give them the right to commit war crimes and genocide."
The UN was founded in the shadow of WWII to prevent further global conflicts. It also established a global standard for human rights and to provide a forum to uphold international law. It has also taken on roles to provide development and humanitarian assistance.
Whether the UN works or not is largely dependent upon whether the five powers that granted themselves veto power (the P5: the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia) allow it to work. They are largely the source of its funding.
With that context in mind, it's difficult to understand your perspective. You've only thrown out your opinion instead of facts, and then - in a preemptive defensive posture - claim any criticism will be insults or ad hominem attacks.
You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)
If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.
> Whether the UN works or not is largely dependent upon whether the five powers that granted themselves veto power (the P5: the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia) allow it to work. They are largely the source of its funding.
The US is responsible for more than 25% of the UN's funding and is ~5-6x more than other members of the Security Council [1]. This is disproportionate to its obligations or its population.
> You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)
Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.
> If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.
If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this. Truth is it never changed. It is still very much regional hegemons governing their parts of the world. The only difference being that the hegemonic boundaries are not defined by homogeneous geographic regions. If you read the world news carefully, you will realize that all conflicts are tied to the boundaries between two or more hegemons.
> The US is responsible for more than 25% of the UN's funding and is ~5-6x more than other members of the Security Council [1]. This is disproportionate to its obligations or its population.
Fact. Another fact: this is a rounding error for the US government's budget. The total spend is under $15b. Government spending has been $5t to $7.5t in the last decade. Why is this particular spending line item of such interest to you? Do you truly see zero value derived from investment in the UN? Is that perhaps because you require some benefit to Americans from the investment? About 2/3rds of UN spending is on development and humanitarian assistance. Is helping the rest of the world raise the standard of living a laudable goal for the richest country in the world to contribute to or not, in your eyes?
> Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.
Perhaps one root difference in belief is that I don't believe the UN is an alliance, and you do. It is a forum for countries that belong to different alliances to have a forum to talk to each other. It also is a forum to build temporary alliances for military intervention (e.g., Iraq War I) across such boundaries. The US failed miserably at building such a consenus for Iraq War II and has been
> If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this.
Thank you. I understand your zero-sum argument and realpolitik in general, both from an academic and personal perspective. I grew up in a third-world country, so - perhaps, unlike you - I'm intimately familiar with the impact of Great Power games in the post-Cold War era. You are unfortunately correct; I wish that the US (my home for several decades now) tried harder to move away from such thinking and utilized the UN for more win-win scenarios, but we're moving away from such liberal thinking, and so my wish will probably remain unfulfilled.
It is utterly weird to me that so many commenters here appreciate the Barbican's aesthetics. To me, it is an ugly eyesore that's a legacy of the brutalist wave of the mid-20th century. I lived close to it (in Islington) for many months, and avoided walking through it to get to the City (where I worked).
Maybe because other brutalist estates in London aren’t nearly as well kept or, uh, wealthy, than the Barbican is. And perhaps it’s uncommon to wander through such estates when you don’t live in them.
The old Robin Hood Gardens before they were demolished were quite unwelcoming, looking from the outside. You wouldn’t go anywhere near those kind of estates unless you were a resident, and you’d have a very different impression as someone who saw what it was like internally.
Heh, very strange to see someone mention this online. (I grew up in the non-Brutalist but nearby Aberfeldy Estate, and now live a few thousand miles away).
Like - at least in my opinion - many brutalist buildings, it's ugly from the outside and gorgeous on the inside. I've explored it many times, and agree with everything in this article and in the positive comments in the thread. And... I kinda agree with you, too. What experience - interior or exterior - architects should prioritize is an interesting conundrum.
But it’s still dreary, in person, on a cloudy day. This style looks good in drawings, well lit and edited photos, but I think it’s a false/failed direction in living reality (specifically the facade, the building shape, “tunnels” etc).
The tunnels are kinda ick, and there are other bits I don't like, also. There's a walkway I've ended up on a time or two that's just bare and windswept, and badly needs... Something to break it up.
Still, though: I think I'd be pretty happy living there (even if it mightn't be my top choice). The (both design and amenity) positives outweigh the negatives, which I cannot say about many, many other parts of London. Do you disagree with that?
Brutalism was a reactionary movement against ornate Victorian and Georgian architecture, which was seen as elitist and emblematic of the "property owning class"
> In the United Kingdom, brutalism was featured in the design of utilitarian, low-cost social housing influenced by socialist principles and soon spread to other regions around the world, while being echoed by similar styles like in Eastern Europe
So beware the vocal minority of English socialists that have a politically-tainted take on this architecture.
The rest of us agree with you. It's offensively ugly!
To me it's a totalitarian style, it tells people 'I'm unashamedly ugly and I couldn't care any less what you think about that'. It goes out of its way to be imposing and institutional as though it's designed not for humans but for entirely fungible economic resources who in time will be burned up and discarded.
It's ironic the style is so strongly associated with socialism I think because it's much more 'dark Satanic mills' than 'England's green and pleasant land'.
Unless you believe there needs to be a plan for CA to secede in the future and thus it needs to be self-sufficient, why does manufacturing need to be in CA? As you stated, the Impulse stove makes heavy use of outsourced manufacturing to other parties; as long as those parties are within the US (which I'm not claiming they are, but there are states like TX that are far less concerned about environmental impact than CA is and thus could pick up any such slack), why is there a security concern here?
As for the economic concern, it seems like this is backwards: I'd argue it's the HCOL that drives industry with the need for low-wage labor away to non-CA locations. There's nothing stopping non-polluting corporations from working and hiring large numbers of people in CA.