Basically, a fairly innocuous bill was sent to Arnie's gubernatorial desk for him to sign. Instead he vetoed it, and the veto letter he sent back...

I'm not going to print it here because it might be considered to be an evasion of the swear filter. Suffice to say that it was epic. And well hidden:

http://tinyurl.com/yz7p89x (I had to tinyurlize it because the article link had a swear word in it)

I have to say, Arnie is pretty bad-$@!.

What's even worse that this bill would have economically helped the economy of SF by funding for infrastructure (we need infra projects frankly everywhere in Cali), especially in regards to the international port there.

I think most everyone in this state is a little fed up with Arnold's shenanigans. He shot himself in the foot (i.e. alienating our legislature and thus, making him a lame duck governor) a long time ago by calling our legislature a bunch of girly men, and he has continued to do so (the various budget discourses also had an incident with him exchanging gag gifts with a senator as if it was perfectly fine for elected officials to fool around when there is serious business). And people wonder why California never gets things done on time.

This was also aimed to be a petty reaction against Rep. Tom Ammiano, who told Arnold to "...kiss my gay $@!". Arnold needs to swallow his pride sometimes and do his job.

I think Arnold's pretty cool. Then again I don't have to live in California so I can just sit back and laugh in peace.

Arnold seems cool, but he's a wishy-washy governor who thrashes around like a kid throwing a tantrum when his ego gets hurt.

How bad is your infrastructure?

I'm really interested in why a nearly bankrupt state thinks it needs to spend more money. Is the port about to fall apart or something?

Yeah, that's good old Arnie for ya.

Seriously though, at least you guys don't have our governor...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Perry

Ahnuld's way of saying "Why should I do !@#$ for you if you won't do !@#$ for me?"

No we are just bankrupt and unable to do anything so...WE WANT MONEY! I used to live there. Taxes suck

Well, infrastructure is pretty bad in the LA area. Poorly planned and it was not built to handle the population boom of the past couple of decades. There are always potholes that have to be mended, and LA really needs to arrange for an improved mass transit system. The highways can't handle all the traffic, and this is a major economic bottleneck in the area.

I'm not sure about SF and its port, you should ask someone from around there.

And yeah, the state is nearly bankrupt, but the vetoed bill was mainly for getting funding through taxes and bonds specific to that area, iirc. At least it's money spent on infrastructure and not on other bloated state departments (such as education).



They won't do anything for him because he alienated them all early in his tenure. A good portion of his Republican base don't support him anymore, either, but he's on his way out of his last term so it doesn't really matter, heh.

The state is bankrupt. They just haven't fully realized it, as yet, in the .gov

I, as a San Franciscan (or at least Bay Arean), support this veto on the grounds that it made me giggle. I like what Schwarzenegger wants to do, but the means are a bit douchey.

Taxes suck everywhere. They would actually mean something if they were put to good use, but the government has been inefficient from years. Dems and Republicans wouldn't be able to come up with a solution at all.




The state is near-bankruptcy, and both sides don't really act to fix it, IMO. One big drain on the government are the major prisons we have established across the state (since the wardens, their pensions and operation of prisons is a very costly business). Maybe we should relocate some to Alaska, Arizona or Nevada

We have a bit of tundra we could rent. Too bad you couldn't afford it, atm


(edit) my spelling sucks arse.

We already spend $10.4 billion a year on prisons, so I wonder why we shouldn't divert some of that money to relocating a few to Alaska?

Decriminalizing drugs and reducing the numbers of non-violent offenders sent to prison will also help us out as well, but good luck getting our politicians to do either of those things.

And there's more!

Well if you have a prison problem then the clear solution is to legalize and regulate drugs, or at least decriminalize them. I am not sure how many pot smokers are in prison there but in the U.S. as a whole there are an insane number of people for jail just because they smoked some weed and were caught, which is absolutely ridiculous. You legalize it and you get rid of all the people in jail for personal weed usage and as a result you save a hell of a lot of money in prison costs. Not to mention that crime in general would go down since pot smokers would no longer end up going to jail and becoming real criminals there. Doing something to yourself is not a crime and one should not waste taxpayer money to lock up people because they like to smoke something, it's ridiculous and a waste of taxpayer money... and apparently it can also be crippling to a state's budget.


Damn... didn't see this.

Yeah, Dennis, drug offenses are rather common here (I would surmise that they are higher than national average), considering that a good percentage of Californians use or have used drugs. SF was the Hippie Paradise in the 60s, and all the drug usage came along with it (not like that is a totally bad thing). Couple this with raids on medical marijuana clinics and their clientele, and you got too many people that don't deserve to be in prison; they weigh the system down and are not menaces to Californian society at all unless they (the pharmacies) were fronts for a gang.

The Three Strikes law also plays into this as well. On a third strike for drug possession or usage, you're in for the long haul. Drug decriminalization needs to happen in this state. Hopefully we'll be the state that leads the way, but that remains to be seen.

Pretty funny. I know next to nothing about Californian politics but I wub Arnie, so I take his side regardless of merit.

What's with CA electing Repub actors?

I said I don't know anything about CA politics

Although I'd have voted for both of them. Reagan because I like his politics, although I don't know if I'd have voted for him again after it became apparent he wasn't really putting them into practice, and Arnie because he's awesome.

re bold - well yes, it is perfectly fine, assuming it didn't take him 10 hours to choose the gift.

Has he admitted this was intentional?

No chance it was just an odd coincidence?

Nope. None whatsoever.

The internets say it's true so it must be...

Well the chances of this happening randomly are at least 1 in 8 billion, so randomness is pretty much out of the question.

8 billion? Notsomuch.

26^7=8,031,810,176

I personally think this wasn't random, especially when the tone of the letter is taken into account.

See the poster right below. And that's actually a very, absolute LOW ball estimate, because it doesn't take into accounting making just the correct paragraph lengths to spell out that particular phrase.

Dont forget folks, California's State Legislature is ruled by Democrats, so don't blame everything on Arnold. You cant do much when the state legislature hates you...

oh snap...what integrity. Very becoming of a governor.

don't forget folks: if someone's in an opposing political party, you're perfectly justified in selling your dignity down the river in the course of metaphorically crapping in your hand and throwing it at them.

At least you don't have our governor..
Tim "Ignoring Minnesota for a White House bid" Pawlenty

We're in a sticky situation, and now he's hardly ever in Minnesota anymore, because he's campaigning. Now isn't that cute?

You would probably hate Trudeau.

Actually it's incorrect. It's far lower than that. The paragraph lengths don't matter. There will be *some* character at the beginning of each line, so your estimate must rely solely on the character. And 26^7 is correct only if you make the assumption that every letter has an equal chance of appearing. As we know, X and Z, Q aren't very common, while F, C, T, etc. stand a much higher chance of appearing in a word. There are only a few hundred words that start with Z, and only a few words (less than 50) used practically and about 70 words that start with X, about 5 in common use, where by contrast there are tens of thousands of words that start with F and Y.

It's a very low chance, but it's not as low as you have denoted.

Arnie's bill is so douchey. There is apparently reason for the bill and he's just wasting everyone's time vetoing it

Dude, when your state government is basically paying people in IOUs, the last thing you need to be doing is funding infrastructure projects with bonds based upon FUTURE taxation.

Fair enough, but the paragraph lengths DEFINITELY matter. The first paragraph is exactly 4 lines, then there is a space, then another 3 lines.

Also, numbers re-evaluated using the Wiki frequency numbers:
F is 1 in 49
U is 1 in 36


Y is 1 in 51
O is 1 in 13


C is 1 in 36
K is 1 in 130

So the actual answer is about 1 in 197 billion. Unless I did something drastically wrong.


EDIT: wrong frequency table :/

Oh, I see what you mean. I misunderstood. Paragraph length odds are pretty minor, though.

And you would consider how many words start with each letter, not just their occurrence overall.

Yeah, I used the wrong table. I really don't want to recalculate all that though. I'm lazy. And in 5 minutes I could...like...I don't know.

Yeah. My point wasn't that it was likely an accident, anyway. Just raising issue with oversimplification. So yeah... point made, haha.

Yeah, I was going to say...

Using the frequencies for letters at the beginning of words in the English language:

F = 1/26
U = 1/67
Y = 1/62
O = 1/16
C = 1/28
K = 1/145

Together, we have 1/7,015,939,840

Or a 1 in 7 Billion chance this happened at random.
(assuming, of course, my math isn't completely wrong)

----

Oh, hey, how about that.

1 in 470 Billion (again assuming I didn't make a dumb mistake).

Your math is wrong. You need to multiply the U in twice.

EDIT: Seems I was beaten to the punch by Loki, oh well here's my arithmetic anyway:

Frequency of most commonly used first letters in the written English language (Calculated from Project Gutenberg Selections):

a 8.167%
b 1.492%
c 2.782%
d 4.253%
e 12.702%
f 2.228%
g 2.015%
h 6.094%
i 6.966%
j 0.153%
k 0.772%
l 4.025%
m 2.406%
n 6.749%
o 7.507%
p 1.929%
q 0.095%
r 5.987%
s 6.327%
t 9.056%
u 2.758%
v 0.978%
w 2.360%
x 0.150%
y 1.974%
z 0.074%

So our odds become...

(0.02228)(0.02758)(0.02782)(0.00772)(0.01974)(0.07507)(0.02758) = 5*10^-12

or 1 in 200 billion. Even more unlikely than the odds without using statistical analysis of common words through Project Gutenberg (as it turns out, all the letters used except for 'o' are below average probability for first letters).

This also doesn't factor in the fact that the two words were neatly arranged in separate paragraphs, which could add a couple more factors of 10 to decrease the odds. It also doesn't factor in the fact that short words are less likely to start a new line in a word processor than long ones. This would drop the probabilities of 'a' and 'i' and other letters more commonly found in short words and probably have a negligible or slight decrease in the probability of this being a coincidence. Then there is also a slight increase due to a handful of messages (maybe 10 or so) that would have caught our attention.

The overwhelming odds against this being a coincidence did not seem to deter Aaron McLear, a spokesman for the Governor's office. In an email responding to comments on the hidden message, he said: “It was just a weird coincidence. I suppose when you do so many vetoes, something like this is bound to happen.”

California .... it doesn't matter whether they actually have a governor, as long as they can elect someone who plays one on TV.

I am more then willing to believe that Arnold did not intentionally write that, but, in his sentient mechanical state, it was a hidden message encrypted subconsciously.

Arnold is a terrible governor, and the state legislature is terrible too. Also Prop 13 $%&@ed us over by switching our main source of revenue to income taxation (more susceptible to market volatility), and our proposition system allows 51% of voters to burden the state with extra spending (favorite tactic: initiatives for children and animals, who'd vote against that), while the state legislature needs 66% to pass taxes, which a rock-solid far-right conservative faction prevents.

California has one of the the worst governments in the US/

true that. I remember there being an initiative for building children's hospitals a while back, and who doesn't love building hospitals for helping the little children? </sarcasm>. That proposition just was an additional expenditure, and I think this state needs ordinary hospitals a whole lot more than specialized children's hospitals. I'm also disappointed that the animal cruelty law passed too. Agriculture is the biggest business in this state, and hurting it hurts us all. Plus, it should be the right of farmers to decide whether they want to have McFactory farms or free-range ranches.

Prop 13 is retarded as hell. Sure, it's great for Hollywood stars, big landowners, and the rich in general, and it looks good on paper, but it just means that income has to be taxed a whole lot more, and that drives people and business out of the state, and that leaves less tax revenues, and so on and so on. The money to pay for some of our services (including a bloated prison system which now has one of the strongest lobbies and a failing yet pricey education system) has to come from somewhere...

The proposition system definitely needs to be amended. But until then, all hail California, its incompetent government and its Hollywood-esque high jinks.

So, how does California compare to saaay...Washington?