Yes, California has long been a "donor state", ie one that pays substantially more federal tax revenue than gets spent there. This shouldn't be too surprising as it's much richer than average and the tax system is approximately progressive.

Why can't they impact insurance? Are CA insurance companies prohibited from using non-criminal information when deciding who to cover or set rates?

Given that they insure cars more than drivers, it seems kinda reasonable that they be allowed to look at tickets for cars.

What's the base rate? Even a very healthy economy doesn't have all sectors growing simultaneously, so I'd be very curious to know if this is a matter of going from "normally 20% is shrinking and now it's 80%" or if it's "normally 49% is shrinking and now it's 51%"

The author complains about country selector drop-downs as part of the address flow, but if you're collecting zip codes you are already assuming United States. I don't think there's a country-inferer from completely generic postal code tool out there yet, is there?

You may be interested in "Do Morons Make Prediction Markets More Accurate?" - https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/do-morons-make-predict...

Essentially the argument is that more dumb money in a prediction market provides an even stronger incentive for smart money to join, moving the price back to an accurate probability.