California can’t build anything. Prop 45 can change that… but Eric Schmidt’s family is fighting to keep the status quo. Prop 45 would reform CEQA for housing, energy, water, transportation and other essential projects by imposing deadlines, limiting the truly insane amounts of environmental review, and making it harder to use lawsuits to stall projects for years. CEQA sounds like an environmental protection law, so you might instinctively support it. In practice, it is one of California’s most powerful tools for delaying and killing projects, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment. Wendy Schmidt, Eric Schmidt’s wife, is helping bankroll the campaign to defeat Prop 45, alongside construction unions (!). So why would construction unions fight a measure that makes it easier to construct things? Because their ability to stop construction is valuable to them. CEQA gives unions ENORMOUS leverage over developers. The threat of years of delays and litigation can be used to push developers into project labor agreements and other labor concessions before opposition disappears, and makes everything more expensive to build. So: a law ostensibly about the environment creates enormous power for groups whose leverage comes from their ability to stop things from getting built. It’s sort of funny- the opponents to it are literally complaining that Prop 45 will make it easier to build. Exactly! California has spent decades empowering anyone who wants to say no. Prop 45 makes it easier to finally say yes. Vote YES on Prop 45! And if you are close to Wendy please shake a fist at her for me.

This is important and everyone should read it. Everyone who works behind a computer should be worried about their job- unless they are a VC. AI may have taste and judgment now but can it sit on a board and ask ‘so what’s the AI strategy?’ every meeting? Didn’t think so.