A big part of the reason that Republicans are more able to pass legislation is that smaller states have a larger impact than they should, based on their populations.

Each state has a number of members in the House of Representatives in proportion to their population - 52 for California. Each state has two members in the Senate, so CA has the same amount of power in the Senate as Wyoming, which has a population of under 600k to CA’s 39 million.

Beyond the impact on Congress, the sum of those counts determines the number of electoral votes a state has in presidential elections. So California has 54 electoral college votes.

If California split up into 12 different states, each would end up with 6 electoral votes. The total count in the House would decrease from 52 to 48, and some other state would get the remaining 4 (though even that could be avoided by just having some sub-states be large enough to get 5 Representatives) but the total count of Senators would increase from 2 to 24 and the total electoral vote count would increase from 54 to 72.

Many of the smallest US states are firmly red, which means Republicans don’t need as much popular support to make policy changes. This would help reverse that. Heck, if California went all the way and split into 65 states, each with the population of Wyoming, they’d end up with 195 electoral college votes.

I feel like the US would take over California again if that was the case.

I’m not sure how you think the US would take over CA again, or what the impact would be, if it continued to be part of the US and just split into several different states. Could you elaborate?

I’d much rather California split into 12 different states, each with roughly the population of Nevada.

No offense taken, but thanks for the comment! If someone was offended and they saw your comment, I think it would probably help

I thought it was like the way one’s brain is wired that causes them to have slightly different perception than the rest.

I’m no expert, either, but this is a solid explanation IMO. It’s why autistic people are prone to sensory overload; their brains don’t filter out noise (like the hum of the refrigerator, the sounds of people chewing, or background conversations) the way that most allistic people’s brains do. It also definitely could have been the reason, or at least contributed to, why the woman from your post was confused - particularly if she was trying to figure out why allistic people did something.

The lady was autistic if I remember collectly. She had a boyfriend who also had a mental ilness.

Autism isn’t a mental illness.

If you want to generate audiobooks using your own / a hosted TTS server, check out one of these options:

• OpenReader-WebUI - this has built-in read along capability and can be deployed as a PWA that can allow you to download the audiobooks to your phone so you can use them offline
• p0n1/epub to audiobook
• ebook2audiobook

If you don’t have a decent GPU, Kokoro is a great option as it’s fast enough to run on CPU and still sounds very good.

If you’re going to use Kokoro, Audiblez (posted by another commenter) looks like it makes that more of an all-in-one option.

If you want something that you can use without an upfront building of the audiobook, of the above options, only OpenReader-WebUI supports that. RealtimeTTS is a library that handles that, but I don’t know if there are already any apps out there that integrate it.

If you have the audiobook generation handled and just want to be able to follow along with text / switch between text and audio, check out https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/

I’ve been meaning to look into Audiobook Shelf! Do you happen to know if it can be integrated with a TTS provider to narrate your ebooks, or does it only support listening to audiobooks you’ve uploaded?