I am a civilian medic, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever likely be, a military medic.
Perhaps the hardest thing I've ever done in my career, and the hardest thing I was told I might have to do in my training, was stand off at a safe distance while a man screamed for help at the center of a hazmat incident. I didn't go in to help him, because if I did, I would likely become another patient myself. This is I imagine, a roughly analogous situation to a combat casualty.
I still have the occasional nightmare about his screams, but I know I did the right thing.
If I'd had a robot to send in to drag him out so I could treat him, I would have paid for it with my own salary for the rest of my life if that's what it took.
Don't tell me this thing is not useful, or a waste of money, not until you wake up in the middle of the night sweating because you couldn't save him.
(If this is a double post, forgive me, some funkiness happened the first time I tried to post.)
I am a civilian medic, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever likely be, a military medic.
Perhaps the hardest thing I've ever done in my career, and the hardest thing I was told I might have to do in my training, was stand off at a safe distance while a man screamed for help at the center of a hazmat incident. I didn't go in to help him, because if I did, I would likely become another patient myself. This is, I imagine a roughly analogous situation to a combat casualty.
I still have the occasional nightmare about his screams, but I know I did the right thing.
If I'd had a robot to send in to drag him out so I could treat him, I would have paid for it with my own salary for the rest of my life if that's what it took.
Don't tell me this thing is not useful, or a waste of money, not until you wake up in the middle of the night sweating because you couldn't save him.
First, A lot of the money that goes to federal land is used for hiring people to look after it (which goes to that state), buying the equipment needed to look after it (which goes to the state it was sold in), and building the structures needed for it (which again goes to that state.).
Second, of the states that are in the top ten in terms of total federal land area owned, half of them, NV, CA, OR, WA and CO, are net "donors" to the federal government. Now, I'm willing to grant that Nevada is a special case, but I would also argue that so is Alaska, so if we strike them, (numbers 1 and 2 on the list, incidentally.). We're still left with half of the states with the most federal land being able to STILL contribute more than they receive.
Oh, and just by the by, number three on the list? That's California.
I was trying to decide how exactly to respond to this, and you did a much better job than I could have hoped to...If it weren't for the fact that I 1) don't have any mod points and 2) have already posted, I would be happily allotting you one.
While that's not a wholly unworthy point, it is rather dodging the issue. It doesn't matter here why those numbers are, it matters that they are.
It seems to me that the big problem most (I use most advisedly, see below) people have with the California bailout boils down to, "They spent themselves into a hole and how they want some of MY money to get out of it!"
The original bailout request maid in January 2010 was for 6.9 billion. Which does sound like a lot of money, until you see those 286 billion and 44 billion numbers.
Let me throw a couple more numbers out there:
In 2005, the total Federal revenue was 2,153 billion, which means that California's contribution of 286 billion amounted to 13.3% of the Federal revenues...by far and away the greatest single contributor to the Federal revenues.
(I saw a number go by in my research, and I ask you to take it with a grain of salt because I didn't research how it was arrived at, that NY was second with 184 billion, or 8.5%...again, that exact number could be wrong, but I do know California was on top.).
Now, back when I was a California resident, I quite happily paid my federal taxes, even knowing that most of it was going to go elsewhere, and help people from other states...because it was still helping people (minus the pork barrel, of course, but if you haven't come to terms with that, we've got bigger issues.). But when California needed a little help (and I don't feel I'm exaggerating TOO much to call even 6.9 billion "a little help", given the other numbers.) "Screw you, you can't have my money!"? W. T. F?
Now, there is a slightly more valid argument running around, which is that the bailout won't really fix things. That's absolutely true, it's a bandaid, designed to keep the state from going broke in order to give them enough time for 1) the budget to be juggled and 2) the recession to clear a little bit more. I can't see, however, that preventing the state government of almost 37 million people from going bankrupt is a bad thing...except, of course, that it's "dirty hippie Californian freeloaders.".
If the people in Utah are happy, what does it matter what the other 49 states think of them?
That's what freedom is all about.
Of course if Utah came begging for a bailout, like what Greece and Ireland did in the EU, then I suggest we tell them "too bad" and let them figure it out by themselves. Same goes for California, New York, or any other state that overspent beyond their means. But overall I think Utah has been well-behaved and limited spending, and therefore doesn't deserve the criticism you aim at them.
In 2005 (the last year I could easily find number for) CA received 79 cents of federal spending for every federal tax dollar paid, NY was 78 cents and Utah was $1.07. To give you some framework for those numbers, CA works out to have sent ~$286,627,000,000 to the Federal Government, and received ~$242,023,000,000 dollars worth of federal funding. A disparity of 44 billion.
Yes, it's absolutely possible to do better, however I would point out that there are a few key differences between Samsø and Roatán.
First, Samsø has a population of 4,300 according to wikipedia, whereas Roatán has a popultation of 30,000 according to wikipedia, and depending on who you talk to around here, the estimates go as high as 90,000 (The concept of a census is only loosely applied here.)
Second, the PPP GDP of Denmark is ~200B (Per capita ~31K), while the GDP of Honduras is ~15B, (Per capita ~3K).
Finally the conversion to wind power of Samsø was (as I understand it), largely funded by grants from the Danish Government, while for various lingering political reasons Roatán (and the bay islands in general) are the red headed step-children of Honduras.
So, to summarize, Samsø has at most 1/6th of the people to provide power to, has per capita income approximately 10x greater, and the government was actually willing to spend some of that money on the island.
This is more apples to oranges than apples to apples.
Here's a cite for you: The island I live on has (almost) all of it's power provided by RECO, using Wärtsilä generators (disregarding the very low adoption of PV and wind, and the couple of gas stations that run their own generators).
According to the first link, RECO burns 15,000 gallons of diesel a day providing the power for this island, according to the second, it's one of 1550 such power plants around the world (specificly using Wärtsilä generators.).
Now, as you pointed out, this is a rather expensive way to go for power generation, but it's certainly done. Of course, the reason this makes any sense if because this is a relatively small island 50 miles off the coast of Honduras, we can't afford the infrastructure needed for a more efficient means of power generation.
Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, I will note that RECO was recently (3 or 4 years ago) bought out by an investor who has been investing massive amounts of money into it, and once he's done bringing the distribution infrastructure up to snuff, he's announced plans to change over to biomass generation.
In a healthcare setting, you're both legally (in most countries) and ethically (In any country) bound to protect a patient's information.
Passing information to a cloud that swears in their EULA that your information will be protected might be sufficient to get you off the hook for the legal obligation when the odds catch up with you and the cloud is hacked, but it won't get you off the ethical hook.
Seriously? You found the bashing of the iPhone 4 odd?
Well, welcome to slashdot, I guess, in a couple of weeks, you'll get the lay of the land.
Here's a hint: Apple, Microsoft, the RIAA, and sort of law enforcement = bad and should be flamed immediately and hard, Linux and really any variety of FOSS = good and should be praised heavily. Any news story which doesn't actually have anything to do with any of the above will eventually be twisted around until it does and the flaming/fanboidom can begin.
Oh, and you can never go wrong with a comment about how this isn't news for nerds, and slashdot is no longer what it was/is supposed to be...oh and don't forget to mention that kdawson is an idiot.
Does the summary author write pushpolls for a living?
Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota? Or a conservative move that bucks the trend of saving money and encouraging open government and transparency by aligning philosophy and practice with at least the option of utilizing open source software?
I honestly cannot think of a more charged way of asking that question that doesn't involve out and out stating conspiracy theories (rather than just hinting at them), or vulgarities.
This is./ ferchristsake. It's not like it'll be hard to get support for anti-Microsoft OR pro-FOSS, let alone both of them.
Oh oh! An opportunity to be pedantic on/.! These so rarely come up!
The first jeeps were actually produced by Willys-Overland (Assuming we're disregarding the prototype built by the American Bantum Corp, who after producing a better design than Willys, was deemed of an insufficient size to produce the volume that the military wanted, and thus their design was given to Willys to produce, and ABC was awarded a contract to build the trailers for what would later become the Jeep and other vehicles.)
It wasn't until after it was decided that Willys wasn't large enough to meet the demand either that Ford was granted a license to build the vehicles to the Willys designs, and were effectively identical, except for minor markings.
Okay, that's my limit of pontification for right now. I thus decline the title of impostor, and pass it to you.
Seriously though, starting at a light source from short distance can't be good for your brain any more than it is for your eyes. The last time I went on vacation, I didn't even bring my laptop with me, and my mind felt a lot sharper at the end of the week.
Here's a thought, how about after your next vacation, you use some of your new found mental acuity to ponder the relationship between correlation and causation?
At a guess, what you're talking about is Molybdenum-99, which is a parent isotope of Technetium-99, which is a beta emitter used extensively in radiopharmaceuticals. While it is mined in the US, Canada has much bigger deposits (as do a few other places).
I appreciate the thought, but even if the computers weren't stolen originally, they probably have by now. And even if they haven't, they've been sitting essentially unprotected on the sea side for a year and a half, they've probably been ruined by now.
As far as the bribery goes, believe me, that thought occurred to us. We made the approaches to a few people, but got no bites.
Could spawn a whole new generation of medical accessories for smartphones/PCs..
I can't find a link to the commercial product off hand, but quite a while ago (in the time frame of tech), there was an EKG unit that was designed to work with Palm pilots (To give you an idea of how long ago this was, I'm relatively certain it was designed to work with Palm IIIs).
Now, I can't directly speak to how accurate it was, since this was well before I got into health care, so I didn't know what I was looking at, but I know a couple of people (One a doctor, the other a NP) who had them and liked them. (They also only did three leads, which are only really useful for diagnosis of arrhythmias, rather than MIs, so they wouldn't have to have had anywhere near the kind of accuracy that a 12-lead has to have.)
It's not even CLOSE to trivial to bring in expensive and bulky equipment to the third world.
I live and volunteer in Honduras, and when one of the projects I work with needs something, one of the primary constraints is how do we get it here. Any piece of equipment that can do the same job and can be brought in with airline luggage will ALWAYS be preferable to something that have to be shipped.
A couple of examples: Someone was kind enough to donate 20 complete new computes (monitor, keyboard etc) to one of the schools I work with. They even paid for shipping it down here. This was a year and a half ago, the container they came in is still sitting at the port it came in to, we could never get customs to clear the shipment. (The general assumption is that they were stolen and customs won't clear it so we don't find out.)
Second example: The medevac service I work with has a Sikorsky S62A, one of very few in the world that still fly. They needed a couple of brackets for the steps, nothing fancy, total cost when new: about 15 bucks, but it's not something you can go down and pick up at the corner store. The owners of the helicopter had a few of them in Australia that they picked up surplus off the USCG when they retired the fleet. So the service paid to have them shipped in, total cost counting shipping and customs: just under 1000USD.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the third world just doesn't work anything close to they way you think it does. If, for whatever reason I needed to bring in equipment to fit people for lenses, and I had the option of a donated piece of professional equipment vs a iPhone that I had to raise money for, I'd pick the iPhone every time.
Umm, kdawson posted something without be flamed as being a moron. All of his other posts I've read the comments for contain at least one, usually more like 5+ which state that he's a waste of oxygen who never has, nor ever will contribute anything of value to this site of "News for Nerds".So, to help correct this oversight, I will provide the following:
kdawson was all like "I r smrt!", but we know to hear him going all like "I r....durr...what?". Now get off my lawn.
This covers my membership dues to the groupthink, right?
8 words : Ballot measures making a lot of spending mandatory.
6 more words : Super-majority required for tax increases.
People vote for ballot measures for spending, but then vote against the tax increases to pay for it.
So, 2005 was the last year I could conveniently find (read 10 seconds of googling) numbers for, but according to taxfoundation.org, in 2005, CA sent ~$286,627,000,000 to the Federal Government, on the other hand they received ~$242,023,000,000 dollars worth of federal funding.
I'd just like to note that this represents a 44.6 billion dollar disparity.
Of course, the withdrawal of that money from the federal budget would mean the effective collapse of numerous other states (I started to add up the numbers, but frankly, I'm too lazy.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I don't, but I have a much dirtier secret...before I left the states, I was a member in good standing with the SCA.
Fuck that, I'm 27 and Cowboys and Indians is still fun.
Now stick 'em up, pardner!
Why yes, I did used to smoke a lot of pot, why do you ask?
I am a civilian medic, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever likely be, a military medic.
Perhaps the hardest thing I've ever done in my career, and the hardest thing I was told I might have to do in my training, was stand off at a safe distance while a man screamed for help at the center of a hazmat incident. I didn't go in to help him, because if I did, I would likely become another patient myself. This is I imagine, a roughly analogous situation to a combat casualty.
I still have the occasional nightmare about his screams, but I know I did the right thing.
If I'd had a robot to send in to drag him out so I could treat him, I would have paid for it with my own salary for the rest of my life if that's what it took.
Don't tell me this thing is not useful, or a waste of money, not until you wake up in the middle of the night sweating because you couldn't save him.
(If this is a double post, forgive me, some funkiness happened the first time I tried to post.)
I am a civilian medic, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever likely be, a military medic.
Perhaps the hardest thing I've ever done in my career, and the hardest thing I was told I might have to do in my training, was stand off at a safe distance while a man screamed for help at the center of a hazmat incident. I didn't go in to help him, because if I did, I would likely become another patient myself. This is, I imagine a roughly analogous situation to a combat casualty.
I still have the occasional nightmare about his screams, but I know I did the right thing.
If I'd had a robot to send in to drag him out so I could treat him, I would have paid for it with my own salary for the rest of my life if that's what it took.
Don't tell me this thing is not useful, or a waste of money, not until you wake up in the middle of the night sweating because you couldn't save him.
Your argument is a non-starter for two reasons.
First, A lot of the money that goes to federal land is used for hiring people to look after it (which goes to that state), buying the equipment needed to look after it (which goes to the state it was sold in), and building the structures needed for it (which again goes to that state.).
Second, of the states that are in the top ten in terms of total federal land area owned, half of them, NV, CA, OR, WA and CO, are net "donors" to the federal government. Now, I'm willing to grant that Nevada is a special case, but I would also argue that so is Alaska, so if we strike them, (numbers 1 and 2 on the list, incidentally.). We're still left with half of the states with the most federal land being able to STILL contribute more than they receive.
Oh, and just by the by, number three on the list? That's California.
Bravo.
I was trying to decide how exactly to respond to this, and you did a much better job than I could have hoped to...If it weren't for the fact that I 1) don't have any mod points and 2) have already posted, I would be happily allotting you one.
While that's not a wholly unworthy point, it is rather dodging the issue. It doesn't matter here why those numbers are, it matters that they are.
It seems to me that the big problem most (I use most advisedly, see below) people have with the California bailout boils down to, "They spent themselves into a hole and how they want some of MY money to get out of it!"
The original bailout request maid in January 2010 was for 6.9 billion. Which does sound like a lot of money, until you see those 286 billion and 44 billion numbers.
Let me throw a couple more numbers out there:
In 2005, the total Federal revenue was 2,153 billion, which means that California's contribution of 286 billion amounted to 13.3% of the Federal revenues...by far and away the greatest single contributor to the Federal revenues.
(I saw a number go by in my research, and I ask you to take it with a grain of salt because I didn't research how it was arrived at, that NY was second with 184 billion, or 8.5%...again, that exact number could be wrong, but I do know California was on top.).
Now, back when I was a California resident, I quite happily paid my federal taxes, even knowing that most of it was going to go elsewhere, and help people from other states...because it was still helping people (minus the pork barrel, of course, but if you haven't come to terms with that, we've got bigger issues.). But when California needed a little help (and I don't feel I'm exaggerating TOO much to call even 6.9 billion "a little help", given the other numbers.) "Screw you, you can't have my money!"? W. T. F?
Now, there is a slightly more valid argument running around, which is that the bailout won't really fix things. That's absolutely true, it's a bandaid, designed to keep the state from going broke in order to give them enough time for 1) the budget to be juggled and 2) the recession to clear a little bit more. I can't see, however, that preventing the state government of almost 37 million people from going bankrupt is a bad thing...except, of course, that it's "dirty hippie Californian freeloaders.".
If the people in Utah are happy, what does it matter what the other 49 states think of them? That's what freedom is all about.
Of course if Utah came begging for a bailout, like what Greece and Ireland did in the EU, then I suggest we tell them "too bad" and let them figure it out by themselves. Same goes for California, New York, or any other state that overspent beyond their means. But overall I think Utah has been well-behaved and limited spending, and therefore doesn't deserve the criticism you aim at them.
In 2005 (the last year I could easily find number for) CA received 79 cents of federal spending for every federal tax dollar paid, NY was 78 cents and Utah was $1.07. To give you some framework for those numbers, CA works out to have sent ~$286,627,000,000 to the Federal Government, and received ~$242,023,000,000 dollars worth of federal funding. A disparity of 44 billion.
Who's bailing out who exactly?
Yes, it's absolutely possible to do better, however I would point out that there are a few key differences between Samsø and Roatán.
First, Samsø has a population of 4,300 according to wikipedia, whereas Roatán has a popultation of 30,000 according to wikipedia, and depending on who you talk to around here, the estimates go as high as 90,000 (The concept of a census is only loosely applied here.)
Second, the PPP GDP of Denmark is ~200B (Per capita ~31K), while the GDP of Honduras is ~15B, (Per capita ~3K).
Finally the conversion to wind power of Samsø was (as I understand it), largely funded by grants from the Danish Government, while for various lingering political reasons Roatán (and the bay islands in general) are the red headed step-children of Honduras.
So, to summarize, Samsø has at most 1/6th of the people to provide power to, has per capita income approximately 10x greater, and the government was actually willing to spend some of that money on the island.
This is more apples to oranges than apples to apples.
Here's a cite for you: The island I live on has (almost) all of it's power provided by RECO, using Wärtsilä generators (disregarding the very low adoption of PV and wind, and the couple of gas stations that run their own generators).
According to the first link, RECO burns 15,000 gallons of diesel a day providing the power for this island, according to the second, it's one of 1550 such power plants around the world (specificly using Wärtsilä generators.).
Now, as you pointed out, this is a rather expensive way to go for power generation, but it's certainly done. Of course, the reason this makes any sense if because this is a relatively small island 50 miles off the coast of Honduras, we can't afford the infrastructure needed for a more efficient means of power generation.
Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, I will note that RECO was recently (3 or 4 years ago) bought out by an investor who has been investing massive amounts of money into it, and once he's done bringing the distribution infrastructure up to snuff, he's announced plans to change over to biomass generation.
In a healthcare setting, you're both legally (in most countries) and ethically (In any country) bound to protect a patient's information.
Passing information to a cloud that swears in their EULA that your information will be protected might be sufficient to get you off the hook for the legal obligation when the odds catch up with you and the cloud is hacked, but it won't get you off the ethical hook.
Seriously? You found the bashing of the iPhone 4 odd?
Well, welcome to slashdot, I guess, in a couple of weeks, you'll get the lay of the land.
Here's a hint: Apple, Microsoft, the RIAA, and sort of law enforcement = bad and should be flamed immediately and hard, Linux and really any variety of FOSS = good and should be praised heavily. Any news story which doesn't actually have anything to do with any of the above will eventually be twisted around until it does and the flaming/fanboidom can begin.
Oh, and you can never go wrong with a comment about how this isn't news for nerds, and slashdot is no longer what it was/is supposed to be...oh and don't forget to mention that kdawson is an idiot.
The sad part is, since moving to Honduras, that just looks like a power pole to me, I had to go back up to look at it to see what you meant.
Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota? Or a conservative move that bucks the trend of saving money and encouraging open government and transparency by aligning philosophy and practice with at least the option of utilizing open source software?
I honestly cannot think of a more charged way of asking that question that doesn't involve out and out stating conspiracy theories (rather than just hinting at them), or vulgarities.
./ ferchristsake. It's not like it'll be hard to get support for anti-Microsoft OR pro-FOSS, let alone both of them.
This is
Oh oh! An opportunity to be pedantic on /.! These so rarely come up!
The first jeeps were actually produced by Willys-Overland (Assuming we're disregarding the prototype built by the American Bantum Corp, who after producing a better design than Willys, was deemed of an insufficient size to produce the volume that the military wanted, and thus their design was given to Willys to produce, and ABC was awarded a contract to build the trailers for what would later become the Jeep and other vehicles.)
It wasn't until after it was decided that Willys wasn't large enough to meet the demand either that Ford was granted a license to build the vehicles to the Willys designs, and were effectively identical, except for minor markings.
Okay, that's my limit of pontification for right now. I thus decline the title of impostor, and pass it to you.
Oh come now, that's the wrong question, everyone knows the right question is "What year Jeep you got?"
The rest of the vehicle line are just impostors.
Just tangentially, but Google and everyone else lists the existence of No Name Uno Rd in Gilroy, CA.
Of course, in their defense, that's the actual name of the actual road there.
I don't know whether to applaud the effort you put into that, or thwap you over the head for the rather bad pun.
I take that back, I do know.
Com'ere, I have my thwaping hand ready.
Seriously though, starting at a light source from short distance can't be good for your brain any more than it is for your eyes. The last time I went on vacation, I didn't even bring my laptop with me, and my mind felt a lot sharper at the end of the week.
Here's a thought, how about after your next vacation, you use some of your new found mental acuity to ponder the relationship between correlation and causation?
At a guess, what you're talking about is Molybdenum-99, which is a parent isotope of Technetium-99, which is a beta emitter used extensively in radiopharmaceuticals. While it is mined in the US, Canada has much bigger deposits (as do a few other places).
I appreciate the thought, but even if the computers weren't stolen originally, they probably have by now. And even if they haven't, they've been sitting essentially unprotected on the sea side for a year and a half, they've probably been ruined by now.
As far as the bribery goes, believe me, that thought occurred to us. We made the approaches to a few people, but got no bites.
Could spawn a whole new generation of medical accessories for smartphones/PCs..
I can't find a link to the commercial product off hand, but quite a while ago (in the time frame of tech), there was an EKG unit that was designed to work with Palm pilots (To give you an idea of how long ago this was, I'm relatively certain it was designed to work with Palm IIIs).
Now, I can't directly speak to how accurate it was, since this was well before I got into health care, so I didn't know what I was looking at, but I know a couple of people (One a doctor, the other a NP) who had them and liked them. (They also only did three leads, which are only really useful for diagnosis of arrhythmias, rather than MIs, so they wouldn't have to have had anywhere near the kind of accuracy that a 12-lead has to have.)
It's not even CLOSE to trivial to bring in expensive and bulky equipment to the third world.
I live and volunteer in Honduras, and when one of the projects I work with needs something, one of the primary constraints is how do we get it here. Any piece of equipment that can do the same job and can be brought in with airline luggage will ALWAYS be preferable to something that have to be shipped.
A couple of examples: Someone was kind enough to donate 20 complete new computes (monitor, keyboard etc) to one of the schools I work with. They even paid for shipping it down here. This was a year and a half ago, the container they came in is still sitting at the port it came in to, we could never get customs to clear the shipment. (The general assumption is that they were stolen and customs won't clear it so we don't find out.)
Second example: The medevac service I work with has a Sikorsky S62A, one of very few in the world that still fly. They needed a couple of brackets for the steps, nothing fancy, total cost when new: about 15 bucks, but it's not something you can go down and pick up at the corner store. The owners of the helicopter had a few of them in Australia that they picked up surplus off the USCG when they retired the fleet. So the service paid to have them shipped in, total cost counting shipping and customs: just under 1000USD.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the third world just doesn't work anything close to they way you think it does. If, for whatever reason I needed to bring in equipment to fit people for lenses, and I had the option of a donated piece of professional equipment vs a iPhone that I had to raise money for, I'd pick the iPhone every time.
Umm, kdawson posted something without be flamed as being a moron. All of his other posts I've read the comments for contain at least one, usually more like 5+ which state that he's a waste of oxygen who never has, nor ever will contribute anything of value to this site of "News for Nerds" .So, to help correct this oversight, I will provide the following:
kdawson was all like "I r smrt!", but we know to hear him going all like "I r....durr...what?". Now get off my lawn.
This covers my membership dues to the groupthink, right?
How about, STOP SPENDING SO MUCH MONEY?
8 words : Ballot measures making a lot of spending mandatory.
6 more words : Super-majority required for tax increases.
People vote for ballot measures for spending, but then vote against the tax increases to pay for it.
So, 2005 was the last year I could conveniently find (read 10 seconds of googling) numbers for, but according to taxfoundation.org, in 2005, CA sent ~$286,627,000,000 to the Federal Government, on the other hand they received ~$242,023,000,000 dollars worth of federal funding.
I'd just like to note that this represents a 44.6 billion dollar disparity.
Of course, the withdrawal of that money from the federal budget would mean the effective collapse of numerous other states (I started to add up the numbers, but frankly, I'm too lazy.)