Mr.Tucker wrote:boldilocks wrote:Would you prefer racially homogenous? They are a people of a common genetic ancestry of a relatively small people in a limited geographical area. And I can assure you there is a swiss people.
I think we need a definition of the word "ethnicity" and "people".
An ethnicity is a bunch of persons with a common race and
language. A people or "nation" is an ethnicity that shares a common culture. Europeans divide along language (ethnic) lines rather than racial lines (which is more common in the US). Asia is it's own, extremely complicated thing....
You know, I've always been under the impression that an ethnicity was a bunch of people with a common
culture at least as much as race or language. Easy to see how race or language could foster a cultural divide, but just considering New England and the Carolinas in the US raises a question as to
how unifying race & language are.
Mr.Tucker wrote:boldilocks wrote:Carving california up into ethnically discrete blocks would probably improve conditions a great deal, especially if you could ensure a complete disconnect between rural and city politics. (Ie, ensured that one couldn't affect the others, with water rights belonging to the closest polity to the source of water, effectively giving rural areas control over the water supplies.)
I agree. The politics of it would be really complicated though....
Leave politics to the locals. Allocate north/south/center groups, decide on one county or city to be emblematic for each, run some affinity polls. Don't assign counties directly to the group that the have the highest affinity with, but instead use transition counties to lay out lines, grow the allocated areas out by some rule or another (probably start with the strictest rule first, and shift to more relaxed rules every time there are left-over counties), then adjust to match with whatever natural boundaries exist.
Maybe move eastern California entirely into Nevada, since the area within three counties of the coast is apparently culturally distinct from everywhere further east.
Mr.Tucker wrote:boldilocks wrote:Oh I don't agree with that at all. American cities have grown increasingly bold in their arrogance, and I've noted the same problem locally in my own country.
It's where we are in the tech tree. It's a cycle. Look at history: the first cities sprung up in the wake of the Chalcolithic, in the various cradles of civilization (India, Mesopotamia, etc) and developed into hydraulic states that build the first kingdoms on the backs of bronze and chariots. They ruled the world for nearly 3000 years, before collapsing in the Bronze Age Collapse, due to the popularization of iron tools and weaponry (which is far more readily available), leading to a 1000 year period where they became insignificant and rural lives were prevalent.
As I recall, this just isn't true. Specifically, I understand the popularization of iron to have come
after the collapse, rather than at it's beginning. I consider it more likely that the "Sea Peoples" were both emblematic and a transition-product of a generalized systems collapse, resulting from just enough "spark" reaching centuries-developed "tinder, kindling, and wood".
Incidentally, iron had apparently been in minor use for centuries before the collapse seems to have started, and apparently wouldn't be comparable to bronze in quality until the Roman Empire. The shift to iron is almost guaranteed to have been a side-effect (the tin required for bronze originated from a fairly small number of sites, so if trade routes disappeared, so did your bronze), rather than a cause.
Mr.Tucker wrote:Then the Classical ancient city-states rose up and once again power was vested in the cities, who now had the ability to build empires due to advancement in technology. These city states once again collaped as the introduction of steel and horsemanship lead to them becoming prime targets. They stayed down for the rest of most modern history, before once again being on the upswing today.
As far as the collapse of Rome goes (if you're talking about something other than Rome, then please clarify), that's another case of multi-factor collapse. If I had to point to any one thing, I'd point to either disease (one of the old pandemics is suspected to have swept through the western empire a bit before it really collapsed), practicality (the empire was probably just too big), or misunderstanding (the Roman Empire didn't fully collapse until the fall of the Byzantines).
There's seriously a lot of factors though (cities are more vulnerable to disease, you need the ability to feed and water those people, how vulnerable are you to war, etc.).
Mr.Tucker wrote:It's a pattern that gets reproduced anywhere there is technological advancement (though with different flavors; the Americas never really progressed beyond the Neolithic, but rather developed that specific strain of technology to a high level).
The Americas are a pretty good example. The Americas had plenty of cities, but many of them kept collapsing. For the Maya, it seems to have been a mixture of droughts and war (again & again). For the Aztecs, I'm sure they had some droughts, but my understanding is that they basically just had a war (when they relocated to modern Mexico City), then got hit by the Spanish after they'd recovered. For the Inca, the Empire was something like 100 - 200 years old, and had seemingly developed what Communists like to pretend Communism results in. In the case of most of the others, I understand it to pretty much be the same as the Maya (+ some transitions into different cultures... the Olmecs I think it was?). In the case of the Amazonian "Cities of Gold" (spoiler alert: the buildings were covered with thatching that looked golden), we can be pretty certain that it was disease.
And for North America, it seems like everywhere either didn't allow for further expansion, or kept killing everyone with a mega-drought every 500 years or so (Europe collapsed
once in the last 2000 years, the US East to Plains seem to have done it
twice).
Mr.Tucker wrote:Modern technology and economics relies, above all else, on human capital, and cities, by their very nature offer that in spades. Technology has advanced to the point where they can also be self-sufficient (large scale desalination, solar, wind and nuclear, vertical farming, in-vitro meat, and other such technologies; cities are affluent enough to build those) to a larger extent. Human are gregarious, and modern communications and transport have made them even more-so. It's where our path takes us (and it'll be even more prevalent in space; rural communities are impossible in space per se). We can protest, but that didn't help Rome or the Chinese Principalities, did it?...
The upshot is that urban centered periods tended to be quite good development periods (some rural centered ones were as well, but to a lesser extent).
And today, the very technology that makes cities possible is also undermining their utility. I don't know the "natural" size of New York City and San Francisco Bay nowadays, but I do know one thing: transport (cars), communications (internet, phones, etc.), and accessibility (e.g. Fed-Ex) mean that their "natural population" today is lower than it was 50 years ago. For a "natural population", you take intrinsic factors (New York City and San Francisco Bay are both ports, so their "intrinsic habitability" is automatically going to be higher than neighboring non-port areas), calculate in side-effects (the services used to support the port will automatically make it easier to live there than at neighboring non-port locations, unless artificially constrained), and that gets you what you should expect if everything were being magically placed in the most sensible location: it doesn't get you some of the largest modern cities, because their legacy populations push them above their natural numbers (a stereotypical example is the cost of living in New York City: it's really only achievable because of the legacy population; the city would still be highly populous, but the current population is overdoing it).
As for space, if you're defining rural in contrast to urban, then there's no particular reason that space can't be rural. I've never heard of anyone say that a space colony needs over 500 people to be viable
while still accessible to other colonies , and I also haven't heard anyone describe 500 people as urban. For that matter, you could probably run a small habitat station with 5-50 people once things developed (or even 1 person, if you were feeling stupid that day), since most of the work will be checking redundant systems to make sure the self-diagnostics are working right, and occasionally re-top some supply hoppers. Rural space only becomes impossible if buildings are your objection.
Krulle wrote:boldilocks wrote:Krulle wrote:Yeah, I remember that oil makes about 20% of Russian economy directly. (old stat, higher oilprices usually also translate tohigher percentages....)
Any dollar down in barrel price hits directly, as the remaining industry and services are relying on oil-industry employees spending their income.
Indirect effects taken into account, the oil industry is more than half or the Russian economy.
Is that why they're pushing into gas? As I recall they're mostly raw natural resources. I think putin himself described russia as effectively a third world economy.
They're pushing gas, because European green parties think that CO2 from gas is less bad for the environment than CO2 from oil.....
Well, in the greenie's defense, Methane (primary constituent of "natural gas") is
much easier to produce than other hydrocarbons. If anything, Methane is the default. So, if your ideology calls for moving to carbon-neutral, or even carbon-negative, then Natural Gas is a good choice, because it makes the
transition easier. There's certainly a lot of fuss about batteries, but they just won't be a viable replacement for localized combustion among a lot of Earth's population for decades, because they're just going to be too expensive. By going to Natural Gas, at least you're using something that itself can realistically make an easy transition. That in turn makes it easier to achieve your goals in the mid-term, while you work on your long-term fixes.
Short-term's probably been realistically impossible since somewhere around the Carter administration. He or someone else around the same time needed to do much better with...
something, solar-power-satellites or whatever, but
something.
Swindle1984 wrote:With the electoral college, you avoid the same scenario of the rest of Illinois being dominated by and resenting Chicago writ large on a national scale. Rather than presidential elections being a popularity contest (which the founders wanted to avoid strongly), it basically gave the power to the states themselves. If Nebraska, with its rather sparse (in comparison) population collectively votes for Candidate A, then Nebraska's representatives in the electoral college vote for Candidate A. What this does is force candidates to campaign in all fifty states and try to appeal to the populations of as many states as possible, even rural"flyover country" that is openly despised by big city liberals on the coasts. If it was purely a popularity contest, with whoever won the most popular votes becoming president, nobody would ever have to campaign outside of California and New York (and one or two others, but those are the most crucial), and the other 48 states can go screw themselves. Being as they started a revolution over the whole "no taxation without representation" thing (technically, the colonies were represented in Parliament, but not by anyone they had selected to represent them, nor by anyone who actually cared about and campaigned on behalf of their interests.), the founding fathers weren't eager to let one or two states (or cities) decide who got to rule over everyone else, so they set up the electoral college to ensure every state got an equal say in the election, regardless of their size, and had their interests catered to rather than ignored.
The current controversy over the electoral college basically exists because the Democrats lost the last election and still haven't gotten over it. When Obama won, they were cheering on the electoral college. Now they want to get rid of it because it made them lose this one. I'm sure we'd hear similar grumblings from the Republicans if the shoe were on the other foot.
Eh, I sorta disagree.
The Electoral College wasn't supposed to work the way that we use it, it's just that it's been so long that noone remembers.
The Electoral College is supposed to work on the same model as Congress. Instead of being a direct democracy, it's supposed to be representative. You can point at the Electors and say that it's still the case, but Electors were supposed to exist in the
absence of political parties. Instead of going up to represent what their voters had already decided, they were supposed to negotiate with other Electors. In the first two presidential elections, you weren't supposed to vote for President
at all, instead you voted for
Negotiator. As the political parties were created, and grew in power, this became corrupted and forgotten, resulting in the current situation, where the Electoral College is effectively a direct vote where some people have more voting power than others, rather than the genuinely different system that it was intended to be.
Just as well, I suppose. It's hard to imagine the original system properly working without a lucky outlier like George Washington anyways.
Swindle1984 wrote:"The form of government I advocate for is the best one when it's executed 'properly'" is a line of argument that vindicates every single form of government.
Except communism. Even on paper, it doesn't work. As often as I hear the tired excuse of "that wasn't
real communism", all you have to do is take exactly what Marx's proposals were and ask
how you implement "real" communism without it failing or turning into a dystopian nightmare. They can't answer you. Doesn't work, except in fantasy where you get to handwave whatever you want into being.
I can think of ways, but all involve my own definition (my standard response to things like "that wasn't
real communism" is to drag out the references, disembowel them in the street, and make doilies from the entrails: for Communism, I go solely with "the workers own the means of production", and throw the related "communal ownership" under "Communalism", since it makes sense), two are "embrace the dystopia", and the third is literally just
allowing 100%-employee-owned companies while otherwise keeping Communism
out of the government. I'm certain that Pol Pot considered himself a quite successful Communist while things were going well for him, and Mao seemed to think that it was all ok as long as everyone else was doing what
he said.
Swindle1984 wrote:You make it sound like most Californians are in your opinion nutjobs, if had their way war declarations would be the result?
California is desperately trying to [snip]
California is insane.
I think you give California too much credit, so I removed the bit I think you're wrong about: it's all insanity, almost 0% is planned. California's state mental disease is metaphorically Multiple Personality Disorder. There's multiple drivers, and they're all controlling something different at the same time. You only need to look at the blackouts in the 1990s & their causes to see this in practice.
Swindle1984 wrote:And they keep fleeing the high taxes, high crime, and Orwellian legislation for other states... that they then immediately try to turn into California 2.0 by demanding the exact same shit they fled from in the first place.
Agreed. Some folks worry about illegal immigration, but those of us who've been here for a while are better armed :p . What worries me genuinely is Californians & similar Left Coasters, fleeing their homes without fleeing their behaviors. Frankly, my state's drift to Anarchism is enough, we don't need the philosophically-deafblind screaming in our ears at the same time.
Swindle1984 wrote:They've thoroughly infested the capital of my state, they're moving into my city in droves and driving up property values
They don't need to move in. I know of a spot owned by a Californian who demands California prices: not only is it in the wrong town, but the location is honestly a pain because traffic's too fast there.
Swindle1984 wrote:insane policies like trying to ban cars from downtown to reduce pollution,
I can think or somewhere I'd like to ban cars from, but that's just because Bricktown is an inscrutable maze, not because of pollution.