It seems to me that "upstate" NY should separate from NYC; NYC should join with west CT and northern NJ (and maybe west MA and a small bit of PA) and form a new state called "Hudson".
The old 38 States proposal seems like a good starting point for breaking things up along lines of regional culture (though things have changed in the 40 years since they came up with this, so it needs a bit of revision); after that, the new states can self-organize into a handful of larger nations.
Breaking up Canada and adding that to the mix isn't a bad idea either. I'll bet the Quebecois would like to be independent, and as you point out, Ontario really has more in common with MI and OH than with QC and BC. BC could join up with OR and WA. And NB and NS could join with ME, NH and VT.
A federal government with a much lighter footprint than what we have today could serve the *actual* common interest of the 50 states well. That was the original idea, after all, and it did reasonably well for approaching 200 years. Then the feds started seizing more power from the states, and the states did nothing about it because they're dependent on big-daddy government's pocket-book.
No, the original idea didn't work out at all. They tried the small-central-government thing and it fell apart in around 15 years, so they had to scrap that idea and write the Constitution. Then the federal government started seizing more power from the states right away, with one big milestone being the Civil War, where states were not allowed to leave the union peacefully and a bloody war ensued to keep them in line.
Face it, you're never going to get the small federal government you dream of. It's been tried before and it never works.
Sorry, forgot about that one. Ecotopia sounds cool too, however. You guys need to step up your efforts to flee the sinking show however. You'll also need to do some extra work to get N-CA to break away from S-CA. Also, be careful with ID; there's a lot of nuts over there, so you might not want them in your country.
Our dear leader jails whistleblowers (after promising more transparency and protection for whistleblowers), wants to keep cannabis illegal even though many states want to legalize it, and he defended the DOMA.
And at least Putin is honest about his intentions, instead of saying one thing to get elected and doing the exact opposite afterwards.
If you really think the Southern states are going to turn into East Germany and put up a wall, I think you're smoking something. Remember, all those people down there still think they're "true Americans", "freedom lovers", etc., they just think that women shouldn't be able to make decisions for themselves and that their version of Christianity should be the national religion.
Yeah, let's go back to the days when states could decide that people with dark skin couldn't sit at the same table as people with light skin.
This is a rather idiotic argument. Northern, liberal states are not going to go back to the days of segregation and all that crap when they're free of the Southerners and their voting habits. Now, the Southern states may very well do that, but that's not our problem. It's not our job to save everyone from themselves, and you can't when you give those people the power to vote, because then you're always fighting over whether progressive or regressive values should be instituted in government policy. If you really want to prevent the Southerners from doing that stuff, you'd advocate breaking the country into separate regions, with people in the backwards parts being denied the right to vote, and basically being a territory of the other regions but with no political power at all, and being forced to live under laws that the rest of us have decided are good for them. You can argue in favor of this, but it's certainly not democratic in any way, plus it breeds resentment and eventually separatist violence. The only peaceful way for the non-backwards states to be free of the voters in the backwards states is to set them free, and for us to go our own ways.
The idea that state governments are more friendly to liberty than the federal government can only be entertained by someone ignorant of historical and political reality.
No, you're the one who's entirely ignorant, of even current events. Has the Federal government made marijuana legal yet? No, but several states have: WA and CO for starters, plus lots of other states have decriminalized it or legalized medicinal uses. It took state governments to make real progress on this issue and work towards stopping Prohibition 2.0; but the Federal government is holding us back, largely because of backwards states that maintain power in Congress. State governments are much more friendly to liberty than the Federal government, and this proves it.
So what if they re-implement Jim Crow? Those states have been holding the rest of us back for many decades; it's time to cut them loose. We can't have any real progress as long as the people in those states have the same voting power as the rest of us. Sure, I feel sorry for the people who will become victims in those states, and to help remedy that, the more advanced states should have immigration programs set up to help get those people out of those states, so the Jim Crow lovers can all live there with each other and watch their economies implode. Note: this does not mean open immigration is a good idea. It is not. We have to be extremely selective of all applicants. If we just allow open immigration from the backwards regions, then what'll happen is all the oppressed groups (non-stupid women, minorities) will try to come here first (which is fine, we like most of them), but after the economy there starts imploding, the poorer Jim Crow voters will start abandoning the place too, coming to the more advanced states, and dragging them down with their stupid voting habits. Democracy doesn't work when you let a bunch of people who disagree with you on everything move in with you and vote against you, and make your country as bad as the country they left. Those people are to stupid to understand it's their own cultural ways and voting habits that made their homeland such a cesspool.
Sounds good in theory, but didn't work in practice. See: The Articles of Confederation. They tried this before, and it was a disaster. Plus, 50 separate countries negotiating treaties among them is horrifically inefficient.
What we need, instead, is to break the country up into about 5-10 regional republics, each mostly or completely autonomous, but with a Shengen-like (but not EU-like) free trade agreement among most or all of them (if one of the new countries turns into a fundie Christian version of Iran, then the others should probably kick it out and hit it with trade sanctions). There's no reason for Rhode Island, for instance, to be a separate country, however, if it combined with Connecticut and Massachusetts, that'd be a decent-size country. Or maybe the whole northeast should join into a single country (New England plus NY, NJ, eastern PA).
Larger countries have more trading and economic power than small countries, however they also are more susceptible to corruption because of the corrupting influence of concentrated power. So we need to break things apart, but not too small.
I'm all for the breakup of the US, and have written about it many times here, but that's absolutely the wrong answer. The 50 states are mostly too small to exist on their own as viable nations (except for California and Texas) without being part of some kind of union, the way small European countries have banded together into a union to increase their trading and economic power and reduce the frictional losses of having separate currencies and economies and having trade barriers.
The answer is to break the US up into a handful of smaller nations: maybe 5-10, not 50. The states need to all secede, and then band together into regional republics with nearby like-minded states. For instance, the southeast ("Southern") states should probably form their own country; they've been wanting to do that for 160 years now. Although these days I'm not sure they'll want Florida with them, though they might want to break it in half and keep the northern part, while giving the southern part to Cuba. The northeast states (including New England) should probably form a separate country; though if they can't all get along, surely NH, VT, and ME would want to join together, while MA, CT, and RI would want to also join together. The pacific northwest states of OR and WA should also join together, and maybe they could get northern CA (maybe including the Bay Area, maybe not) to join them; they might also want to join with part of ID and WY, and maybe they could get British Columbia to leave Canada and join them into a country called "Ecotopia". The Dakotas and parts of WY and MT could also form their own country of "Lakota" as they've been wanting to do for a while. Now of course, all these new countries can also have their own "states" or administrative regions within them, whether using today's boundaries or better yet, redrawing many of them since many of today's state boundaries were very badly chosen, frequently by just drawing an arbitrary straight line on a map (see the western states esp.) rather than taking into account regional/local cultures.
But you're absolutely right: democracy simply does not work in large countries. There's too much internal friction, too much power, and too much corruption.
For sites that want to foster honest discussion, I say strip away the moderation and 'reputation' systems, and leave it anonymous
This doesn't work. Then all messages are seen by viewers, with no filtering at all, and viewers have to wade through tons of troll and flamebait posts and other inanity, hoping to see a few good messages. The viewers get sick of it and go elsewhere. Not having any kind of moderation lets trolls run rampant, and scare away the users you want to have.
Of course, the problem with community moderation is that you end up with popular views being elevated and unpopular views being hidden and deemed "trolls". But it's better than no moderation at all. There's really no way to fix this situation, except to eliminate community moderation and switch to professional moderation: you have to hire a team of people to read all the posts and moderate them, according to the standards and policies you decide on. Of course, this is really expensive, so no one does it.
Yes, of course the UK has crap, I'm sure every country does. However, there's some small amount of good stuff. Here in the US, there is no good stuff. The Simpsons? Really? Do you have any idea how old that show is? It's completely worn out now. Friends? That show has been canceled for ages. What are you going to do now, cite Star Trek from 1967 or The Twilight Zone from 1959? I'm talking about modern shows, still airing, stuff you can watch right now on over-the-air (freely available) TV in the US, not excellent shows in our distant history. The US can't ride on its historical achievements forever.
No, the UK has a lot of dreck, and a few really good shows. The US has a lot of dreck, and that's it. There are no good shows in the US. (Before you say something about Game of Thrones, that's an international show made in Europe; what's more that's only on high-end pay TV, I think it's more fair to compare the regular channels' offerings).
My favorite example comparing the two is Gordon Ramsey's "Kitchen Nightmares" show. There's a version for the UK, and a version for the US (on Fox). The UK version is quiet and thoughtful, goes into detail about the food, doesn't show him yelling at everyone, etc. The US version is drama, drama, drama, and lots of noise and fast edits.
I live next to Manhattan, and see a lot of people there making only $40-60k. Heck, I saw one job advertised there recently that only paid $400/week for a pretty serious legal secretarial position. How anyone could survive in Manhattan on $400/week, I have no idea, but this seems to be the trend with jobs these days.
Wow, that is a BIG assumption right there. Pretty sure a Tesla dealership is going to charge considerably more for maintenance than a local garage. And very few local garages around here can work on Teslas.
No, it's not a BIG assumption, in fact it's probably the other way around: the Tesla will have lower maintenance costs. Exactly what maintenance do you think an electric car needs anyway? There's no oil to change, no radiator fluid, no power steering fluid, no spark plugs, there's really nothing that needs to be looked at for 100k miles. You might want to change the brake fluid at 100k miles, but that's no different than on any other car (the Tesla uses a pretty standard hydraulic brake system with ABS), you might need to change the brake pads at that time too (but with it being electric, and having regenerative braking, it probably doesn't go through pads as much as a regular car; it uses standard Brembo pads anyway which you can get on the internet for not too much money). The only thing I'd worry about is the air suspension system. The A/C might need servicing after 10 years or so too, but again that's no different than any other car.
Like which cars? The only way I think that's achievable is with air struts. I've seen adjustable ride control on crappy American cars for many years, but that's a crap solution because all they do is change the damping rate of the shocks (dampers), which does nothing to change the spring rate. Springs and shocks need to always be in tune with each other so you get properly dampened oscillation, rather than overdamping or underdamping (classic crappy American car ride). So the only way to change both rates simultaneously is by eliminating the springs altogether and replacing them with air struts, such as those from "Praxxis". I believe the Tesla Model S has something like this, judging by what I've seen on the car skeleton in their showroom, but that car is hardly typical by any standard.
Maybe, but looking at the quality of the sidewalks in my town, I think we'd be much better off using Roman concrete for them than whatever they're using now.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that "upstate" NY should separate from NYC; NYC should join with west CT and northern NJ (and maybe west MA and a small bit of PA) and form a new state called "Hudson".
The old 38 States proposal seems like a good starting point for breaking things up along lines of regional culture (though things have changed in the 40 years since they came up with this, so it needs a bit of revision); after that, the new states can self-organize into a handful of larger nations.
Breaking up Canada and adding that to the mix isn't a bad idea either. I'll bet the Quebecois would like to be independent, and as you point out, Ontario really has more in common with MI and OH than with QC and BC. BC could join up with OR and WA. And NB and NS could join with ME, NH and VT.
As much as I'd like that, you'd really need a new actor because Takei has unfortunately gotten too old for the part.
The US population is quite a bit larger now than it was 31 years ago. A larger population means more potential customers.
While shooting and punching certainly aren't peaceful, screwing seems like a nice, peaceful way of handling diplomatic relations....
A federal government with a much lighter footprint than what we have today could serve the *actual* common interest of the 50 states well. That was the original idea, after all, and it did reasonably well for approaching 200 years. Then the feds started seizing more power from the states, and the states did nothing about it because they're dependent on big-daddy government's pocket-book.
No, the original idea didn't work out at all. They tried the small-central-government thing and it fell apart in around 15 years, so they had to scrap that idea and write the Constitution. Then the federal government started seizing more power from the states right away, with one big milestone being the Civil War, where states were not allowed to leave the union peacefully and a bloody war ensued to keep them in line.
Face it, you're never going to get the small federal government you dream of. It's been tried before and it never works.
You're telling me there's a big difference between CT culture and MA or RI culture? How about NY culture?
I'm sorry, but compared to MS or FL or TX or CA or AK, you guys are all the same.
You're willing to take on responsibility for Detroit? Chicago is a big mess too, I'm not sure you want that either.
Sorry, forgot about that one. Ecotopia sounds cool too, however. You guys need to step up your efforts to flee the sinking show however. You'll also need to do some extra work to get N-CA to break away from S-CA. Also, be careful with ID; there's a lot of nuts over there, so you might not want them in your country.
Our dear leader jails whistleblowers (after promising more transparency and protection for whistleblowers), wants to keep cannabis illegal even though many states want to legalize it, and he defended the DOMA.
And at least Putin is honest about his intentions, instead of saying one thing to get elected and doing the exact opposite afterwards.
If you really think the Southern states are going to turn into East Germany and put up a wall, I think you're smoking something. Remember, all those people down there still think they're "true Americans", "freedom lovers", etc., they just think that women shouldn't be able to make decisions for themselves and that their version of Christianity should be the national religion.
Yeah, let's go back to the days when states could decide that people with dark skin couldn't sit at the same table as people with light skin.
This is a rather idiotic argument. Northern, liberal states are not going to go back to the days of segregation and all that crap when they're free of the Southerners and their voting habits. Now, the Southern states may very well do that, but that's not our problem. It's not our job to save everyone from themselves, and you can't when you give those people the power to vote, because then you're always fighting over whether progressive or regressive values should be instituted in government policy. If you really want to prevent the Southerners from doing that stuff, you'd advocate breaking the country into separate regions, with people in the backwards parts being denied the right to vote, and basically being a territory of the other regions but with no political power at all, and being forced to live under laws that the rest of us have decided are good for them. You can argue in favor of this, but it's certainly not democratic in any way, plus it breeds resentment and eventually separatist violence. The only peaceful way for the non-backwards states to be free of the voters in the backwards states is to set them free, and for us to go our own ways.
The idea that state governments are more friendly to liberty than the federal government can only be entertained by someone ignorant of historical and political reality.
No, you're the one who's entirely ignorant, of even current events. Has the Federal government made marijuana legal yet? No, but several states have: WA and CO for starters, plus lots of other states have decriminalized it or legalized medicinal uses. It took state governments to make real progress on this issue and work towards stopping Prohibition 2.0; but the Federal government is holding us back, largely because of backwards states that maintain power in Congress. State governments are much more friendly to liberty than the Federal government, and this proves it.
So what if they re-implement Jim Crow? Those states have been holding the rest of us back for many decades; it's time to cut them loose. We can't have any real progress as long as the people in those states have the same voting power as the rest of us. Sure, I feel sorry for the people who will become victims in those states, and to help remedy that, the more advanced states should have immigration programs set up to help get those people out of those states, so the Jim Crow lovers can all live there with each other and watch their economies implode. Note: this does not mean open immigration is a good idea. It is not. We have to be extremely selective of all applicants. If we just allow open immigration from the backwards regions, then what'll happen is all the oppressed groups (non-stupid women, minorities) will try to come here first (which is fine, we like most of them), but after the economy there starts imploding, the poorer Jim Crow voters will start abandoning the place too, coming to the more advanced states, and dragging them down with their stupid voting habits. Democracy doesn't work when you let a bunch of people who disagree with you on everything move in with you and vote against you, and make your country as bad as the country they left. Those people are to stupid to understand it's their own cultural ways and voting habits that made their homeland such a cesspool.
Sounds good in theory, but didn't work in practice. See: The Articles of Confederation. They tried this before, and it was a disaster. Plus, 50 separate countries negotiating treaties among them is horrifically inefficient.
What we need, instead, is to break the country up into about 5-10 regional republics, each mostly or completely autonomous, but with a Shengen-like (but not EU-like) free trade agreement among most or all of them (if one of the new countries turns into a fundie Christian version of Iran, then the others should probably kick it out and hit it with trade sanctions). There's no reason for Rhode Island, for instance, to be a separate country, however, if it combined with Connecticut and Massachusetts, that'd be a decent-size country. Or maybe the whole northeast should join into a single country (New England plus NY, NJ, eastern PA).
Larger countries have more trading and economic power than small countries, however they also are more susceptible to corruption because of the corrupting influence of concentrated power. So we need to break things apart, but not too small.
I'm all for the breakup of the US, and have written about it many times here, but that's absolutely the wrong answer. The 50 states are mostly too small to exist on their own as viable nations (except for California and Texas) without being part of some kind of union, the way small European countries have banded together into a union to increase their trading and economic power and reduce the frictional losses of having separate currencies and economies and having trade barriers.
The answer is to break the US up into a handful of smaller nations: maybe 5-10, not 50. The states need to all secede, and then band together into regional republics with nearby like-minded states. For instance, the southeast ("Southern") states should probably form their own country; they've been wanting to do that for 160 years now. Although these days I'm not sure they'll want Florida with them, though they might want to break it in half and keep the northern part, while giving the southern part to Cuba. The northeast states (including New England) should probably form a separate country; though if they can't all get along, surely NH, VT, and ME would want to join together, while MA, CT, and RI would want to also join together. The pacific northwest states of OR and WA should also join together, and maybe they could get northern CA (maybe including the Bay Area, maybe not) to join them; they might also want to join with part of ID and WY, and maybe they could get British Columbia to leave Canada and join them into a country called "Ecotopia". The Dakotas and parts of WY and MT could also form their own country of "Lakota" as they've been wanting to do for a while. Now of course, all these new countries can also have their own "states" or administrative regions within them, whether using today's boundaries or better yet, redrawing many of them since many of today's state boundaries were very badly chosen, frequently by just drawing an arbitrary straight line on a map (see the western states esp.) rather than taking into account regional/local cultures.
But you're absolutely right: democracy simply does not work in large countries. There's too much internal friction, too much power, and too much corruption.
Compared to our current leaders, Vladimir Putin is a good guy. That should say something about our current leaders, especially Obama.
For sites that want to foster honest discussion, I say strip away the moderation and 'reputation' systems, and leave it anonymous
This doesn't work. Then all messages are seen by viewers, with no filtering at all, and viewers have to wade through tons of troll and flamebait posts and other inanity, hoping to see a few good messages. The viewers get sick of it and go elsewhere. Not having any kind of moderation lets trolls run rampant, and scare away the users you want to have.
Of course, the problem with community moderation is that you end up with popular views being elevated and unpopular views being hidden and deemed "trolls". But it's better than no moderation at all. There's really no way to fix this situation, except to eliminate community moderation and switch to professional moderation: you have to hire a team of people to read all the posts and moderate them, according to the standards and policies you decide on. Of course, this is really expensive, so no one does it.
Yes, of course the UK has crap, I'm sure every country does. However, there's some small amount of good stuff. Here in the US, there is no good stuff. The Simpsons? Really? Do you have any idea how old that show is? It's completely worn out now. Friends? That show has been canceled for ages. What are you going to do now, cite Star Trek from 1967 or The Twilight Zone from 1959? I'm talking about modern shows, still airing, stuff you can watch right now on over-the-air (freely available) TV in the US, not excellent shows in our distant history. The US can't ride on its historical achievements forever.
We could build stuff just as durable as Roman buildings these days if we wanted to
No, we can't, because we don't know how to.
We're only just now discovering how Roman concrete was made:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-14/ancient-roman-concrete-is-about-to-revolutionize-modern-architecture
No, the UK has a lot of dreck, and a few really good shows. The US has a lot of dreck, and that's it. There are no good shows in the US. (Before you say something about Game of Thrones, that's an international show made in Europe; what's more that's only on high-end pay TV, I think it's more fair to compare the regular channels' offerings).
My favorite example comparing the two is Gordon Ramsey's "Kitchen Nightmares" show. There's a version for the UK, and a version for the US (on Fox). The UK version is quiet and thoughtful, goes into detail about the food, doesn't show him yelling at everyone, etc. The US version is drama, drama, drama, and lots of noise and fast edits.
I live next to Manhattan, and see a lot of people there making only $40-60k. Heck, I saw one job advertised there recently that only paid $400/week for a pretty serious legal secretarial position. How anyone could survive in Manhattan on $400/week, I have no idea, but this seems to be the trend with jobs these days.
From what I've read, they DID reset the tests a few years ago, raising the standards.
Wow, that is a BIG assumption right there. Pretty sure a Tesla dealership is going to charge considerably more for maintenance than a local garage. And very few local garages around here can work on Teslas.
No, it's not a BIG assumption, in fact it's probably the other way around: the Tesla will have lower maintenance costs. Exactly what maintenance do you think an electric car needs anyway? There's no oil to change, no radiator fluid, no power steering fluid, no spark plugs, there's really nothing that needs to be looked at for 100k miles. You might want to change the brake fluid at 100k miles, but that's no different than on any other car (the Tesla uses a pretty standard hydraulic brake system with ABS), you might need to change the brake pads at that time too (but with it being electric, and having regenerative braking, it probably doesn't go through pads as much as a regular car; it uses standard Brembo pads anyway which you can get on the internet for not too much money). The only thing I'd worry about is the air suspension system. The A/C might need servicing after 10 years or so too, but again that's no different than any other car.
Like which cars? The only way I think that's achievable is with air struts. I've seen adjustable ride control on crappy American cars for many years, but that's a crap solution because all they do is change the damping rate of the shocks (dampers), which does nothing to change the spring rate. Springs and shocks need to always be in tune with each other so you get properly dampened oscillation, rather than overdamping or underdamping (classic crappy American car ride). So the only way to change both rates simultaneously is by eliminating the springs altogether and replacing them with air struts, such as those from "Praxxis". I believe the Tesla Model S has something like this, judging by what I've seen on the car skeleton in their showroom, but that car is hardly typical by any standard.
Maybe, but looking at the quality of the sidewalks in my town, I think we'd be much better off using Roman concrete for them than whatever they're using now.