Now if you've going to be revoking citizenship rights, maybe start with the people who design that curriculum.
Debate on the U.S.'s long term strategic and technological goals in an increasingly multi-polar world.
- Thread starter Free-Stater 101
- Start date
Now if you've going to be revoking citizenship rights, maybe start with the people who design that curriculum.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
With regard to de-urbanization, it's not necessary or helpful to do so in a general capacity. What needs to go are ultra-dense metropoli, where people are packed so tightly that simply commuting for work is an hour or longer slog.
Small and medium sized cities are fine, and meet the economic requirements better than megacities like New York.
Small and medium sized cities are fine, and meet the economic requirements better than megacities like New York.
Aaron Fox
Well-known member
The thing is, you'll need that high population density to even have a hope to maintain modern life. Last I've checked, you need a population density on the order of 2k/sq. mile minimum to keep everything we need for a modern civilization functioning.
Due to that having runaway effect, the only way you can prevent it is complete and utter disregard of freedom of movement.
OK, you're gonna have to back those facts up somehow.
Aaron Fox
Well-known member
My Google-fu is bad but I distinctly remember it with a thread in SB talking about making public transport or hospitals better. I'll try to find it but I can't promise you anything.
Blasterbot
Well-known member
why? ultra dense cities require more resources, are more expensive to live in or get anything out of, barely make anything at this point since we outsourced everything to china. just they are awful. people should spread out for their own good. if they want to be miserable and live on top of each other that is their prerogative but I see no appeal.
edit: in addition the cities are heavily dependent on importing resources and energy adding additional expenses. getting food into cities more efficiently is a huge issue. getting energy in there is another. we aren't able to get more nuclear, no more anything related to fossil fuels. solar and wind work only sometimes and we lack the capacitor tech to store the energy between the high and low points. this is unsustainable and needs to be addressed.
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Aaron Fox
Well-known member
That isn't entirely the case, last I've checked. You forget that industry hasn't been a primary money-maker since the 1970s (i.e. when computers took off) and that farming/mining hasn't been a money-maker since the 19th century when the 2nd Industrial Revolution started to get into gear. It has been the service industry that replaced it... and those need quite a bit of population to sustain alongside their support structures and industries.
While Stand on Zanzibar had a good idea about how bad it can get for humans psychologically when you start cramming people at extreme levels (and, no, New York City isn't at that level, we've tested it in prison populations and the equivalent population is far higher than what is in NYC, I'll have to read it again but its something on the order of a few thousand more than what NYC has for population density)... but it forgot that humans have similar horrid reactions psychologically when the population density is too low... which is what we've been seeing in rural America.
In addition, your last comment isn't unusual, it's historical. By and large, no sort of settlement has been self-sufficient, and while exceptions exist, they are just that, exceptions. Or have you forgotten your history and geology? I mean the Bronze Age civilizations in the Med had to go as far as Britain to get the tin required to forge bronze, as the Med is largely tin-less.
Blasterbot
Well-known member
it isn't about money. it is about resources. food doesn't spring from the ether. energy is not created ex nihilo. we are ignoring reality if we pretend that these things don't matter. have you looked into the logistics chain required to maintain NYC? it is held together by a shoestring and a prayer.
we have not been allowed to tap our own resources for decades and we have outsourced most manufacturing to foreign actors. now consider where we are right now.
Russia is a big exporter of oil and fertilizer. they invaded Ukraine. both export a fair amount of food. particularly to africa. now consider europe. they depend on food imports. now consider america. we have had a couple of shit harvests for a few years now and now going into planting season we are gonna lose access to a major source of fertilizer. how is this gonna impact food? give you a hint wheat is already up 70% and that is gonna have a lot of knock on effects.
Now back to russia. they gonna export to china. Russia, China and India are in talks right now about making a system to run parallel to the SWIFT banking system. if they set up a parallel economy what do you think happens? what happens to our cheap imports we depend on for keeping these cities going? what happens to Taiwan? what would we do without those chips? could we afford to intervene? could our currant admin even competently handle these crises? I don't believe so.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
They do not require NYC level population, though. You do not need fifty-story apartment complexes down five miles to sustain a modern economy. And the extreme density decreases efficiency of supporting infrastructure and industry. The point is that modern megacities that dominate politics are a negative state, by seemingly every metric.
Sure, they are not at the point of absolute breakdown, but those problems start up long before that point. They can't take even a few days of interruption because stockpiling and distributing resources for that many people in that small of an area just does not work. There is no meaningful crisis they can deal with.
Aaron Fox
Well-known member
You seriously didn't get what I said at the bottom, did you? Historically, no one is self-sufficient, especially at the lowest levels like towns and villages. They need resources from elsewhere to sustain them, especially in this day and age.
You would be actually surprised at what is needed for modern civilization and the support infrastructure to build and maintain it. I mean I was when I discovered that... I had a 'wait, what' moment. We're not living in a world where a machine shop can maintain a relatively good quality of life anymore, we're living in a world where one needs stupid amounts of infrastructure to maintain a relatively good quality of life. We're talking superfine grade machining that can't be used in a machine shop. We're talking about chip manufacturing plants, giant oil refineries, and more.
Economies of scale are baked into reality, and that is something that we can't ignore.
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Morphic Tide
Well-known member
The problem is the amount of that infrastructure that's per-capita. New York City is approaching physical limits of how much shit they can cram in, over, and under their streets. Actually moving material into the place is a vastly wasteful process.
Manufacturing can be set anywhere you can stick a road, no matter how intricate, and having ultradense urban area share that road increases the cost because of traffic congestion. New York City level densification is nearly always a downside.
The technology behind this can, at this point, usually be parallelized. The benefit is standardizing and coordinating, not building a single obscenely vast complex. The individual factories have not grown much since the 70s.
There's little need to have two photolithography facilities next door to eachother, so long as they can both ship to the needed destination. One could be in New York, the other in San Francisco, and any experts could be moved between in a day or two.
My ultimate point is that the way logistics work nowdays means that the major metropoli are not needed. New York City does not have beneficial economies of scale, that ultra-dense urban area is in the way of the port and hardly anything else could benefit.
15 story apartment blocks, sure. Block after block for miles of 50 story residential units? The logistics eventually become an unsustainable complexity spiral, wasting enormous amounts to deal with overloaded infrastructure and too many middlemen.
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
Could you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what you mean, especially when its current incarnation is as a rubber stamp.
Bassoe
Well-known member
| Problem | Proposed Solutions |
| Lack of payoff for collaborating with the system of civilization. The deal is, obey the laws and work and you get a decent quality of life. The deal has been broken. Work is either unavailable or doesn't yield the desired payoff. The system either fixes that, or there's no point in loyalty to it. | New New Deal, focused on replacing our deteriorating cold-war-era infrastructure and manufacturing industries on a nationwide scale, driving down costs of housing and American-made products with increased supply while simultaneously providing massive numbers of jobs. Massive tariffs on foreign trade to make it cheaper to hire Americans. |
| Traitorous imbeciles offshored vital manufacturing and resource extraction infrastructure to enemy nations, simultaneously letting them hold us hostage with the threat of cutting off our supplies and stripping us of jobs. | We need a domestic microchip manufacturing industry capable of replacing Taiwan on a moment's notice if the PRC ever actually does try to conquer it, thorium reactors and powersat receivers across the nation, asteroid-mining for rare earth ores for batteries, etc. |
| Corporations robbing the public purse with the assistance of bribed puppet politicians. | When a corporation takes on a contract from the goverment to build or maintain something, if they don't do it, at a minimum, they need to give the money back and be backlisted from future contracts, or ideally, suffer actual significant criminal penalties. |
| The neoconservative warmongers, the rogue intelligence agencies and military-equipment megacorps. Our military is powerful, that's not the problem, rather, that it isn't our military. The glowies have such overdeveloped surveillance capacities they should've caught the Epstein and Schwab conspirators decades ago, but they use it to spy on us. The military can lay waste to any nation not protected by nuclear MAD deterrence, it gets used against nations full of innocent bystanders like Iraq after they took the blame for the 9/11 attacks actually committed by supposed American 'ally' Saudi Arabia. And so forth and so on. They're either incompetent or deliberately acting against our best interests. And now, with the war in Ukraine, they're openly doing everything in their power to get us into a war with a nuclear superpower over something which honestly, wouldn't really affect us one way or the other | Shut down the CIA and NSA. Crack open their archives to the public and criminally persecute their agents for every single crime they've ever committed. If setting up a replacement intelligence agency, make sure to backlist everyone employed by the preexisting ones. |
| The Schwab conspiracy. A bunch of wannabe bond villain billionaires attempting to reinstate feudalism by means of repeatedly crashing the economy until they can buy off all assets, then rent them company town-style to everyone else and remove civil rights by being 'private companies refusing to sell their products' to dissidents when they're the only ones available. | Trust-bust every single corporation involved. Make speech legally protected against firing. Enforce common carrier anti-censorship regulations upon all webservice providers. Make copyright end after a decade after original publication. Make company scrip impractical with a law that there must be an option offering payment in the nation's currency for no extra fees or bureaucratic hassle rather than in some controlled pseudo-currencies the payer made up. And if that isn't enough and they don't get the message, just take a leaf out of China's book and have the New Glowies start arranging Unfortunate Accidents for the conspirators. |
| The Epstein conspiracy. A bunch of the wealthy and politically powerful are very poorly disguised pedophiles who've been using their authority to escape persecution for their crimes. There's some overlap with the Schwab conspirators, unclear if that's coincidence, if the objective of the Schwab conspiracy is to seize enough power to end up like Lacrentiy Beria where everyone knows of their crimes but the secret police still protect and deliver victims to them or if the pedophilia is a form of blackmail-based orientation for anyone joining the conspiracy to ensure the 'loyalty' of the lesser conspirators to whoever holds the recordings. | Law enforcement matter. The fact that so far, police and media haven't been focusing on something this major would appear to indicate corruption in their organizations. I'm not really sure how to deal with this, probably something like taking down a Mafia. |
Simonbob
Well-known member
Sure.
A lot of this runs into the same issue, although no all. Trust.
Any "New Deal" is going to go down the same path, but I do like the idea of tarifs.
Most of the rest is best fought by simply not having that much money and power in the hand of govenment. So, shutting down the CIA and NSA, and I'd include DEA at the very least, makes perfect sense.
Why is it impossible to compete with these massive corps? Well, that's mostly Gov bullshit, too. You don't need Trust busting, most of these corps will die under their own stupid policies, if certain groups in Gov don't support them.
The problem with your solutions overall, IMO, is the reliance on government while at the same time attacking government. Realistically, you'll get one or the other, not both. And relying on government to solve problems is just asking to be disappointed.
On specific points:
Quite bluntly, the new deal lead to a lot of the problems we are in now, and the previous new new deals (LBJ's war on poverty, for example) have made everything worse. So I don't want a new one until you end the old one, social security and all.
And with us in a supply shock, the absolutely 100% last thing the US should do is spend any money for anything. We don't need more demand (which is what the government spending money does), we need more supply. More demand for same supply just increases prices. So that's at least a current no to both Infrastructure spending, spending money on bringing stuff back here, etc.
Instead, stop the fucking tarriffs! At least on friendly countries (keep 'em on China, fucking slavers).
(Quoted a little weirdly, sorry)
This isn't how corporations are screwing people through the government.
For federal/state contractors, they usually do complete the work, eventually, but frequently the contract is set up as a "costs plus" contract. Frequently that "plus" is a percentage of costs. This is completely ass-backwards (and it also doesn't help the corporations stay competitive either! For example, NASA's change of contract structure from designing a rocket and buying it (under a cost plus model) into instead just buying a ticket (there current model) has been wildly successful for both NASA, which is saving money, and SpaceX, as they have an actual incentive to cut costs, and can make a higher return than a "cost plus" contract.
This is also about half the problem with the military industrial complex.
Now the second, bigger problem with corporations is the subsidies and using government to hit another competitor. This is a huge problem, and requires ripping up a ton of regulations that have been planted. It's gonna be a long slow doing, but needed.
Intel agency & Federal law enforcement:
Also, as a quick aside, we need a foreign intelligence bureau, or we just get fucked by other countries with ones. The fault for Epstein is an FBI problem, not a CIA one (unless he was actually employed by them, but IDK on that).
The solution for the NSA is the easiest: ban them from all domestic spying (still hasn't been done), then ban them from contributing to standards of encryption (they try to water it down every time).
CIA is a hard solution, IDK what to do exactly, but we do actually need a CIA as much as I don't like it, and you can't just kill off the CIA without having a bunch of capable people angry at you. Do fire the
FBI and the other law enforcement are a lot easier. Blow up the ATF and DEA (also end the drug war and the NFA), shove their useful agents (like undercover ones, and ones looking at gangs) under the FBI, then slowly devolve the FBI back to the state police agencies, with an exception for actual multistate efforts/coordination. Also just privatize the TSA entirely.
As for Trust Busting, not needed, and when it is attempted, it's always political, not for a good actual reason. Seriously, as @Simonbob said, a lot will fall apart without government help, remove that to solve problems.
Simonbob
Well-known member
I'm pretty sure there's a federal police already, isn't there?
I was thinking about this one, and I worked something out.
Corp script is normal, natural, and only a big deal if the Gov screws the dollar badly enough. After all, pretty close to everybody in the site has had some before.
It's called a "gift voucher".
And then you have a company that refuses to pay people in anything other than its own gift vouchers. Or to accept payment for anything in normal money.
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Simonbob
Well-known member
Name one.
Seriously.
Not that it's impossible, but until it's large enough to provide everything you need, it's not going to happen.
Bassoe
Well-known member
Simonbob
Well-known member
Having just read that, he did a company town, but not a corp script.
Note, there was nothing keeping people in there. If you wanted to, you could leave, but you had to get another job.
Besides, if you look at it, currency of all types is simply a commodity, and if a company wants to offer such a thing, that's not a problem, so long as you can exchange it for other things of value. It's only with Gov backing that you have to use any currency, and that's mostly because they only accept it for tax and other Gov use.
The problem, as always, is the lack of choice.