So that's at least two of us in MN. I live in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis.

You mentioned Boston's transit. I've seen a number of Youtube videos critical of the MBTA -- primarily long-deferred maintenance. Design is itself a problem -- the oldest parts of the system were built about 124 years ago. Corners are tighter than would now be designed, less space was allocated. Old and newer elements within the MBTA are sometimes not quite compatible.

I lived in Boston in 1968/9, and I thought the subway, elevated trains, and buses were just wonderful.

Here's a pretty good Youtube video about the problems of the MBTA.

Based on my experience of growing up in a rural county, I'd say there is no practical way of providing regular transit service. On-demand rides could certainly be done -- I think are done in some rural areas on a limited basis. There is a real need, though. Many people in rural areas are elderly and would prefer to have a practical option to driving themselves everywhere.

Example of rural transit: The Mayo Clinic is located in Rochester, MN - a town of 121,000 people. It employs a large number of people from at least 3 surrounding counties. In order to cut down on traffic and parking costs, and to keep from annoying citizens more than they already do, Mayo organized a transit system for its employees, collecting 1 or two bus loads of people each in small towns up to 50 miles out, and dropping them off at the buildings in which they work. In the evening the routes are traveled in the opposite direction. Several thousand workers get to work this way.

There used to be intercity or interstate bus service in some of these towns, but that died out decades ago.

I don't - never did - drive, so P and R services are outside my ken. I don't know what level of utilization they have / had or whether they fulfilled their purpose. The commuter rail systems are a sort of park and ride -- in the AM you drive to the station, park (or are dropped off), and get on a heavy rail train into town, and do the reverse in the PM.

@Schopenhauer1 During the pandemic (now running into its 4th year) offices were closed and employees in offices were given the means to work from / at home, The numbers of people not needing transit or a car trip downtown was big enough to produce a crisis in the office real estate market. Many billions of dollars worth of office space across the country are empty. This reveals two things:

First, technology makes it possible for many people to work at home. Good? Bad? It depends. It depends. In a cartoon from 2020, two cats ask, "When are they going to leave?" and "Why don't they just go outside and die." Initially many people didn't like it; now, as their employers are dithering over office rent, most don't want to go back to the daily commute.

Secondly, changing one thing (hundreds of thousands of office workers at home) can have adverse effects elsewhere in the economy. Work from home (wfh) was a boon to communication businesses. Think Zoom. At the same time wfh was a disaster for transit -- millions of fares foregone,

Central business district support businesses were devastated. Cafes, caterers, small stores, etc. tanked all over the place. The usual unlovely elements moved in to fill the vacuum created by absent office workers.

City planners aren't sure whether their downtowns will find ways to become even moderately interesting please to be. Convert the office to towers to apartments? This is only sometimes economically feasible. Buildings with narrow floor plates can convert offices to living spaces, though it is expensive to add plumbing for baths and kitchens and HVAC for individual units. Large square or wide rectangular office buildings (the most common kind) have too large a floor plate. Apartments arranged along the outside edge, where the windows are, leaves a large cavity in the center of each floor that just isn't usable for much. Air shaft? Atrium? Again, generally not economically feasible.

How many people living downtown add up to an interesting city? I don't know, but a lot more than who are presently living there. I'd say... let's say... could be... 25,000 residents downtown could make for an interesting city that didn't depend on office workers.

Minneapolis has about 50,000 people living in a very generously defined downtown. These 50,000 are not a dense enough concentration for the amount of area they live in. 400,000 people live in Minneapolis, and they don't make downtown an interesting place, because most of them never drive -- never drove -- downtown,

Why did they not drive downtown? Because there are scary unpleasant things downtown, like one way streets, parking meters, the dreaded cultural diversity, no enclosed shopping centers, parking lots charging money to enter, busses all over, too many stop lights... It's a nightmare!

I actually use park and ride in big cities to keep my car from being vandalized. — Mark Nyquist

That's a benefit, not the primary purpose -- one hopes. Park & Ride seems to be aimed at lessening congestion on inbound/outbound roads, and having to use expensive parking downtown. P & R is also a way of creating ridership.

At other times mass transit must be available for the small volume of people who want to use it, and it must still be frequent enough to meet people's needs — Agree-to-Disagree

why at any given day of the week and at any given time, there are so many people "not at the workplace", but going to shops, restaurants, the beach, and somewhere else. — L'éléphant

The fact of the matter is that a large share of "mass transit" is largely transit for the poor and the disabled who have little choice but to use "shabby transit". Because the constituency using transit tends to be poor people, students, or people who can't/don't drive, frequency, comfort, quality, convenience, etc. just isn't a priority.

IF the kind of anti-social, dysfunctional, disorderly, and disruptive behavior that swept over transit during the pandemic occurred in a wealthy suburb's shopping area, there would have been an immediate crackdown on riff raff. On many transit systems, this crap continued for 3 years before transit authorities got serious about bad behavior on their systems.

Did I miss the punchline to this lame joke?

Yes, Jesus blessed the cheesemakers. Had he lived two millennia longer, he would have had to pass final judgement on Velveeta. Would he bless it or blast it? My guess is he would say something along the lines of, "Woe unto you, deceitful fabricators of plasticized, extruded, and perpetually shelf-stable crap."

Cars are extremely inefficient when it comes to cost, pollution, physical, and psychological damage/outcomes if everything is considered in relation to it. — schopenhauer1

Absolutely. The tragedy is that practically our whole economy is built around this cost, pollution, physical and psychological damage, and negative outcomes.

As Jesus said, "It is much more difficult for an advanced economy to devolve dependence on the automobile than it is for a whale to live in a fish bowl." He said that. Really!

imagine if people built interconnected cable cars — schopenhauer1

VERY unfortunately, an interconnecting system of transit lines is, in most American metropolitan areas became an impossibility since WWII.

A core city like Boston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, even Minneapolis can operate such systems, provided they run their buses and rail systems frequently enough, and sometimes they even do. But, as you know well, the bulk of the population is now distributed in concentric rings around core cities.

I don't think we can afford the costs of building out the light rail / bus rapid transit lines that it would take to serve the large share of the nation's population that live in these dispersed concentrically arranged areas, whose design was predicated on individual car ownership and concrete everywhere. Minneapolis and St. Paul together are roughly 20 miles long and 10 miles wide. The 2.5 million people in the Minneapolis St Paul Metropolitan metropolitan area are spread across 70 or 80 miles, reaching across 4 to 6 counties. Crazy, but that's what happened.

It gets worse: one half of Minnesota's population lives in dispersed metropolitan areas while the other half, another 2.5 million, live within the roughly 60,000 square miles of rural territory (small towns, mostly). Many states have similar distributions. Northern Illinois is densely populated; the rest of the state, not so much. Mississippi, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, similarly.

Were we to make the truly Olympian decision to abandon individual transportation (whether gas driven or electric) it would require a Titanic change in the way 330,000,000 million people live--changes that are over the horizon and can only be guessed at.

All this is to say we are totally screwed. The unmarked pivotal events in our total screwing happened at least a century ago, and have been amplified again and again. The New Deal housing program that was a great blessing for millions of people was one of those amplifications. It created hundreds of suburban metropolitan zones, out of nothing, around the country and fed a tremendous amount of economic growth. Now we're stuck with it.

As much as I wish for great mass transit (especially as a transit dependent person), I don't see it as an economic or cultural possibility.

imagine if people built interconnected cable cars — schopenhauer1

Do you mean "cable cars" literally? Or do you mean trolley, bus, tram, street car, or light rail? I mean, cable-pulled trolleys are a charming but very anachronistic means of transport.

There is another angle to the question of how the invention of the automobile industry became evil.

Capitalism requires growth.

Suppose Ford sold stock and spent a few million dollars to build a car factory. He decided to make and sell just as many cars in a year as it would take to cover the cost of materials and labor, and then he would shut down -- maybe in September. In January of the next year, he'd start the factory up again and make / sell enough cars to pay off the cost of manufacture.

Everyone would get paid. What's the problem?

One major problem with this scheme is that it doesn't produce a significant profit. Another problem is that Ford's company would be static. There would be no growth. No one would invest another dime in Ford's factory if the business plan didn't call for greater production, more sales, and more profit on an on-going basis. There is a theoretical limit on how many cars could be produced and sold before the market was 100% saturated, but cars wear out, the population increases, and after over 100 years, automakers haven't yet totally saturated the market (which is the world).

At the opposite end of the economic continuum from car manufacturers are hunter-gatherers who spend no more effort on meeting their basic needs than is required. There is no accumulation of wealth, no growth in the standard of living. Tomorrow will be quite similarly to any day 5 years ago, maybe with slightly different weather.

Various peoples have lived much closer to the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer than the way an automaker lives. Even in many sedentary agricultural societies, the goal was to raise enough food to eat, enough wood to cook with, and enough wool to stay warm with. After 100 years of settlement, the population and its lifestyles might be the same.

Once capitalism and industrialism joined forces in the 17th / 18th century, the assumption of growth was central. A firm needed to grow to attract on-going investments in order to reach new markets with new products and/or services, and to generate increased profits with which to reward investors.

If you are not trying to grow, then don't bother starting.

Capitalist industrialism didn't proceed to begin wrecking the world until the technology was capable of mass production for a large and growing population with enough resources to consume what was produced on an on-going upward-trending basis.

Continual growth is a mandate for everyone from Coco Cola to Apple computers.

Do people need more Coke? Do people need a new $1000+ phone every year? No -- clearly not, but the economy does. If Coke sales continually decline, that will be very bad news for its many investors -- plus many people require Coca Cola to function, apparently. People could eke out mediocre lives with a 3 year old phone, but that would mean catastrophe in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, and China, among other places.

So... buy a case of Coca Cola every week, and buy the latest fucking phone whether YOU want / need it or not. America is counting on you.

The U of M mechanical Engineer scheme I mentioned fits your idea of AI "trains" (maybe one small car on a rail rather than a string of them). His was an 'on demand' system. One would call for a ride; there wouldn't be a string of cars passing every few minutes.

His system wouldn't work by itself -- it would need too large a number of cars to handle peak traffic. For peak travel times, buses and trains would move large volumes of travelers.

Lyft serves my needs fairly well. Most of the places I need to get to quickly cost about $10 each. I use Lyft maybe 2 or 3 times a month. Today I used it three times within 4 hours because I had 3 places to be and no way to get to each by bus or bike. That was an unusual situation,

The bus system operates an on-demand ride share for some parts of the city that have been underserved and have a lot of bus riders. I don't know how well it works.

What makes Boston's system good, or even the Twin Cities' system good when it is good, is enough buses on a given route to offer frequent service, and then good interconnections with rail or other buses. Covid 19 fucked things up for transit systems across the country. Just now things are getting back to normal, but not quite up to 2019 levels.

Bus Rapid Transit lines run as frequently as every 8 minutes. which gives them good connectivity with other parts of the system. Some of the lines are 10 miles long or longer.

I have had a lot of negative experiences with buses over the last 50 years -- like long waits and slow travel times, or not knowing when in hell the bus was supposed to arrive. If you didn't have a printed schedule, you were sol. That has been solved by a text system for finding out when the next bus is scheduled to arrive.

Imagine if more money was put into mass transit. Bullet trains, underground subways. Imagine if every city had worked out a way to transport people where anyone living in a metro area was never more than five minutes away from a stop for mass transit. Imagine a world where there were so many various train routes going from city hub to city hub, there wouldn't even be a need for highways. Imagine if one's personal or commercial goods were moved from various tram-like / light rails along with cable cars that could be connected right to a drive way to a residence. — schopenhauer1

Imagine all the unintended evils that would accompany such a thing — Leontiskos

Indeed!

Effortlessness requires a lot of infrastructure, especially if it involves retrofitting.

In the 1970s a mechanical engineering professor at the U of Minnesota proposed a network of 1 or 2 person small automated vehicles moving on very light rails throughout the city. It would pick you up at your door, or maybe the street corner, and deliver you anywhere else in the city. It was, in a number of ways, attractive. And in many ways highly impractical and expensive.

50 years later, it's much more likely that an AI supervised self-driving car will deliver door to door service for much less. Get rid of the Uber or Lyft driver and you're almost there. All we need is a self-driving system that is up to the task. So far, not so good.

You can have door to door transportation in a skyscraper IF you install elevators while you are building the tower. If you have to add elevators after the tall building is finished, elevator shafts and elevator systems become prohibitively expensive. Same thing for a city, to a large extent. One of the difficulties the met council's light rail system had was digging up all the infrastructure that was under the streets on which the light rail would run. It had to be either moved or upgraded so that it excavation wouldn't be needed in the intermediate future. Neither elevated rails nor burrowed tunnels get around all problems.

Our best bet for getting beyond the personal car and highways is global warming and an economic crash. The highways are always crumbling (at least in cold parts of the country) so without maintenance they'll be gone PDQ, what with a nastier climate.

The truth is, we missed the boat a century ago. We dismissed trains and we staked our future on autos, trucks and highways. Yes, it was a bad idea.

Suburbanization started before Henry Ford. In Boston, horse-power (and horse-oriented roads) and steam trains extended the distance that well-off people could travel between home and job in the 1880s. In time, this extension accelerated and included. Boston's first subway opened in 1901. Some of the "subway" was elevated -- and stayed that way for 80 years. Chicago started building EL trains in 1892. New York opened its first subway in 1904.

Outward-directed growth of cities at a relative low density was underway by the time cars became a feature. The US had room; a LOT of acreage and long distances. The compact manner of growth practiced in Emgland wasn't necessary here, and wasn't obviously beneficial. By the time the downsides of highly dispersed growth became manifest, it was too late to do much about it.

Another factor here is racial policy. The US practiced segregation early on. After the Civil War, it was practically mandated, if not legislatively ordained. A series of events -- WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII resulted in the American urban scene being crowded and at least some what dilapidated. New Deal Legislation, which played out in full during the Post-WWII Boom, built large swaths of new suburban communities for (more or less) middle class white people. Large tracts of urban land (neighborhoods) were written off as black slums. Downtown cores gradually emptied out -- so that by the 1990s, say, there was not as much "there" there as there used to be. Covid nailed the coffin lid shut.

Highways were built to, within, and between suburbs; highways were built between urban hubs; highways were rammed through cities; highways were built coast to coast. "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." The kernel of Ford's and GM's drive to create new markets where no market had previously existed, reached its fulfillment during the completion of the Interstate Highway system in the 1970s.

It took time for "the automobile market" to fully transform the American society, the American economy, the American landscape, American demographics--about 60 years, 1914 to 1974, to pick a year. Did Ford and GM plan all that out? No. In general, capitalists are short-sighted. They want to see yesterday's investment pay off tomorrow. That may take a year, 5 years, 10 years, or maybe 20 at the extreme. As goals are met, as the market reaches its goals, new goals are set -- ever towards growth, new markets, new products, new transformations--whether The People jolly well like it or not. But plenty of money will be spent on getting them to like it.

It took more than Fordism to get the automobile mega ball rolling. There had to be oil, grease, and gasoline; iron ore, coal / coke, and steel producers; rubber plantations, rubber shipping, and rubber manufacture; limestone, coal, cement, and concrete--all in huge abundance. The stock market and government ran in tandem, investing and spending.

Imagine if more money was put into mass transit. Bullet trains, underground subways. Imagine if every city had worked out a way to transport people where anyone living in a metro area was never more than five minutes away from a stop for mass transit. Imagine a world where there were so many various train routes going from city hub to city hub, there wouldn't even be a need for highways. Imagine if one's personal or commercial goods were moved from various tram-like / light rails along with cable cars that could be connected right to a drive way to a residence. Or, if we had anything interesting, we could use robotic pickups and dropoff of large materials to the locations of our choice. Imagine a world where automobiles were rare, and mainly used in rural areas that were extremely remote or for emergency purposes only. — schopenhauer1

It has nothing to do with virtue that at 77 I have not driven a car. Poor vision has kept me out of the driver's seat and kept everyone else safer. I have always depended on either someone with a car or public transit, and I can testify to the truth that it is more or less difficult to live without a car in the United States. Less difficult IF you live along transit corridors in dense urban settings. More, and much more difficult if you live in a transit starved suburb, exurb, or rural area.

Just for example, I live 3 miles from the University of Minnesota where I have worked and where I get medical and dental care. It takes me about 50 minutes to travel that distance on a bus (with good connections). It takes about an hour to walk. It takes about 20 minutes to bike. 50 minutes is too long for the distance, but there are no direct busses to the U from where I live. If a bus is missed, automatically add 12 to 30 minutes to the time.

Minneapolis supposedly has good transit -- maybe, but compared to whom? Certainly not New York, Chicago, or Boston. Better than Boise? Better than Biloxi? Better than Baton Rouge? Almost certainly.

The Metropolitan Council (an authority created by the State of MN) runs Transit, Water, and Waste Water Treatment systems, among other things, They have also built two light rail lines of about 20 miles total. Just as good (If not better) and cheaper are the Bus Rapid Transit lines the Met Council built. A third leg of light rail running out to a western suburb has cost 2.75 BILLION so far, and they have been working on it for years.

Light Rail is about as cheap as rail systems in an urban setting can get. Tunneling is extremely high cost. Maybe elevated trains, like Chicago uses, would be cheaper than tunnels, but people hate the idea. But then a lot of people also hate buses.

Interurban trains, running from urban hub to urban hub, used to cover much of the United States. I think we have a very romantic notion of what much of that train service was like. Long distance trains in the 1950s and early 1960s reached a high standard, then they went broke. Most train service was just not splendid. Schedules could be inconvenient, waiting rooms could be dreary, train cars could be too hot, too cold, not very clean, and uncomfortable in several different ways. Riding first class was certainly better, but it might not have been quite as fine as Hollywood made it seem.

Interurban trains were not especially fast -- certainly nothing resembling bullet trains. They chugged along, maybe 70 or 80 mph. But one could get almost anywhere, and one could ship a load of coal or sofas almost anywhere. Many small towns, like <2000, had at least freight train service. Lumber, coal, and oil was delivered to towns that way -- not by truck. Back in the day (say, up to the 1960s).

IF, and it is a VERY BIG IF, we had spent as much money on rail transit and urban transit as we did on highways, we would have a gold-plated system that would be the envy of the solar system.

Let's not blame everything on Ford. There was also Cadillac, Fiat, Renault, Land Rover, Skoda, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, Tatra, and Peugeot. In 1908 William C. Durant founded General Motors as a holding company for the Buick Car Company. Within two years, Durant brought together Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Pontiac, and the predecessors of GMC Truck

There are now 1.2 BILLION cars on the world's road with 2 BILLION expected by 2035. Most of these cars are now internal combustion powered. In 2035 a larger share will be electric -- but not all of them by any means.

1919 was the first time auto loan was available to the general public. — L'éléphant

Thanks for that. I didn't know when car loans began.

How to sell those cars if not enough people are wealthy enough to buy all the cars produced. — L'éléphant

Ford started paying his workers 62¢ an hour ($5 a day) in 1914. At the time the average factory pay was around 22¢ per hour. This solved two problems. It reduced turnover in the workforce, and it enabled workers to buy a Model T, which in 1914 sold for around $500. Ten years later, the price had dropped to around $260.

I am not sure whether workers saved up for a car, bought it on time, or borrowed the money, My guess is more the former and less the latter.

I'll begin my response to this highly relevant topic with a film made at the time of transition from hooves and hay to tires and gasoline: This short film was made 4 days before the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. It consists of a cable car ride down Market Street; a camera was mounted on the front of the car. I know you are all media-sophisticated people, but bear in mind the film was silent.

No peace-loving human being can ignore the carnage waged against...

any number of communities around the world. Ukraine, China, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, Syria, Sudan, D. R. Congo, East Africa, Central America, and more!

Ill-treating fellow humans in one place doesn't justify not-quite-as-bad, similar, or worse treatment somewhere else. The ICJ would be too busy to break for lunch if charges were brought against every guilty government.

Yemen fires missiles at international shipping in the Red Sea. The US & UK strike missile sites in Houthi controlled areas. There are immediate protests that bombing the missile sites will make things worse. So, what to do, what to do?

Someone on the BBC suggested that it would have been better if India and the Netherlands had carried out the strikes. Maybe. But wouldn't that just "widen the war in the Middle East" which any number of actions are said to do?

I'm not sure that Israel declaring a cease-fire really would lower the risks in the region, though it would reduce the suffering in Gaza.

Given the way that AI is compounded, it is (just guessing) sociopathic by necessity. It doesn't have the means of "feeling" guilt, authenticity, or anything else. It is articulate enough to be glib. It is empty, of course, because it doesn't experience what it does. It does what it does based on its training and programming, and that's all it can do. Apparently, it doesn't know enough to detect its own bullshit or obviously contradictory information,

I enjoy gathering my own information about the Middle Ages or mushrooms, or whatever, and I rarely feel the need to ask an AI anything, I'm not producing products for anybody.

That said, they seem to be remarkable achievements by their makers, and using them should be helpful enough as long as one remembers that they don't actually care about us (and can not care) and they are not self-aware. At some point we will find a psychopathic / sociopathic executive employing a psychopathic / sociopathic AI system to achieve his goals. The AI system won't be responsible for magnifying the executive's anti-social harm.

Yet, anyway. Maybe at some point in the future an AI system will have an evil intention and will carry it out on its own. Somehow it seems less likely, but an AI system may instead have an urge to do unbidden good deeds and will benefit many. Even humans get such urges every now and then.

Please stop talking about "brutally frigid weather". Spells of below-zero F temperatures (and lower wind-chill) are not abnormal in this part of the world. Indeed, it's refreshingly normal after months of abnormally warm to brutally hot weather. Trump's Iowa win was not a cold day in hell -- it was entirely expected. The cold day in hell would be his second inauguration. Hopefully he will be locked up in solitary by that time.

How ChatGPT works is orders of magnitudes above my level of understanding. It is remarkable in its capacity to generate responses that resemble the sort of things that "we" say -- or would say if we had as much knowledge at our "mind's fingertips" as this chatty machine has.

I found this IMF statement sobering:

In advanced economies, about 60 percent of jobs may be impacted by AI. Roughly half the exposed jobs may benefit from AI integration, enhancing productivity. For the other half, AI applications may execute key tasks currently performed by humans, which could lower labor demand, leading to lower wages and reduced hiring. In the most extreme cases, some of these jobs may disappear.

In emerging markets and low-income countries, by contrast, AI exposure is expected to be 40 percent and 26 percent, respectively. These findings suggest emerging market and developing economies face fewer immediate disruptions from AI. At the same time, many of these countries don’t have the infrastructure or skilled workforces to harness the benefits of AI, raising the risk that over time the technology could worsen inequality among nations.

I have had a couple of detail work jobs (decades ago) for which I thought a computer would be more effective and cheaper. The main reason humans end up in these jobs at all is that computers have difficulty handling file folders and handling pieces of paper, and carrying work to and from the copy center. It was opposable thumbs and not mental capacity that mattered in this university department support job. Then too, some people probably preferred talking to humans, and giving humans orders more than doing the same with a machine.

Downgrading jobs has already happened as a result of automation, technology, and computerization, so chatGPT's effects may not stand out that much from the background.

So, bypassing the question of the theory of mind, I'm more interested in the theoretical question of what we are going to do for the minds of those cast aside by AI. I didn't like the detail-work job, but it paid for lots of mindwork I did on my own.

the US, which is more likely to fully degenerate into a corporatocracy due to its particular off-brand of delusional idiocy — Benkei

Hey, calling our delusional idiocy "off-brand" is an insult!

You're a decade too late if you're trying to assess what type of evil you're dealing with — Benkei

That's a good point. Bad stuff may crawl out of the swamp, but it takes time to coagulate and grow. For example, the far right wing of the Republican Party wasn't created by Trump. Tax law is critical for the growth of the super-rich class and happened decades ago. 3M was secure in dumping per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS into the ground. Etc.

Fact is, all sorts of bad stuff have happened in the US, carried out by duly elected representatives, following (sort of) open procedures in legislative sessions, and signed by elected chief executives. Fascists weren't required.

This just in, Capitalism is working just as intended. — Benkei

Old news in these quarters.

Fascism does have many definitions, but "the way it works" is less variable. If some people are operating in a fascistic manner, it's worth focusing on.

other than as a tool to diagnose why it is unfair. — Benkei

And, one hopes, do something about it!

They won't do it voluntarily, not any of 'em — Vera Mont

Wait a minute. The USSR collapsed peacefully, after which Russia went through a period of deformation, then reformation, now deformation again. Is reform the next stop?

China recovered from the Cultural Revolution of Mao, and with the non-violent help of the US, became a manufacturing and infrastructure building giant. Hundred of millions are better off now than they were. I don't like Xi, but he won't live forever. the US has carried out reforms. Civil Rights, establishing the EPA (under Nixon), improved infrastructure, establishing the principle of 1 person/one vote (1962) principle, and so on.

I have seen no proof presented that breaking up large nation-states is an unalloyed good or even slightly helpful.

I'm not arguing against teachers making a decent income, and I wasn't using household income, which of course increases with more than 1 earner. Depending on where you live in New York or California, $120,000 might not be enough to buy a mediocre house or afford to rent the nicest place. It is, however, extremely sufficient to prevent starvation, homelessness, and having to hitchhike to and from school 185 times a year.

Advocates for human rights (in all of the various subcategories there are), or anything else, don't get anywhere by announcing that things are fine. They may have to dig a little, but problems can be found anywhere, everywhere. It helps if the problems are getting worse. Never let a crisis go to waste!

I'm not as cynical as I sound. If you are in the advocacy business, are a fundraiser, are a middle class liberal well-intentioned non-profit executive, etc. you have to do whatever works, or you get left behind. It's hard to get people to pay attention and send money for honest-to-god good causes. A fundraising letter that says the formerly homeless are all in long-term shelter, the drug addicts are all in treatment, and that the drunks are all sober is going to yield a big fat nothing,

(Confession: I was not a successful fundraiser.).

I'm actually pretty gloomy about the future. My doom-beat is global warming which I think will swamp all the other problems. I'm gloomy about capitalism (WHEN is it going to go away, for god's sake?). I could, however, be equally gloomy about the ocean of debt on which individuals, companies, states, and the federal government are all floating. I could be gloomy about Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, Taiwan, China, India, Ecuador--if it's on the map, I could lament its future.

I am sure some school districts pay handsomely for the services of experienced teachers, even figures well over $100,000 per year, maybe adding up to a couple million bucks after 20 years. Great!

Most teachers are not getting that much, on average, during much of their careers. According to the NEA, the average public school teacher earns $66,745. They are earning on average $3,644 less now than they were 10 years ago. And then there is inflation, of course.

The gains made by minorities and LGBTQ aren't even close to being wiped out. — RogueAI

There are social gains, political gains, and economic gains. Which GLBT people have gained what, when, and where varies quite a bit. To be fair, GLBT gains which have been firmly established haven't been wiped out. Where minorities are also economically, socially, and politically marginalized, my guess is that things at least haven't improved, or have regressed -- again, varying by areas.

Somalis in the Minneapolis have done well politically and economically, certainly. The Hmong, not so much, even with a longer residential time. Illegal immigrants are generally marginalized, are generally minorities, and are generally not doing well.

Gay people in liberal, prosperous states have seen solid social and political gains. Many (not all) have seen economic gains, too. In politically and religiously conservative and less prosperous states, the situation is not the same as in LA, Boston, Chicago, and NYC.

The Methodist Church is going through a schism over homosexuality -- how much to accept, who can be married, who can be ordained. Missouri Synod Lutherans are not especially tolerant. Southern Baptists, ditto.

The right to access abortion services was settled law until it wasn't. The protections available to GLBT people is not, for the most part, constitutionally protect on the state level. 16 states have very little protection on the books.

Looking at the economy broadly, working class people -- including minorities and GLBT people -- have not benefitted as much as pundits suppose they have. The richer 10% of the population have done well; the richer 20% have done well. The less one has, the less one gets is the general rule for the rest of us.

I'll cite my own white gay case: over the last 50 years, including working years and then retirement, I have not seen a lot of improvement in my standard of living. I'm not complaining -- I have enough -- but IF I had had dependents, my income would not have been anywhere close to enough. Many minority and GLBT people did or do have dependents, and have found the going pretty tough.

Hasn't capitalism increased the standard of living immeasurably over the last 100 years? — RogueAI

There have been periods of time over the last century when our capitalist economy distributed more resources to a broader population than at other times--the post-WWII period up until the early 1970s. But the post-war boom was sandwiched between a severe depression (1930s) and a period of neoliberal distribution of resources for the richer 25%, which is still in effect.

For a substantial block of the population, roughly 25%, there just hasn't been economic advancement.

It's an example, not my recommended approach.

Garreau published the book in 1981; some of his identifications--like The Foundry--were already out of date. His "foundry" had been turning into the rust belt it is today. I'm not sure how familiar Garreau was with the geography of some of the country. His point, though, is worth considering: Various areas of the US have affinities with each other that are not represented by state boundaries.

He (or some one else, can't remember the name) identified a band of "yankee culture" running west from New England to the upper Midwest created by migration from the east to the west. Within this band citizens expect the state to serve as a vehicle for positive social change through health and education, for instance, Welfare benefits are generous in this band, and firearm deaths tend to be among the lowest in the country most of the time -- much lower than New Orleans, for example.

In a number of southern states, the role of the state is much more constrained.

Dixie isn't as homogeneous as it used to be, and the southern breadbasket area belongs with the south -- culturally and demographically.

and so on...

I view reorganizing the map as a game -- not as a serious enterprise. Some states could merge, I think (the Dakotas for instance) and some states could split -- Californians have talked about a three way split for years. But what makes CA a powerhouse is the varied economic zones within the state and a huge population. Some states have both a large agriculture sector and an equally large urban business sector. The combination helps states (like some Midwestern states) weather fluctuations in economic conditions better.

Maybe you have heard of, or read Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America. Garreau divides up the continent into 9 regions that presumably have similar demographics, industries, and politics. His is not the only attempt to do this.

The problem with a new division of the country is finding the right basis to draw boundaries. Cultural, industrial, and agricultural similarities may not overlap. For instance, Minnesota and Massachusetts have much more in common culturally than Minnesota and Louisiana do. Both may be agricultural producers, but are otherwise not very similar economically, culturally, or sociologically.

It's a fun game to play, and there is certainly some validity to some of the arrangements. But there are mistakes to make too. Garreau's identification of the Rocky Mountains as "The Empty Quarter" overlooks the large agricultural and industrial establishment of Alberta, Canada.

The problematic aspect of your lament over the dissolution of state's rights was that the war that formally drew them legally bound together under the same Constitution was not one fought for any lofty principle. It was fought to protect the institution of slavery by a confederacy that did nothing to try to protect the individual state rights within its confederacy. It's just that South wanted its own slave protecting laws for its region and so it went to war. — Hanover

Why was slavery important enough to fight and to secede over? Money! the collective value of all slaves in the US was $4 billion in 1860. That was a substantial share of all wealth in the US at the time. $4 Billion in 1860 would be worth about $143 Billion in 2023 inflated dollars. In today's national indebtedness of $23 Trillion, 143 Billion doesn't seem like it would be worth going to war over. But $4 Billion was a much large amount of money in 1860 than $143 Billion today.

The dollar cost of slave-produced goods (like cotton bales, iron, tobacco, bricks, etc.) was much lower than could be achieved by employing wage labor. There was also a critical social factor: The social and political preeminence of the planter class depended on the profitability of the slave-labor system. They were, of course, loathe to relinquish their high-status, powerful position.

The south was in fact suspicious of federal power. For that matter, many in the southern states were suspicious of any centralized power, within and between states. Consequently, canals and railroads were built mostly within state boundaries, rather than across state lines. Many canals were built to benefit one or two plantations, rather than a larger area.

The Civil war forced the states in the confederacy to build networks of regional railroad and telegraph lines.

resurrection — Hanover

Spell Czech apparently preferred "resurrection" over "insurrection"? It never explains it's preferences!

Hosea's warning, "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind" (Hosea 8:7) comes to mind. The consequences of an act may exceed proportionality.

The warning cuts both ways. Who sowed the wind and who will reap the whirlwind? Israel, Hamas, or both of them?

Israel's response to the Hamas attack on October 7 is disproportionate. Disproportionate retaliation is always a risk in war. When Israel began its retaliation, some people were saying that Israel was playing into Hamas's plan. If Hamas wanted an overwhelming response, we ought not complain about them getting it.

Israel's retaliation is proportionate in the context of its history. It is engaged in a long struggle to establish for itself a secure homeland. Previous attacks on Israel have resulted in at least vigorous Israeli armed self-defense. Hamas was surely aware of what would happen to them and to Gaza after the massacre they carried out.

The purpose of a disproportionate retaliation is to strongly discourage future attacks.

Maybe Israel is reaching the end of useful disproportionality. Literally destroying every last standing building in Gaza on its way to killing every last Hamas fighter would be, may already be, disproportionate--think diminishing returns. Has Israel killed enough Hamas fighters? Who knows? Killing them all will result in many MORE civilian deaths -- something that was inevitable from the getgo in a densely populated territory with Hamas as an embedded enemy.

Not far from krystallnacht, at least in spirit, but with 'Liberals' and 'the Deep State' as targets. — Wayfarer

I most sincerely hope we are not heading for any kind of Krystallnacht but some equivalent at some point isn't inconceivable. Krystallnacht was not a spontaneous outburst of hatred. It was an engineered event. Nazi cadre performed the outrages. The January 6 Insurrection was an engineered event. "Volunteers" showed up and performed the desired signs of "resistance to the deep state". Manufacturing an event takes very little away from its effectiveness as propaganda of the deed for the receptive public at large.

disproportionate retaliation — 180 Proof

Perhaps you specified in an earlier post what a proportionate retaliation would be.

I don't know what it would be, but it seems like killing 23,000 people; destroying at least 60% of the housing for 2 million people, busting up the infrastructure required in a city, destroying the hospital and health care system (such as it was), just wide-spread wrecking everywhere in the strip--would all add up to more than a sufficient retaliation.

Killing off the current Hamas personnel is another objective apparently. Netanyahu says it will take a year of fighting, bombing (I would think), preventing all but minimal relief for the civilians, and the like. Granting that they could achieve this goal, the severely aggrieved Palestinian civilians are likely to welcome new fighters (Hamas or something else), rendering the whole retaliation moot.

misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and anti-immigration .
— BC

These seem to be hard-to-define, usually-incorrectly-attributed, subjective and naive things to consider... (minus the underlined). — AmadeusD

I carelessly quoted terms I don't especially like.

These terms are clear enough to me. That said, I don't like nouns with the "phobic" suffix. The term "Homophobia" got some use in the 1970s but took off in the following decades. I don't think people have phobias toward religion or towards homosexuals. I think they just dislike homosexuals. [Granted, some people have psycho-sexual hang-ups; some people are afraid that they might be homosexual. That's probably less common where homosexuality is readily accepted. I don't think there is anyone who is afraid he or she might be Moslem.] I prefer a scale with strong identification on the left side, indifference in the middle, and hate on the right side. Same for Islam. "I don't fear islam; I loathe Islam."

"Misogyny" and "anti-immigrant" aren't confusing you, I hope.

Am I noticing a somewhat socially left-leaning element to this forum? — AmadeusD

Oh yes, definitely.

This alone makes the movement different from the Nazis. It is less about a national people, but about a select people. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree.

Fascism may be more easily defined by the way fascism operates than a set of beliefs it follows. That isn't to say it has no beliefs.

American fascism, should it emerge full force, will probably not look like Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. We do not have the Freikorps and Communists who engaged in heavy street fighting. We don't have the SA (Sturmabteilung) Brown Shirts marching around singing the Horst-Wessel song and beating up people who didn't "sieg heil" with sufficient enthusiasm.

Our fascism will probably feature what Universeness calls "evanhellicals". White Christian Nationalists, gospel of prosperity preachers, KKK types, misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and anti-immigration Proud Boys, Boogaloo, QAnon, white supremacy groups, demented fundamentalists, etc.

If violence is deployed, it will probably be directed at racial minorities, the left-wing professoriat, prominent liberals, civilian officials, sexual minorities, and might be organized as scattered gang / vigilante / terrorist executions. This kind of violence would not need state sanction.

That doesn't mean anything. Most of the people who have the huge stockpiles are probably Trump supporters. — schopenhauer1

According to a 2020 Gallop Poll, 32% of Americans say they own guns. So, 68% do not. Gun ownership is not a normal distribution across demographics.

Republicans (50%), rural residents (48%), men (45%), self-identified conservatives (45%) and Southerners (40%) are the most likely subgroups to say they personally own a gun.

Liberals (15%), Democrats (18%), non-White Americans (18%), women (19%) and Eastern residents (21%) are the least likely to report personal gun ownership.

According to figures quoted by the NRA, Americans own nearly 25 million AR and AK platform firearms. (NSSF[5])

AR-15s are the most commonly used rifles in marksmanship competitions, training, and home defense.

According to Pew, "About three-quarters (72%) of gun owners say that protection is a major reason they own a gun. Considerably smaller shares say that a major reason they own a gun is for hunting (32%), for sport shooting (30%), as part of a gun collection (15%) or for their job (7%)." Hitmen would need a gun, I guess.

There is, not surprisingly, a difference between Democrats and Republicans about whether gun violence is a problem. Why don't more Republicans and Republican-leaning people think gun violence is a problem?

It might have been Robert Paxton who suggested that fascists are as much identifiable as fascists by the way they operate as by what they believe. This is what makes Trump, so objectionable in so many ways as he is, a prime suspect. The January 6 riots were not spontaneous, of course. Using a mob to break up a civil proceeding to gain or keep power is a classic fascist move. He has persisted in maintaining the lie that the election was stolen from him. Politicians lie all the time, of course, but Trump's lies tie into the riots, Stop the Steal chants, and all that.

Labor might well be the bitter and resentful collective Rorty posits. Sufficient economic distress could also motivate white collar, lower-level managerial types to turn into fascists. We need to keep an eye on Christian Nationalists (they're a thing in the US -- another abomination), fascist military types, white nationalists, of course--the Proud Boys, et al. The people who resent limitations on their right to do whatever they damn well please (on federal land, for instance) need to be watched. The wealthy are another suspicious group. Having nothing to lose can stimulate radical thinking, and so can having a lot to lose -- which the rich definitely have.

The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. It's believable, given its setting in time, but perhaps isn't indicative of how a fascist movement would operate now.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is a novel about Ireland under fascism. It won the Booker Prize in 2023. So people are thinking about fascism, one way and the other.