Oceans Yet to Burn

disexplications:

argumate:

rendakuenthusiast:

argumate:

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a badder guy with a gun.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a bad guy with a bigger gun.

The only thing that can stop a nice guy with a gun is the friend zone, apparently.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is agents of the state monopoly on legitimate violence, who have legitimate-violence-guns.

If guns are outlawed by the state asserting a monopoly on the use of force, then only outlaws and agents of the state whose sworn duty is to oppose outlaws will have guns.

If states are outlawed, only outlaws will have states

You’re memeing, but, like, Anarchism.

the-grey-tribe:

mitigatedchaos:

There is a vulnerability (yet another one anyway) in the wokeosphere open for a troll to exploit: simply running around claiming people are white.

Because in practical terms standpoint theory means your race determines your speaking value in the progressive stack, and because bad SJ types will be more likely to believe this kind of accusation, it would be quite dangerous to one’s social standing. I won’t go into further details because I don’t want to encourage it, but defense on this would not be easy.

For my part I see this kind of vulnerability as an indictment of the system itself. Its axioms and patterns make it essentially unsolveable without either tight restriction of access or changing to something else.

The irony that the opposite probably wouldn’t work on White Nationalists isn’t lost on me.

The irony that the opposite probably wouldn’t work on White Nationalists isn’t lost on me.

It does not work to call certain hard leftists, especially Antifa, cuckolds. It literally does nothing (I think I wrote about this before). Fatherhood is a social construct anyway, and if you think paternity tests matter, then you are a MRA. So on some level, it makes sense and cancels out.

Some people also don’t take bourgeois as an insult. Some people don’t mind being called plebes.

It’s almost an inverted shibboleth. Those their enemies would want to insult most with it are most likely to remain unfazed by a word.

That they don’t see anything wrong with being “a cuck” and don’t see fatherhood as real - by Alt Right standards, it’s the most damning indictment of all. I don’t think they call them cucks because the insult has the most teeth. Most people don’t even know what it means. I think they call them cucks because it expresses just how lowly they are (in Alt Right terms).

I’m not of a pure liberal mind myself. I can see the value in a man raising another man’s child, but I worry what it might do to the gene pool.

anaisnein:

mitigatedchaos:

mitigatedchaos:

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

@anaisnein

I think that you’re paying an interesting, perhaps useful, amount of attention to envisioning a dense way of life aligned to the felt and latent needs and wants of suburbanites, but that you’re focusing on them to the point of more or less ignoring the needs and wants of urbanites, as well as ruralites. (Horrible lexicon but eh.) What you’re creating looks to me emphatically like a suburb, not a city; no city-dweller would want to live in it; there’s no there there. It is interesting though!

Blogger Infuriates Urbanites With This One Weird Trick! You Won’t Believe It!

That might be it.  I am a suburbanite at heart, and when I did live in the city, it was on an American university campus - which I liked - and American university campuses are often little medium-density villages within the city, taking up about 2km2 of space, permeable along the edges and with a self-selected population, a civic center for social clubs to gather, park areas throughout, predominantly moved about through walking.

If I were British, I might live in Milton Keynes entirely unironically.  Many of the residents love it there, even though it’s derided as a “non-place” by outsiders.  It just seems like a strange objection to me, and my intuitive response - to give different areas unique architecture or let them dynamically cluster businesses on some purpose - is probably not what the urbanites are looking for.

What I’m focusing on are, yes, questions of how to convince suburbanites to leave the sprawl and live more densely, without using social, economic, or governmental power to force them to do so.

What is a suburb?  It’s somewhere safe, with ample trees, grass, forest, where you can walk the streets at night.  You can ride your bike recreationally right from your house.  On the fourth of July, everyone has a cookout outside and the smell of food wafts through back yards (but otherwise you aren’t flooded with food smells).  Sometimes the neighborhood will put up a tent in a cul-de-sac and have a block party.  Children run free to play with little need for adult supervision.  Wild animals sometimes wander through yards.

People sometimes talk about those suburbanites and their darn autos and wasteful lawns (though it’s less wasteful if you don’t live in Arizona or California!), but there’s a real appeal there, something that has to be acknowledged and transformed in order to win people over.

How can I make the city safe like a suburb?  How can I make it green like a suburb?  How can I make this dense enough to pool resources for various goods and hit the threshold for public transit like a city?  So that they can hang out with people and walk to shops, fixing the sins of the suburb?

It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the result to be a densified suburb.

Though, perhaps you can help me to understand.  What does it mean for there to be a there?

Broadly speaking, I align with Andrew Alexander Price on what makes a city feel real and vibrant and interesting and comfortable and livable as opposed to exhausting and dreary and alienating and frightening and dystopian, and I’m on the Jane Jacobs side of the Jane Jacobs/Robert Moses fight.

But yeah, you’re asking a specific question that needs an answer, and I’m not sure how to answer it even though I think about this a fair amount. FWIW, I live in NYC, and I’m actually pretty jaundiced about it, I’m not a total cheerleader for city life and I see the appeal of suburbs. Good suburbs. Like I personally would only consider walkable places with shops and restaurants and good transit and manageable commute times. (I don’t have kids and loathe driving so obviously that’s going to be how my priorities shake out; I wouldn’t want to impose that specs list on like everyone in America because clearly a lot of people here feel very differently than I do, but also tbh they’re Wrong.) But the rub is that those characteristics I just listed are not! actually! sufficient to define a good place, a real place, a place that’s got a there there. New prefab suburbs do get built on all the right principles of walkability, etc, by people who think like me – didn’t they do something like that in Alexandria? Do I care, and would I move there? Not just hell no but feh.

So there’s something more to it. I’m on mobile or I’d go through some of the Price blog looking for better language or more specific specifics; he’s the clearest thinker I’ve ever come across in amateur smart as fuck urban planning (buries face in hands over own brain’s filing system) and what I want may be in there somewhere.

My irrational gut feeling, I’m afraid, is that it has something to do with the literal age of the place., which is the one thing you can’t address.

There’s a gravitas to older cities that only a very few places in the U.S. have anything of – parts of Boston and New England in general have some of it, TriBeCa in New York has a little, New Orleans has quite a bit. None of it is close to what you get in an older European city. When I go to Europe, I breathe more easily, I feel awake, it’s as if I suddenly realize, wait, what, have I literally been dissociating for the past several years, what did I miss. And it absolutely has something to do with the buildings being several centuries old, the older the better — I can tell by the PK/PD curve, so to speak. (The new part of Ulm, for instance, is no better than Boston; an intact medieval university city is pretty much an antidepressant-nootropic miracle.) Conversely, most of California doesn’t feel real at all to me, not even the objectively breathtakingly lovely parts, to the point that I’m low-key uncomfortable and conscious all the time of a slightly dissociated feeling whenever I’m there. The overnight fake Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles comes to mind. This is unfair and irrational, but I’m sorry, I’m just like this. (I don’t even want to talk about Dallas or Salt Lake City.)

It’s not primarily about density for me, for what that’s worth. I like cities for all the reasons people like cities but my ideal scenario personally would probably be a large village or small town with decent <90m transit to the first or second city in a minor modest-but-functioning European country. My floor for density is basically decent Internet service and no need to own a car, and that means something very different in other countries vs here.

I expect that if I went to one of those foreign cities, I wouldn’t feel a sense of ‘placeness’, though I might be wrong about that.

I suppose I really must travel to London and Kyoto some day.

nuclearspaceheater:

cromulentenough:

confusedbyinterface:

isaacsapphire:

decameter:

thetransintransgenic:

loki-zen:

I know ‘Americans’ is generally understood to have that meaning, but:

a) It is still ambiguous, and that irritates me. How, if this is the nomenclature, are we to refer to ‘people from the continents of America’?

b) The fact that ‘Americans’ and ‘America’ are understood to solely refer to people from the USA seems to me to be part of the ‘we are the only people and place that exists or matters’ thing that US culture can sometimes project, and that really irritates me, which makes the word usage irritating beyond just its ambiguity.

I’d like to say Yanks but apparently it has a different meaning in the USA.

“Yankee” is a kind of complex word.

“For northerners, a “yankee” is somebody from New England. For New Englanders, a “yankee” is somebody from Vermont. For Vermonters, a “yankee” is somebody who eats apple pie for breakfast.“ http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000205.html

Anyway, it would also be nice to have a word for people from North and South America as a group.

Seppos.

americasians

All of the Americas belong to the United States.

Don’t worry, guys.  This ends with the annexation of Mexico in 2068 and the formation of the North American Union, at which point we are known as Unionese.

its-okae-carly-rae:

mitigatedchaos:

mitigatedchaos:

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

@anaisnein

I think that you’re paying an interesting, perhaps useful, amount of attention to envisioning a dense way of life aligned to the felt and latent needs and wants of suburbanites, but that you’re focusing on them to the point of more or less ignoring the needs and wants of urbanites, as well as ruralites. (Horrible lexicon but eh.) What you’re creating looks to me emphatically like a suburb, not a city; no city-dweller would want to live in it; there’s no there there. It is interesting though!

Blogger Infuriates Urbanites With This One Weird Trick! You Won’t Believe It!

That might be it.  I am a suburbanite at heart, and when I did live in the city, it was on an American university campus - which I liked - and American university campuses are often little medium-density villages within the city, taking up about 2km2 of space, permeable along the edges and with a self-selected population, a civic center for social clubs to gather, park areas throughout, predominantly moved about through walking.

If I were British, I might live in Milton Keynes entirely unironically.  Many of the residents love it there, even though it’s derided as a “non-place” by outsiders.  It just seems like a strange objection to me, and my intuitive response - to give different areas unique architecture or let them dynamically cluster businesses on some purpose - is probably not what the urbanites are looking for.

What I’m focusing on are, yes, questions of how to convince suburbanites to leave the sprawl and live more densely, without using social, economic, or governmental power to force them to do so.

What is a suburb?  It’s somewhere safe, with ample trees, grass, forest, where you can walk the streets at night.  You can ride your bike recreationally right from your house.  On the fourth of July, everyone has a cookout outside and the smell of food wafts through back yards (but otherwise you aren’t flooded with food smells).  Sometimes the neighborhood will put up a tent in a cul-de-sac and have a block party.  Children run free to play with little need for adult supervision.  Wild animals sometimes wander through yards.

People sometimes talk about those suburbanites and their darn autos and wasteful lawns (though it’s less wasteful if you don’t live in Arizona or California!), but there’s a real appeal there, something that has to be acknowledged and transformed in order to win people over.

How can I make the city safe like a suburb?  How can I make it green like a suburb?  How can I make this dense enough to pool resources for various goods and hit the threshold for public transit like a city?  So that they can hang out with people and walk to shops, fixing the sins of the suburb?

It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the result to be a densified suburb.

Though, perhaps you can help me to understand.  What does it mean for there to be a there?

Inner-city crime seems to be an American thing, for Reasons. Here in New Zealand it’s more obvious that the benefit people get from the safe suburbs is simply that filtering on income keeps undesirables out, and opposition to increased density in a suburb is *because* it’ll make housing cheaper and bring in undesirables, in the short term before more complete intensification and urbanisation makes it a place that people also work and do business and eat and drink and so on, and subsequently increases rents because people want to live there. A big part of this is our relatively lax limits on rent increases and evictions, I think, which means you don’t get such chronically entrenched low-income high-density areas.

Does New Zealand have issues with schools and location/community?  In America, our inner city schools consistently fare poorly, even though they often have high funding per student.

I can’t imagine Japan has the same school issues Americans do, for instance, since a truly disruptive student wouldn’t be allowed by their schools or culture.  But people really don’t want to make the kinds of changes that would bring that situation about in America.

squareallworthy:

mitigatedchaos:

squareallworthy:

mitigatedchaos:

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

What’s the purpose of all this Blendering? Are you just noodling around, or are you offering Serious Solutions to Today’s Problems?

I’m not dedicated enough in research to count as a Serious Person, but on the other hand a lot of Serious People have been very wrong lately.

The One Thousand Villages series is part of the general direction of this blog to search for overlooked or uninvented paths for society through an intuitive synthesis across multiple fields. (Also it has some nice art to look at which I’ll be adding to my portfolio.) The intent is that eventually some of these ideas will potentially be refined and studied more closely, possibly by others, helping society to escape a local maximum. This post on a reorganization of how schools work is similar. In both cases, the small details are less important than overall ideas that break from the consensus. It’s less about the intricate road layout than the idea of building sub-communities within cities, with friction of movement, as a means of overcoming some of the disadvantages of cities. The recent post is more about spreading the idea of guided busways as a concept.

“Okay,” you might say, “but I studied in that field and what you proposed doesn’t work for reason X.” And that would be a totally valid critique, so if you’re holding back of saying “Actually, that one-way flow through the kilometer was tried in a newtown in Britain and failed,” or something, you can go ahead with it.

Admittedly, it’s also for entertainment, too. I’m on Tumblr as opposed to writing my own SSC equivalent for a reason, I admit.

I have no expertise on urban planning, no. But it strikes me that starting from a blank slate is exactly the wrong approach, and likely to lead you to repeat the same mistakes that plague other planned communities. The world does not need another Brasilia or Salt Lake City.

I think that depends in part on our goals, or we might say that there is a tradeoff.  In the United States, we’ve got expensive suburban sprawl as what people do unplanned, and traffic-choked cities with freeways bumper-to-bumper with cars, elevated crime rates… 

Once the buildings have been built, it’s an expensive fight to install transit infrastructure, because you have to knock down peoples’ homes and businesses.  If a bunch of corridors were left as park land to be converted later, it would be a lot easier.

But we want people to live more densely, right?  For environmental reasons and maybe social reasons.  How can we get the suburbanites to come in from the suburbs?

It turns out that suburbs have all sorts of nice features that people like, which is why they move out to them when they can afford to.  I think those features can be replicated at a higher density, making the suburbanites more comfortable with living in a denser area, saving on carbon, etc if there’s some planning.

Likewise, people fight against density.  Why?  A variety of reasons, including crime, noise, having to give up their home, etc.  But with a different structuring of both land and incentives, that could be changed, preventing yet more resource-consuming suburban sprawl.

its-okae-carly-rae:

mitigatedchaos:

the-grey-tribe:

Interestingly, replacing all schooling with Khan Academy has one big problem in common with replacing a city with an agglomeration of villages:

You take away common ground, a schelling point to meet. No more class discussion. No more convenient shopping streets. No more pub crawls. No more cultural/literary touchstones. @mitigatedchaos

But all the pubs and shops are on the outside of the village walls, on the more heavily-trafficked streets, and thus publicly accessible, because businesses should be publicly accessible in order to get enough customers.

Even the civic center is on the outside edge so that you can have dudes over for your board gaming group or knitting club if there aren’t enough knitters in your village.

Yeah if you’ve got a city of millions of people you kinda can’t just have those sorts of places entirely centralized, and if you do it’s inaccessible to a lot of people.

Though the disagreement i have is probably something of a similar nature, which is that the discrete and semi-permeable nature of quads sort of adds an insularity that is detrimental to the broad economic benefits of cities, and there are economies of agglomeration which I don’t think get fully captured here. Like, Jane Jacobs would just say the blocks are too big and you need lots of short streets to get the full benefits of a dense city. 

It also makes me think of A City Is Not A Tree, actually. I was dissatisfied by that piece on a couple of levels, but I still think it makes some good points which are applicable here. 

What do you think of university campuses?

onecornerface:

argumate:

davidsevera:

A prediction market for which identities will be taken seriously 5 years hence, so I know which ones I can claim publicly without fear of future unemployment.

I am long furry, but not all fursonas are created equal.

Surely you meant to say all fursonas are equal, but some are more equal than others?

multiheaded1793:

the-grey-tribe:

If I ever meet @mitigatedchaos in the year 1995, I’ll buy her a beer.

Past-her might probably be more thankful for a dire warning about the horrors of Shakira Law and no-go zones overtaking Europe. Eh? Eh? Wouldn’t you be, @mitigatedchaos?

Your mind jumps to this, and not 9/11?

Either Osama Bin Laden was breathtakingly stupid or delusional, or his goal wasn’t to just get the West to quit interfering in the Middle East.

9/11 is what creates the political capital necessary for George Bush to launch his Iraq War, even though it isn’t tied to it, killing thousands of Americans and over a hundred thousand Iraqis.  It cost two trillion dollars, the entire lifetime economic output - total, not profit - of over five hundred thousand people, and is likely to cost an additional $4 trillion over time.  This is in addition to the two trillion dollar cost of the 9/11 attack itself and its effect on the economy and the American psyche.

Before that, Islam was just considered a Weird Foreign Religion.

Of course, this would do nothing to prevent what happened at Rotherham.

However, what happened at Rotherham required the Left to jump to the defense of a designated politically-favored group when it was not justified.  A lot of the Left’s sudden fascination with Islam is due to the right’s opposition to it - no 9/11 means there’s less right-wing opposition, which means there’s less left-wing counter-opposition in favor of a religion that is worse on most axes the Left says they care about than the fundamentalist Christianity they happily opposed before.

Which means “holy sht we need to do something about this systematic child sexual abuse” doesn’t get met with “SHUT UP YOU EVIL RACISTS!”  

And with the other pathways in this timeline, perhaps Libya doesn’t get destabilized, or Syria doesn’t get destabilized, so there is no migration crisis.

More US military power conserved means more leverage against China and the ability to topple North Korea before the Kims get nuclear missiles.  There’s a reasonably high probability that Saddam’s regime doesn’t collapse and so there’s no DAESH.

The benefits just keep going and going.

You don’t seem to understand me as well as you think you do.

squareallworthy:

mitigatedchaos:

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

What’s the purpose of all this Blendering? Are you just noodling around, or are you offering Serious Solutions to Today’s Problems?

I’m not dedicated enough in research to count as a Serious Person, but on the other hand a lot of Serious People have been very wrong lately.

The One Thousand Villages series is part of the general direction of this blog to search for overlooked or uninvented paths for society through an intuitive synthesis across multiple fields. (Also it has some nice art to look at which I’ll be adding to my portfolio.) The intent is that eventually some of these ideas will potentially be refined and studied more closely, possibly by others, helping society to escape a local maximum. This post on a reorganization of how schools work is similar. In both cases, the small details are less important than overall ideas that break from the consensus. It’s less about the intricate road layout than the idea of building sub-communities within cities, with friction of movement, as a means of overcoming some of the disadvantages of cities. The recent post is more about spreading the idea of guided busways as a concept.

“Okay,” you might say, “but I studied in that field and what you proposed doesn’t work for reason X.” And that would be a totally valid critique, so if you’re holding back of saying “Actually, that one-way flow through the kilometer was tried in a newtown in Britain and failed,” or something, you can go ahead with it.

Admittedly, it’s also for entertainment, too. I’m on Tumblr as opposed to writing my own SSC equivalent for a reason, I admit.

argumate:

mitigatedchaos:

argumate:

mitigatedchaos:

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

wonder if we could rig up an actual simulation of this stuff

I have no doubt that I could, but I can’t justify doing so without funding.  You know how it is.

fund it via KickStarter on the basis that it’s developing levels for an fps-

actually that’s needless deception, the indie games market has demonstrated that people are more than willing to spend on incredibly niche geeky shit like simulating perfect virtual cities

Well, let’s see.  To justify the project as a game, I’d need about 2,000 people to pay about $10, or about 1,000 people to pay about $20. 

So let’s think about what that might look like.

As you may know, Skyrim compresses distance in a symbolic way by somewhere between a factor of 10 and 100.  It’s how you can walk ten meters, kill a pack of wolves, then walk another ten meters and kill another pack of wolves.  What often isn’t discussed is that most citybuilders do this as well, which is why they require such laughably overbuilt transit infrastructure.  Cities: Skylines gives you about 36km2 to play with.  Singapore is about 720km.  Manhattan is about 59 kilometers.

So presumably, this simulation game would work to aggressively limit computation so that it can do a lot more computation.  It would rely on a grid of 5m squares instead of allowing as much freedom in road-building.  Agents would all be represented in the sim, and their paths would be stored, but visual traffic would be represented as a statistical aggregate and not following individual cars from place of employment.  The visual style would be fairly simple to conserve on cycles - even people would be represented with 2m tall boxes (children with shorter boxes, obviously).  Traffic paths would primarily be updated opportunistically rather than continuously.

In exchange, each resident in the city would be simulated, and a wide array of more complicated municipal policies would be available, including state ownership of housing developments, the various components needed to try the One Thousand Villages, etc.  There would also be “markets” that bid somehow on jobs or properties, to decide what to do with a mixed-use zone for instance.  Just managing the fine details would end up requiring some minor automation and I bet there would be a “zone for subdivision” fill tool that caused a private property developer agent to insert a dynamically-generated slice of suburbia.

Possible elements could also include political costs/capital needed to push through bulldozing houses to install new light rail, disruptions from the global economy, etc.  Another element could be the cultures thing @lockrum brought up, but rather than real ethnicities (which could make people upset, and also are the largest source of real ethnic tension), they’d be represented as high school cliques or various subcultures (jocks, otakus, hipsters) and you could forcefully integrate them Lee Kwan Yew style, or they might self-segregate automatically, or they might be atomized by the distribution of jobs and housing prices.  (They would probably be depicted as different-coloured two meter rectangles instead of grey ones.)

Would people fund that?  I’m unsure.

argumate:

mitigatedchaos:

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

wonder if we could rig up an actual simulation of this stuff

I have no doubt that I could, but I can’t justify doing so without funding.  You know how it is.

rendakuenthusiast:

femmenietzsche:

unknought:

If you’re arguing about whether the U.S. should weaken protections of freedom of speech, I’m likely to find you a lot more persuasive if you examine other Western nations with weaker free speech protections (i.e. most of them) and the observable consequences of that, than if you expound on the most horrifying dystopia that you can imagine resulting from the opposing side.

Yeah. As someone who’s innately a free speech absolutist, it’s hard to admit that moderate limits on speech aren’t necessarily very onerous and can be maintained for decades (at least) without spiraling into anything much worse, but it’s pretty obviously true. Doesn’t mean the restrictions pass a cost-benefit test, but it’s pretty obviously true.

I do actually think that European and Canadians restrictions on speech are already onerous, and American 1st amendment jurisprudence is the one major thing that is genuinely politically superior about the US compared to those countries. I keep seeing stories about the cops being called on people for hate speech tweets in the UK that would be unambiguously constitutionally protected in the US, and thinking I’m glad my servers are here and not there.

If I lived in one of those counties I would consider it politically important to move local law more towards the US model, or barring that preventing effective enforcement of censorship law; since I live in the US, I consider it politically important to prevent the state of 1st amendment law from moving even a little bit in the direction of Europe and Canada (which I agree are not dystopias).

nuclearspaceheater:

shlevy:

@nuclearspaceheater

Here’s one: orthogonality thesis. People who disagree with you are not just dumber versions of yourself, and making them smarter without addressing their hostile values just gives those values more effective people to attack you with.

Setting aside concerns about the orthogonality thesis as applied to artificial agents, do you really think it’s reasonable to bring it to bear when the agents in question are all still basically structured by the same evolutionary and cultural pressures and the intelligence in question is nowhere near the “you can achieve any goal you could possibly pursue” threshold?

I think extant neurotypes and values provide enough examples of goal-diversity that humanity itself is, to me, the most persuasive argument in favor of the orthogonality thesis. (Though, it’s negation was never persuasive to me to begin with.)

Considering how heavily loaded crime/etc are towards low IQ, I think there’s a significant gain to be made from using genetic engineering to bring up the low end.

ethicalanimefordecenthumanbeings:

If you look into a mirror at night and say “bernie sanders and gamergate were both russian projects to assault american democracy from both sides” three times you become verified on twitter

mailadreapta:

the-grey-tribe:

Do religions really scale?

A lot of talk about the social benefits of Mormonism, Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism talks about the effects of the religion on local communities.

The social “benefit“ of hellfire as a deterrent against crime, in addition to secular punishments like jail or fines should persist on a national level.

Positive effects of Mormon communities extent to their non-Mormon neighbours.

It’s really unclear to me if a belief in the supernatural is necessary to create these benefits, or if the benefits of the beliefs vanish if you’re the only one with them, or if they vanish as a religion becomes the majority in a country.

Religion has one hell of a Simpson’s paradox. The wealthiest nations are also some of the least religious, and poor nations tend to be more religious. But within nations, religion correlates positively with income.

I do not understand this, and I wish I did.

Perhaps they are in some sense less religious, since it is the social expectation that *everyone* be religious in those communities? Whereas in more liberal countries it isn’t just a matter of how religion changes people, but of who comes to religion.

collapsedsquid:

argumate:

god it’s way past time we dissolved Western Australia

either get rid of all the states entirely and give more authority to local councils, or get rid of the federal government and let states print their own currencies, but the current split between state and federal is incredibly irritating.

That’s the part of the world @mitigatedchaos can be in charge of.  It’s mostly uninhabitable, so who cares if it’s fucked up?

I know, you’re probably thinking this is a safe idea.  “Let’s exile that lunatic to the vast desert of Western Australia.  No matter how many bizarre plans they have, the collateral damage cannot possibly escape to the rest of the developed world.”

And of course, this seems perfectly reasonable.  The diagonal of Western Australia is literally over two thousand kilometers in length.

It’s just over two point six million square kilometers in size.  Even the construction of a Special Economic Zone kept wet by a nuclear-powered desalination plant would be dwarfed by four orders of magnitude by the shear scale of Western Australia.

But did you realize it’s possible to terraform the Outback with existing technology?

Who would fund such a thing?  Well, multiple nations are looking to meet their climate commitments, and the newly-formed state of Technocratic Western Australia would be in a position to supply.  A new city would need to be built to accommodate the infrastructure necessary to oversee this enormous project, along with a series of smaller and more temporary towns, allowing a great degree of flexibility in urban planning.  

The scale of the project would ensure funding for the new regime for several decades, while power was consolidated and a new culture was forged across multiple immigrant groups brought in to provide the labor for the project.  A tiered citizenship system, including education and service to advance up the hierarchy, with special status reserved for national heroes and more voice available in the National Delegation for loyalists, would place long-term political power in the hands of those committed to the new Western Australia.

As the trees spread across the continent, new development opportunities and industries would open up as the temperatures and local climates changed, paving the way for a nation of twenty million by the mid century.

The only thing preventing this future is that I am not in charge of Western Australia.