/And if anybody pulls this off, let me know in three years.
Local Lunatic Given Control of Personal Army, Made Absolute Leader of Toledo, Ohio, as “Emergency Measure”
Democratic Party Leaders Vow to Impeach Trump, Fight Trump Administration Over Unexplained Decision to Yield American City to Obscure Blogger
[Photo illustration: Obscure blogger “Mitigated Chaos” rides into city of Toledo at head of tank column, wearing “reimagined Union Army uniform”]
Blogger to head new “Metropolitan Planning Authority” as greater Toledo area declared tax-free “Special Development Administrative Zone” by Executive Order 15335
Your strengths:
* 45 minute drive to DTW, one of the best airports in the country. Yes, it’s a drive (so car ownership), but. * There is an Amtrak station. And if you can ever convince Amtrak to run more than 1 train a day that shows up at 5AM (overnighters from DC to Chicago), you’re 2 hours from Cleveland, 4 from Chicago and Pittsburgh (evening trips), and 10-ish from DC (overnighter). * You’re the corner of Lake Erie and every bit of economic activity out of Michigan and heading east is either rolling through you or through Canada.
Your weaknesses:
* White residents who remember why they all fled to Sylvania and their gorgeous suburban mansions in the first place, and spent 50 years getting their every bias confirmed and deepened by the evening news.
/Seriously, I get why you skipped over the racial/class aspects of this whole thing, but uh… that’s really critical. There’s two reasons why Ann Arbor works for this sort of thing, and Toledo does not.
It’s true - dealing with racial issues would require some pretty strong ideological support.
I think race/class issues could be mostly resolved, given the right conditions, but that the population largely do not believe in the necessary ideological supports required to accomplish this, or for that matter, to supply the necessary political energy for the necessary political policies.
The required measures would border on national separatist levels of energy.
On the other hand, Toledo was not chosen out of serious consideration, but for shtposting purposes due to required level of obscurity, position, etc.
On the third hand, the Great Lakes region has access to bulk long-range shipping.
/And if anybody pulls this off, let me know in three years.
Local Lunatic Given Control of Personal Army, Made Absolute Leader of Toledo, Ohio, as “Emergency Measure”
Democratic Party Leaders Vow to Impeach Trump, Fight Trump Administration Over Unexplained Decision to Yield American City to Obscure Blogger
[Photo illustration: Obscure blogger “Mitigated Chaos” rides into city of Toledo at head of tank column, wearing “reimagined Union Army uniform”]
Blogger to head new “Metropolitan Planning Authority” as greater Toledo area declared tax-free “Special Development Administrative Zone” by Executive Order 15335
this is okay, but the real question is the degree of non-viability of certain small cities, and the contingent nature of that viability on technological development and unspecified exogenous shocks
True, but I reckon it hurts less to move from Cornville, OH to Cleveland, OH than it does to move from Cornville, OH, to OverpricedBurough, NYC, NY.
[epistemic status: significant fatigue is being masked by caffeine and other effects]
The best time for your city to be built for efficiency is the year 1950, when it was initially laid out. The next best time for your city to be built for efficiency is now.
Rent - Housing is a very significant expense. It can range from 22%-50% of income. Every dollar that your citizens spend on housing is a dollar that they cannot spend on something else.
There must be enough housing units, but they must be built in a way that is intelligent, and which does not conflict with other goals of efficiency. The regulatory regime for both renovation and new housing construction must be both effective and efficient.
If median household income in your city is $50,000, each one point reduction in rent frees $500 per household per year. If the city has 500,000 households, this amounts to $250M annually, which could be
spent on another government program (or infrastructure)
used to potentially lower wages without lowering standard of living, making the city more competitive for employers
allowed to escape untaxed, raising standard of living for citizens
Transport - In the US, a car costs over $8,000 a year. If the average household in our city has an income of $50,000, this is 16% of total annual income. At one car per household for 500,000 households, this amounts to $4,000M annually.
We can work to make car usage less frequent or necessary, which prolongs car lifespans and reduces accidents (and associated costs). However, the real binary is deciding whether to own a car at all.
For every 5% of our city that does not own a car, we free up $200M, minus the cost of our public transport network, to spend on something else that could be making our city more competitive, each year. If our public transport network were free, we could send 5% of our city’s population to university with this money (using a series of expiring loans that only have to be repaid if the person moves out of the city).
At the regional level, our city should have good commercial (airport) and industrial (seaport, river, rail) transport options, for cost-effective shipping of raw materials and goods and cost-effective business meetings.
Regulations - Regulations do not have to be non-existent. If we let companies step all over our city too much, the resulting social and environmental damage will render the city uncompetitive, and the costs pushed off onto the citizens will lower their effect standard of living. However…
Our regulations should be predictable and easy to comply with. Companies can plan for costs that they can foresee, but unplanned costs are significantly more expensive. Additionally, while allowing companies to pollute without consequence pushes costs off on everyone else and may decrease net efficiency,any regulations beyond those which are necessary is a loss - it is a form of waste.
Infrastructure & City Services - We want our infrastructure and city services to be cost-effective, as again, any money we save can either be spent on something else, or spent on more city services. Nailing the efficiency on every other aspect of the city will help with this - if half of our city doesn’t own a car, we’re talking a potential average %8 decrease in the cost of our cops, clerks, and judges. If our rent is only %25 of income, compared to other cities we could be looking at at 45% of income, our cops might cost $14,000 less, or we could get cops that are $14,000 better, because they have an effective wage which is 28% higher.
Triage - As the city’s population is falling, however, we may want to look at in-city relocation programs for residents which would allow us to de-urbanize subsections of the city.
In particular, this would allow us to maintain service levels by keeping density high enough for infrastructure and city services to remain cost effective. Infrastructure in the de-urbanized areas would be shut off and no longer maintained, and buildings would be demolished to prevent the pro-crime effect of vacant buildings.
Attracting Talent - You probably won’t attract all the talent of the cool, hip places, like New York - but you don’t have to. If your city offers high quality of life with low cost of living (a profit for employees!), it can attract sensible, competent people that are attractive to employers that aren’t looking to skim the cream of the crop from the entire country in a desperate arms race of absurd rent prices along the coasts.
It probably still pays to develop a university that has excellence synergistic with a key industry in the area to build up a unique talent pool allowing for city specialization competitive globally (although this is still somewhat risky).
However, I’d like to reiterate the idea of conditional loans here, depending on how much funding the city has available. These would go to promising people pursuing degrees in key local industrial/commercial sectors, which would gradually be paid off by the city so long as they remained in the city, or until paid off completely. This allows us to build a talent pool which is unique to our city, providing an indirect subsidy for employers, employees, and potentially improved economic productivity.
(Low cost of living per quality of living also helps us attract professors for our university!)
How do we get there?
That, I think, is a very good question. It is economically infeasible to rebuild the city into a more efficient form all at once. You’d go bankrupt if you tried.
I think, aside from some of these matters that exist primarily at the municipal level, the answer is that we redevelop subsections of the city around principles of efficiency over time. This allows us to maintain a productive base to keep our city alive long enough to build the next one, and as we connect these areas together with public transport, the overall value of each one will improve.
For some locations, even a genius invested with absolute municipal power could not pull it off, as the fundamentals of the location are not viable within the current economic context, but IMO, it is likely that combining everyone into a few ultra-dense, ultra-high-rent coastal cities is not actually the most economically efficient possible use of resources.
they most certainly did botch it, but i think it'd be worth looking at how exactly. i think you're working towards something worthwhile but there's got to be compromise regarding adaptations to high population densities and how tight-knit you can have your social groups. if you want, i'll see if i can find some passages that are particularly relevant, so you can get the gist without reading the whole thing?
But how would you send it on Anon? …I guess I better make some room in my askbox.
Wouldn't Russian Marines arguably be amphibious steppe marauders?
So you’re here to be entered into the contest? We’ll need you to provide a blood sample so that your eligibility can be verified. Admittedly, I’m not sure if grey spheres can be either Mongolian or Filipino, but I suppose that’s up to the genetics company to determine, right?
The last two races of this year are Mongolians and Filipinos!
If you are of Mongolian or Filipino ancestry, please contact the front desk to be entered into our grand prize drawing for your chance to win your very own horde of amphibious steppe marauders.
Although admittedly the complaints that “WHY WONT WOMEN MARRY A STACK OF HUSBANDS SO THAT I CAN MARRY A STACK OF WIVES??!!” would be funny. But on some level the people that would want polygamy would either know this or be too huffed on the moral justification for it, so they would never agree to this weird ideological compromise.
So when’s the “multiamory is bad because it will result in polyandry”discourse? I mean, the arguments write themselves: Women can easily find partners, men can’t; therefore men should settle for being one of many. Toss in some just-sos to explain why women would want a stack of husbands, and bam.
I’ll believe in polyandry risk when I actually see it. Male and female dating behaviors are not actually the same, which is part of why normies doing polygamy is (non-SJ) problematic.
Also, pro-poly is not going to propose “poly, but only to the degree that a given generation’s gender ratio is out of balance”. Or “poly, but only to the degree that the other sex is poly”.
So when’s the “multiamory is bad because it will result in polyandry”discourse? I mean, the arguments write themselves: Women can easily find partners, men can’t; therefore men should settle for being one of many. Toss in some just-sos to explain why women would want a stack of husbands, and bam.
I’ll believe in polyandry risk when I actually see it. Male and female dating behaviors are not actually the same, which is part of why normies doing polygamy is (non-SJ) problematic.
i'm not saying people shouldn't live like suburbanites if they're paying for it, just that it doesn't work at high population densities, and it's been tried before, and jacobs objections aren't that it doesn't fit with her aesthetics and preferences, it's that it doesn't work and leads to crime and other social problems. my question really was "have you read jane jacobs lately" to see if you had responses about the pragmatics of past failures, when what you propose doesn't seem that different
I may have to, although I suspect “it’s been tried before” includes “…and they botched it”.
(I did read about the Hulme Crescents, although that may not be close to what you have in mind.)
But as for right now, I’m focusing on my (largely unrelated to urban planning) fiction writing, and for reading, I have that book by LKY arriving soon. (I don’t actually read that much. I’m not really a good person, you see.)
Every time I see one of those posts about “where are the fantasy stories with even remotely realistic economies and politics!” I glance over to the scattered notes and snippets I’ve made for Exactly That Story and get wracked with those why-aren’t-you-following-your-dreams shivers.
For the third edition of the Exalted rpg, they went to a lot of trouble to cajole the guy who developed the first edition to come back and write some material for the book, and he totally didn’t give a shit since he’d been doing other things for ten years at that point. He’s an economist now, so the biggest contiguous contribution he made was like two pages that just talk about about currency denominations, coinage, and seignorage in the game’s fantasy setting and how those things related to factional politics, and they cut basically the entire section because people do not want to read two pages of that in the core setting chapter of a high fantasy adventure game.
This was the same game line that hired an actual marine historian to write the book about seafaring and thus got a huge amount of material about shipboard chains of command, hull and rigging types, naval watch scheduling, and so on. I loved that book unironically, but you basically can’t use that sort of material because 95% of people will just totally skip your weird Moby Dick style digressions into whale physiology or whatever.
Anyway, regarding your specific story: if the Silmarillion teaches anything, it’s that sufficiently detailed worldbuilding can overcome the need to actually write readable fiction.
you're not the first person to try and duplicate suburbs and small towns at urban densities. people trying that is like at least a third of what jane jacobs was objecting to.
Maybe not every community has to be the same.
Not everyone actually likes cities for what they are. Suburbs aren’t evil in themselves, they just have too much infrastructure per taxpayer… and particularly if we remove the need for large numbers of automobiles, the math on them changes.
Ideal Form: be love interest in female-oriented paranormal romance, except it turns out to be a grimdark genre deconstruction, the normie girl fails to tame me, and I monsterify her instead
What if she likes grimdark deconstructions though.
the most horrifying thing i can think of is waking up in a futuristic emergency room operating table and your whole body neck down is now translucent plastic prosthetics with madcatz logos all over
emotional wounds aren’t the only legitimate negative consequence of
cheating; some people value playing it safe with their health
I don’t doubt this. But no one objects to cheating only because of health risks, and to frame the immorality of cheating as arising solely (or even primarily) from the health risks is therefore absurd.
Interestingly, when I first started poly-ing I had a couple friends who had really negative reactions. And they tried very hard to justify their negative reactions in terms of health and safety stuff.
But it was pretty clear that that wasn’t the “real” problem—they were trying to explain to themselves why it as bad, and that was the first idea they came up with.
Their instincts aren’t entirely wrong. There are issues of sex/gender demand imbalances, risks of financially unstable childbirth, emotions that can run high including jealousy (which evolved for a reason), lower exit cost creating a greater risk of being abandoned if a more desirable partner comes along… Poly isn’t only a high risk activity in terms of direct physical health.
Speaking of writing, one piece of advice stuck out to me from years ago. It went something like - “What is the most interesting part of your character’s life? Are you writing about that? If not, why not?” And there may be suitable reasons, such as that you already wrote that story, but…
I recently read another piece of writing advice where the author was talking about increasing her writing speed, and how she shifted from writing in the moment to graphing out scenes relatively quickly before writing them - but the interesting part was that if she wasn’t enthusiastic about writing a scene, it meant something needed to change in the pre-writing sketching out.
So I was thinking about this in synthesizing, and I was thinking, do we ever actually need an uninteresting scene?
Not to communicate setting information, or setup things we need for later, to lower or defuse tension (so we can ramp it up again later), or to create within the reader a sense of the passage of time. All those can be interesting, even if they aren’t viscerally exciting.
And I think sometimes we may think we need an uninteresting scene so that we can set things up for later - but I think perhaps we don’t. We can change the scene. If that doesn’t work, there are ways to include the setup information in one of our interesting scenes.
Do you ever see a “critique” of fiction writing that was pretty obviously pulled out of the critic’s ass just to complain about like “Why didn’t the author spend 500 pages explaining the selective breeding practices of this species of domestic dragon to create fireproof leather armor?” Because Jimothy I can’t find a reader with that many fucks to give.
So is it like George RR Martin complaining about Tolkien not explaining the tax system of his world?
Man, every time I see one of these posts implying something would be too absurdly boring and specific to include in a fantasy novel I’m like ‘hmm, that’s something I wish they would have gone into more, that would be something I’d find legitimately interesting’
To me, it feels like we should in some ways let the world speak for itself, creating a sense of natural depth of simulation and realism where larger amounts of information are implied by relatively few lines, and save the detailed discussions that talk directly about tax regimes for online bonus content.
Of course, I may not be the best source of advice on this. We’ll see how things turn out.
There are two ways, I think, to approach this.
The first is a sort of intuitive iceberg below the surface, where a minor interaction within the story communicates a much larger information load or general sense about the nature of the world. To take an example I already posted,
The adultery laws don’t apply to registered prostitutes.
It isn’t highly entangled with the plot, but it tells us that
They are socially conservative enough to ban adultery
They are simultaneously not socially conservative enough to ban prostitution
Synthesizing 1 & 2, their axis of social conservatism is probably different from our own, based on some alternate popular understanding of social mechanics
The government is sufficiently interventionist/statist enough to not only ban adultery, but to register prostitutes - there must be a bureaucracy to enforce these laws, so we can infer something about the size and power of the government
So we don’t need to know the details of the regulation regime to get a sense of the world from it and feel a depth to the world simulation, assuming other aspects of the work align with the implications. We get even more out of it if we already know other facts about the government, like if it has popular support, in which case we can infer that the population itself has similar views of social conservatism.
The second is to entangle the fantasy mechanics with the plot.
In video games, there is an idea of tension between game mechanics and plot or story, and there is an idea that some of the best games really weave the two together in a natural way to create higher immersion as part of games as an artform.
I think we can view a fantasy book similarly, with a continuum.
At one end, there is this setting detail and there is the story, and they’re almost irrelevant relative to each other. We get a big long description of the Cow Tax, but our main character is a thief in a totally different province, and the Cow Tax not only doesn’t come up in the story but only impacts like 0.25% of GDP of the neighboring kingdom.
(Of course, some people can enjoy a book that is primarily about setting and not plot. Like a sort of fictional non-fiction book.)
As we move along the spectrum, the Cow Tax starts to become more entangled with the plot. Perhaps it interferes with the funding of the enemy noble’s army, or there is a rebellion in a province because cows were taxed too much.
We can move closer, too, and tell a story about a peasant suffering because of the Cow Tax, making its resolution the central element of the plot, or have the entire plot hinge on demonstrating the effects of the Cow Tax.
Under this approach, the more entangled something is, the more explanation it gets, unless we want to create an air of mystery or something.
(To some degree, “the whole plot is about demonstrating the effects of the Cow Tax” is a very classic sci-fi approach, where the whole book is a big “what if?”)
Hey friends, can we tag for the “let’s break up Google” discourse? I recommend #hatred of the good for being the good, but really anything reliable will do
sure! I’ll tag it #StateOwnedEnterprisesWithAmericanCharacteristics
Alright, that’s it, we’re sending you back to the factory where they make the owls. This is too much.
Today’s misread: “after being impregnated by Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple” for “after being inspired by Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple”
Oh my goodness.
I didn’t know Half-Literature was even a template in D&D.
I think one could make a decent case the Verizon should turn Tumblr into the social networking non-profit similar to Mozilla is for web browsers where Tumblr would embrace compatibility and open standards for social networking. Tumblr is unlikely to become profitable because its user bases is not rich and the nsfw content tends to scare advertisers. Verizon runs many content businesses which could be harmed if Facebook captures the entire attention market. By encouraging a commodification of social networking through open standards, more of the customers money/attention will be available for the content businesses.
I’m not sure many people would donate to Tumblr though.
there might be other revenue possibilities besides advertising, a Patreon-style system, perhaps
Hold on, a Patreon-like system built into Tumblr?
I have no idea what the effects of that would be, but given the number of artists and other content creators on Tumblr…
Slight diversion: genre fusion wherein the antagonists to magical girls are Bond villains
that’s not even much of a diversion: over-the-top selfish megalomaniacs who employ colorfully psychologically broken characters in order to pursue sinister goals like world domination because they can’t get past their own emotions, operating shadowy organizations, who continually execute their underlings for failure, and who continually make sub-optimal decisions out of a sense of showmanship?
the only real difference between Queen Beryl and Ernst Stavro Blofeld is what tools they have available to them
Sometimes we’ll get “look, straight neurotypical women don’t *really* want a man that will perform masculinity, her boyfriend is wearing a pink shirt!” but then the dude is tall, buff, and confident, and he works in construction - the kind of man for whom a pink shirt shows that he is so masculine that wearing a pink shirt doesn’t harm his aura of masculinity, and thus further proves his masculinity.
Local man finds another way to say “countersignalling masculinity” in more words
Real men wear pink and take estradiol!
So what you’re saying is that Rationalist Tumblr is actually really, really manly?
Do we need to get lifting shirts made? The barbell kind, not the petty-crime-as-a-hobby kind.
The continent itself was an enormity. Its immense ruddy desert allowed for little life, and that life which did survive was rendered twisted and cruel. Poison was the norm rather than the exception. The asphalt tendrils of civilization mattered little, merely connecting the few desperate humans who eked out a living on the fringes of their land. Why did they not flee, later historians would wonder. Did some enchantment hold them fast? Did none foresee their doom? Only the desert knows now.
So… this is like a Mad Max thing, or just a description of Australia as it is now?
DNA identification of all citizens, but the State only stores a series of hashes rather than the DNA itself, for reasons of privacy.
This basically came out of a realization that if the government has stored your eye scan, fingerprint, and DNA information, then at some future date, it might be possible to clone you (or rather parts of you) in order to defeat your biometric protection mechanisms.
So a proper cyberpunk government should have some way of not storing this information itself, but only data prints that can be reliably and unidirectionally generated from it. Otherwise that authorization infrastructure could be severely compromised by foreign rivals in the event of a breach - and you can’t so easily change your President’s DNA.
then you realise that we’re surrounded by billowing clouds of biomarkers wherever we go and private entities will be sucking it all up to add to their databases anyway
True. Biological bodies are very inconvenient that way.
On the other hand, that isn’t so good for the field of biometric identification!
DNA identification of all citizens, but the State only stores a series of hashes rather than the DNA itself, for reasons of privacy.
This basically came out of a realization that if the government has stored your eye scan, fingerprint, and DNA information, then at some future date, it might be possible to clone you (or rather parts of you) in order to defeat your biometric protection mechanisms.
So a proper cyberpunk government should have some way of not storing this information itself, but only data prints that can be reliably and unidirectionally generated from it. Otherwise that authorization infrastructure could be severely compromised by foreign rivals in the event of a breach - and you can’t so easily change your President’s DNA.
Yeah but they’re the bad type of skin color so we can safely ignore them and nothing insane will happen.
:<
Have you actually been seeing a significant number of lefty people say that we should ignore the drug overdose epidemic or that it isn’t a problem?
My “:<” was more about the situation overall.
This did fly under the radar for a while, and there was a bit of coverage, but no real political will to accompany it. In this case the GOPpers aren’t so much better since they don’t know how to actually fix drug problems, although apparently they’re changing the laws to stop handing out opioids by the 90-pill bottle after every surgery.
(I was given some prescription painkillers after my surgery and deliberately avoided using the full dose, or even many of the pills. I wanted to feel enough pain to know when I might be causing trouble. Apparently I inadvertantly followed what you’re supposed to be doing.)
God fucking dammit my I typed out two replies in a row only to have Tumblr’s donkey piss mobile app shit itself.
TL;DR the left has been trying to get drug addiction taken seriously as a medical issue rather than stigmatized as a moral failure for a while now, and I don’t see how there is/was “no political will” unless you narrowly define that to mean political will to put restrictions on opiate prescriptions, which is a policy that I’m still not really sold on even in light of the scope and seriousness of the epidemic.
Edit: also that emote only showed up as a “:” to me in your earlier reblog because of weirdness with how tumblr parses HTML and @staff needs to get their shot together
You’re thinking that I’m having a stronger reaction to this than I am. If you want to argue the point, take it up with Slart.
I don’t see how there is/was “no political will” unless you narrowly define that to mean political will to put restrictions on opiate prescriptions,
In fact, I did mean this particular issue flew under the radar, and this particular issue didn’t seem to have a lot of political will behind it. Left will is focused a lot on recreational drugs legalization and preventing all the secondary harms from incarceration (significant), rather than preventing drug abuse.
In the case of opioids, apparently what’s needed is prevention, as most of the addicts are ones that got issued dozens of pills after a surgery, when in practice they should be getting about five plus ordinary painkillers or something, then come back if that isn’t enough. (And policy is changing on this. Scott would probably have something to say about it in terms of dysfunction of the medical system.)
The “:” was probably because I originally typed “:<” on the mobile website, instead of “:>”. (I don’t use the app.)
Yeah but they’re the bad type of skin color so we can safely ignore them and nothing insane will happen.
:<
Have you actually been seeing a significant number of lefty people say that we should ignore the drug overdose epidemic or that it isn’t a problem?
My “:<” was more about the situation overall.
This did fly under the radar for a while, and there was a bit of coverage, but no real political will to accompany it. In this case the GOPpers aren’t so much better since they don’t know how to actually fix drug problems, although apparently they’re changing the laws to stop handing out opioids by the 90-pill bottle after every surgery.
(I was given some prescription painkillers after my surgery and deliberately avoided using the full dose, or even many of the pills. I wanted to feel enough pain to know when I might be causing trouble. Apparently I inadvertantly followed what you’re supposed to be doing.)
So there’s been this interesting pattern where the places that are habitable after global warming are also the places with housing restrictions.
At which point everyone despairs of ever living in the 80 degree parts of LA and moves to 120 degree Vegas at a tenth the price. (Or at least the 109 degree parts of LA a couple mountain ranges away).
And right now, it sure looks like the fastest growing cities and regions in the country are either the sort of place where an extra 5F gets people killed or the sort of place where you get semi-regular hurricanes.
So uh… what happens when people try to flee north and can’t?
massive pressure on the Canadian government to allow unrestricted immigration, probably.
which we’ll cave to without anything in return
probably.
The population of the South census region is 120 Million, the population of Canada is 30 Million, and a mild exodus of admittedly rich Asians from a single city-state destroyed an entire province in under a decade (And then actual China got involved and things got worse).
Even if you wanted to take them all, you physically couldn’t.
Which is really sort of my question here. The only places in America that are growing are probably places that we don’t want growing because they’re not terribly nice places to live. What happens if/when they become uninhabitable?
~shock therapy~
Shouldn’t the US Great Lakes/Rust Belt region remain pretty habitable after global warming? As a bonus the region is already built overbuilt from populations that peaked mid century.
Also, fresh water concerns in the southwest. They’re draining the aquifers faster than they can refill them.
If you wanted to live there anyway and can get a suitable job, northern Ohio likely isn’t a bad place to plunk down. The housing is much cheaper than the coasts, especially the coastal metros. However, this migration probably won’t occur for 20-30 years.
I would avoid buying long-term property in Texas, Nevada, or Florida.
So there’s been this interesting pattern where the places that are habitable after global warming are also the places with housing restrictions.
At which point everyone despairs of ever living in the 80 degree parts of LA and moves to 120 degree Vegas at a tenth the price. (Or at least the 109 degree parts of LA a couple mountain ranges away).
And right now, it sure looks like the fastest growing cities and regions in the country are either the sort of place where an extra 5F gets people killed or the sort of place where you get semi-regular hurricanes.
So uh… what happens when people try to flee north and can’t?
massive pressure on the Canadian government to allow unrestricted immigration, probably.
which we’ll cave to without anything in return
probably.
The population of the South census region is 120 Million, the population of Canada is 30 Million, and a mild exodus of admittedly rich Asians from a single city-state destroyed an entire province in under a decade (And then actual China got involved and things got worse).
Even if you wanted to take them all, you physically couldn’t.
Which is really sort of my question here. The only places in America that are growing are probably places that we don’t want growing because they’re not terribly nice places to live. What happens if/when they become uninhabitable?
For those who haven’t been reading my blog long enough to know this:
One of my goals is to invent a new form of Nationalism, adapted to the 21st century, powered by new organizational and information technologies.
Not a racial nationalism, nor what people have in mind with an ethnic one, but a kind of National Technocracy, where the nation is ruled effectively by true experts - not merely the credentialed - for the benefit of its citizens, selected through new forms of republic or democracy.
This is unrealistic, I admit, but then so was the last election, and I can feel how the Overton Window has opened up, and maybe some fragment of it will fall to Earth and improve something, somewhere.
