http://gizmodo.com/national-park-service-banned-from-tweeting-after-anti-t-1791449526

Ay, he's banning federal departments from Twitter for mocking him.

I see this a lot among conservative ****posters. Why does a vote from the the midwest count more than one from California? It infuriates me how easily they dismiss votes from states they don't like.

It's not that they don't count. It's just that the state is an aberration and probably the biggest argument against the popular vote. Clinton's entire popular vote victory is lost without that one state and Trump won bigly without it.

Maybe California should secede.

Edit: and New York. And Washington. Oh, I guess I meant to say "Maybe the US economy should secede".

Interesting question, though. Did the flyover states vote Trump because they are economically disadvantaged, or are they economically disadvantaged because they're the kinds of people who would vote Trump?

I always hear Midwest/Southern conservatives say this, but I've lived in California for my entire life and I don't get what's so bad. Alabama, now that's a place where I wouldn't want to live.

Honestly, this is exactly the kind of rhetoric I am talking about. I don't appreciate being called part of an aberration.

Well, there is an organization actively promoting this cause, called CalExit.

They've just opened an embassy in Moscow. Sounds perfectly legit to me!

And in terms of dependency on federal tax dollars, California is hardly the aberration that Mississippi and Kentucky seem to be!

ya heard it here, folks. A US state with a modern economy is an aberration. The American citizens who actually pay tax, i.e. the ones who live in coastal cities, do not deserve equal representation.

They could make their votes a lot more important by awarding electoral votes on a district by district, or even on a proportional basis. However, because the democrats are solidly in control, they won't do that because it means fewer guaranteed electoral votes for their candidate. Non-swing states are willing to trade representation for advancement of their political platform at a national level, and swing states are happy because their wants and needs are way more important to national policy. It's pretty stupid.

Write up a post mortem on the country every year which turns out to be a plug for the exiting new country that you are crowd funding?

Democracy isn't working, better pivot

??? Republicans seem to benefit most from the electoral college, and also the Republicans will control the House and Senate for the next two years..

California is a 100% lock for the Democrats. If they awarded their electoral votes proportionately, it would only ever help the Republicans in the election. The GOP has fewer hard lock states, which does benefit them to a point, but it's also a liability, since a small demographic change could result in massive and sudden loss of power.

Peter Thiel to the rescue. I remember watching him converse with some phony intellectual about how democracy is bad.

So far as I can tell only Vermont had a lower percentage for Trump but even Hillary had a lower percentage there than in California. If you remove California from the equation, Trump wins the popular vote. Even if you then remove the biggest Republican state, Texas, he still wins the popular vote and the Electoral College in any event. Also somewhat interesting is that California is about 12% of the population and has about 10% of the electoral vote so that's pretty equal, as if that's a thing. So, yeah, in this election they were an aberration and it's a good thing we have a system in place to protect us from this sort of thing.

If you remove California from the equation, the US can't afford to be a country in 30 years

Who really wants to make America great again, the libtard queer lovers in their coastal cities starting all of the companies, creating all of the jobs, and contributing all of America's GDP growth since the Cold War ended? Or idiots in flyover states *****ing about no jobs and overdosing on Fentanyl?

Oh, but thank God the people doing all of the work in America didn't get to decide who would run the government.

well to be fair when all of us flyover idiots overdose and die from lack of healthcare coverage the coasties will have places to be refugees at in the rest of the country when their cities get ****ed. and luckily, when californias economy is removed from the rest of the country, it will be because the global economy has ground to a halt, and nowhere else will be a country either, really giving all the startup founders a regulation free playing field to innovate human survival.

honestly this is for the best because then there will be no conflict when the startups have to start up utopian refugee camps for themselves inland. if the whole country had gotten taken care of rural areas would probably rebound too much and result in all of those useful people youre talking about have to flee the ocean through a forest of overweight oath keepers with poorly maintained ar-15s with molon labe inscribed all over them. if all of the real humans (taxpayers) can hang on for a few years they will have a great retirement landscape to build cities without the ancient infrastructure baggage of the rest of them.

Ow. I admit that gibberish is a frequent ingredient of my more fanciful posts, but is this really what we sound like to others?

Or maybe it isn't Fentanyl after all. (Ethanol?)

It's not polite to take someone elses flamebait.

On a more serious note, though, infrastructure replacement is a bigger problem in middle america than it is in the coastal cities. The coastal cities are much older but have higher population density. All of the heartland municipalities have seriously over-invested on infrastructure (for lots of different reasons) accounting for operating costs only, and not amortizing total cost of ownership including capital consumption. When San Francisco has to dig a new BART tunnel, it's going to be expensive but that cost can be spread across the hundreds of thousands who take BART every day. When **** Creek, WY has to re-pave 120 yards of low-traffic road per household, well, um, they're basically ****ed.

There are some parts of the US where you could basically turn the entire economic output of the residents toward infrastructure maintenance, and you'd still come up short.

I haven't done the math, but I bet it would be literally cheaper for the government to build skyscrapers downtown, give units away for free, and buy up all single-family dwellings at current fair market value, than pay the replacement costs for all of the infrastructure that's necessary to support those homes.

Hmm, and there I was thinking that telecommuting from rural Idaho (or rural anything) was my out of the Bay Area real estate market.

Oh, don't worry. Your rural red state lifestyle would be fully subsidized, care of your nearest high-density blue district. Enjoy your free socialism!

yes but theres still less infrastructure to cause extremely dangerous large scale problems (nobody is going to maintain all of those ****ty concrete parking garages if there isn't enough of an oil economy to use all the hydraulic jacks) in getting rid of it, making it prime real estate for fully automated homosexual luxury space communism city states with decentralized infrastructure so the city people can still have their high energy lifestyle!

I'm telling you this is just group selection taking care of all of us inferiors so that the ubermensch who naturally gravitate towards cities because of their superior intelligence can have a shot at carrying their superior genes to the stars under the leadership of Elon the Great.

too bad there's going to be (continue to be) droughts inland too and the food production of California won't be made up anywhere else.

I read a version of that BS on "strong towns," some web site set up by a some people basically pushing for everyone to move to cities and for everyone to get rid of their cars. They're anti-rural like that comment. The problem is that cities don't grow food, fell timber, mine minerals, pump oil, etc. So if you stop "subsidizing" rural living (in the form of taxes which fund things like the highway systems) you'd better figure out your urban farming right away. You're oversimplifying a complex problem.

Oh yes, please tell me what acreages and low density suburban developments contribute to the resource economy.

I'm oversimplifying a complex problem because simplifying it only a little does nothing for solving it. Neither does not simplifying it. Because we are ****ed. 100%. Urban farming won't work (but muh vertical farming!) and traditional agriculture has so many problems we need literal magic to keep it alive. By the way the percentage of people in rural areas working in agriculture is extremely low. The rest are, as you rightly say, generally employed in another industry that is destabilizing the climate and ecosystem we depend on.

The vast majority of people who live rurally, or in low density suburbs, commute to the nearest high density commercial or industrial zone. On the highway. In their sole occupancy vehicle.

I commute to my own heart Jon See.

I think I've only now come to the right interpretation of Spook's signature.

Please tell me I was pretty blacked out when I changed it to that.

I suppose we're not talking about the same thing. What's your definition of low vs. high density? What's your definition of an urban center vs. rural living?

It seems like you guys have this utter disdain for people who live away from the cities and commute; yet these people can't afford to live in the cities. So you advocate for government subsidized housing right? Or extreme rent control? Or more welfare such that minimum-wage workers can afford downtown condos? Here in Seattle everyone voted for $15/hr minimum wage, but even at that you still can't afford a studio apartment anywhere near downtown; the closest you can afford is still a 45 minute bus or train ride in (or worse during rush hours). They also voted in a multibillion dollar public transit bill that's going to put in light rail to a few select neighborhoods over the next 20 years; well you know what's going to happen, right? Housing prices in those neighborhoods are going to skyrocket so that public transit is going to support the people who have money, not the minimum wage workers.

This is a very complex issue. People living away from big cities are likely from families who have lived away from cities for generations. Are you proposing we uproot everyone and move them into public housing skyscrapers in the middle of big cities? Or just do like Bremerton, WA did here and cut all the 4-lane roads to 2-lane roads, build sidewalks and bike lanes, and just hope that suddenly people will move to the downtown core? All while neglecting the rest of the city limits? (Hint: it didn't do anything other than increase traffic congestion; still nobody wants to live in downtown Bremerton.)

I live in a cluster of towns that are each centered around separate military bases. The military bases are relatively small but do support quite a bit of the local economy. But around the bases popped up shopping centers, a hospital, and all the other types of stuff that build up over 50 years. You can point your fingers and say that it's wrong that things have built out from the bases, and it's too expensive to maintain and whatever. But we're all young people who inherited this. You can point your fingers at your parents or grandparents or whoever all you want but it's not going to solve anything. What can you/we actually do about it as individuals to make the situation better?

I tell you what, I'm certainly not going to pack up my ****, sell my house, and move to an apartment in downtown Seattle. One, it won't help anything. Two, it will make my family miserable. And I don't expect anyone else to do that, either.

lol. I grew up on an acreage. I currently live on a farm. This isn't about taking your **** away, Brian. This is about the United States not being able to afford to maintain the infrastructure that lets you live there and commute to your Seattle tech job.

I'm not sure if you're talking to me, but I didn't really express any disdain (except for maybe sarcastic jams at the Admiral) for those people since they are my people. In fact, my whole point is that we inherited this. The chance to reorganize the economy in a way that wasn't simply a giant heat engine of centralization passed more than a decade before I was born. There is almost nothing we can do on the mitigation side short of fantastical geoengineering and, yes, figuring out how to eliminate huge energy sinks like people commuting, whether it is in to town or across it. Downside there is we lose all of the aerosols in emissions that help to temper the effects of greenhouse gasses.

The most important things we could do are adaptation to future economic and climate realities. Unfortunately, this will probably require a huge amount of energy expenditure and has no room for anything resembling business as usual. Without business as usual, we have to make a worldwide culture change to something that doesn't value growth or doesn't value things dependent on growth without limits. So, in my opinion, what we can actually do to make the situation is nothing. That isn't to say I don't think we should do things differently, but for it's own sake. Personally I'm in an agriculture program with a climate focus and I'm getting involved in various sorts of decentralization efforts, but I'm not thinking it's going to help.

You conveniently didn't answer any of my questions. And actually, I don't commute to any job. Well, I guess I do, 2x per month, but I use public transportation (ferry, walking), but since it's only 2x per month it's barely worth mentioning.

^^^ @Jon^C

I'm not answering your questions because they are not relevant to my point.

I don't dispute the very real cultural and economic pressures that keep people living there. I also don't believe that government efforts to move people to the cities would work (unless it was by force). I also happen to think it would be SUPER NICE if everyone could live rurally, since that is also my chosen lifestyle.

None of this changes the basic reality that rural and suburban areas are going to be SUPER ****ED because it's actually super expensive to have people living out here. And the more rural and suburban a place is, the more expensive it is per capita to build roads and bridges, run ambulances, fire departments, police forces, and utilities. And whether you like it or not, eventually you WILL be paying these bills on your own, because the government and inner city taxpayers won't be able afford it anymore.

(FWIW Canada has already been trying to buy up low density towns to get them to move to larger cities. Because its ****ing impossible to pay for this ****. Don't wanna move? Okay, but don't expect an ambulance.)

Not to mention why would the United States be responsible for Brian's local infrastructure?

Also, some more interesting facts. California accounted for 10.3% of the vote. Hillary Clinton won all of California's electoral votes which were 10.2% of the total. She only had to achieve 40% of the electoral votes from the other 98% of states.

I'm originally from a small rural community where there are about 1,800 people & not enough jobs in that "city" for even half of them. There were a few farms, but the vast majority of people commuted to the city in their pickup trucks & SUVs, which was pretty obvious during rush hour. I used to drive 45 minutes to community college, another 30 minutes to another branch of said college, 30 minutes to work, & then 30 minutes to get back home, 5 days each week. My parents didn't get sewer & water until a few years ago & my dad had to run the pipes himself to save money. There's still no affordable high-speed Internet (satellite or capped 3G are your only options) & the local monopoly has clearly stated that they have no intention of running lines out that way. Their home is heated with wood & kerosene. I dislike living around humans, & I really enjoyed the area where I grew up, but for every rural area outside of Seattle, there are tons of areas like the one I grew up in, where significant numbers of people are choosing to live there because they want to get away from the city, & it often has nothing to do with not having other choices.