I won't speak to the northern parts of the state. Try any of that stuff within a hundred miles of the Idaho National Laboratory and all the nuclear things there, though, and the response will be very different than what's happening in Oregon.
Related to your second point is that it is an article of faith for the national GOP that urban problems, particularly in the northeast quarter of the country and California, are all due to Democrats' mismanagement. For all sorts of reasons, right-of-center media are going to tend to support that dynamic. If the Rs do well, it will get lots of coverage. For example, back in the 1990s, CATO was pushing the pension plans for the City of San Diego and San Diego County as miracles of applying conservative principles to city and county government. When it turned out that the rosy numbers were all due to cooking the books, the CATO articles disappeared from their web site. TTBOMK, no formal retractions or apologies for getting the story entirely wrong were ever issued.
Also, while the states obviously could not afford to get all the land back at once, they could afford to start getting some of it back in manageable sections. Get a chunk, sell it or make it into a park, and start generating tax or user fee revenue from it...
Once negotiators sat down at the table, things would get... complicated. The fees for grazing cattle on state-owned public lands today are much higher than the fees the feds charge. The states and the feds charge comparable royalties for minerals extracted from the public lands, but the feds share those with the states to only a limited extent. State severance taxes would be collected if the states held the mineral rights. The states might well generate enough revenue to manage grazing and minerals.
Most proposals that get kicked around assume the federal government would retain ownership of the national parks, national monuments, and national wilderness areas, so no state costs there. One of the questions that I would certainly put on the table is the water rights associated with that. Today, the feds can take whatever water they feel they need. Very different situation if the feds have to buy water from other rights holders in dry years if they decide to keep the wilderness river flowing.
Many of the future costs associated with the federal public lands will be due to horrible past policies. The national forests are seriously sick because of decades of total fire suppression. The clean-up of old mines, where the operators were allowed to leave hideous messes behind, are going to run to tens of billions. If the costs to deal with those problems are dumped on the states, sure there's a problem. Should the states pay for those?
A state, not too populous, global warming, 1-in-30 is still a long shot... Alaska's sort of the obvious choice, with a chance that the permafrost thaws and the oil revenue evaporates.
Too many people are using the word "police" like all law-enforcement agencies are interchangeable. The Malheur refuge situation is the FBI (and presumably ATF); Occupy and Black Lives Matter were generally handled by local urban police forces. The FBI and ATF made drastic changes in their rules of engagement after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Local urban police, clearly not.
I mean, after all,we aren't afraid to get tough with a different sort of folk.
Here's a goup of people, relatively heavily armed, in an isolated spot, claiming they're looking for a confrontation. (Not how I would provoke a confrontation, but that's maybe just me.) Implicit in that, I think, is that they're looking for publicity. The authorities know who they are individually. Leaving them out there, not getting the attention, increasingly cold and hungry, seems like exactly the right thing. At some point they'll leave. The authorities know who they are and can arrest them at a convenient time.
Groups like Occupy and Black Lives Matter take a rather different approach that has a lot more potential to get out of hand.
There's an interesting psychology question buried in here. Given a species that has solved its population and energy problems to the extent that they can realistically plan for thousands or tens of thousands of years to build a ring or something approximating a planet (or larger) in scope, are they expansionist enough to want to do so?
IIRC, the estimates for Ringworld -- let alone a Dyson sphere -- was roughly the mass of all the planets in our solar system. The vast majority of which is hydrogen. So, given some miracle technology...
Seriously. Give me an estimate of the cost in energy to construct habitat for, say, just a billion people. Then convince me that it's not possible to sterilize the planet with less energy than that.
It's an old SF trope, in various forms. Anderson's Flandry stories include barbarian planets that were given spaceships and modern weapons. Or Brin's Uplift novels, where evolution can only get so far on its own. Brin's notion of leaving broad areas of the galaxy "fallow" to allow pre-sentient life to evolve also explains the lack of visiting aliens. Although Brin includes genocide as a not-unheard-of occurrence, even in a civilization that spans multiple galaxies and is billions of years old.
Phrased differently, the four wildcard teams were better than the four weakest division winners. At some point, the NFL is going to have to stop rewarding teams for being merely adequate in a terrible division.
Let's see if I can be obnoxious... centrism is what happens in the suburbs. The important fissures on the left can be described as tension between suburban liberals and the urban poor. On the right, between suburban conservatives and the rural poor. Control of everything from the Presidency down to state legislatures depends on winning in the suburbs.
As xkcd pointed out, reported sightings of UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, and Bigfoot have all fallen to almost zero in an inverse relationship to the penetration of cell phones with cameras.
One of the comments after the let's-join-Idaho article asks the question, "Why Idaho? Why not Nevada, or Utah?" Aside from the obvious problem that the county doesn't border Utah, both of those states have the same "problem" that Oregon does: they are increasingly dominated by the urban/suburban population center, the Wasatch Front in Utah and Clark County in Nevada. If you flap your ears at the proper conversations, you can hear the equivalent of the Grist piece in most of the western state legislatures.
Not too long ago, Charlie Stross posed a question on his blog (that drew, IIRC, something over two thousand comments) basically asking the question, "Since we believe von Neumann probes are possible, and it takes surprisingly little time for a wave of such probes to span the galaxy, where the hell are they?" Most of the speculation was along the lines that there's something intrinsic in intelligence great enough to build von Neumann probes that inhibits doing so. My own thoughts along those lines are that the combination of sufficiently intelligent to build them and sufficiently aggressive to want to do so results in genetic weaponry that wipes out the species before they get around to building the probes.
Fun times in the league office on Monday morning deciding how many and how big the fines are going to be. I'll just say that the no-call hit on the receiver would have been targeting and expulsion in a college game, and should be in the NFL too. Ducking your head and leading with the crown of the helmet like that has to stop.
Twenty-some years ago I busted my butt trying to champion IP multicast -- which would make such things trivial -- to the big telecoms that were going to dominate internet access. Failed miserably.
Denver's fate rests in the hands of the zebras. The Broncos lose the first game they play where the officials call defensive holding and illegal contact using "playoff" standards instead of "regular season" standards. If the opposing defense can disrupt the routes, the o-line's not good enough to give either Manning or Osweiler enough time. The best defense in the world isn't enough to overcome an offense that only goes +10 net points. Pete Carroll in Seattle has shown everyone the way -- if you keep bumping for an extra couple of yards downfield and hold a bit early in the route on every play, the zebras will quit calling it.
Especially those with "home rule" cities built into their state constitutions.
If I were just trying to drive density, I might start by banning annexation or new city creation, and doing away with private sewer districts. That more-or-less confines major job creation to the existing municipal boundaries. Of course, it probably has the side effect of driving land prices through the ceiling, exacerbating some of the other problems.
Co5: We need a better term than "non-coastal" for this. Front Range Colorado, for example, is very much a "coastal" metro area in terms of venture capital, high-tech jobs, and entrepreneurial activity. With all of the bad things like soaring rents and real-estate prices, gentrification, etc. Ditto Austin. While I sometimes find it offensive, I unfortunately think of North Dakota as "left behind" country, as in the parts of the country at greatest risk of being left behind in the new economy. Colorado, Texas, and California all have significant areas that fall into that "left behind" classification.
Exactly. Consider the 100 largest MSAs in the US. There are several in the NE urban corridor that cross state borders (more that do than don't, I think). Outside that corridor, there are 14. They're rare in the Deep South, and there are only three that are west of the Mississippi River.
Statelets and navigable rivers as the state borders. Chicago is the only real exception, sprawling enormously along the lakefront.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “David Bowie as the Right Wing Artist”
I won't speak to the northern parts of the state. Try any of that stuff within a hundred miles of the Idaho National Laboratory and all the nuclear things there, though, and the response will be very different than what's happening in Oregon.
On “The Sounds of Conservative Silence”
Related to your second point is that it is an article of faith for the national GOP that urban problems, particularly in the northeast quarter of the country and California, are all due to Democrats' mismanagement. For all sorts of reasons, right-of-center media are going to tend to support that dynamic. If the Rs do well, it will get lots of coverage. For example, back in the 1990s, CATO was pushing the pension plans for the City of San Diego and San Diego County as miracles of applying conservative principles to city and county government. When it turned out that the rosy numbers were all due to cooking the books, the CATO articles disappeared from their web site. TTBOMK, no formal retractions or apologies for getting the story entirely wrong were ever issued.
On “Morning Ed: Oregon {2016.1.11.M}”
Also, while the states obviously could not afford to get all the land back at once, they could afford to start getting some of it back in manageable sections. Get a chunk, sell it or make it into a park, and start generating tax or user fee revenue from it...
Once negotiators sat down at the table, things would get... complicated. The fees for grazing cattle on state-owned public lands today are much higher than the fees the feds charge. The states and the feds charge comparable royalties for minerals extracted from the public lands, but the feds share those with the states to only a limited extent. State severance taxes would be collected if the states held the mineral rights. The states might well generate enough revenue to manage grazing and minerals.
Most proposals that get kicked around assume the federal government would retain ownership of the national parks, national monuments, and national wilderness areas, so no state costs there. One of the questions that I would certainly put on the table is the water rights associated with that. Today, the feds can take whatever water they feel they need. Very different situation if the feds have to buy water from other rights holders in dry years if they decide to keep the wilderness river flowing.
Many of the future costs associated with the federal public lands will be due to horrible past policies. The national forests are seriously sick because of decades of total fire suppression. The clean-up of old mines, where the operators were allowed to leave hideous messes behind, are going to run to tens of billions. If the costs to deal with those problems are dumped on the states, sure there's a problem. Should the states pay for those?
Anyway, it's complicated.
On “David Bowie as the Right Wing Artist”
A state, not too populous, global warming, 1-in-30 is still a long shot... Alaska's sort of the obvious choice, with a chance that the permafrost thaws and the oil revenue evaporates.
On “Morning Ed: Oregon {2016.1.11.M}”
Too many people are using the word "police" like all law-enforcement agencies are interchangeable. The Malheur refuge situation is the FBI (and presumably ATF); Occupy and Black Lives Matter were generally handled by local urban police forces. The FBI and ATF made drastic changes in their rules of engagement after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Local urban police, clearly not.
"
I mean, after all,we aren't afraid to get tough with a different sort of folk.
Here's a goup of people, relatively heavily armed, in an isolated spot, claiming they're looking for a confrontation. (Not how I would provoke a confrontation, but that's maybe just me.) Implicit in that, I think, is that they're looking for publicity. The authorities know who they are individually. Leaving them out there, not getting the attention, increasingly cold and hungry, seems like exactly the right thing. At some point they'll leave. The authorities know who they are and can arrest them at a convenient time.
Groups like Occupy and Black Lives Matter take a rather different approach that has a lot more potential to get out of hand.
On “Greetings From Planet Earth”
There's an interesting psychology question buried in here. Given a species that has solved its population and energy problems to the extent that they can realistically plan for thousands or tens of thousands of years to build a ring or something approximating a planet (or larger) in scope, are they expansionist enough to want to do so?
"
Wouldn’t be easy, but it isn’t impossible.
IIRC, the estimates for Ringworld -- let alone a Dyson sphere -- was roughly the mass of all the planets in our solar system. The vast majority of which is hydrogen. So, given some miracle technology...
Seriously. Give me an estimate of the cost in energy to construct habitat for, say, just a billion people. Then convince me that it's not possible to sterilize the planet with less energy than that.
On “Weekend!”
As my mother (now 88) put it once: "It was a good year. Didn't appear on the obituary page."
On “Greetings From Planet Earth”
It's an old SF trope, in various forms. Anderson's Flandry stories include barbarian planets that were given spaceships and modern weapons. Or Brin's Uplift novels, where evolution can only get so far on its own. Brin's notion of leaving broad areas of the galaxy "fallow" to allow pre-sentient life to evolve also explains the lack of visiting aliens. Although Brin includes genocide as a not-unheard-of occurrence, even in a civilization that spans multiple galaxies and is billions of years old.
On “NFL Playoff Preview!”
Phrased differently, the four wildcard teams were better than the four weakest division winners. At some point, the NFL is going to have to stop rewarding teams for being merely adequate in a terrible division.
On “A Shot Over the Bow of Centrism”
Let's see if I can be obnoxious... centrism is what happens in the suburbs. The important fissures on the left can be described as tension between suburban liberals and the urban poor. On the right, between suburban conservatives and the rural poor. Control of everything from the Presidency down to state legislatures depends on winning in the suburbs.
On “Greetings From Planet Earth”
As xkcd pointed out, reported sightings of UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, and Bigfoot have all fallen to almost zero in an inverse relationship to the penetration of cell phones with cameras.
On “Morning Ed: Oregon {2016.1.11.M}”
One of the comments after the let's-join-Idaho article asks the question, "Why Idaho? Why not Nevada, or Utah?" Aside from the obvious problem that the county doesn't border Utah, both of those states have the same "problem" that Oregon does: they are increasingly dominated by the urban/suburban population center, the Wasatch Front in Utah and Clark County in Nevada. If you flap your ears at the proper conversations, you can hear the equivalent of the Grist piece in most of the western state legislatures.
On “Greetings From Planet Earth”
Not too long ago, Charlie Stross posed a question on his blog (that drew, IIRC, something over two thousand comments) basically asking the question, "Since we believe von Neumann probes are possible, and it takes surprisingly little time for a wave of such probes to span the galaxy, where the hell are they?" Most of the speculation was along the lines that there's something intrinsic in intelligence great enough to build von Neumann probes that inhibits doing so. My own thoughts along those lines are that the combination of sufficiently intelligent to build them and sufficiently aggressive to want to do so results in genetic weaponry that wipes out the species before they get around to building the probes.
On “NFL Playoff Preview!”
Fun times in the league office on Monday morning deciding how many and how big the fines are going to be. I'll just say that the no-call hit on the receiver would have been targeting and expulsion in a college game, and should be in the NFL too. Ducking your head and leading with the crown of the helmet like that has to stop.
On “Linky Friday #148: Crime & Commerce”
Twenty-some years ago I busted my butt trying to champion IP multicast -- which would make such things trivial -- to the big telecoms that were going to dominate internet access. Failed miserably.
"
Blind Fury. 'Nuf said.
On “From New Jersey to Illinois…”
NJ is one of the states that expanded Medicaid. Unless they're a real outlier, their hospitals are paying for a lot less charity care these days.
On “NFL Playoff Preview!”
Denver's fate rests in the hands of the zebras. The Broncos lose the first game they play where the officials call defensive holding and illegal contact using "playoff" standards instead of "regular season" standards. If the opposing defense can disrupt the routes, the o-line's not good enough to give either Manning or Osweiler enough time. The best defense in the world isn't enough to overcome an offense that only goes +10 net points. Pete Carroll in Seattle has shown everyone the way -- if you keep bumping for an extra couple of yards downfield and hold a bit early in the route on every play, the zebras will quit calling it.
On “Linky Friday #148: Crime & Commerce”
Especially those with "home rule" cities built into their state constitutions.
If I were just trying to drive density, I might start by banning annexation or new city creation, and doing away with private sewer districts. That more-or-less confines major job creation to the existing municipal boundaries. Of course, it probably has the side effect of driving land prices through the ceiling, exacerbating some of the other problems.
"
Flying cars. If you want it to seem like the future, you've got to have flying cars. Well, and mention that they depend on commercial fusion power.
"
Co5: We need a better term than "non-coastal" for this. Front Range Colorado, for example, is very much a "coastal" metro area in terms of venture capital, high-tech jobs, and entrepreneurial activity. With all of the bad things like soaring rents and real-estate prices, gentrification, etc. Ditto Austin. While I sometimes find it offensive, I unfortunately think of North Dakota as "left behind" country, as in the parts of the country at greatest risk of being left behind in the new economy. Colorado, Texas, and California all have significant areas that fall into that "left behind" classification.
"
Cr5: The link goes to a story about a man in Alabama losing >250 pounds. No mention that I can see of guards or inmates.
"
...more due to geography...
Exactly. Consider the 100 largest MSAs in the US. There are several in the NE urban corridor that cross state borders (more that do than don't, I think). Outside that corridor, there are 14. They're rare in the Deep South, and there are only three that are west of the Mississippi River.
Statelets and navigable rivers as the state borders. Chicago is the only real exception, sprawling enormously along the lakefront.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.