Varies a lot. Consider the Koch brothers, current scourge of the Democrats (or at least, I'm getting weekly e-mails telling me that the Kochs are coming to steal our Congressional seats and eat our puppies). All four have advanced degrees from elite East Coast schools. Two were basically bought out of the family business. One of those splits his time between Boston and an elite coastal community where he spends lots of money on sailing. The other lives in NYC somewhere. One of the two still in the business lives in Manhattan and does their high finance. All three of those are serious patrons of the arts in NYC and Boston. The last lives in Wichita and handles the large and complex nuts-and-bolts of their oil services business, and is active in the fine arts in Wichita.
Telling that they have backed out of the Presidential politics for now, and are focusing on Congressional seats and state issues.
The other day I typed the single search term "cartogram" into the image search on Google. Of the first 30 or so images, three were cartograms I'd built and used in various places on the Web. There was a brief euphoric "How cool is that!" moment before I remembered... tailored search.
That sucks. Do other search engines do that as well?
I wouldn't say sucks, especially if they're successfully moving links helpful to me higher up in the list. I assume that all the browser companies are doing that, or they're planning on going out of business because everyone thinks their search isn't as helpful as the competition's.
I've been pointing out the big data "risks" for going on two decades now. Google and the rest have a bazillion spare cycles, some of which get spent looking for personal preferences and connectivity networks. A couple of months ago, LinkedIn asked me if I know Will Truman (under his real name). Somewhere, some amount of time in Google Groups and other Internet activities reached some threshold and the software kicked out a possible linkage that got sold to LinkedIn.
Almost completely off topic, but unless one takes pains to hide their identity, Google's search results will be tailored at least somewhat to the individual. The order in which things are presented to me may be quite different than the order they are presented to you, particularly if the search includes terms that I have used in the past.
Hopefully you'll get better results than I did back in the late 70s (I assume that they've learned a lot). For two years, at steadily increasing dosages, I had exactly the same response to each shot: two hours of fairly intense allergy symptoms, then three days when I was completely symptom free, then back to whatever allergy symptoms were "normal" for me at that time of year. The allergy specialist said that he had discussed my peculiar reaction with colleagues, and no one had a clue what was going on.
A decade ago when I was taking graduate public policy classes at the University of Denver, the classes were mostly a lot 20- and early-30-something folk, and two of us in our fifties. On more than one occasion during the homeland security class, the other old fart and I went off on a rant that was a mix of (1) people died to get you those civil rights, (2) if you give them up you'll probably never get them back, and (3) Niemöller's "first they came for the socialists" quote.
The only one I remember in any detail ended up along the lines of, "After a quarter in this class, I know something about each of your backgrounds. I've got a much deeper understanding of what can be done with contemporary computing and communications technology than any of you. And I am terrified when I listen to what powers you're willing to grant to the government."
Western states are moving relatively rapidly to universal vote by mail. Prove you're eligible once, and each election after that you get a ballot in the mail, that you can return in the mail. I have eastern friends who tell me that there must be massive fraud going on in there somewhere, if only we would look harder. As I understand it, Oregon has been looking quite hard for 20 years now -- at some point, my friends need to admit that there's no more fraud than in-person voting produces.
Sounds like something my uncle, a former Green Beret, would have said. I did hear him tell someone in rural Iowa, "You're driving around with a loaded weapon in this vehicle that's not in someone's hands, who's taking care that it doesn't get pointed at people? Stop the car and let me out."
But will they be able to do anything with it? Back in the days when content was simple analog, there were limits to how much it could be concealed and still be useful. Now that things are digital, there are a number of strong encryption schemes with fancy key management and device enabling that make decryption in real time not impossible, but prohibitively expensive. Unless you use one of the approved devices for decrypting the signal.
Sirius broadcasts on known frequencies using known modulation schemes, so it's pretty easy to access the bit stream. Doing something useful with it is a much harder problem.
Indeed. There's a whole world currently counting on the fact that the US maintains a (very expensive) military capability to force an opening of the Strait of Hormuz if Iran decides to declare it closed, and trusts that the US won't make "only shipments bound for the US" a condition for doing the forcing. So long as the US can be trusted to not limit trade through the Strait, all of James's game theory applies and says that the proper strategy for the rest of the developed economies is "let the US pay for it".
OTOH, a WSA with a population of 75M could cheerfully give up any nuclear weapons capability and leave it up to the 225M in the ESA to cover those costs. After all, what does a Department of Defense for the WSA have to worry about? Canada? Mexico? A strike force from Asia by way of Hawaii, trying to sneak across 2,000 miles of empty ocean? The ESA, sneaking across 500 miles of Great Plains? To paraphrase Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, how many bombs does it take to wipe out the WSA? Nine, although a few of them would have to be awfully big: Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay area, LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Denver. But for conventional warfare, it's a really hard problem.
We have guys demanding that they carry guns into church, I guess on the offhand chance that the organist will pop a cap in their ass.
We did have a case here of a shooter entering one of the megachurches, killing two and wounding three as he did so, who was stopped by a church member acting as a volunteer security guard using her privately-owned handgun. Still, the risk of getting killed in traffic is almost certainly higher.
Broadly, I don't disagree with anything you write here. As an intellectual exercise, I predict exactly one partition -- east-west with the Great Plains as the dividing line. I do so on the basis of various trends that are now occurring and are likely to continue in some fashion into the future. For much of my career, it's what was called a "Mike project" at the places I worked. Given several trends, what happens if you extend them? Does the forecast include interesting possibilities? If the partition happened in less than 25 years I would be shocked, for precisely the reason you and others have given: significant linkages of various sorts across urban America. I'm interested in other secession "plans", but don't predict that they'll happen.
What sorts of trends? There are reasons to believe that air and land transportation is going to get much more expensive in money and/or time in the future. Cheap petroleum is getting harder to find. Growing political pressure to control CO2 emissions. Imagine a generation that grows up in Portland for whom Times Square is a place they see pictures or videos of, but almost no one visits. Imagine a generation of New Yorkers who have never visited one of the big national parks in the West. Moving across the country becomes more difficult The cultural linkages get weaker. I claim that Friedman's The World is Flat predictions of an ever-shrinking world came out just when circumstances suggested the trend was about to reverse :^)
It's a nerd specialty, but I think there are going to be enormous pressures put on the US electric grid in the future. The two sides of my hypothetical partition are already headed down different paths. The western path leads to, I believe, a system that requires a regional strategy that won't work in the East. The current federal policies for how reliability is to be achieved were designed with the Eastern grid in mind, not the Western. Maybe the federal government is flexible enough to allow both, but I have my doubts.
Most of the people you're talking to would be very, very disappointed in how I think my partition would work. Ranchers who think they're going to suddenly get unfettered access to those millions of acres of public lands, for example. But a WSA would be very heavily urban/suburban, so wilderness and preservation are going to be well represented in the debate. Certainly there would be some differences -- western states would almost certainly have a much stronger interest in land exchanges that break down some of the god-awful checkerboard patterns the feds created in the 1870s. The libertarians will be disappointed, too. Regulations follow urbanization; it is no surprise that California, by population the least-rural state in the country, does so much regulation.
Here's a post I did after the Colorado election that had a the-county-commissioners-should-look-at-it advisory item on the ballot in a few counties. Will's right on the mark about all the points. The biggest share of North Colorado's population would still be Front Range suburbs. I did the exercise of drawing a real rural state (no town bigger than about 25,000) out of parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. The population cartogram suggests that even pulling from all three states, the population would be far to small.
@tod-kelly
As a hypothetical, from the perspective of a movement conservative... What is the difference between the tariffs and other laws starting in 1828, which had at least the secondary purpose of transferring wealth from the South to the North, and the succession of Medicaid expansion, same-sex marriage, and regulatory decisions that seriously penalize the use of coal for electricity generation? And why those shouldn't be viewed as as serious a threat to a regional culture and economics as the Tariff of Abominations and its assorted follow-ons? Serious enough that the only way to avoid the tyranny of the majority is to somehow get out of the Union?
I'm only a hack historian, but my perception is that the North believed "Oh, no, they're just talking, they won't possibly resort to violence and try to leave; if we just keep pushing, they will accept that we have the better argument." And the price to enforce the argument that the South should abandon a major aspect of its culture, and accept the transfer of wealth, was a million lives?
There are days when I'm terrified about what might happen.
There are days when I'm not sold on my east-west partition :^)
That said, I think the public lands issues will get more contentious. I think the electric grid issues will get more contentious. I think the West will relatively quickly become a pot-smoking commission-redistricting vote-by-mail region where the state legislatures are kept from getting too extreme, no matter which party is in control, by the threat of the citizen initiative [1]. I expect a lot of eastern head-shaking about those nuts out west.
[1] In Arizona, one of the more conservative members of the legislature is advocating pot legalization. Because if the legislature does it, they get a say; if it's done by initiative, the legislature can't touch the statute for five years.
It would come down to scenarios about what the intermediate future looks like. Just for example... Texas is currently a part of a global nuclear power whose military is unmatched. Some Texans think that's important (eg, Sen. Cruz's remarks a few days back about carpet bombing parts of the Middle East). If the US as a whole were to lose that position -- eg, the toys just become too expensive to build and protect [1] -- then the Texans who want to be part of a global nuclear superpower no longer have that to lose in a partition.
[1] There was a lively comment exchange at LGM as part of the response to one of Farley's posts, based on the question of whether the F-35s were going to wind up being so expensive that no one would be willing to risk losing them in combat.
This is an outstanding comment, thanks for leaving it. I suspect that if you picked the right parts of the Pacific Coast or Northeast cities, you would see similar percentages to a question asking if Texas (or other parts of the Deep South) should be allowed to go, or even kicked out.
So much of any debate about this depends on the scenario in question. Assume a peaceful separation of the US into multiple parts. Now look at the Great Plains (use the map here, the Great Plains counties are shown in white). For that region as a whole, the population peaked in 1930 and has been declining ever since. If you look at where the east-west interstate highways cross, you see basically the same routes that were used for the transcontinental railroads in the 1870s and 1880s. I-25 runs up the west edge, I-35 stays well to the east. In round numbers, agriculture has been tried on a third of the area, grazing has been tried on another third, and the remaining third is largely untouched as unsuitable for either. Under almost any climate change forecast, the region gets warmer and dryer and less suited for either agriculture or grazing in the future. The exception to the slow collapse is areas where there are large hydrocarbon deposits. We've gotten good enough at extraction that much of those will be gone in 25-30 years. The main split in the US power grid is pretty much down the center of the GP; the eastern grid extends thinly in from the east, the western grid extends thinly in from the west, and there are a few minimal interties that help with local reliability in those very rural areas in the middle.
So, consider splitting up the country. Any piece east of the GP that wants to include Denver has to maintain infrastructure and connectivity across that 500 mile buffer. Any piece west of the GP that wants to control Kansas City has the same challenge. Heck, ask @morat20 about how well El Paso (west of the GP) is "connected" with the rest of Texas today. Here's a population cartogram based on the map above; El Paso looks like part of New Mexico, not Texas. The GP is a big empty space, getting emptier, that has little to offer. Anyone trying to do a practical partition would be well served to start by drawing the north-south line down the middle of the GP, saying "We'll conduct trade across that as practical", and then get on about their business.
James Cascio's The Long Crisis scenario with the US just sort of falling apart has an eight-way split in 2039. Some of it's just silly -- the remaining "US" stretches from upstate NY across the Great Lakes states, most of the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Great Basin, with its capital in Chicago. He describes its strength as "military power", and lists it as one of the world's major military powers, despite the fact that it has no ocean ports. I call it silly because in most any things-fall-apart scenario, the Great Plains is a 500-mile-wide depopulated buffer zone. Cascio's summary slides have gotten hard to find, except via the archive at the Wayback Machine (largish PDF).
During a graduate class on health care policy at the U of Denver, we had a guest speaker one evening who described himself this way: "If I'm on my meds, I'm an incredibly effective advocate for properly diagnosing and treating mental illness. If I've been off my meds for three days, it is not safe for anyone to be in the same room with me. When I'm on my meds, I want to stay on. If I've been off my meds for three days, I will kill you before I let you force them on me. The non-profit I work for provides someone to travel with me to verify that I take my meds."
As far as median age, yeah, they're an outlier on the low end. I'm not sure how much the rural part matters. 80% of the population is in the five Wasatch Front counties, and the lion's share of the state's population growth is there as well -- much of it from inward migration from other states, not high birth rate.
I would speculate that the story in Utah would be much the same as the behind-the-scenes story I've heard about in Texas -- the rural Republicans in Texas are effectively in federal court trying to pry power from the hands of the suburban Republicans in Texas.
Everyone leaves out the Mountain West. They'll go with the West Coast because they have far more in common with them than with the states east of the Great Plains: water, fire, public lands, energy, broad use of citizen initiatives...
If the question the Court chooses to answer is "Must states use something other than total population figures in districting?" -- which is what I understand plaintiffs are asking -- then there aren't five votes to toss most of the districting plans in the country in an election year. If the Court chooses to answer the question "May states use something other than total population figures in districting?" then maybe, but I don't think that's what plaintiffs are asking. Although I could see five votes for the idea that elected officials don't represent acres or trees, but do represent all the people who live in their district, young and old, citizen and not, so total population is the only metric.
There's a line somewhere between "nut case" and "representative of a significant minority opinion." There are parts of the country where a back-to-basics limited-choice approach to K-12 education is mainstream -- teach fewer things but teach them better.
I thought he was a nut case, or at least ignorant, on other subjects. A state can choose not to participate in Medicaid. They don't get to make that choice about SNAP (formerly food stamps). So the new state would have to have a bureaucracy and an approved computer system to handle client intake, send out the money, perform federally required audits, etc. Similarly for unemployment insurance -- a state doesn't have to have a conforming program, but there are steep federal tax consequences for employers if the state doesn't.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Only the Right Believes in Class Conflict Anymore”
Varies a lot. Consider the Koch brothers, current scourge of the Democrats (or at least, I'm getting weekly e-mails telling me that the Kochs are coming to steal our Congressional seats and eat our puppies). All four have advanced degrees from elite East Coast schools. Two were basically bought out of the family business. One of those splits his time between Boston and an elite coastal community where he spends lots of money on sailing. The other lives in NYC somewhere. One of the two still in the business lives in Manhattan and does their high finance. All three of those are serious patrons of the arts in NYC and Boston. The last lives in Wichita and handles the large and complex nuts-and-bolts of their oil services business, and is active in the fine arts in Wichita.
Telling that they have backed out of the Presidential politics for now, and are focusing on Congressional seats and state issues.
"
Dejah Thoris of Helium and/or John Carter? NSFW.
"
The other day I typed the single search term "cartogram" into the image search on Google. Of the first 30 or so images, three were cartograms I'd built and used in various places on the Web. There was a brief euphoric "How cool is that!" moment before I remembered... tailored search.
"
That sucks. Do other search engines do that as well?
I wouldn't say sucks, especially if they're successfully moving links helpful to me higher up in the list. I assume that all the browser companies are doing that, or they're planning on going out of business because everyone thinks their search isn't as helpful as the competition's.
I've been pointing out the big data "risks" for going on two decades now. Google and the rest have a bazillion spare cycles, some of which get spent looking for personal preferences and connectivity networks. A couple of months ago, LinkedIn asked me if I know Will Truman (under his real name). Somewhere, some amount of time in Google Groups and other Internet activities reached some threshold and the software kicked out a possible linkage that got sold to LinkedIn.
"
Almost completely off topic, but unless one takes pains to hide their identity, Google's search results will be tailored at least somewhat to the individual. The order in which things are presented to me may be quite different than the order they are presented to you, particularly if the search includes terms that I have used in the past.
On “Weekend!”
Hopefully you'll get better results than I did back in the late 70s (I assume that they've learned a lot). For two years, at steadily increasing dosages, I had exactly the same response to each shot: two hours of fairly intense allergy symptoms, then three days when I was completely symptom free, then back to whatever allergy symptoms were "normal" for me at that time of year. The allergy specialist said that he had discussed my peculiar reaction with colleagues, and no one had a clue what was going on.
On “Linky Friday #144: Far Out”
A decade ago when I was taking graduate public policy classes at the University of Denver, the classes were mostly a lot 20- and early-30-something folk, and two of us in our fifties. On more than one occasion during the homeland security class, the other old fart and I went off on a rant that was a mix of (1) people died to get you those civil rights, (2) if you give them up you'll probably never get them back, and (3) Niemöller's "first they came for the socialists" quote.
The only one I remember in any detail ended up along the lines of, "After a quarter in this class, I know something about each of your backgrounds. I've got a much deeper understanding of what can be done with contemporary computing and communications technology than any of you. And I am terrified when I listen to what powers you're willing to grant to the government."
On “Marquee Case On The Docket: Evenwel v. Abbott”
Western states are moving relatively rapidly to universal vote by mail. Prove you're eligible once, and each election after that you get a ballot in the mail, that you can return in the mail. I have eastern friends who tell me that there must be massive fraud going on in there somewhere, if only we would look harder. As I understand it, Oregon has been looking quite hard for 20 years now -- at some point, my friends need to admit that there's no more fraud than in-person voting produces.
On “Cowen on Gun Control and Militarism”
Sounds like something my uncle, a former Green Beret, would have said. I did hear him tell someone in rural Iowa, "You're driving around with a loaded weapon in this vehicle that's not in someone's hands, who's taking care that it doesn't get pointed at people? Stop the car and let me out."
On “Market Failure 4: Collective Action Problems (Tragedies and Catch 22s)”
But will they be able to do anything with it? Back in the days when content was simple analog, there were limits to how much it could be concealed and still be useful. Now that things are digital, there are a number of strong encryption schemes with fancy key management and device enabling that make decryption in real time not impossible, but prohibitively expensive. Unless you use one of the approved devices for decrypting the signal.
Sirius broadcasts on known frequencies using known modulation schemes, so it's pretty easy to access the bit stream. Doing something useful with it is a much harder problem.
On “The Texas Secession Microcosm”
Indeed. There's a whole world currently counting on the fact that the US maintains a (very expensive) military capability to force an opening of the Strait of Hormuz if Iran decides to declare it closed, and trusts that the US won't make "only shipments bound for the US" a condition for doing the forcing. So long as the US can be trusted to not limit trade through the Strait, all of James's game theory applies and says that the proper strategy for the rest of the developed economies is "let the US pay for it".
OTOH, a WSA with a population of 75M could cheerfully give up any nuclear weapons capability and leave it up to the 225M in the ESA to cover those costs. After all, what does a Department of Defense for the WSA have to worry about? Canada? Mexico? A strike force from Asia by way of Hawaii, trying to sneak across 2,000 miles of empty ocean? The ESA, sneaking across 500 miles of Great Plains? To paraphrase Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, how many bombs does it take to wipe out the WSA? Nine, although a few of them would have to be awfully big: Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay area, LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Denver. But for conventional warfare, it's a really hard problem.
On “What Passes For A Profile In Courage These Days”
We have guys demanding that they carry guns into church, I guess on the offhand chance that the organist will pop a cap in their ass.
We did have a case here of a shooter entering one of the megachurches, killing two and wounding three as he did so, who was stopped by a church member acting as a volunteer security guard using her privately-owned handgun. Still, the risk of getting killed in traffic is almost certainly higher.
On “The Texas Secession Microcosm”
Dang, everyone here is a better writer than I am.
Broadly, I don't disagree with anything you write here. As an intellectual exercise, I predict exactly one partition -- east-west with the Great Plains as the dividing line. I do so on the basis of various trends that are now occurring and are likely to continue in some fashion into the future. For much of my career, it's what was called a "Mike project" at the places I worked. Given several trends, what happens if you extend them? Does the forecast include interesting possibilities? If the partition happened in less than 25 years I would be shocked, for precisely the reason you and others have given: significant linkages of various sorts across urban America. I'm interested in other secession "plans", but don't predict that they'll happen.
What sorts of trends? There are reasons to believe that air and land transportation is going to get much more expensive in money and/or time in the future. Cheap petroleum is getting harder to find. Growing political pressure to control CO2 emissions. Imagine a generation that grows up in Portland for whom Times Square is a place they see pictures or videos of, but almost no one visits. Imagine a generation of New Yorkers who have never visited one of the big national parks in the West. Moving across the country becomes more difficult The cultural linkages get weaker. I claim that Friedman's The World is Flat predictions of an ever-shrinking world came out just when circumstances suggested the trend was about to reverse :^)
It's a nerd specialty, but I think there are going to be enormous pressures put on the US electric grid in the future. The two sides of my hypothetical partition are already headed down different paths. The western path leads to, I believe, a system that requires a regional strategy that won't work in the East. The current federal policies for how reliability is to be achieved were designed with the Eastern grid in mind, not the Western. Maybe the federal government is flexible enough to allow both, but I have my doubts.
Most of the people you're talking to would be very, very disappointed in how I think my partition would work. Ranchers who think they're going to suddenly get unfettered access to those millions of acres of public lands, for example. But a WSA would be very heavily urban/suburban, so wilderness and preservation are going to be well represented in the debate. Certainly there would be some differences -- western states would almost certainly have a much stronger interest in land exchanges that break down some of the god-awful checkerboard patterns the feds created in the 1870s. The libertarians will be disappointed, too. Regulations follow urbanization; it is no surprise that California, by population the least-rural state in the country, does so much regulation.
"
Here's a post I did after the Colorado election that had a the-county-commissioners-should-look-at-it advisory item on the ballot in a few counties. Will's right on the mark about all the points. The biggest share of North Colorado's population would still be Front Range suburbs. I did the exercise of drawing a real rural state (no town bigger than about 25,000) out of parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. The population cartogram suggests that even pulling from all three states, the population would be far to small.
"
@tod-kelly
As a hypothetical, from the perspective of a movement conservative... What is the difference between the tariffs and other laws starting in 1828, which had at least the secondary purpose of transferring wealth from the South to the North, and the succession of Medicaid expansion, same-sex marriage, and regulatory decisions that seriously penalize the use of coal for electricity generation? And why those shouldn't be viewed as as serious a threat to a regional culture and economics as the Tariff of Abominations and its assorted follow-ons? Serious enough that the only way to avoid the tyranny of the majority is to somehow get out of the Union?
I'm only a hack historian, but my perception is that the North believed "Oh, no, they're just talking, they won't possibly resort to violence and try to leave; if we just keep pushing, they will accept that we have the better argument." And the price to enforce the argument that the South should abandon a major aspect of its culture, and accept the transfer of wealth, was a million lives?
There are days when I'm terrified about what might happen.
"
There are days when I'm not sold on my east-west partition :^)
That said, I think the public lands issues will get more contentious. I think the electric grid issues will get more contentious. I think the West will relatively quickly become a pot-smoking commission-redistricting vote-by-mail region where the state legislatures are kept from getting too extreme, no matter which party is in control, by the threat of the citizen initiative [1]. I expect a lot of eastern head-shaking about those nuts out west.
[1] In Arizona, one of the more conservative members of the legislature is advocating pot legalization. Because if the legislature does it, they get a say; if it's done by initiative, the legislature can't touch the statute for five years.
"
It would come down to scenarios about what the intermediate future looks like. Just for example... Texas is currently a part of a global nuclear power whose military is unmatched. Some Texans think that's important (eg, Sen. Cruz's remarks a few days back about carpet bombing parts of the Middle East). If the US as a whole were to lose that position -- eg, the toys just become too expensive to build and protect [1] -- then the Texans who want to be part of a global nuclear superpower no longer have that to lose in a partition.
[1] There was a lively comment exchange at LGM as part of the response to one of Farley's posts, based on the question of whether the F-35s were going to wind up being so expensive that no one would be willing to risk losing them in combat.
"
This is an outstanding comment, thanks for leaving it. I suspect that if you picked the right parts of the Pacific Coast or Northeast cities, you would see similar percentages to a question asking if Texas (or other parts of the Deep South) should be allowed to go, or even kicked out.
"
So much of any debate about this depends on the scenario in question. Assume a peaceful separation of the US into multiple parts. Now look at the Great Plains (use the map here, the Great Plains counties are shown in white). For that region as a whole, the population peaked in 1930 and has been declining ever since. If you look at where the east-west interstate highways cross, you see basically the same routes that were used for the transcontinental railroads in the 1870s and 1880s. I-25 runs up the west edge, I-35 stays well to the east. In round numbers, agriculture has been tried on a third of the area, grazing has been tried on another third, and the remaining third is largely untouched as unsuitable for either. Under almost any climate change forecast, the region gets warmer and dryer and less suited for either agriculture or grazing in the future. The exception to the slow collapse is areas where there are large hydrocarbon deposits. We've gotten good enough at extraction that much of those will be gone in 25-30 years. The main split in the US power grid is pretty much down the center of the GP; the eastern grid extends thinly in from the east, the western grid extends thinly in from the west, and there are a few minimal interties that help with local reliability in those very rural areas in the middle.
So, consider splitting up the country. Any piece east of the GP that wants to include Denver has to maintain infrastructure and connectivity across that 500 mile buffer. Any piece west of the GP that wants to control Kansas City has the same challenge. Heck, ask @morat20 about how well El Paso (west of the GP) is "connected" with the rest of Texas today. Here's a population cartogram based on the map above; El Paso looks like part of New Mexico, not Texas. The GP is a big empty space, getting emptier, that has little to offer. Anyone trying to do a practical partition would be well served to start by drawing the north-south line down the middle of the GP, saying "We'll conduct trade across that as practical", and then get on about their business.
"
James Cascio's The Long Crisis scenario with the US just sort of falling apart has an eight-way split in 2039. Some of it's just silly -- the remaining "US" stretches from upstate NY across the Great Lakes states, most of the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Great Basin, with its capital in Chicago. He describes its strength as "military power", and lists it as one of the world's major military powers, despite the fact that it has no ocean ports. I call it silly because in most any things-fall-apart scenario, the Great Plains is a 500-mile-wide depopulated buffer zone. Cascio's summary slides have gotten hard to find, except via the archive at the Wayback Machine (largish PDF).
On “So Many Terrorists [UPDATED]”
During a graduate class on health care policy at the U of Denver, we had a guest speaker one evening who described himself this way: "If I'm on my meds, I'm an incredibly effective advocate for properly diagnosing and treating mental illness. If I've been off my meds for three days, it is not safe for anyone to be in the same room with me. When I'm on my meds, I want to stay on. If I've been off my meds for three days, I will kill you before I let you force them on me. The non-profit I work for provides someone to travel with me to verify that I take my meds."
On “Marquee Case On The Docket: Evenwel v. Abbott”
As far as median age, yeah, they're an outlier on the low end. I'm not sure how much the rural part matters. 80% of the population is in the five Wasatch Front counties, and the lion's share of the state's population growth is there as well -- much of it from inward migration from other states, not high birth rate.
I would speculate that the story in Utah would be much the same as the behind-the-scenes story I've heard about in Texas -- the rural Republicans in Texas are effectively in federal court trying to pry power from the hands of the suburban Republicans in Texas.
On “The Texas Secession Microcosm”
Everyone leaves out the Mountain West. They'll go with the West Coast because they have far more in common with them than with the states east of the Great Plains: water, fire, public lands, energy, broad use of citizen initiatives...
On “Marquee Case On The Docket: Evenwel v. Abbott”
If the question the Court chooses to answer is "Must states use something other than total population figures in districting?" -- which is what I understand plaintiffs are asking -- then there aren't five votes to toss most of the districting plans in the country in an election year. If the Court chooses to answer the question "May states use something other than total population figures in districting?" then maybe, but I don't think that's what plaintiffs are asking. Although I could see five votes for the idea that elected officials don't represent acres or trees, but do represent all the people who live in their district, young and old, citizen and not, so total population is the only metric.
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There's a line somewhere between "nut case" and "representative of a significant minority opinion." There are parts of the country where a back-to-basics limited-choice approach to K-12 education is mainstream -- teach fewer things but teach them better.
I thought he was a nut case, or at least ignorant, on other subjects. A state can choose not to participate in Medicaid. They don't get to make that choice about SNAP (formerly food stamps). So the new state would have to have a bureaucracy and an approved computer system to handle client intake, send out the money, perform federally required audits, etc. Similarly for unemployment insurance -- a state doesn't have to have a conforming program, but there are steep federal tax consequences for employers if the state doesn't.
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