jj4211

Sure, it's just an interesting challenge for funding development with public money.

You draw funds from people who can't benefit unless they further will spend even more money to relocate. Hard to get initiatives passed when your tax base is largely not going to benefit. The chicken and egg effect is harsher than just the time it will take.

Of the things listed in this post, I don't think Harris would have pursued any of those. There are other negative outcomes that may have been the same, but I don't think any of those.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Both things can be true.

A good campaign can get people into the voting booth.

A demographic that fails to show up when you think you've done everything that makes sense to get them out can cause them to give up on the demographic. They may be woefully misinformed about what they should be doing, but since they don't know any better, they are likely to just give it up as a lost cause.

Show up in the primaries for the candidate you want, it's the only realistic way to break the chicken and egg of the establishment ignoring the voters that don't show up and the voters not showing up for the establishment that ignores them. If the establishment is surprised by the primary outcome, that's the strongest wakeup call for them.

I might amend that from 'scale' to 'distribution'. Through the nineteenth century population centers built up around the rail lines. In the twentieth century that didn't matter so you have minor population centers just splattered all over the place.

This is the reality that our area has dealt with as they have tried to fund better transit, that they have to spend an exorbitant sum to serve a relatively small slice of the population because everyone is just spread everywhere.. Chicken and egg, designing a transit system around current population distribution is infeasible, encouraging a shift to a more amenable distribution requires that a transit system be deployed to motivate people.

It at least holds true for a lot of people, and is even enforced in some forms of leadership training. Some folks believe the worst thing is to be perceived as ever being wrong and will push hard against that outcome no matter what.

If you weakly hold an opinion, it's more malleable, but you are also unlikely to express that opinion strongly.

If someone is proactively expressing an opinion or responding, they are frequently pretty attached to the position they take if it is vaguely important.

It's not universal, but it's probable that if you make a strong statement towards the Internet, your view is kind of set and certainly some text from some anonymous guy on the Internet is supremely low on the list of things that are going to change your mind.

On the scientific discoveries, we have gotten the low hanging fruit. The twentieth century was remarkable, but the limitations of physics are harsh. A lot of excitement as we went from barely pulling off heavier than air flight to a moon landing in under 50 years. Media naturally imagined space exploration to be just a matter of time. Alas everything is exponentially harder and any further loopholes are supremely elusive.

Probably the one area with a great deal of unrealized potential would be biology, because the ethical easy forward is slow.

The thing is that while people struggle harder and harder for a smaller chunk of scraps, they still have a lot of quality of life improvements over the standard of living back in the 70s.

You almost certainly have decent access to passable air conditioning, which was far from a given back then. Even if you can't afford decent health care, the sporadic health care you can get is still better than the standard of care then. You can have a 60 inch television and more content provided to it than you could imagine.. You can instantly engage with people all over the world.

Sea steading, BioShock here we come...

But seriously the fact that anyone ever mentions Mars colonization as a realistic strategy to do better than earth shows how stupid they are. Imagine the least habitable biome on earth where no one wants to live, imagine it even worse by unchecked climate change and realize it's still just ashtoningly easier to live there than the most optimistic expectations of Mars.

If it's one to one communication, it's probably not going to be productive, but worth a shot, just don't waste too much time.

In a public forum, it's more about giving the lurkers something to process, those that might not have gotten emotionally attached to one side or another, or just need to see there's a diversity of thought to avoid getting too sucked into one thing or another.

He's always been team Elon, and team Elon also likes to be contrarian and 'edgy', so that aligned with being pro Trump. He also wants to ditch government spending and regulation, which aligns to a claimed GOP principle (though they love spending so it's a lie). So now he's faced with the reality that everyone else already knew, the Republicans spend like crazy, even less responsibly than Democrats.

He basically wants a party to represent the perspective of 'screw poor people' as it's one and only tenant.