• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Because the candidates do have those responsibilities, but have shirked them. Ideally, we’d want a better voting system, that didn’t mathematically garuntee that only two viable parties emerge, so that when the politicians refuse to use their power as they should, people who will may be chosen instead, but we don’t have that, and changing that is a long and difficult process that only gets harder if the more authoritarian types get power anyway. If you’re in a lifeboat with holes, and there are two people that have rigged things so that one of them is going to be in charge, and one wants to stop bailing out water and the other wants to scoop it back into the boat, then even though those two aren’t following their responsibilities, it doesn’t mean you should stop bailing the water out, because it has to get done by somebody or you drown. And if you have a say in which of the two is in charge, the guy that just wants to sit there uselessly is still the option you must pick, because at least they aren’t trying to undo the progress you’re making. Ideally you’d want to figure out how to undo the rigged system too, but you have to deal with the water first, lest you all drown fighting over who’s in charge.






  • To be fair, most professions that would be needed to survive in an apocalypse or rebuild society, aren’t things that an already functioning modern society can support everyone doing anyway. We need farmers and carpenters and such, but we don’t need so many as to have openings for a majority of the population to be them, these days.











  • the main argument I see for rail is that it doesnt get stuck in car traffic, which should make it easier to keep to a reliable schedule and speed, and that it can have a higher capacity per vehicle. Those would seem to indicate that it should be better than busses for routes that are very busy, provided of course that the rail infrastructure is actually good (able to do a reasonable speed, have reasonable reliability, and separated from other modes of transit to as to not cause conflicts at crossings). If your trains are so slow you can beat them by walking, and directly cross the roads and bike paths, then its not trains as a concept that are the problem, its that you have rather bad trains.