Walnut creek (suburban city near San Francisco) budget is about $1500 per resident, Contra Costa county, which contains Walnut Creek, spends about $3500 per resident. San Francisco is like $14000 per resident.
Don’t discount the many sources of funding in America. The state and federal governments can and do pay for infrastructure, along with long term bonds paid using sales and other taxes. The suburbs benefit from the highways to the suburbs, but the suburbs don’t fund them.
Orders of magnitude may be hyperbolic, but costs alone are twice as much from that study. Note that some of those costs are directly paid by households and not through taxes. For example, you need a car and drive further distances increasing fuel and maintenance costs.
We're not talking about taxes, but environmental cost. San Francisco provides a bunch of (human) services walnut creek does not.
As one example, muni costs money and sf pays more for BART than WC does. These are still cheaper and more environmentally efficient than everyone owning cars.
If Walnut Creek paid an extra $9000/year for each resident then they could easily offset whatever extra environmental cost. Carbon offsets etc are not all that expensive.
2. Bart and muni are not the majority of the $9000 difference. The majority of the cost is various social services. The actual cost of muni per sf resident is something like $500, which is still significant (muni is not a great rapid transit system), but that's far less than the cost of carbon offsets for every resident.
If you read the news every day then you will certainly hear from the other half of the country. I just checked CNN's front page, and while most coverage focuses on the new President, these three articles all feature right-wing viewpoints:
A lot of the great wars of history have been instigated by rich countries - modern USA, Nazi Germany / Imperial Japan, Spanish Empire, British Empire, Napoleonic France, Roman Empire.
I can't speak for the other nations, but Nazi Germany was a very poor country. The standard of living in Germany was relatively bad, in no small part because of the post-war economic turmoil.
I submit the first few chapters of Wages of Destruction as my source. I am totally unqualified to summarize it, but it's shock full of data that support this thesis. It's a really good book.
Totally buying that book now. One of my most memorable classes back in college was Economics of War. While I'm sure Economics isn't the only reason for wars, it seems to be one of the big ones.
I'd be curious to know more, I'll try to take a look at that book when I get a chance. Are you saying, though, that Nazi Germany was very poor relative to its neighbors (e.g. France, Poland, Italy) or relative to the world at the time (e.g. Mexico) or in an absolute sense (widespread extreme poverty, lack of basic necessities of life)?
Wealthy nations are definitely more likely to engage in war. Especially if there is something to be gained from it.
However, I'm not referring to the wealth of the countries themselves, but the concentration of wealth within them. Both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were desperately poor with a starving citizenry. Germany from paying reparations completely devaluing their currency and Japan from a lack of natural resources. The empires of the 18th and 19th century would be third world states by our standards. Life was cheap and people dying en masse wasn't a big deal.
Modern USA hardly even engages in full scale warfare since Vietnam. Now we have a few limited engagements against small countries without any real backers. Even then the tiny US losses from those wars has killed our taste for them. Even Donald Trump is disengaging from them.
It's hard to send a bunch of people to die when they are the ones holding the wealth of your nation. It's much easier to send the poor huddled masses if they exist.
Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were major industrial centers with large cities, educated populations, newspapers, trains, etc. They were vastly richer than peasant societies like China or Mexico.
Modern USA hardly even engages in full scale warfare since starting one of the deadliest wars of the late 20th century, except for the time we started the deadliest war of the 21st century?
Your reasoning strikes me as kind of post-hoc, but maybe I'm mistaken .. could you say more precisely what you think causes countries to go to war, in a way that I could take a random country and see if it fits the criteria?
To say what I think causes a country to go to war would take a book, and NOT a short one. Causing a war seems depressingly easy. In fact the relative peace we have been living in the past half century is exceedingly unusual.
In this instance, I'm talking about preventing war. A major factor is ensuring that those most responsible for paying for the war in taxes and blood (Lower and middle classes) have the wealth and the power to say no. (Convincing them that NO is the right answer is another thing!)
The wealth of the countries themselves is not necessarily the wealth of the people who live within them. Take a look at the so called "Banana republics."
I don't know exactly what you disagree with in my reasoning or what exactly is ad-hoc but I always love to talk about it.
Now, to address a few of the facts above:
Japan and Germany were both desperately poor following World War I. It was only after significant military expansion that they reached the prosperity you mention above. Japan gained most of their wealth through their expansion during the Showa era and consecutive wars.
Nazi Germany started from the poverty of 1933 with the suspension of civil liberties after the burning of the Reichstag. Their economic success was mostly spurred by efforts to gear up their military. By that point it was too late for any middle class to object and they hardly had the power to avoid being sent to concentration camps.
China makes us all look like pikers when it comes to war. Mao Zedong and the Chinese Nationalist party before him engaged in mass killings to make your blood turn cold. The modern PRC is the result of almost constant wars consolidating the region we now refer to as "China." Before the 20th century, the countries that make up modern China were engaged in almost constant warfare.
As for Mexico, they barely have anyone to go to war with anymore. In fact, part of the reason there is a wall between the US and Mexico in Nogales is because of a war between the two about 100 years ago after World War I.
Mexico seems to mostly be wrapped up in insurrections and criminal organizations lately though. I wouldn't be surprised if some intelligence agency cooked up most of Mexico's problems during the 1960s to keep them weak and it's just been burning since then. Sort of a Cold War toxic waste spill... But that's pure speculation of the quality used in light fiction.
How well is Iran's current strategy of being a regional and global pariah working out?
Without excusing the actions of US, could you honestly say that the present circumstances Iran finds themselves in is not a result of their decisions and choices since the revolution? And like I said, it isn't even about regime change. US is friendly with plenty of non-democratic regimes, even ones they were at war with (like Vietnam). On the other side, nations that set an explicit policy of antagonism, like Cuba, North Korea and Iran, tend to not fare well. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Iran's, and North Korea's, strategies are working out pretty well for the people making those decisions. Khamenei, like Kim Jong-Il, looks set to die of natural causes at an advanced age.
The people of Iran and North Korea are not doing so well. But if you were an Iranian citizen hoping for a better future, would you really pin your hopes on a US-backed regime change, after seeing the aftermath of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria?
>Iran's, and North Korea's, strategies are working out pretty well for the people making those decisions...The people of Iran and North Korea are not doing so well.
So your contention is that nation-states shouldn't interact with each other at the nation-state level? That is, if a nation-state proceeds with antagonistic policies, like funding regional militant and terrorist groups against your allies, you cannot hold that nation-state to account lest it hurt their populations? This is not an easy ethical question. At the nation-state level there is no rule of law, it is anarchy. It seems like there may be 'international law' in the modern world, but that's only for those that live within the sphere of influence of the relevant superpower who can enforce it (USA plays that role in much of the globe, soon to be replaced wholly or in part by Chinese influence).
Policies like sanctions have many goals. In the specific case of Iran, sanctions have a goal of curbing Iranian regional antagonism and not necessarily regime change (we're much too cynical for that).
>But if you were an Iranian citizen hoping for a better future, would you really pin your hopes on a US-backed regime change
There is no easy answer. Ultimately, it is the Iranian government that is responsible for the well-being of their citizens. Their citizens could have their lives drastically improved TODAY if their governments chose to do so. I don't know why you put that responsibility on the US because US cannot do this job. US needs to balance the well-being of their people as well as the well-being of the people of their regional allies as well, in addition to basic rights of all humans.
I posed a question to you in my previous message and you refused to answer it. But I'll rephrase: Why do you bend over backwards to remove all agency from Iranian government for actions they chose to get themselves and the people they are responsible for, into the present situation. This includes their absolute refusal for making decisions that would get them to stop being a regional and global pariah.
I don't really understand what you're referring to when you say that Iran has a choice to improve their people's lives today. The Iranian leadership talked to the USA and worked out a deal. The USA then went back on that deal, reimposed sanctions without even trying to renegotiate, and basically declared war on Iran, assassinating a top Iranian general. What choice do you think that Iran has right now? Their choices are surrender to US aggression, or continue to resist. I've mentioned a few of the many recent regional episodes - Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Kurds - which make it completely obvious that appeasement of the US will not end well for the Iranian government or its people. They are making the only rational choice at this juncture. Since they have no alternative they are blameless at this juncture. Since the USA does have choices - to go back to the deal, or to try to renegotiate a new deal with whatever demands they might add - the USA is therefore to blame for current Iranian suffering.
this is quite an academic exercise since a decade of intensive research hasn't brought us close to working self-driving cars, much less 1x safe self-driving cars, much less 5x safe, nor is there any clear path to resolving this open research problem.
The Rails people never went for SPAs though. Releasing another server-rendering AJAX thing for rails (previous was TurboLinks) no more represents "the pendulum swinging back" than a new version of COBOL that runs on mainframes represents the pendulum swinging back to mainframes. If this approach gains market share against React etc., then that will be meaningful - but don't hold your breath, there are legitimate reasons for the move to SPAs and also an enormous amount of institutional inertia behind it.
I don't think that's entirely accurate. Lots of Rails users went the SPA route the second stuff like Backbone came out. Wycats was big in the Rails community at this time and he spearheaded Emberjs. The Shopify guys were (and are still) big in the Rails community and they created their own Batman.js. It's just that the Rails core devs made a decision to not go that route. They were even working on their own front end framework at one point and after some time they decided to kill it in favor of just using pjax/turbolinks. You can get your 80% case accomplished with these technologies with substantially less effort. There are definitely reasons to go SPA, but the dev community at large has jumped on the hype train here without really identifying that using these technologies are a good idea for their use case. I mean, there's a lot of people doing CRUD with React. That's crazy.
Lots of rails back end applications power SPAs on the front end. Sometimes for good reasons, often enough just because it was more "modern" - but much less efficient in terms of programming.
