AIUI, the performances were to be spread out over multiple days. Will Trump come to the Mall and do his four-hour set each day? Or will he hold himself back to be the big blow-off at the end?
For wj, since his example helped get me off my butt... The local county election office offered me a job as a "resolution judge" for the primaries, which I accepted. (1) Resolution judges sit in the counting facility and look at ballots rejected by the machines to see if voter intent can be determined. (2) Paper ballots with fill-in ovals for the vast majority of voters; no hanging chads. (3) There are no election volunteers in this county, everyone gets paid.
Once, there were my friends and my wife-to-be's friends. Over time, those were slowly displaced by our friends. With my wife in memory care, doing things with our friends is more difficult. Finding a new set of my friends takes more energy than I can come up with sometimes. I understand the attraction of senior active-living communities more than I used to; some of the high price is effectively paying for a cruise ship social director.
Honestly, 90% of the artists I know are either in a relationship with a more stably employed SO
This is a recurring theme among the authors who occasionally hang out a Charlie Stross's blog. They pretty much all believe that novel-length fiction in the future will be done by a relative handful of people with enough reputation to have an agent, hired editors, and advances big enough to live on. Then a larger group who are supported (including pensioners). Then mostly self-publishers who do it on their own, sans things like copy editors. I tend to avoid those because I don't enjoy being a copy editor while I read for enjoyment.
Open thread... Over the last couple of months I've been reading some of Juliet McKenna's Green Man urban fantasy. For certain values of urban, like lots of very rural England. Along with a variety of English folklore, I've learned that downs are a very specific sort of geology. Also, that while I cook a variety of recipes involving beans, after looking at online videos I think I'll pass trying beans on toast.
Cutting off the food supply of cities would be more effective for the rural rebels than going in and trying to conquer by street fighting. Depending on location spoiling the water supply would be even more effective.
Most of the food actually eaten by rural people in the US is shipped from huge warehouses in metro areas. If the farmers say, "We're not going to harvest this fall," the cities respond with, "We're not going to ship canned and frozen goods to your local grocery starting today."
For example, Michael’s map lumps together the mountain west with the Pacific coast states. Are they different enough to warrant splitting them up?
Random thoughts...
My friend the anthropologist says that the suburbs of major metro areas west of the Great Plains (ie, Denver and farther west) are more alike than they are like anything east of the Great Plains. In support of that, now that the Census Bureau supports built-area density calculations, it turns out that western suburbs average almost twice the population density of suburbs in the other three CB regions.
The coastal and interior West share a synchronous electric grid, with minimal connections to the Eastern grid and none to the Texas grid. The coastal cities/states import lots of electricity from the interior. There are two major long-distance power lines under contruction -- Transwest Express and Sunzia -- that will increase that. Large pieces of both of those lines are HVDC -- they really are intended for no purpose other than moving gigawatts of Wyoming wind and New Mexico wind and solar from the western edge of the Great Plains to switch yards close to Southern California.
Reliable agriculture requires irrigation in all the western states. Land with irrigation rights in the Willamette Valley in Oregon is much more expensive than land without because despite the annual averages, it doesn't rain there during the crucial months of July and August. Plus other sorts of water issues: California is concerned about Colorado snowfall, Oregon and Washington about eventual discharges of nasty stuff from the INL into the Snake/Columbia, etc.
Both coastal and interior states have recalls, initiatives, and heavy vote by mail. There are nine state legislative chambers in the US where 50% or more of the seats are held by women, all in western states, both coastal and interior (the Progressive Era lives on!). All of them have a long-term distrust of the federal Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Reclamation.
Playing with the cluster analysis -- based, recall, on people moving between states -- and proceeding to more regions, the two that break up last are the West and NY/New England. That suggests tighter "binding" than in Greater Texas, the Southeast, and the two Midwest chunks.
...and most people understand that both states provide huge benefits to the country as a whole. i can’t think of a state that doesn’t provide something we’d all rather have a domestic supply of than have to import – food, oil, lumber, even culture and scenery are nice to have in-house.
There are lots of models. There's the EU model, with a common currency, no trade barriers, free movement of labor and capital, but defense left to the members. That addresses most of your list, excepting where culture and policy overlap. There's the UK model, with devolution of lots of civilian authority but none on defense, and tax receipt transfers between the members. However, what happens if Reform wins control of Parliament on the basis of English votes and attempts to impose its "revive North Sea fossil fuels" policy on a Scotland controlled by the SNP/Greens who oppose?
The last is particularly interesting to me because the Western Interconnect has multiple reasons to decide on an energy policy that is "Electrify everything, and get rid of thermal power plants." Trump, and hence the Republicans, are solidly opposed to even allowing that, yet alone supporting it. The conflict is already happening: Trump ordering that coal-fired plants stay open even if most of regional population doesn't want to buy coal-fired electricity. My own local power authority, faced with a requirement to join an ISO/RTO by 2030, has done so early. ISO/RTO's implement the FERC model for electric markets, designed for the eastern US. Only a month in, and the RTO is dispatching our peaking gas-fired generators at a rate that will require them to go offline for maintenance in the summer, when they're really needed for reliability. One of my questions is how should the West react to an oncoming decade of "Run your electric grid as if you were eastern states, with many generators, a dense demand network, and lots of water."
...but i can’t think of a state so unloved that the rest of the country would shrug at the idea of it leaving.
Conservatives hate California as a matter of faith. Lots of them might not just shrug, but be happy to see it go. Most western states are nominally unhappy with California, but that's primarily a matter of the California Diaspora helping drive up real estate prices. (The first time I heard the term "California Diaspora" was in 1988, from a history prof at the U of Colorado in Boulder.)
Similarly for NY/NJ, but that's largely New York City hate. Illinois has now passed NJ as the state with the highest percentage of residents unhappy with their own state. My own personal beef with NJ, despite (or because of) living there for ten years can be illustrated by an early interaction I had with a native at a party, who remarked, upon learning I had done my undergraduate time at Nebraska, "Nebraska? That's out there by Ohio and Nevada and those states, isn't it?"
Texans visiting other places seem to be uniformly disliked. My perception is that's because Texans do their version of the Ugly American routine so well it even annoys other Americans. ("Drawl even slower and louder, maybe I'll understand it that way.") I lived there for two years and there were a lot of people who were just mean-spirited; eg, "Freeze a Yankee in the Dark" bumper stickers as a way to advocate pro-Texas energy policies.
In various polls/study groups, only Hawaii beats Colorado on least-disliked list. Who doesn't like laid-back stoned hikers, or surfers?
A revealed-preference version of the question is where do people move? Some years back I wanted to learn more about cluster analysis. The test problem I chose to play with was grouping states based on immigration between them, using IRS data that was available at that time. One of the maps I generated was based on dividing the contiguous states into seven clustered groups. (Why seven is too detailed to go into, even in a comment that has already reached this length.) Some of the groupings were the result of individual metro areas: NM was attached to Texas because El Paso, but not otherwise; OH was connected to KY because Cincinnati. Looking more closely at the western group revealed three interesting patterns. (1) All of the states' rural populations were slowly shrinking back to the major metro areas. (2) There was a modest amount of migration back and forth between the West and the rest of the country. (3) There was significant migration in both directions between all of the major metro areas. Texas likes to make a big deal about Californians moving to Texas. In fact, Californians who leave are much more likely to go to Phoenix, or Denver, or Portland, or Seattle than to Texas. And people move from those cities to California.
On a different subject entirely, my car recently started "missing" occasionally when I was stopped with it in gear (eg, at a red traffic light). No lights on the dashboard, but the tachometer twitched every time. I was thinking about it last night and decided it started shortly after I got my last tank of gas. This morning I went to a different station and topped the tank with premium, then drove ten miles and back on the Interstate. The problem appears to be fixed.
I suppose with gas prices being what they are, it's unsurprising if some marginal fuel is getting delivered. I may be more susceptible to such problems because I only fill up every 4-6 weeks. Also, it's an older car -- it'll turn 18 this summer.
But extensive guerrilla warefare and terrorism, especially within the new areas? Much more likely. Especially with support from other fragments. I could especially see some efforts directed at the perceived oppression of their co-religionists.
I've started about a dozen responses to this. I'll leave it at this: describe a plot you could sell to a publisher where the Southern Baptists from Kentucky and Alabama drive 1500 miles to support the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Who are they going to attack? California and Phoenix and Front Range Colorado? Where the Mormons are generally well-regarded? IIRC, as recently as 2006 the official SB position was that the LDS were cultists, not Christians.
I’m wondering how Western America (sans TX/OK) divides up the political baby between the purple Front Range and NM, the mostly red patch from the Western Slope to the western side of the Cascades/Sierra Nevada.
That's an excellent point -- today. 20 years of climate change on, with states looking at partitions, the question to ask those areas is, "Do you think Indiana and North Carolina and Florida care about your fire and water and energy problems? More than your neighboring states do?"
How many Americans in 1832-33 during the Nullification Crisis, thought there would be a shooting war in less than 30 years? Not, as I've said, that I think a shooting war is a likely result. As someone else pointed out, this is not 1861, states don't raise militias, and there's a very large standing military.
The decline of the Pound was around when the US was still nominally on the gold standard (pre 1972), wasn’t it?
The 30-year people say that in practice, the decline began around 1915 because of the enormous debt the crown had to take on for WWI, and was effectively finished by 1945 at the end of WWII. By then, the financiers wanted dollars, not pounds. The 50-year people extend that out. My own opinion is that 1945 is the right date; the US had the only undamaged large industrial capacity in a world that suddenly wanted to rebuild.
Government bonds aren't the only store of value. At that time, GM shares/bonds denominated in dollars were almost as good.
But at the moment, it seems that the major impediment is simply that it takes time and care to diversify out of dollars without crashing the value of the dollars you still hold.
Is 25 years enough? The pound took 30-50 years, depending on how you want to measure it. One suspects it would be like Hemingway's bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. The hard question is what would replace it. China certainly doesn't want the renminbi to take on that role because of the down sides. I believe they have occasionally proposed a fiat currency tied to a basket of real currencies for trade purposes, but not as a store of value.
1861 had something to say about states trying to leave the union. and that was decided with foot soldiers. no state is going to stand a chance against a few B52s.
If 38 states decide that they would be better off in independent groups, or with heavily devolved powers, the B52s don't matter (absent a military dictatorship, of course*). Unlike a couple of commenters at Lawyers, Guns & Money, I've never said that a partition could happen other than by sufficient states agreeing to do it.
* Which is a possibility. Who loses the most if the US were to break up into two, or three, or four groups? DoD and the rest of national security would be high on that list. Not nearly so many expensive orbital toys for the NRO, for example. The vast administrative state and everyone who sucks from that teat (eg, K Street lobbyists). Wall Street.
I’d be interested in where the time frame comes from.
Start with the question, "Under what conditions might a partition be possible?" One of the things that would almost certainly be necessary is that things that only an intact US can provide decline in importance. Eg, the US is no longer the conventional military superpower who can project force anywhere, and everybody knows it. There are a variety of ways that might happen. Carrier strike groups may be too expensive. The weapons systems may become too expensive to actually use. Cheap weapons become smart enough to overwhelm the defenses expensive platforms can carry. The world decides it will no longer risk hosting US forward deployments. Some combination. The US won't lose that status overnight. But in 25 years? Arguably, some version of all of those things are already happening. (Exercise for the student: can the US dollar lose its reserve currency status, and how long would that take?)
One of the weird things about the past decade is that when you make a list of the conditions that would make a partition feasible, Donald Trump seems to be working to make most of them happen sooner rather than later.
Sometime in the next 25 years or so, there will be an opportunity for the western states -- roughly the area of the Western Interconnect, or the area west of the center line of the Great plains, or the part of the country where the night time lights satellite pictures show that the previous settlement patterns broke down -- to go their own way. They (we) should jump at it. And in the meantime, push more and more interstate compacts to implement regional solutions to problems.
Amusement of the day: US Central Commend calling Iranian strikes against US naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz “unprovoked.” Words fail me.
I'm wondering if the first real panic to occur will be the Arab Gulf states. In the last couple weeks, the UAE has left OPEC and called a $3B loan they had made to Pakistan. There's the on-again off-again maybe on-again KSA and Kuwait ban on the US using those countries' bases and airspace to implement the escort service through the Strait. There are hints that something odd is going on in Bahrain. Vice-President Vance is in Qatar today meeting with government officials.
None of the subs, though, is going to fit through the Moffat Tunnel, so coming from CA is out. Not sure if any of the other 30 tunnels on the California Zephyr route are between Chicago and Denver, but I imagine that track clearance would be an issue even without the limits of train tunnels.
An LA-class sub is 360 ft long (109 meter), has a 33-foot beam (10.05 meters), and I believe is the smallest of our active nuclear submarines. I, for one, do not want to be responsible for even trying to balance that over rails spaced 4' 8.5" (1.43 m) apart, and then moving it.
That’s a lot harder to do for Colorado. You mention “put it on wheels”, but that’s still a long way from any coast, mostly uphill.
1) They wouldn't have to get to Colorado. The Glenn Canyon Dam sits at the center of the Arizona-Utah border. In theory, with enough time to do some planning, you could pick a different switch yard much closer to the ocean for connection. Except that both Diablo Canyon reactors are running at full power, anchoring there might have been feasible.
2) All of the Navy reactors, both submarine and carrier, depend on circulating seawater to dump waste heat. One of the underappreciated reasons that wind and PV solar are popular in the American West is that they don't require any form of cooling water. Semi-arid and precipitation variance increasing? I'll have some of generating technology that doesn't need cooling water, please.
The snow has started here at the north end of the Colorado urban corridor. The forecast says 4-8 inches of accumulation overnight and through tomorrow. As much as a couple of feet up in the mountains. The moisture is welcome, but it won't break the drought. It's also mostly happening east of the Continental Divide so does nothing for the Colorado River crisis.
California, Arizona, and Nevada appear to have reached a one-year agreement on the river in which each takes only 60% of their legal allotment. The debate on long-term changes to the Colorado River Compact seems to be at an impasse between the lower basin and upper basin states.
Still on track for power generation at the Glenn Canyon Dam to stop due to low water around August. That takes ~1.3 GW of generation off line. The regional coal-burners were retired years back and have been torn down. Wonder what Trump's Dept of Energy will order done?
Statement from my local power authority after the first month of being in an RTO that controls what generation gets dispatched... These guys are dispatching our NG-fired peak generators every day for base load just because they're cheaper than the crud the other power authorities operate. At this rate, we'll have to take them off line in July and August for maintenance, just when they're really needed.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
AIUI, the performances were to be spread out over multiple days. Will Trump come to the Mall and do his four-hour set each day? Or will he hold himself back to be the big blow-off at the end?
On “Open Thread time”
For wj, since his example helped get me off my butt... The local county election office offered me a job as a "resolution judge" for the primaries, which I accepted. (1) Resolution judges sit in the counting facility and look at ballots rejected by the machines to see if voter intent can be determined. (2) Paper ballots with fill-in ovals for the vast majority of voters; no hanging chads. (3) There are no election volunteers in this county, everyone gets paid.
On “The quiet grief of adult friendship”
Once, there were my friends and my wife-to-be's friends. Over time, those were slowly displaced by our friends. With my wife in memory care, doing things with our friends is more difficult. Finding a new set of my friends takes more energy than I can come up with sometimes. I understand the attraction of senior active-living communities more than I used to; some of the high price is effectively paying for a cruise ship social director.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
The list time someone said ‘I do my own research’ within my hearing, I popped up, all smiles, and said, "Great! Can you explain the statistics to me?"
"
Honestly, 90% of the artists I know are either in a relationship with a more stably employed SO
This is a recurring theme among the authors who occasionally hang out a Charlie Stross's blog. They pretty much all believe that novel-length fiction in the future will be done by a relative handful of people with enough reputation to have an agent, hired editors, and advances big enough to live on. Then a larger group who are supported (including pensioners). Then mostly self-publishers who do it on their own, sans things like copy editors. I tend to avoid those because I don't enjoy being a copy editor while I read for enjoyment.
On “Open Thread time”
Open thread... Over the last couple of months I've been reading some of Juliet McKenna's Green Man urban fantasy. For certain values of urban, like lots of very rural England. Along with a variety of English folklore, I've learned that downs are a very specific sort of geology. Also, that while I cook a variety of recipes involving beans, after looking at online videos I think I'll pass trying beans on toast.
"
Cutting off the food supply of cities would be more effective for the rural rebels than going in and trying to conquer by street fighting. Depending on location spoiling the water supply would be even more effective.
Most of the food actually eaten by rural people in the US is shipped from huge warehouses in metro areas. If the farmers say, "We're not going to harvest this fall," the cities respond with, "We're not going to ship canned and frozen goods to your local grocery starting today."
"
For example, Michael’s map lumps together the mountain west with the Pacific coast states. Are they different enough to warrant splitting them up?
Random thoughts...
My friend the anthropologist says that the suburbs of major metro areas west of the Great Plains (ie, Denver and farther west) are more alike than they are like anything east of the Great Plains. In support of that, now that the Census Bureau supports built-area density calculations, it turns out that western suburbs average almost twice the population density of suburbs in the other three CB regions.
The coastal and interior West share a synchronous electric grid, with minimal connections to the Eastern grid and none to the Texas grid. The coastal cities/states import lots of electricity from the interior. There are two major long-distance power lines under contruction -- Transwest Express and Sunzia -- that will increase that. Large pieces of both of those lines are HVDC -- they really are intended for no purpose other than moving gigawatts of Wyoming wind and New Mexico wind and solar from the western edge of the Great Plains to switch yards close to Southern California.
Reliable agriculture requires irrigation in all the western states. Land with irrigation rights in the Willamette Valley in Oregon is much more expensive than land without because despite the annual averages, it doesn't rain there during the crucial months of July and August. Plus other sorts of water issues: California is concerned about Colorado snowfall, Oregon and Washington about eventual discharges of nasty stuff from the INL into the Snake/Columbia, etc.
Both coastal and interior states have recalls, initiatives, and heavy vote by mail. There are nine state legislative chambers in the US where 50% or more of the seats are held by women, all in western states, both coastal and interior (the Progressive Era lives on!). All of them have a long-term distrust of the federal Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Reclamation.
Playing with the cluster analysis -- based, recall, on people moving between states -- and proceeding to more regions, the two that break up last are the West and NY/New England. That suggests tighter "binding" than in Greater Texas, the Southeast, and the two Midwest chunks.
"
...and most people understand that both states provide huge benefits to the country as a whole. i can’t think of a state that doesn’t provide something we’d all rather have a domestic supply of than have to import – food, oil, lumber, even culture and scenery are nice to have in-house.
There are lots of models. There's the EU model, with a common currency, no trade barriers, free movement of labor and capital, but defense left to the members. That addresses most of your list, excepting where culture and policy overlap. There's the UK model, with devolution of lots of civilian authority but none on defense, and tax receipt transfers between the members. However, what happens if Reform wins control of Parliament on the basis of English votes and attempts to impose its "revive North Sea fossil fuels" policy on a Scotland controlled by the SNP/Greens who oppose?
The last is particularly interesting to me because the Western Interconnect has multiple reasons to decide on an energy policy that is "Electrify everything, and get rid of thermal power plants." Trump, and hence the Republicans, are solidly opposed to even allowing that, yet alone supporting it. The conflict is already happening: Trump ordering that coal-fired plants stay open even if most of regional population doesn't want to buy coal-fired electricity. My own local power authority, faced with a requirement to join an ISO/RTO by 2030, has done so early. ISO/RTO's implement the FERC model for electric markets, designed for the eastern US. Only a month in, and the RTO is dispatching our peaking gas-fired generators at a rate that will require them to go offline for maintenance in the summer, when they're really needed for reliability. One of my questions is how should the West react to an oncoming decade of "Run your electric grid as if you were eastern states, with many generators, a dense demand network, and lots of water."
"
...but i can’t think of a state so unloved that the rest of the country would shrug at the idea of it leaving.
Conservatives hate California as a matter of faith. Lots of them might not just shrug, but be happy to see it go. Most western states are nominally unhappy with California, but that's primarily a matter of the California Diaspora helping drive up real estate prices. (The first time I heard the term "California Diaspora" was in 1988, from a history prof at the U of Colorado in Boulder.)
Similarly for NY/NJ, but that's largely New York City hate. Illinois has now passed NJ as the state with the highest percentage of residents unhappy with their own state. My own personal beef with NJ, despite (or because of) living there for ten years can be illustrated by an early interaction I had with a native at a party, who remarked, upon learning I had done my undergraduate time at Nebraska, "Nebraska? That's out there by Ohio and Nevada and those states, isn't it?"
Texans visiting other places seem to be uniformly disliked. My perception is that's because Texans do their version of the Ugly American routine so well it even annoys other Americans. ("Drawl even slower and louder, maybe I'll understand it that way.") I lived there for two years and there were a lot of people who were just mean-spirited; eg, "Freeze a Yankee in the Dark" bumper stickers as a way to advocate pro-Texas energy policies.
In various polls/study groups, only Hawaii beats Colorado on least-disliked list. Who doesn't like laid-back stoned hikers, or surfers?
A revealed-preference version of the question is where do people move? Some years back I wanted to learn more about cluster analysis. The test problem I chose to play with was grouping states based on immigration between them, using IRS data that was available at that time. One of the maps I generated was based on dividing the contiguous states into seven clustered groups. (Why seven is too detailed to go into, even in a comment that has already reached this length.) Some of the groupings were the result of individual metro areas: NM was attached to Texas because El Paso, but not otherwise; OH was connected to KY because Cincinnati. Looking more closely at the western group revealed three interesting patterns. (1) All of the states' rural populations were slowly shrinking back to the major metro areas. (2) There was a modest amount of migration back and forth between the West and the rest of the country. (3) There was significant migration in both directions between all of the major metro areas. Texas likes to make a big deal about Californians moving to Texas. In fact, Californians who leave are much more likely to go to Phoenix, or Denver, or Portland, or Seattle than to Texas. And people move from those cities to California.
"
On a different subject entirely, my car recently started "missing" occasionally when I was stopped with it in gear (eg, at a red traffic light). No lights on the dashboard, but the tachometer twitched every time. I was thinking about it last night and decided it started shortly after I got my last tank of gas. This morning I went to a different station and topped the tank with premium, then drove ten miles and back on the Interstate. The problem appears to be fixed.
I suppose with gas prices being what they are, it's unsurprising if some marginal fuel is getting delivered. I may be more susceptible to such problems because I only fill up every 4-6 weeks. Also, it's an older car -- it'll turn 18 this summer.
"
But extensive guerrilla warefare and terrorism, especially within the new areas? Much more likely. Especially with support from other fragments. I could especially see some efforts directed at the perceived oppression of their co-religionists.
I've started about a dozen responses to this. I'll leave it at this: describe a plot you could sell to a publisher where the Southern Baptists from Kentucky and Alabama drive 1500 miles to support the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Who are they going to attack? California and Phoenix and Front Range Colorado? Where the Mormons are generally well-regarded? IIRC, as recently as 2006 the official SB position was that the LDS were cultists, not Christians.
"
I’m wondering how Western America (sans TX/OK) divides up the political baby between the purple Front Range and NM, the mostly red patch from the Western Slope to the western side of the Cascades/Sierra Nevada.
That's an excellent point -- today. 20 years of climate change on, with states looking at partitions, the question to ask those areas is, "Do you think Indiana and North Carolina and Florida care about your fire and water and energy problems? More than your neighboring states do?"
How many Americans in 1832-33 during the Nullification Crisis, thought there would be a shooting war in less than 30 years? Not, as I've said, that I think a shooting war is a likely result. As someone else pointed out, this is not 1861, states don't raise militias, and there's a very large standing military.
"
The decline of the Pound was around when the US was still nominally on the gold standard (pre 1972), wasn’t it?
The 30-year people say that in practice, the decline began around 1915 because of the enormous debt the crown had to take on for WWI, and was effectively finished by 1945 at the end of WWII. By then, the financiers wanted dollars, not pounds. The 50-year people extend that out. My own opinion is that 1945 is the right date; the US had the only undamaged large industrial capacity in a world that suddenly wanted to rebuild.
Government bonds aren't the only store of value. At that time, GM shares/bonds denominated in dollars were almost as good.
"
But at the moment, it seems that the major impediment is simply that it takes time and care to diversify out of dollars without crashing the value of the dollars you still hold.
Is 25 years enough? The pound took 30-50 years, depending on how you want to measure it. One suspects it would be like Hemingway's bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. The hard question is what would replace it. China certainly doesn't want the renminbi to take on that role because of the down sides. I believe they have occasionally proposed a fiat currency tied to a basket of real currencies for trade purposes, but not as a store of value.
"
1861 had something to say about states trying to leave the union. and that was decided with foot soldiers. no state is going to stand a chance against a few B52s.
If 38 states decide that they would be better off in independent groups, or with heavily devolved powers, the B52s don't matter (absent a military dictatorship, of course*). Unlike a couple of commenters at Lawyers, Guns & Money, I've never said that a partition could happen other than by sufficient states agreeing to do it.
* Which is a possibility. Who loses the most if the US were to break up into two, or three, or four groups? DoD and the rest of national security would be high on that list. Not nearly so many expensive orbital toys for the NRO, for example. The vast administrative state and everyone who sucks from that teat (eg, K Street lobbyists). Wall Street.
"
I’d be interested in where the time frame comes from.
Start with the question, "Under what conditions might a partition be possible?" One of the things that would almost certainly be necessary is that things that only an intact US can provide decline in importance. Eg, the US is no longer the conventional military superpower who can project force anywhere, and everybody knows it. There are a variety of ways that might happen. Carrier strike groups may be too expensive. The weapons systems may become too expensive to actually use. Cheap weapons become smart enough to overwhelm the defenses expensive platforms can carry. The world decides it will no longer risk hosting US forward deployments. Some combination. The US won't lose that status overnight. But in 25 years? Arguably, some version of all of those things are already happening. (Exercise for the student: can the US dollar lose its reserve currency status, and how long would that take?)
One of the weird things about the past decade is that when you make a list of the conditions that would make a partition feasible, Donald Trump seems to be working to make most of them happen sooner rather than later.
"
So what, in practice, can and should be done?
Sometime in the next 25 years or so, there will be an opportunity for the western states -- roughly the area of the Western Interconnect, or the area west of the center line of the Great plains, or the part of the country where the night time lights satellite pictures show that the previous settlement patterns broke down -- to go their own way. They (we) should jump at it. And in the meantime, push more and more interstate compacts to implement regional solutions to problems.
"
How did the separatist parties do in Scotland and Wales?
"
Amusement of the day: US Central Commend calling Iranian strikes against US naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz “unprovoked.” Words fail me.
I'm wondering if the first real panic to occur will be the Arab Gulf states. In the last couple weeks, the UAE has left OPEC and called a $3B loan they had made to Pakistan. There's the on-again off-again maybe on-again KSA and Kuwait ban on the US using those countries' bases and airspace to implement the escort service through the Strait. There are hints that something odd is going on in Bahrain. Vice-President Vance is in Qatar today meeting with government officials.
"
And then Starlink renamed itself Skynet.
I found John Varley's malevolent AI in Press Enter much scarier. Software reaching into your house via 1980s level networking to kill you...
"
More Springtime in the Rockies this morning.
"
None of the subs, though, is going to fit through the Moffat Tunnel, so coming from CA is out. Not sure if any of the other 30 tunnels on the California Zephyr route are between Chicago and Denver, but I imagine that track clearance would be an issue even without the limits of train tunnels.
An LA-class sub is 360 ft long (109 meter), has a 33-foot beam (10.05 meters), and I believe is the smallest of our active nuclear submarines. I, for one, do not want to be responsible for even trying to balance that over rails spaced 4' 8.5" (1.43 m) apart, and then moving it.
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That’s a lot harder to do for Colorado. You mention “put it on wheels”, but that’s still a long way from any coast, mostly uphill.
1) They wouldn't have to get to Colorado. The Glenn Canyon Dam sits at the center of the Arizona-Utah border. In theory, with enough time to do some planning, you could pick a different switch yard much closer to the ocean for connection. Except that both Diablo Canyon reactors are running at full power, anchoring there might have been feasible.
2) All of the Navy reactors, both submarine and carrier, depend on circulating seawater to dump waste heat. One of the underappreciated reasons that wind and PV solar are popular in the American West is that they don't require any form of cooling water. Semi-arid and precipitation variance increasing? I'll have some of generating technology that doesn't need cooling water, please.
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The snow has started here at the north end of the Colorado urban corridor. The forecast says 4-8 inches of accumulation overnight and through tomorrow. As much as a couple of feet up in the mountains. The moisture is welcome, but it won't break the drought. It's also mostly happening east of the Continental Divide so does nothing for the Colorado River crisis.
California, Arizona, and Nevada appear to have reached a one-year agreement on the river in which each takes only 60% of their legal allotment. The debate on long-term changes to the Colorado River Compact seems to be at an impasse between the lower basin and upper basin states.
Still on track for power generation at the Glenn Canyon Dam to stop due to low water around August. That takes ~1.3 GW of generation off line. The regional coal-burners were retired years back and have been torn down. Wonder what Trump's Dept of Energy will order done?
Statement from my local power authority after the first month of being in an RTO that controls what generation gets dispatched... These guys are dispatching our NG-fired peak generators every day for base load just because they're cheaper than the crud the other power authorities operate. At this rate, we'll have to take them off line in July and August for maintenance, just when they're really needed.
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