It's unfortunately predictable. IIRC Trump has been consistent about wanting to enable more resource extraction from of the public lands and did so under his last term. I assume he's going to do so again this term, it's mostly a question of when and how much.
The next phase on this is to use prisoners, including immigrants waiting for deportation, and unemployed people as emergency workers.
They'll make a deal with the private prisons to pay the owners for supplying workforce when needed. Unemployment benefits will be tied to a commitment to "volunteer" for emergencies.
Many of us adults in the room saw this coming and tried to stop it. Unfortunately those who didn’t want the “self own” were outnumbered by the truly stupid.
It’s crazy how divided we are on the issues. In the last 4 years the needle went so far left, way past what even traditional Democrats wanted. Now it’s heading to the right faster than a Falcon 9 rocket. The people in the center are probably just frustrated. The far left are visibly enraged and the far right are celebrating at every EO. Crazy times.
> In the last 4 years the needle went so far left, way past what even traditional Democrats wanted.
Not in many useful ways by global standards of "left." There was a certain amount of public investment in infrastructure, but beyond that...
Better public healthcare?
Getting prescription prices under control?
The use of left-leaning methods to address housing prices (rent control, say)?
The FTC went after some mega-corps, at least, but without much hope of success because the legislature didn't do anything new in the M&A or antitrust space.
Did the needle go far left? I didn’t see it go much past the American center (which is very right compared to most of the western world). We got some DEI that has for the most part been proven to be lip service, so much for equal under law and land of the free. We got some money for infrastructure, we put people who participated in an insurrection in jail, we got business as usual.
We didn’t get universal healthcare, we didn’t get a reduction of the power of monopolies, we didn’t get a reduction in the military budget, we didn’t get a minimum wage that tracked inflation let alone was a livable wage, we didn’t get money out of politics and politicians, we didn’t get the rich to pay their fair share. The only way I’d measure the past 4 years as being left is because of the current jarring swerve into a right wing oligarchy
"Let's check the military" is the latest thing, so you might get a reduction in the military budget now, who knows. Perhaps in relation to things like throwing Ukraine under the bus. Is this a very left-wing thing, a small military?
Yes. That's probably why I don't see the DOD budget move much. Maybe bigger contracts with Tesla,spaceX, neuralink and starlink to replace some of Boeing.
Really? In the past four years, did we get land reform? Housing reform? Healthcare reform? Something that addressed wealth inequality? Police accountability? Worker rights? Anything to address the mental health crisis? Anything to tackle the problems people with drug addiction are facing? Any change to the trajectory of climate change, as opposed to just kicking the can down the road? Affordability of childcare? Cost of education? I could go on and on.
We aren't 'divided' on how to deal with our issues. The right doesn't see any of the above as issues, and doesn't see any need to address them.
Your perception that things swung left does not match the reality. The right echo chamber has driven itself into a frenzy to try to manufacture this perception, as justification for their reactionary politics.
About 55%, who voted, nationally voted for the current president of the USA.
My _opinion_ is around 20-30% of those that voted 'voted for this' or otherwise like it. The other 35-25% maybe didn't get what they voted for; I believe if None of the Above (reject everyone and give all new candidates) had been on the ticket in ANY sort of instant runoff voting system, would have voted for that with higher preference.
I'm for _requiring_ that everyone who is eligible to vote, does so. They're free to officially abstain. I'd like for None of the Above to be a mandatory option for all votes with the effects described above. I'd also like for ANY Instant Runoff Voting system, though I prefer "Path Vote" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method ) I do mean any IRV method.
I would also like, FFS, if we're going to HAVE primaries at all, that they're always open and required, no free passes in.
Finally, all Elections should be Voting Holidays. I'd love if every state did all Mail In Ballots like WA state. I'd also like any ballot mailed before midnight at the end of the Voting Holiday to be postmarked, and counted (but please get your votes in early).
I'd like all Non-Emergency votes to be limited to the 4th of July and Nov (whatever the format is) as those Voting Holidays.
Proposal 1: You don't get to leave the job until the replacement is hired.
Proposal 2: Follow the chain of succession to a position that did get elected / appointed. I wonder if cabinet members retain their jobs until replaced?
Also, that would count as an Emergency election. Maybe we could do a crack at 2 months to 'primary' and 1 month to campaign? Other countries seem to get by just fine.
Well then the people would elect None of the Above over and over again, leaving the country in permanent political limbo, like Belgium. The government wouldn't be able to do anything. But I suppose on the plus side, the government wouldn't be able to do anything.
The majority of the electorate has dissatisfaction after any election. The job of democracy is not to obtain good governments, but partly tolerable ones.
Offhand memory of something from the weeks after the election, though Wikipedia's numbers likely reflect the final official tallies rather than the numbers of that time.
The popular vote seems to have been closer than I recalled hearing.
Trump's agenda has been widely known, disseminated and broadcast on all channels for almost a decade, and most of it is based on alt-right/Evangelical Christian/neocon beliefs that have been around for much longer. Trumpism has become a worldwide political movement, it's nigh inescapable.
Maybe there were some rubes, but most people who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were voting for, because it's what they voted for in 2020, and in 2016, and what they wished in their heart of hearts would happen ever since Obama did 9/11.
People still didn't know what they voted for though. There are many reasons, voters often don't truly research on who they are going to vote. They either are going by just "the man" they vote for because of promises, they believe the garbage on social media without any second thought, and reject anything that doesn't fit their view because it comes from the deep state fake news. That's why Project 2025 didn't get the attention it should have.
I think people care. People are angry about this coup and scared about what might happen next. At the moment, I wonder if people are waiting for Trump's opponents in government to fight back. It's looking increasingly doubtful they will accomplish anything, though. I think we'll start to see larger protests soon.
At what point does enough of the breakage affect the people who voted for this *cough to happen to others* make them turn off the tv trigger drip long enough to ask if this model of government behaviour is really fine for their families long term future. Because I really do not want to see a future far-left government that is actively taking notes atm.
I played co-ed sports with a couple forest rangers and they were always trying to recruit people because they couldn't be everywhere all the time (or that's what the complaint was I don't know what they actually do but it sounded like a Tom & Jerry or Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon with them as the chaser).
They were republican but not sure if they ever fell down the far-right rabbit hole. They would be safe from the firings, but probably not happy about losing new help.
Of course not it's a gutting of the federal government to prevent it from regulation or enforcement of anything that would limit the power of billionaires and companies.
The question is what is there to do now, especially for those living in the US.
My opinion is that probably strong and organized civil resistance is probably the only good venue now. Be it churches, clubs, unions or whatever. But not individuals in their homes.
> "There's God's side and the other side." --Katt Williams
This reminds me of one of my favorite things:
> Now I am enjoying the last rays of the sun again, marveling at the incredible beauty of everything that has not been created by man. The red dahlias at the white garden gate, the tall serious fir trees and the trembling golden birches with their now shining trunks in front of all the green and rust-colored foliage, the golden sun that enhances the luminous colorfulness of every single thing instead of, like the glowing summer sun, smothering everything that still wants to move next to it. Everything is so astonishingly beautiful that I do not yet know what kind of feeling my speechless heart should develop for it, for it is not yet mature enough for pure joy; it is amazed and content with delighted astonishment.
> Isn't it puzzling enough, and if you don't know the reason for it, almost frightening, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the terrible things that happen. Something great and unknown has intruded into my sheer joy in everything beautiful, namely a sense of its Creator, whom the innocent created creatures praise with their beauty.
> Therefore, only man can actually be ugly because he has the free will to separate himself from this song of praise. And now one could often think that he is capable of roaring over this song with the thunder of cannons and cursing and blasphemy. But I realized last spring that he can't, and I will try to side with the victors.
-- Sophie Scholl in a letter to her friend Lisa Remppis, October 1942
Of course just boiling it down to "love" is prone to misunderstandings, and bringing up "God" is like whipping out a hand grenade on HN. People with different perspectives read these words differently, and of course we get triggered by the religious fascists it makes us think of; but what can you do. Yet also:
> But I have learned that a hard spirit without a soft heart heart must be just as unfruitful as a soft heart without a hard spirit. I believe the sentence comes from Maritain: "Il faut avoir l’esprit dur et le coeur tendre". A word that is not experienced by the soul is a dead word, and a feeling that is not the womb of a thought is in vain.
Our love must be fierce in defense of the innocent. We must love God with all our being; only then can we more perfectly bring Its love down to this paradise in the face of all the terrible people around here.
God bless you, and may peace be with you. I am at your service.
Now is the time to search for a strong opposition voice within the Democratic Party. While Biden was in office, Trump never shut his mouth. The Democrats need to be doing the same. Holding rallies, making TV appearances. Representing the close to 50% of the country who are watching this unfold in horror.
Democrats need to go on the offensive and hard. Call Trump a scumbag in public. When the loudmouth bully magas speak up, remind them that Traitor trump is a sexual predator. Remind them he’s an insurrectionist and failed businessman. Remind everyone, everywhere that he’s horrible by every single measure. A convicted conman. Make up lies about Republicans and repeat them. Play dirty. They only get defensive when you tell lies about Republicans. They wear ignorance as a badge.
Yeah, but for that they need pressure both from the inside and the outside. Apparently D representatives receive a ton of phonecalls from their constituents, which is already a good start.
But what is also needed is more and younger people running within the party and for office to create more pressure for bolder messaging and more decisive actions.
The D party had the problem of being perceived as the status-quo party, and that perception IMO is not wrong if you look who is in positions of power within the party. So if the Dems want voters to drop Trump in the next election they need to undergo a massive transformation, especially age-wise (maybe with the sole exception of Bernie Sanders who aleays was popular with people from both sides).
It is not about saving money, it is about gaining it. I suspect some of those national parks have resources in them.
In short: You gave the crackheads the keys to your apartment and they are tearing the copper out of the drywall as you idly stand by and decided nothing can be done.
Which coincidentally is what most Americans can trace their deed back to, save a small fraction that was privately chartered by order of the king from the get go.
Someone (read most people west of the Mississippi at the very least) is in possession of homesteaded or sold land and without that we'd be in an even more serious housing crises. There is an element of hypocrisy.
We ought to share our land with our youth to homestead, in this housing crisis. I had to build on truly terrible desert shithole land due to insane land prices (and even burnt out trailers were 150k+ so building a shack on vacant land was my only option), much worse than much of public land, I'd prefer others not have to suffer that.
> We ought to share our land with our youth to homestead, in this housing crisis.
I do sympathize, but this is just so incredibly short-sighted. And allowing politicians to enrich themselves (and their already rich developer/landlord buddies who caused the housing crisis) by selling us back what we already own is no fix at all. We really shouldn't set the precedent of letting politicians buy votes from us by temporarily alleviating the problems that they themselves have caused.
The east coast is already a concrete nightmare of conurbation and paved suburbs from Boston to Miami. If you live your whole life in Europe, at least there are proper villages, but it's pretty hard to get more than a few miles away from other people, even in the Alps. If you can get to the Amazon or the Sinai or the Kashmir, then you can enjoy some peace and quiet at the risk of running into soldiers/militants/narcos. In the neighborhood of Everest/Annapurna, roads and cell towers are on the rise. Or you can freeze your tits off in the great frozen north, or file detailed travel plans with China and struggle to arrange for transport to remote areas. The combination of accessible/inaccessible in the American west plus the relative stability is unique, it is a refuge, and this kind of thing is disappearing from the world.
We'll be much poorer if we give it up, certainly the future will be bleaker, even if some people feel like they are getting a sweet deal on the acreage.
Are you familiar with everyman's right in Nordic nations? I think a balance can be struck that provides a relief valve for those who need a dwelling while providing access to rugged wilderness. They could be recorded as covenants under the deed.
I am familiar. Certainly if terms and conditions like this are encoded in deeds then the idea sounds better, but OTOH what we're discussing is eroding protected status and replacing it with "less protected". After "less protected" is the new "protected", then of course it will just be eroded further.
Anyway, we all know that desert shacks will eventually want water and power, which is only going to be available if we slightly expand existing cities/townships. This is not great, because actually curbing relentless profiteering is ultimately a better fix than starting a new wave of it, but it's also not terrible. The bait-and-switch here is that removing protections on public lands is ultimately for companies that are interested in exploitative extraction, not for renters. If public lands are going to be used in that way, then at the very least it should be part of a way to fund basic-income or something. This is the way it works in Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund), and whether or not it's effective is a matter for debate, but at least it actually feels like trying to take a step in the right direction.
What I'm having trouble getting past is the hypocrisy of building my home on sold public lands while telling the youth 'sorry got mine, go fuck yourself, you can't do the same thing that made my land ownership possible.'
Perhaps there is a balance to be struck, but if our ancestors said what you're saying today we'd be in extremely dire straits and squashed into a tiny cluster of OG slivers of chartered land.
It's less about "got mine, fuck you" and more about noticing what does or doesn't work out.
As you said, practically everything used to be public land, and yet we observe that a burned out meth trailer on .25 acres still costs a quarter million. So.. now you know exactly what happens if you decide to change nothing else and just privatize public lands. This fixes the problem for 1 guy maybe, who gets the dubious pleasure of paying a slightly less outrageous price and then shitting in a bucket for 20 years. Then that guy fucks over the next generation when they sell at the highest possible price that the market will bear and that increasingly desperate buyers can afford.
Why do we want to do more of that? What's the plan for growth when the future arrives and there's nothing else to steal from the public?
>, practically everything used to be public land, and yet we observe that a burned out meth trailer on .25 acres still costs a quarter million
The omitted piece here is without discharging public lands .25 of marginal land on slivers of original chartered land would now likely be worth millions with nothing cheaper in sight. We noticed public discharge of lands had worked spectacularly well towards providing more land for homes and for cheaper prices. If we went by your criteria it would be a resounding 'sell it all' unquestionably.
>ell at the highest possible price that the market will bear and that increasingly desperate buyers can afford
Simple supply/demand dictated higher supply should lower prices all else equal
>his fixes the problem for 1 guy maybe
1 guy who improved the land, then dies/sells, this goes on and generations enjoy the compounding fruit of this.
And who says I want to change nothing else? The recipe I've found for success in a building a home for under 6 figures has many components
1) Use recently discharged or never developed former public land
2). No building codes or inspections, nor building plans or structural engineering. I took advantage of this to be able to DIY a home for $30k without having to deal with bureaucrats.
3) No licensing for trades. I saved lots by not dealing with unions or tradesmen gatekept by trades rackets.
4). Loose zoning
5). No public services. I built my own roads, with no tax funded road access, private septic, private water and utilities so that property taxes are near 0.
Using my recipe people can own homes+land for a couple years of typical full time middle age wages and pay practically no taxes on it
If you like to go outside, Texas is incredibly boring compared to Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, or even California. Everything is privately owned, so even though Texas is nearly entirely unpopulated land, there's nowhere to go.
I'd pay to see a well-conserved original plains ecosystem in park form. The fact that Texas is all boring farms is the bug, it's not like they were made farms simply by being "not mountains". Someone decided to make all the land farms, and therefore someone decided they didn't want any parks. And that sucks.
Because as we've seen the 'public' land is actually materially controlled by a tiny minority, many of whom are in cahoots with corporate interests, which is now coming to a head.
Since it generates next to no revenue as a public park it doesn't take much cash by exploiters to curry interest. If it isn't doing anything profitable nor in the private hands of say some rancher that will chase off ne'er do wells it is in jeopardy to whoever has greatest access to corruption.
This is such a weird objection. I'm sure national forests and BLM lands could be better managed, sure. But I can still camp, bike, motorcycle, raft, canoe, swim, hike, climb, ski, etc etc etc. I'd rather have poorly managed land I can use than a bunch of no trespassing signs.
It would be nice if it were more accessible, but for a cup of coffee a day you can get an annual hunting lease and more or less treat it as a personal park. There is a vast assortment of them available in Texas, some complete with cabins etc.
Sure, but how long is it going to take you to get bored of the same couple hundred acres? A large part of the joy of outdoor recreation is exploring new places. And meeting occasional people.
One source [0] says Texas is 4.2% public lands. Although that's near the bottom of the list, it is equal with Ohio, and ahead of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Rhode Island. (These are 1991 figures though, so maybe things have changed in the last 30+ years.)
You mention as comparators Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and California – those are all what are called "Western public land states" – the federal government acquired most of them by armed conquest or purchase of Mexican territory, and hence is the original landowner for the majority of the state (the US recognised some pre-conquest/purchase land ownership, so some land titles go back to Mexican or Spanish land grants, but that's a minority of their area). Congress then organized those areas into territories, and then admitted them as states – but the federal government remained a major landowner post-statehood. And many of these states still have significant federal public lands to this day. (There are also the Eastern public land states, whose lands were acquired by the federal government either through being ceded by the 13 original states, or by such events as the Louisiana and Florida purchases.)
By contrast, other states are what are called "private land states", since the federal government was never a major landowner in them. This includes the original 13 colonies. It also includes Texas, because Texas declared independence from Mexico, and then after some years of independence, applied to enter the US as a state. Mexican public lands became public lands of the Republic of Texas, and their ownership was then inherited by the Texas state government (The Texas Lands Commissioner), not the federal government. All the federal lands in Texas have been acquired post-statehood, either by purchase or eminent domain. Similarly, although Hawaii has extensive public lands, they are mostly owned by the state not federal government, since the Kingdom of Hawaii's public lands passed to the State of Hawaii not the federal government, making it like Texas a private land state.
Private land states tend to have significantly less public land than public land states, but it varies – both Nebraska and Nevada are Western public land states, but over 80% of Nevada is public land, Nebraska is near the bottom of the list. I believe that's because the federal government decided to sell or grant most of the federal lands in Nebraska into private ownership, but decided to retain most federal lands in Nevada.
> Private land states tend to have significantly less public land than public land states
How are they off for "peppercorn rents" as defacto public lands?
Here, Western Australia, an initially British colony, there are several major urban parks the were deeded to the city in exchange for a peppercorn rent subject to usage constraints.
These are in a murky area, many are currently listed as public owned, owned by the city (or specific city council), but have been "conditionally gazzetted" and might revert back to original owning families (after several intervening generations) should the land usage change (eg: building apartments on land conditionally gifted for public gardens).
I would not be surprised if the same kind of scenario is happening somewhere in the US, but I doubt it is common enough to make any difference to land use statistics. There’s always going to be edge cases where you can debate whether they should be counted as public or private, but so long as they are sufficiently rare, they disappear in the rounding of the statistics.
Also, the term “private land state” is somewhat confusing (although officially correct), since private land states can still have extensive land holdings by state or local governments, and they can even have federal lands - it is just their federal lands were originally private land or non-federal public lands, unlike much of the federal lands in the public land states, which have been federal lands since the very beginning of US sovereignty over them
Lets go with 'layoff' or 'release' unless that's somehow worse than 'fire' in this context.
Also what if the machinery of this arm of government isn't (currently) optimizing the sum of risk-adjusted damage due to mudslides and fires? How do you propose we start over?
As much as I would like to suspect that "Edward Helmore" might have some background in Civil Engineering or statecraft more generally, it seems he's just a New York-based author who writes for a British publication, maybe he's not the best to defer for about the consequences of this area...? I mean, it's not joke, people lose homes in fires and mudslides, and it's not like Trump doesn't know this, but if the current regime isn't optimally preventing or responding to these, then your options are pretty much to just try again.
Musk has infinite money, it wouldn't surprise me if he's hired a private investigator for every single member of congress and has blackmail for a lot of them.
I have a feeling large parts of this pristine blue and green ball will be further enshittified by the greedy men who rules it.
I was always amazed at how much of the US is national parks, what a treasure for you guys over the pond I thought. My home country also has large swaths of untouched land but my content is way overcrowded.
It's funny (and sad) that the US federal workers are being made to experience the same FUD we immigrants face for years, some for decades, over job security, livelihood, taking care of family etc. That too for absolutely no good reason, given how well the economy is doing.
84 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadOut of control fire seasons due to poorly managed vastly understaffed land is a catastrophe.
What a catastrophic self own, America.
They'll make a deal with the private prisons to pay the owners for supplying workforce when needed. Unemployment benefits will be tied to a commitment to "volunteer" for emergencies.
A subset that is almost as large was appalled by this.
Not in many useful ways by global standards of "left." There was a certain amount of public investment in infrastructure, but beyond that...
Better public healthcare?
Getting prescription prices under control?
The use of left-leaning methods to address housing prices (rent control, say)?
The FTC went after some mega-corps, at least, but without much hope of success because the legislature didn't do anything new in the M&A or antitrust space.
We aren't 'divided' on how to deal with our issues. The right doesn't see any of the above as issues, and doesn't see any need to address them.
Your perception that things swung left does not match the reality. The right echo chamber has driven itself into a frenzy to try to manufacture this perception, as justification for their reactionary politics.
My _opinion_ is around 20-30% of those that voted 'voted for this' or otherwise like it. The other 35-25% maybe didn't get what they voted for; I believe if None of the Above (reject everyone and give all new candidates) had been on the ticket in ANY sort of instant runoff voting system, would have voted for that with higher preference.
I'm for _requiring_ that everyone who is eligible to vote, does so. They're free to officially abstain. I'd like for None of the Above to be a mandatory option for all votes with the effects described above. I'd also like for ANY Instant Runoff Voting system, though I prefer "Path Vote" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method ) I do mean any IRV method.
I would also like, FFS, if we're going to HAVE primaries at all, that they're always open and required, no free passes in.
Finally, all Elections should be Voting Holidays. I'd love if every state did all Mail In Ballots like WA state. I'd also like any ballot mailed before midnight at the end of the Voting Holiday to be postmarked, and counted (but please get your votes in early).
I'd like all Non-Emergency votes to be limited to the 4th of July and Nov (whatever the format is) as those Voting Holidays.
What do you do if that were to happen? Another 6 months of campaigning while nothing gets done? That's no way to run a country.
Proposal 1: You don't get to leave the job until the replacement is hired.
Proposal 2: Follow the chain of succession to a position that did get elected / appointed. I wonder if cabinet members retain their jobs until replaced?
Also, that would count as an Emergency election. Maybe we could do a crack at 2 months to 'primary' and 1 month to campaign? Other countries seem to get by just fine.
The majority of the electorate has dissatisfaction after any election. The job of democracy is not to obtain good governments, but partly tolerable ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
The popular vote seems to have been closer than I recalled hearing.
Maybe there were some rubes, but most people who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were voting for, because it's what they voted for in 2020, and in 2016, and what they wished in their heart of hearts would happen ever since Obama did 9/11.
I played co-ed sports with a couple forest rangers and they were always trying to recruit people because they couldn't be everywhere all the time (or that's what the complaint was I don't know what they actually do but it sounded like a Tom & Jerry or Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon with them as the chaser).
They were republican but not sure if they ever fell down the far-right rabbit hole. They would be safe from the firings, but probably not happy about losing new help.
My opinion is that probably strong and organized civil resistance is probably the only good venue now. Be it churches, clubs, unions or whatever. But not individuals in their homes.
You have good ideas. Bolster them with the power of love, my friend. It's our entire purpose, and love requires fighting injustice and cruelty.
As to what to do? Connect with the Source and let It guide you.
"There's God's side and the other side." --Katt Williams
This reminds me of one of my favorite things:
> Now I am enjoying the last rays of the sun again, marveling at the incredible beauty of everything that has not been created by man. The red dahlias at the white garden gate, the tall serious fir trees and the trembling golden birches with their now shining trunks in front of all the green and rust-colored foliage, the golden sun that enhances the luminous colorfulness of every single thing instead of, like the glowing summer sun, smothering everything that still wants to move next to it. Everything is so astonishingly beautiful that I do not yet know what kind of feeling my speechless heart should develop for it, for it is not yet mature enough for pure joy; it is amazed and content with delighted astonishment.
> Isn't it puzzling enough, and if you don't know the reason for it, almost frightening, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the terrible things that happen. Something great and unknown has intruded into my sheer joy in everything beautiful, namely a sense of its Creator, whom the innocent created creatures praise with their beauty.
> Therefore, only man can actually be ugly because he has the free will to separate himself from this song of praise. And now one could often think that he is capable of roaring over this song with the thunder of cannons and cursing and blasphemy. But I realized last spring that he can't, and I will try to side with the victors.
-- Sophie Scholl in a letter to her friend Lisa Remppis, October 1942
Of course just boiling it down to "love" is prone to misunderstandings, and bringing up "God" is like whipping out a hand grenade on HN. People with different perspectives read these words differently, and of course we get triggered by the religious fascists it makes us think of; but what can you do. Yet also:
> But I have learned that a hard spirit without a soft heart heart must be just as unfruitful as a soft heart without a hard spirit. I believe the sentence comes from Maritain: "Il faut avoir l’esprit dur et le coeur tendre". A word that is not experienced by the soul is a dead word, and a feeling that is not the womb of a thought is in vain.
-- Sophie Scholl, January 1942
> but what can you do?
Our love must be fierce in defense of the innocent. We must love God with all our being; only then can we more perfectly bring Its love down to this paradise in the face of all the terrible people around here.
God bless you, and may peace be with you. I am at your service.
But what is also needed is more and younger people running within the party and for office to create more pressure for bolder messaging and more decisive actions.
The D party had the problem of being perceived as the status-quo party, and that perception IMO is not wrong if you look who is in positions of power within the party. So if the Dems want voters to drop Trump in the next election they need to undergo a massive transformation, especially age-wise (maybe with the sole exception of Bernie Sanders who aleays was popular with people from both sides).
In short: You gave the crackheads the keys to your apartment and they are tearing the copper out of the drywall as you idly stand by and decided nothing can be done.
We ought to share our land with our youth to homestead, in this housing crisis. I had to build on truly terrible desert shithole land due to insane land prices (and even burnt out trailers were 150k+ so building a shack on vacant land was my only option), much worse than much of public land, I'd prefer others not have to suffer that.
I do sympathize, but this is just so incredibly short-sighted. And allowing politicians to enrich themselves (and their already rich developer/landlord buddies who caused the housing crisis) by selling us back what we already own is no fix at all. We really shouldn't set the precedent of letting politicians buy votes from us by temporarily alleviating the problems that they themselves have caused.
The east coast is already a concrete nightmare of conurbation and paved suburbs from Boston to Miami. If you live your whole life in Europe, at least there are proper villages, but it's pretty hard to get more than a few miles away from other people, even in the Alps. If you can get to the Amazon or the Sinai or the Kashmir, then you can enjoy some peace and quiet at the risk of running into soldiers/militants/narcos. In the neighborhood of Everest/Annapurna, roads and cell towers are on the rise. Or you can freeze your tits off in the great frozen north, or file detailed travel plans with China and struggle to arrange for transport to remote areas. The combination of accessible/inaccessible in the American west plus the relative stability is unique, it is a refuge, and this kind of thing is disappearing from the world.
We'll be much poorer if we give it up, certainly the future will be bleaker, even if some people feel like they are getting a sweet deal on the acreage.
Anyway, we all know that desert shacks will eventually want water and power, which is only going to be available if we slightly expand existing cities/townships. This is not great, because actually curbing relentless profiteering is ultimately a better fix than starting a new wave of it, but it's also not terrible. The bait-and-switch here is that removing protections on public lands is ultimately for companies that are interested in exploitative extraction, not for renters. If public lands are going to be used in that way, then at the very least it should be part of a way to fund basic-income or something. This is the way it works in Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund), and whether or not it's effective is a matter for debate, but at least it actually feels like trying to take a step in the right direction.
Perhaps there is a balance to be struck, but if our ancestors said what you're saying today we'd be in extremely dire straits and squashed into a tiny cluster of OG slivers of chartered land.
As you said, practically everything used to be public land, and yet we observe that a burned out meth trailer on .25 acres still costs a quarter million. So.. now you know exactly what happens if you decide to change nothing else and just privatize public lands. This fixes the problem for 1 guy maybe, who gets the dubious pleasure of paying a slightly less outrageous price and then shitting in a bucket for 20 years. Then that guy fucks over the next generation when they sell at the highest possible price that the market will bear and that increasingly desperate buyers can afford.
Why do we want to do more of that? What's the plan for growth when the future arrives and there's nothing else to steal from the public?
The omitted piece here is without discharging public lands .25 of marginal land on slivers of original chartered land would now likely be worth millions with nothing cheaper in sight. We noticed public discharge of lands had worked spectacularly well towards providing more land for homes and for cheaper prices. If we went by your criteria it would be a resounding 'sell it all' unquestionably.
>ell at the highest possible price that the market will bear and that increasingly desperate buyers can afford
Simple supply/demand dictated higher supply should lower prices all else equal
>his fixes the problem for 1 guy maybe
1 guy who improved the land, then dies/sells, this goes on and generations enjoy the compounding fruit of this.
And who says I want to change nothing else? The recipe I've found for success in a building a home for under 6 figures has many components
1) Use recently discharged or never developed former public land
2). No building codes or inspections, nor building plans or structural engineering. I took advantage of this to be able to DIY a home for $30k without having to deal with bureaucrats.
3) No licensing for trades. I saved lots by not dealing with unions or tradesmen gatekept by trades rackets.
4). Loose zoning
5). No public services. I built my own roads, with no tax funded road access, private septic, private water and utilities so that property taxes are near 0.
Using my recipe people can own homes+land for a couple years of typical full time middle age wages and pay practically no taxes on it
If you like to go outside, Texas is incredibly boring compared to Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, or even California. Everything is privately owned, so even though Texas is nearly entirely unpopulated land, there's nowhere to go.
Since it generates next to no revenue as a public park it doesn't take much cash by exploiters to curry interest. If it isn't doing anything profitable nor in the private hands of say some rancher that will chase off ne'er do wells it is in jeopardy to whoever has greatest access to corruption.
You mention as comparators Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and California – those are all what are called "Western public land states" – the federal government acquired most of them by armed conquest or purchase of Mexican territory, and hence is the original landowner for the majority of the state (the US recognised some pre-conquest/purchase land ownership, so some land titles go back to Mexican or Spanish land grants, but that's a minority of their area). Congress then organized those areas into territories, and then admitted them as states – but the federal government remained a major landowner post-statehood. And many of these states still have significant federal public lands to this day. (There are also the Eastern public land states, whose lands were acquired by the federal government either through being ceded by the 13 original states, or by such events as the Louisiana and Florida purchases.)
By contrast, other states are what are called "private land states", since the federal government was never a major landowner in them. This includes the original 13 colonies. It also includes Texas, because Texas declared independence from Mexico, and then after some years of independence, applied to enter the US as a state. Mexican public lands became public lands of the Republic of Texas, and their ownership was then inherited by the Texas state government (The Texas Lands Commissioner), not the federal government. All the federal lands in Texas have been acquired post-statehood, either by purchase or eminent domain. Similarly, although Hawaii has extensive public lands, they are mostly owned by the state not federal government, since the Kingdom of Hawaii's public lands passed to the State of Hawaii not the federal government, making it like Texas a private land state.
Private land states tend to have significantly less public land than public land states, but it varies – both Nebraska and Nevada are Western public land states, but over 80% of Nevada is public land, Nebraska is near the bottom of the list. I believe that's because the federal government decided to sell or grant most of the federal lands in Nebraska into private ownership, but decided to retain most federal lands in Nevada.
[0] https://www.summitpost.org/public-and-private-land-percentag...
How are they off for "peppercorn rents" as defacto public lands?
Here, Western Australia, an initially British colony, there are several major urban parks the were deeded to the city in exchange for a peppercorn rent subject to usage constraints.
These are in a murky area, many are currently listed as public owned, owned by the city (or specific city council), but have been "conditionally gazzetted" and might revert back to original owning families (after several intervening generations) should the land usage change (eg: building apartments on land conditionally gifted for public gardens).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(law)
Also, the term “private land state” is somewhat confusing (although officially correct), since private land states can still have extensive land holdings by state or local governments, and they can even have federal lands - it is just their federal lands were originally private land or non-federal public lands, unlike much of the federal lands in the public land states, which have been federal lands since the very beginning of US sovereignty over them
Also what if the machinery of this arm of government isn't (currently) optimizing the sum of risk-adjusted damage due to mudslides and fires? How do you propose we start over?
As much as I would like to suspect that "Edward Helmore" might have some background in Civil Engineering or statecraft more generally, it seems he's just a New York-based author who writes for a British publication, maybe he's not the best to defer for about the consequences of this area...? I mean, it's not joke, people lose homes in fires and mudslides, and it's not like Trump doesn't know this, but if the current regime isn't optimally preventing or responding to these, then your options are pretty much to just try again.
Seems to be pretty much nothing these days.
I was always amazed at how much of the US is national parks, what a treasure for you guys over the pond I thought. My home country also has large swaths of untouched land but my content is way overcrowded.
I feel sorry.