BigNote

Nor is it, in fact, the largest economy in the world by any measure.

Capitalism is fine as long as its well-regulated and is only one component of a larger system. It's no accident that the best countries in the world to live in all rely in part on well-regulated capitalism together with robust democracy and relatively high levels of what in the US would be called socialism.

Construction industry project manager here.

Sure, we use lots of tech and actually build a lot of the data-centers and fabs that are the backbone of the internet and modern computing, but the on-the-ground nuts and bolts of what we do is very much about highly-skilled tradesmen performing manual work that can't be done remotely or by robots.

So it's not really "tech" per se at all, even though we do a ton of work for companies like Intel, Google, Meta and the like.

There are various versions of democracy. Some are far more effective at implementing the will of their constituents than others.

In my opinion the problem isn't democracy itself, but rather, has to do with the many various ways in which it's implemented.

The US version of democracy, for example, is very old, clunky and buggy as fuck because it was created by 18th century white men, some of whom were slave owners, and all of whom were terrified of the possibility that in creating a new (to them) form of governance they might accidentally create a new mechanism for tyranny.

Accordingly, they deliberately created a system that by design would be almost impossible to change short of massive civil unrest and that to this day is very unresponsive to real public sentiment.

The key is that they designed it that way not because they wanted an efficient democracy, but rather, because they wanted to protect themselves and their rights against the rise of a possible tyrant.

What they created was very stable, but again, it wasn't responsive, nor was it meant to be responsive, to public opinion.

Since then, political scientists have figured out much better ways to run democracies.

One of my favorites is the Irish Republic which, in the 1920s, instituted a suite of reforms to the US model in creating its government with the result that Ireland has gone from being the last third-world country in western Europe, to now being a thriving and economically developed western European nation with a highly-educated English-speaking population that isn't obliged to take orders from any of the world's great powers.

Ireland did this by having a high-functioning modern-style democracy.

Yes. That's precisely my point. Thanks for spelling it out.

Cars and trucks are one of the best examples of how effective things like marketing can be. It's unreal what people are willing to pay for in order to have a vehicle that fits their self-image.

I've said for years that the deniers and fossil fuel barons will be looked upon by future generations as some of history's greatest villains. They will be seen in much the same light as a Hitler or Stalin or Mao.

"Redress." It's "redress of grievances," not "address." They can have similar meanings, but they aren't quite synonyms.

Yes but that's only true due to a suite of nefarious influences having to do with things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money and manufactured voter apathy.

This will never stop being weird to me, or at least unfamiliar.

Reason; I was raised by boomers, but they were legitimate 1967 Haight-Ashbury hippies (actually my dad derosed out of Vietnam in '67, so he wasn't in SF until '68, but leave us not quibble) who even now, though both my parents are dead, are still far to the left of me, and I'm basically a Bernie-style democratic socialist.

To put in perspective, while my parents weren't actually part of the SLA, they personally knew and were friendly with some of the most notorious of the lot, though they had parted ways by the time the SLA started to get seriously crazy.

All of which is just to say that growing up with Boomer parents in NorCal was a very different experience for a lot of gen Xers like myself.

Well the guy we elected after Johnson was Grant, and while he was an outstanding General, he was nowhere near as capable in the presidency where his authority, while great, was very different in kind from that of a military commander.

There's an argument to the effect that Grant was largely an absentee president who preferred to spend his days drinking as opposed to actually being the chief executive.

I'm not a historian and don't know enough about his presidency to have a strong opinion on it, but there's no question that the policies that Johnson put in place, that allowed reconstruction to go so badly off the rails, weren't competently addressed by the Grant administration, so in that respect your original point is not entirely incorrect.

He also badly botched, mostly through a lack of attention, Indian affairs with regard to the powerful plains tribes. It was probably inevitable that said tribes would eventually be subjugated, but it certainly could and should have been handled more humanely.

One would only think that's surprising or funny if they assumed that "best economy" and "best states to live in" necessarily have a one to one overlap. While I can see there being some overlap, l think we all know that business-friendly policies that foster economic growth almost always come with a suite of larger demographic costs.

The key is to seek balance between what's good for business and what's good for the public, and in that light it shouldn't really come as a surprise that some of the most business-friendly states are also the worst places to live.