Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the Start

> I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about.

For direct democracies with significant electoral control over what goes on, sure. For the thing that most "democratic" countries have, I disagree.

> Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?

"Government" as understood in modern Western "democracies" is a combination of the bureaucracy and a certain number of elected officials.

You really haven't heard of elected officials putting their elected desires ahead of their nominal constituents'?

For the rest, as far as I can tell the main business of governing is in fact done by the bureaucracy in most Western countries, and bureaucratic departments tend to prioritize achievement of the goals they were set (often by themselves), without regard to how others would prioritize those goals. This is neither unheard of, unexpected, nor unusual. Everyone I've met who has thought about the problem at all, regardless of political persuasion, understands that this is a fundamental hazard of bureaucracy that needs to be addressed somehow. There are strong disagreements on how best to address it, of course.

> the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails

I think we agree on when and why it fails. The question is when it stops being democratic and along what dimensions.

For example, I consider the various statewide legislation passed recently in some states that forbids democratically-voted-for municipal wifi to be a failure of democracy in precisely the way you describe, and one that would be avoided by more-local devolution of power.

Now the problems you mention with discrimination are very real, and I have no problem with strongly centralized civil rights protections that are therefore uniformly applied to all citizens regardless of jurisdiction. There are certainly various other issues like this, where either there are significant externalities or a historical failure of local governance that ought to be the purview of more central government bodies.

This need for case-by-case analysis does mean that there are no easy solutions here, and I'm not claiming that there are. But I _am_ claiming that due to repeated failures in the current system, whether they were avoidable or not, there is fairly widespread perception that the central government is not to be trusted. And I don't think this perception really "dates back to Reagan" so much as that Reagan _expressed_ this rising perception. That is, Reagan was a consequence of the perception, not a cause of it.

The middle class, and rural America have a unique mix of deep ignorance of reality, and a legitimate complaint. Legit: they have been screwed economically, the rich have by every single measure gotten astronomically more wealthy, and the middle class has at best stagnated but also has shrunk.

Deep ignorance and denial how flawed their culture is. They believe their taxes go disproportionately to cities, and the poor, and that illegal immigrants get free health care who they also subsidize. They believe gays, gay marriage, women, and non-Christians are not equal to straight white men. And they HATE that they are forced by courts and laws to treat them as equal.

They've become skeptical of democracy because it's not working in their favor. When courts were siding with them on religion in schools and part of the public discourse, meaning they get to metaphorically slap minority gays and women around, it was great for them. But as they're on the losing end of these civil rights cases, they're not liking it.

Neither the economics, nor democracy are working for them. So they're attacking the entire system, and Republican politicians are really taking advantage of that in a variation of the Nixon southern strategy:

https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...

Rural folk don't seem to understand that 100 miles of distributed water and sewage, shared by not that many people, will cost a lot to maintain. Yet they get pissed that city folk are paying less for water and sewer, totally not understanding the concept of economies of scale. They have no idea that rural telephones have been subsidized by city folk for upwards of 100 years to make hundreds of miles of copper more affordable, basically neutralizing the fact they live in the boonies.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jun/19/americas-grea...

America has taken local power to an extreme. There is just no pre-emption or exception to that local power which includes numerous fiefdoms within the county, the city, the utilities, a massive complex of competing federal, state, and city regulations. And then unions. To this day, if you do a trade show in Javits and take a computer power cord and plug it into a power strip, let alone BRING YOUR OWN power strip, you will get chewed out. A worker who sees it will chew you out, tell his buddy who will chew you out, tell his boss, and he his boss, and in sequence you will have a minimum of an hour of swearing, vitriol over how you're intentionally trying to fuck them over, cost them money, take their jobs, on and on. It is one of the worst union cities I've ever experienced.

Instead of protecting a right to work concept, they protect specific tasks. So even if that task becomes obsolete, you still have to pay that union guy with that specialty to stand around doing nothing.

If it weren't for all the people you'd disenfranchise from such a process, what you'd want is a business, neighborhood, city, state delegation to create a federal law that totally preempts all state and local laws, for each major project, to cut through the red tape. shrug

Oh and middle men. There's a middle man for everything. Especially in Manhattan, it's almost not hyperbole to say the doorman has an accountant, a lawyer, and a therapist. And anybody making more money than a doorman, has two or more of each of those.

Great city. And a shit hole.

EDIT: Also, I think the 2nd Ave project is a big fat classist waste of money. The Lexington Ave/Park Ave line is not that far away, Manhattan has already a very dense subway service compared to Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.

Kind of an aside, but the need for the 2nd Ave Subway isn't so much about having to walk a couple of blocks but that the 456 line has too many riders which leads to overcrowding and delays.