Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'

Remember, there are conservatives who are smarter than you.

(And this goes the other way, for conservatives.) It's just something to keep in mind whenever you feel like making dumb generalizations about large groups.

County borders make much more sense. Congressional district boundaries change much more often. They also mean nothing to people in terms of their geographic identity. No one says, "Oh yeah, I live over in the 13th District."

> A lot of people in America seem to believe that the hardworking "real Americans" in the middle of the country are subsidizing the poorly-run coastal liberal enclaves. In reality, the money almost always flows in the other direction; taxpayers in cities are subsidizing the rural-dwellers. This has nothing to do with work ethic, it's just a hard fact that a lot of costs scale with square miles instead of with people (roads, emergency services), and that lower cost of living in the country leads to lower incomes which lead to lower tax revenue.

You've made up this narrative of what 'the other side' thinks.

I'll recast it for you.

* start narrative *

A lot of people in america seem to believe that their wages have stagnated while witnessing the wages of those living on the coast, who often disagree politically with them, rise stratospherically. To them it seems like the coastal elites do nothing, while they are quite literally breaking their backs to earn a paltry wage, that they then owe to the very coastal elites they feel are doing nothing.

It seems like they take the money, pay it in taxes, subsidize us and tell us we should grovel to them for it, while simultaneously opposing policies we feel would reduce the dependence. For example, they tell us we can't water our farms because of 'global warming', and instead should rely on their benevolence. But we don't want that benevolence.

* end narrative *

When you put it that way, you realize the 'hardworking real Americans' actually have a lot in common with far-left labor activists. And you'd be right. It would behoove everyone to have more compassion and charity towards their countrymen.

Anyway, there is a drastic shift in the Republican party that has gone completely unnoticed. Trump, everything from his personality to his tactics are more reminiscent of the pre-neo-liberal democrat party establishment than anything else. There is a real warming up of the republican base to social programs, government spending, and unions, so long as those institutions prioritize what they believe to be important issues. This is a far cry from the anti-spending, anti-union GOP of old.

There is no alternative to Medicare given the risk profile for the elderly. It has high approval because there is no other option.

It is also not universally accepted- this is only anecdotal, of course, but I had a doctor tell me he didnt accept it because the rates for some procedures worked out to be below the state's hourly minimum wage.

Perhaps a better example would be the VA- government run hospitals and coverage that is perenially in the news for some new corruption or incompetence scandal, and a very very hit or miss reputation.

I like your train of thought here, it's a good "noodle". If I might add some more to the noodling... :)

I see an interesting alignment between the trends we are seeing in technology and politics. Actually, my senior thesis back in college (2003) was that the politics of information technology are disruptive to organizations. Not necessarily disruptive in a "sided" sense, in that "disruption" can be considered good, or bad, healthy or damaging, or both.

There is a trend we see in information system/technology architectures towards "decentralized" and/or "federated" solutions. For example - "service mesh" [1] or "data mesh" [2], both higher level stack abstractions that came from lower level mesh networking concepts. And we even see "mesh" concepts in the form of knowledge graphs, social networks, peer-to-peer, etc.

If you read up on this you will often see the word "federated" and it is so interesting that federation is both something we apply to technology/systems as well as political. I am quite sure that it is part of the key to what you are thinking about. There's a reason that countries have been referred to as "federations", why we call it the U.S. "federal" government, etc. I believe, among other things, it largely revolves around how one implements governance and ensures a working "system" in terms of standardization/policy.

There is a desire to be autonomous yet interoperable, and this applies as much to "human" systems as well as purely technological systems. There is a link, after all, between how humans implement systems per Conway's Law [3] - organization's systems often are designed to mirror their communication structure.

Institutions are just one kind of organizational unit, and there too you come across all kinds of interesting issues that have perhaps, barely been explored - one such example is "institutional trust" [4].

In summary, my own latest "noodling" on this area is that actually, our technological and political systems are still very much evolving. When you take into context the possibility that it is truly becoming possible within, how about we say, the next 100 years - that humanity my be able to truly exist off the Earth, in space, for longer periods of time - then that is going to open up a whole world of questions about these very systems which we think we have completely figured out.

If there is one constant I think we can count on, it is probably change - but, ultimately survival (a key element of which is adaptability) will probably be the force that drives whatever the next 100 years look like - and that could be both good or bad overall for the development of new organizational structures.

Personally, I feel that all of this is interwoven together in quite an interesting way and all related, as information systems are the backbones of organizations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_mesh

[2] https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-monolith-to-mesh.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_trust_(social_sc...