States Are So Passé

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

I am curious what people think they are getting from the layer of state government.

Isn't more local, municipal government the best way to make sure degenerate urbanites or rural dirt farmers get to live under the laws they like?

[Okeefenokee]

The improvement would be to carve out city states that functioned independently of their states. Cut off Chicago from the rest of Illinois. Cut off NYC from the rest of NY. Cut off LA, SD, and SF from the rest of California.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

The improvement would be to carve out city states that functioned independently of their states. Cut off Chicago from the rest of Illinois. Cut off NYC from the rest of NY. Cut off LA, SD, and SF from the rest of California.

Why is that better than having every municipality govern itself?

[Okeefenokee]

There's a critical mass threshold where things change. We clearly can't replace fifty states with seven million city states. Only the largest cities will be granted city-state status. The rest will fall under the control of the nearest city. That leaves us in the same state we're in.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

I get ya.

[Okeefenokee]

See? It's the fucking skin! Look at how civil drunk Okee is on the new board. On the old board I'd probably be lobbying for you to be culled by now. What's the word? Fung shway? Hash's place is right calmin'.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Oh god, this chill vibe is turning us all into hippies.

The skin needs to be dark red, and we need to put some images of spiders and bright flashing lights every where or we will lose our edges.

[Okeefenokee]

Oh god, this chill vibe is turning us all into hippies.

The skin needs to be dark red, and we need to put some images of spiders and bright flashing lights every where or we will lose our edges.

Nah, dude. We're in a new phase. No longer under the impression that we are safe in our own home. We know what the future might hold, having faced the prospect of our ship going down. We'll conduct our regular discourse, but with the knowledge that we might again find ourselves set adrift with only one another to hold onto. Those old regulars, DSL and DB, came from sinking ships, and should have talked more about it rather than only bringing it up when the DCF hit the iceberg. For a lot of us, the DCF was our first online home. We're seeing it go down, and are adjusting accordingly, and the new skin, yeah, that helps.

[BjornP]

Increased centralization always results in inefficiency in governance, as well as in business. Worse, it also results in... I'd call it "statistical dehumanization", but there might be a better, pre-existing word. The meeting between state and citizen should not only ever occur in the exchange of paper forms, where the state gets to know their citizens only through answers in boxes the state put on the paper for the citizen to check.

[Okeefenokee]

Increased centralization always results in inefficiency in governance, as well as in business. Worse, it also results in... I'd call it "statistical dehumanization", but there might be a better, pre-existing word. The meeting between state and citizen should not only ever occur in the exchange of paper forms, where the state gets to know their citizens only through answers in boxes the state put on the paper for the citizen to check.

the discrete analysis of factor-forms against the stark backdrop of indicators strongly suggests that the subject is not a factor but an indicator, yet the under-studied field of opinion variance leads us to conclude that the indication is not equivocal

That's all I can make of that.