How (and why) to Ramble on your goat sideways
12-16-2013, 12:52 PM
Boost Pope
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So, you think the US would be better off if we adopted the EU / EMU as a model, then?
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12-16-2013, 01:29 PM
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Better off, who's to say. I don't claim to know what I'm talking about in this regard, it just seems pretty logical to me that smaller in this regard is better. In every other aspect of life, smaller is easier to maintain and manage and much more efficient, be it car, house, farm, store, city, ect. I can't see country being any different. You have politicians completely out of touch with people they are trying to govern thousands of miles away, and national organizations and companies trying to keep up with far too much over too large of a spread.
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12-16-2013, 01:52 PM
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12-16-2013, 01:58 PM
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In every other aspect of life, smaller is easier to maintain and manage and much more efficient, be it car, house, farm, store, city, ect. I can't see country being any different.
One big country is definitely better in terms of having a strong and cohesive military. The US and Russia were the Big Dogs in WWII because we had enormous armies and navies, and sufficient infrastructure to keep them supplied.
It's also better in terms of resource self-sufficiency. We have oil in the southeast, coal in the north, timber in the north-central and northwest regions, cotton in the south, lots of good agricultural land in the west, etc. Because we're all one country, it's easier to move resources around from place to place than it would have been were we all split up like Europe. (This is one big reason why the EU and EMU were such a hit- it made it easier for Europe to pretend to be the US from an agro-industrial standpoint.) Germany and Japan, to pick two countries completely at random, might have fared differently in the mid 20th century if they had significant oil-producing capability of their own.
It's unlikely that the Internet itself would ever had been invented were it not for the need to create a fault-tolerant computer network that spanned an entire continent from coast-to-coast. 50 individual countries would not have had that requirement.
Etc.
So, yeah. Pluses and minuses.
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12-16-2013, 03:37 PM
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Come on, don't be like that. Not everything can be grown local of course, but a lot of things can. And not even just growing local, but people eating local produce, whatever is available.
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12-16-2013, 03:40 PM
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Well< Rome certain outgrew its ability to be effectively governed... Still, I wonder if the developments in electronic communication of the 20th and 21st centuries will, in the perspective of history, prove to be a paradigm-changing technology? Really, a territory is only as large as the time required for information to cross it.
Well, in some ways yes, and in other ways no.
One big country is definitely better in terms of having a strong and cohesive military. The US and Russia were the Big Dogs in WWII because we had enormous armies and navies, and sufficient infrastructure to keep them supplied.
It's also better in terms of resource self-sufficiency. We have oil in the southeast, coal in the north, timber in the north-central and northwest regions, cotton in the south, lots of good agricultural land in the west, etc. Because we're all one country, it's easier to move resources around from place to place than it would have been were we all split up like Europe. (This is one big reason why the EU and EMU were such a hit- it made it easier for Europe to pretend to be the US from an agro-industrial standpoint.) Germany and Japan, to pick two countries completely at random, might have fared differently in the mid 20th century if they had significant oil-producing capability of their own.
It's unlikely that the Internet itself would ever had been invented were it not for the need to create a fault-tolerant computer network that spanned an entire continent from coast-to-coast. 50 individual countries would not have had that requirement.
Etc.
So, yeah. Pluses and minuses.
Well, in some ways yes, and in other ways no.
One big country is definitely better in terms of having a strong and cohesive military. The US and Russia were the Big Dogs in WWII because we had enormous armies and navies, and sufficient infrastructure to keep them supplied.
It's also better in terms of resource self-sufficiency. We have oil in the southeast, coal in the north, timber in the north-central and northwest regions, cotton in the south, lots of good agricultural land in the west, etc. Because we're all one country, it's easier to move resources around from place to place than it would have been were we all split up like Europe. (This is one big reason why the EU and EMU were such a hit- it made it easier for Europe to pretend to be the US from an agro-industrial standpoint.) Germany and Japan, to pick two countries completely at random, might have fared differently in the mid 20th century if they had significant oil-producing capability of their own.
It's unlikely that the Internet itself would ever had been invented were it not for the need to create a fault-tolerant computer network that spanned an entire continent from coast-to-coast. 50 individual countries would not have had that requirement.
Etc.
So, yeah. Pluses and minuses.
Still, whether or not there would be a net gain or loss in quality of life, it's all up for debate.
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12-16-2013, 03:58 PM
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It's impossible to say what would have happened in the latter half of the 20th century had the US dismantled its military after WWII, while the Soviet Union continued to grow, right alongside other potentially belligerent nations. We might have already had World Wars 3 and 4 by this point- Alaska and western Canada might be part of the USSR, Hawaii might be owned by China, most of the OPEC nations by Iraq, etc.
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12-17-2013, 04:09 AM
My Wife was driving home from work about midnight tonight and some ******* decided to turn left in front of her at an intersection. She plowed into him at about 50 mph. She's going to be ok. Our Mazda5 is totalled. I hope she killed the ******.
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12-17-2013, 07:42 AM
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Someone has the Christmas spirit. I'm very glad your wife is going to be alright. I hope the other person is, too. I wouldn't want someone to lose a wife, mother, father, son, daughter due to an accident, much less right before Christmas. I'm sure the other person didn't want to have the accident either. I understand your frustration, though.
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