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littlejssn (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
vet cardvet cardtopher has a vet cardlalalalalalala
TopherWil (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
I think his idea of improving the space of our country is awesome, but thats not what we should focus on when we defend our country. I'm an Iraq war vet and if I had died in Iraq, my last thought of home would have been people, Americans themselves. Thats worth spilling blood for.
mrmultidextrous (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
No, through a competition of ideas and then a competition of realizing them. Realizing that human nature was such that it would go hook, line and sinker for it, the "masons" of society shaped it's destiny. It wasn't really unreasonable, the thing that was hard to predict was how many things would be made and that science wouldn't provide the magic energy source that would be needed to sustain that way of life.
mpgingdl (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
Sprawl: the result of an unholy alliance of federal/state governments, auto companies, oil companies, "development" companies, and retailers. The "market forces" that some posters have mentioned were the monster created by this cabal. And now, we get to sit back and watch the whole thing unravel, with consequences that no one can forsee.
CrazyHorseInvincible (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
I contest the idea that sprawl is cheap. Tell me, what's more profitable? Maintaining two strips of steel carrying a vehicle that gets 400 mpg per ton of cargo, charging whatever rate the market will bear, with towns and resources springing up along these rails, or a network of four lane monstrosities in dire need of maintenance the whole year round. That's excluding the complex relationships between filling stations, enforcement of traffic rules, standards to be agreed on for vehicles...etc...
CrazyHorseInvincible (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
No, it's not regulation at all. I meant that the sprawl was a government initiative. Our highway system is a government initiative, and is maintained by taxes. The filling stations were a government initiative. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are responsible for half the home loans in this country. They essentially push people into suburbia where banks might hesitate. I would say the government's singular purpose for the past 50 years has been to preserve this "American Way of Life."
dtrailen (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
If your point is that sprawl is somehow more the result of regulation rather than deregulation, I don't see a cogent argument here. Left to itself, the free market will do what is cheapest, and cheap is the essence of sprawl: cheap land (former farm land), cheap fuel for driving (until recently), cheap buildings (subdivisions, big box stores, strip malls). What Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have to do with sprawl, I haven't a clue. The vast majority of home loans are financed privately.
CrazyHorseInvincible (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
Really? So the asphalt vomited all over America, the preplanned outlet for white flight called "suburbia," the dimwitted initiatives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to segregate economic classes into different groups of little boxes held together by glue, all came about through market forces?
ceruttme (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
does anyone know where this speech would be in text!
valhala56 (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
The US may look something like Russia did in the 80's as their economy imploded. It's funny People gave R Regan and the Pope credit for the fall of the Soviet Union. The real reason the Soviet Union came to an end was more like what is happening to US now. We may experience a similiar situation of displacement, high unemployemt, devalued currency, high crime, like the Russian gangster that flourished and a dcaconian law enforcement. This may take a while to we get where Kunstler wants it. |
