Suburbs can’t be a ponzi scheme

Genuine question: Why not?

While the article indeed barely touched on its headline, the way I’ve seen the “suburb infrastructure upkeep problem” described seems indeed reminiscent of a ponzi scheme.

The way I understand it:

Suburbs have a relatively low initial cost (for the city) compared to the taxes they generate. However, their maintenance cost is relatively high because Suburbs are huge.

Thus, US cities have long had a policy of paying the rising cost of their older Suburbs by creating new Suburbs - which is pretty analogous to a Ponzi scheme.

In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

In light of this, and since you were able to work through the not-so-stellar episodes of ST, I’d strongly argue that Babylon 5 should be your next stop.

It has a slow start, some more mixed episodes, dated special effects and both main characters (they switched after season 1) are plain “heroic American leader” types, but virtually everything else is top tier even today. An excellent political plot, humor, great characters with genuine growth.

Just be aware that it is different from DS9 (personally, I like both).

Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and The Expanse are probably worth pointing out, too. To me, they’re the best high-production-value sci-fi shows that didn’t sacrifice their plot. Nevertheless, both are far more grim than the shows you’ve mentioned and overall “feel” different.

(Warning: Might be coded by German extremism culture)

Right-wing extremists burn immigrants. Left-wing extremists burn cars. The latter is worse, because it could be my car while I don’t own any immigrants.

(from the Cangaroo Chronicles)

To clarify:

Even if an unambiguous majority of Texas would say “we’d like to turn Texas into an independent country”, you’d rather force them to stay by force of arms?

I really hop you’re trolling, because you’re letting out some pretty crucial parts here.

Democracy is also when you vote and your voted-for result doesn’t happen. More than 40% of the state just had that experience.

Democracy isn’t about you. Or me. It’s about the majority.

You’d need to significantly increase overall education (both among voters ans legislators) on how science works to make the latter feasible.

Scientists are human. Scientists have opinions. Scientists require funding. Scientists disagree.

Simple example: The heliocentric model didn’t become accepted knowledge because the “earth is the center of the universe” crowd (who *were? scientists) was convinced by scientific argument - they weren’t. It did when they died.

Science holds a lot of high-likelihood facts. This is what we call the “generally accepted body of knowledge”. We know that the earth is round. We can predict gravity in most circumstances. And yes, we know that anthromorphic climate change is real.

But there’s also a lot of “game-changing” studies/experiments out there that are still to be debunked without ever making it into said body of accepted knowledge. This is normal, it is how science works.

Yet it also means that for virtually any hair-brained opinion that is not already strongly refuted by said body of knowledge (flat earth, for example, is refuted), you can find some not yet debunked science to support it.

Separating the wheat from the chaff here requires insight into the scientific process (and it’s assorted politics and market mechanisms) most people (and voters) don’t have.

And no, just telling people whether a fact is broadly accepted in the scientific community or fringe science doesn’t work. We tried that with the topic of anthromorphic climate change.

I’m aware.

I just didn’t want to go into detail with this particular can of worms.

A landlord and their tenant(s) are at a natural conflict of interest to begin with.

Also, for most tenants, the rising costs for many goods and services associated to housing are bundled into rent, so to them, it’s their landlord who’s jacking up prices and being frugal with repairs etc.

Next, the term “landlords” encompasses not only uncle Mike who invested his life savings in two apartments to secure his retirement, but also the millionaire who owns a dozen houses and the middle manager who doesn’t even own the units they’re managing but has to represent a large company.

So landlords make for easy targets of frustration to begin with.

A landlord who is, on top of that, intent on not only covering costs (including their own), but wants to create generational wealth get rich(er) quickly, will have to squeeze their tenants more.

Remember: wealth isn’t created. It’s extracted.

(Yes, there’s money genuinely being generated somewhere in the realms of credits and banking, but my LL isn’t being paid by a bank. They’re being paid by me.)

Politicians who know that their political career is about to end have the nasty habit of doing favors for their big corporation of choice, knowing that they’ll receive a cushy board position in return afterwards.

If you want to establish term limits, you also need to establish some sort of accountability for the time afterwards.

But at this point, the conclusion of either interpretation should be the same:

The Bible is not a workable moral guideline for modern life.

Neither “Thou shall not sleep with men like you would with women” nor “Thou shall not rape men like you would women” are acceptable.

I genuinely believe that all the tabooisation around sex is a holdover from the days where birth control wasn’t readily available.

There was an economic incentive for People Who Own Stuff to control procreation, because this allows them to control who inherits their stuff.

There was a personal incentive for most people to control procreation to prevent their children of making A Mistake™ by getting stuck with The Wrong Person™.

Where there’s incentives, they’ll wind up being followed. Story as old as time.

Cloaking all that in religion is just window dressing so one doesn’t have to admit their true reasoning, but a purely secular pre-contraception society would also have tried to regulate sex.