Yes, if lower standard of living is acceptable, it will work. Generally populations do not accept a lower standard of living than they have, but it is not impossible.

Well, you also have to remember that they probably don't see it that way. The people in those places probably think they'll have a higher standard of living and things will be better if they can do things like cut off welfare spending and not "send so much of our money to the federal government". The reality won't hit them until later. Of course, I could be wrong, and maybe my preferred regions will get the short end of the stick and Dixie will become an economic powerhouse with its conservative fiscal policies, but I kinda doubt it.

Do you think some of these "nations" will try to bring back slavery?

Honestly, no. I think that issue is dead and buried. Southern culture still has its faults to be sure, but I come from the South, and I don't see any significant number of people wanting to bring back slavery. There's still some prejudice and all, but nothing like that. Even back when slavery was legal, it wasn't all that great; it worked out ok for a few wealthy plantation owners, and the rest of the white population had a hard time finding a job. Slaves were also expensive. Today's mechanization I think renders the question moot. Machines do most of the agriculture work these days (though we do use some immigrant guest workers for crop-picking), so you don't need armies of humans just to tend crops any more. And you certainly don't want disgruntled humans operating your expensive machinery.

To that regard, fewer states within the federal system may help.

That's another thing I'd like to see: fewer states. Not just 5 or 10 though, but 38:
http://www.tjc.com/38states/
The states should all be reorganized and borders drawn based on local culture, so for instance, NYC has its own state (including northern NJ and western CT), while most of the rest of NY state is separate from it, because the two regions are nothing alike.

However, I also recognize that maintaining our current form of government and reorganizing all the states within is a far more ambitious and ridiculously unlikely plan than simply breaking the country up into 5 parts.

They don't all need their currencies propped up like the US dollar is. The western states do quite well with tech, even without needing to force other countries to respect US IP laws (no one recognizes our software patents for instance), so these states would still be quite healthy after a break-up, probably much healthier than they are now since they wouldn't need to prop up the other states. The northeast should do OK, there's still a lot of industry there and some tech. The southeast has agriculture, but they can expect a much lower standard of living, but that's OK, they'll be able to pass all the crazy religious laws they want, so I'm sure the bargain will seem worth it to them.

The constitution was supposed to be a stronger government than the articles of confederation made but it was never intended to take over most lawmaking for the states.

Doesn't matter what was intended, it was the inevitable conclusion. It's just the way strong central governments work. And it didn't all start with FDR in 1933, it was a long, slow process; much of the groundwork was laid by Lincoln and the Civil War, where states were not allowed to leave the union. That wasn't many decades after the Constitution was signed.

Don't be idiotic. The political differences between people within a single region are much smaller than the differences between far-flung regions. How many Washingtonians or Californians or Vermontians want to ban abortion and contraceptives? A very, very small minority. How many Alabamans would like to do that? Probably most of them. Same goes for marijuana: Washingtonians and Coloradans obviously are all in favor of legalizing it, Oregonians will probably vote to legalize it very soon, but it'll be a century before the southeast states agree to that. Moving these different regions into separate countries stops these issues from being contentious, and allows the different regions to move on to more important issues and make more progress, without being held back by disagreement from other regions.

See my reply to another poster. Having 50 separate countries is far too many, and suffers from huge efficiency problems as he notes. But having a weak government, as the states' rights people seem to advocate, doesn't work either: we tried this already, under the Articles of Confederation, and it didn't work. That's why we have the Constitution, with a strong central government, and necessary byproduct of a strong central government is a federal government that takes over most lawmaking from the states, leading to the situation the states' rights advocates now complain about.

You can't have it both ways: you can't have a strong central government that allows strong states' rights. It's one or the other. So I propose keeping the strong central government, but breaking up the country into ~5 new nations, each with its own strong federal government, and independent from each other. People from Alabama and Mississippi aren't going to bitch a lot about laws passed by the federal government of Dixie since there's not much disagreement between those states, but when you give a voice to totally different states like Oregon and New York, no one can agree on anything.

You don't have to break up the country, you just give more power to the state and local governments.

That doesn't work in a federal system. The central government always grabs more power. In other words, we've already tried what you suggest, and we wound up where we are now. State governments don't have any power because they don't have much funding, and have to get it from the federal government. States can't increase taxes to make up for what they get from the federal government in order to opt out of federal mandates, because their citizens would be taxed too much (having to pay 30% taxes to the IRS + another 35% to the state government isn't going to go over well). Breaking up is the only way.

Lots of small countries leads to all kinds of inefficiencies regarding trade, customs, defense, law enforcement, immigration etc etc.

That's why I never suggested "lots of small countries", only about 5. The present states would still be part of larger federal governments, just smaller ones limited to regions instead of the entire continent. There's no reason for Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine to all be separate countries, for instance. But having them in the same country as Missouri, Alabama, and Idaho just isn't working. Each new nation would have over 60 million people (assuming equal division), which is a good size for a country.

In fact what they are trying to create with enormous amount of trouble and complications, is not very much unlike what we used to have, a weak fed (because of the difficulty of getting 27 sovereign countries to agree to anything)

See, here you're agreeing with me. We tried the confederacy thing ages ago, and it didn't work out well, so we wrote the Constitution instead, and now we have a strong central government that grabs too much power. You can't have it both ways with a big country: either you have a strong central government where no one's happy and you have our current situation, or you have a weak central government where nothing gets done and you have all the "trouble and complications" you refer to.

So, my solution is a compromise: break the country up into smaller units, but not too small.

That's why you break the country up. When you have smaller regions where people are more alike, you get more agreement on issues, and the minority that disagrees is smaller. Right now, with one big giant country, you have 49% that disagrees with the majority 51% on issue X. When you break it up, region A will be 80/20 in favor of issue X, while region B will be 70/30 against that issue. Region A can have a law in favor of it, region B can have a law against it, and both sides will be much happier than the current state where there's near-deadlock.

The problem with a weak government is that it can't get that much done, and doesn't provide many necessary social services which help you to actually have a nice place to live (i.e., there's a reason that Sweden and Switzerland are much better places to live than Zimbabwe or Somalia; the former have strong social safety nets).

The problem we have is that our government is too corrupt, and there's too much diversity in the country so people can't unite and elect leaders who will get things done without being corrupt. The solution is simple: the country needs to be broken up into smaller units. What voters in Alabama want is totally different than what voters in Oregon want, and trying to balance all these differences of opinion is what's gotten us into this mess. Break the country up into 5 or so smaller nations and we won't have all this infighting, and with less power concentrated, corruption will be less of a problem. Voters in California can vote for greater social services, while voters in Mississippi can vote for contraception to be banned, and everyone can be happy.

It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately it's hard to see how it can be. The technology industry has a poor track record of deploying truly strong end to end privacy protections, partly because the physics of how computers work mean that outsourcing things to big powerful third parties that can be easily subverted is very common. E.g. my mobile phone can search gigabytes of email from the last decade in a split second and rank it by importance, despite having nowhere near enough computing capacity to really do that itself, only because it's relying on the Gmail servers to help it out.

That same phone can receive calls only because the mobile network knows where it is. How do you build a mobile phone that is invulnerable to government monitoring of its location? It doesn't seem technically possible. The only solution is to ensure that anonymous SIM cards are easily obtained and used, but many countries have made those illegal as part of the war on drugs.

This trend towards outsourcing, specialisation and sharing of data to obtain useful features is ideal for governments who can then go ahead and silently obtain access to people's information without those people knowing about it. I do not see it reversing any time soon. The best we're going to achieve in the near term future is encryption of links between devices and datacenters, but this doesn't help when politicians are simply voting themselves the power to go reach in to those datacenters.

Ultimately the only long term solutions here can be political, and I fear we will need a far longer and larger history of abuses to become visible before the majority will really shift on this. The problem is a large age skew. Older people skew heavily authoritarian, if you believe the opinion polls, and are much more likely to support this kind of spying. Perhaps they associate it with the cold war. Perhaps the old adage "a libertarian is a republican who wasn't mugged yet" has some truth to it. Whatever the cause, the 1960's baby boom means that demographically, older people can outvote younger people as a block, and for this reason there aren't really any fiscally conservative, economically trusted AND individual rights-respecting parties in the main English speaking countries. People get to pick between borrow-and-spend socialists with an authoritarian bent, and fiscal conservatives with an authoritarian bent, so surprise surprise we end up with people in power who are authoritarians.

>Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects - Conservatives know nuclear power is safe
Which would be responded to by conservatives with the old "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet" argument.

I can't imagine why Fukushima would have anything to do with the argument over nuclear power is safe in the modern day. It should only be a poster child for why it's a bad idea to have an old nuclear plant located next to the ocean where it can be hit by a tsunami. That plant was just a disaster from an engineering standpoint: bad location, bad design, bad redundant systems, etc. There's plenty of reactors worldwide located in safe areas that don't have these problems. The French seem to do a pretty good job with their nuclear power industry; when was the last time they had some big disaster?

The moment you call 911 the GPS turns on. AND they track the cell tower.

There's a simple solution to this:
Don't call 911. When you've injured yourself with a power tool, just go ahead and bleed to death rather than calling 911, so that the Gubmint can't track you.

England these days is becoming much like America and turning to radical (read: fascist) conservatism. That's one reason Scotland was keen to become independent, because the Scots are more politically liberal than the English.

>'course, there have been times when they've left the recycling can sitting un-emptied because they saw a plastic bag in it (no, seriously... isn't that shit supposed to be recyclable)?

No, not by the same place. Municipal curbside recycling normally can't accept plastic bags; the machines they use to sort them will get jammed up by plastic bags, so you're supposed to just put loose recyclables in there.

You can recycle plastic bags, but only separately, and usually only at certain stores (like grocery stores) which have special receptacles for them. I imagine they have a totally different process for dealing with plastic bags than for anything else; they probably just melt them down.