WTF, it's as if Byzantium and al-Andalus never existed. Never mind that we can also recognize progress made outside former Roman territory, and count Arabia and Persia proper, the Gupta Empire, or the Tang and Song Dynasties... loci of technological innovation and imperial power shift, and people who study these things call bullshit on the whole notion of a "dark age" (unless they're just referring to periods without much of a historical record).

While I don't doubt that postmodernism has influenced the idea you're talking about, its time as the ideology of the intellectual elite has come and gone. Those people nowadays who deny the existence of merit are followers of the religion of intersectionality, which is also where you're most likely to hear that "oppressor" language these days. (Postmodernists axiomatically deny the existence of all objective truth, while intersectional feminists implicitly assume there are certain truths about the world that can be known—theirs.)

California's not like the rest of the West. From Sacramento on down there's a lot more developed here than in any of the states on the other side of the Sierras. And a lot of the land that is sparsely populated in California is just straight-up mountains. The flatter parts in between are pretty packed in by American standards, hence the awful traffic even in lots of spots outside the city centers. (And I'm saying this living in one of the less populated regions of the state, which is nowhere near the proposed HSR.)

But just how much cheaper is limited-access highway compared to high-speed rail? Feel free to include the savings in land acquisition costs given how much narrower freeways are than railroads.

And heck, why not factor in maintenance costs as well, I'm sure that'll make your numbers look even better!

Let me guess, you're not a teacher?

I would be happy to enforce the reasonable laws against the asshole cyclists who make things difficult for everyone, including other people on bike. But first we have to agree upon which laws make sense to require cyclists to follow.

Personally, I would be fine with the only changes being to legalize the Idaho stop (treat stop signs like yield signs and red lights like four-way stops), change how fault is assigned in cyclist-motorist collisions to default to the motorist, mandate 3 feet of passing space, and do something to penalize motorists who try to interfere with cyclists' attempts to take the lane. Then I think it would be totally fair to crack down on all the other violations, put points on their drivers' licenses for biking infractions, impound bikes of repeat offenders, etc.

Keep in mind that those things you call "obstructions" not only make it easier for law-abiding folks to ride bikes safely, they also make it easier to tell who's trying to follow the law and who deserves to be penalized. More often than not, they make things safer for drivers at the same time.

Hey now, I'm not saying I'm one of those idiots who blows through stop signs. I'm just saying that in most cars, your field of vision is blocked in a number of places and you need to take a moment at a full stop to look around you before proceeding. If you do that while moving, it screws with your perception. The difference between 2 and 5 and 10 mph is a lot more subtle in a car than on a bike.

On a bike there are no support columns in your way, no blind spots, and absolutely no difference between craning your neck around while very slowly drifting forward versus doing so with your feet on the ground. You can tell if traffic is clear or not just as well either way. (I'm talking about quiet residential streets here, not places where there's usually cross traffic!) If it were equally convenient to stop completely, maybe no one would care, but since it is a lot easier to accelerate from even a very low speed than from a full stop, it becomes really obvious that the latter doesn't do a damn thing for safety once you force yourself to do it a few dozen times, in spite of the inconvenience, and make the comparison.

After 20+ years of biking on roads, and 15 years of driving, the only accident of any sort I've been involved in was when I was young and stupid, biked on the sidewalk where there wasn't room to bike in the road, and T-boned another cyclist at low speed when he came out of an alley. No near misses, either, though I've had to shout "Watch out!" to zombie drivers who don't check their mirrors more times than I can count. So anecdotally, at least, I can say this approach works!

In a reasonable world, we would change the laws to allow people on bikes to yield at stop signs and go at red lights after a full stop, as they already do anyway, so as to not artificially slow them down while making their behavior more predictable for pedestrians and motorists. But instead we moralize and say that if I can't legally plow through four-way stops in my car, no one can! Even though four-way stops were engineered deliberately to slow down cars in residential neighborhoods for the benefit of other road users.

Signed, an enthusiastic driver who also enjoys riding a bike, who follows the road laws exactly when in a car and bends them while on a bike, because I'm concerned about actual safety and not just arbitrarily following rules.

You're talking about Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, not all of NYC. The main issue in the Bronx is not that it's too expensive.

I think what you're seeing is a lot of Americans uncomfortable with the realization that because corporate action on this front cannot be directly controlled, the most obvious solutions to this problem involve a much greater deal of government intervention and interference with the free market. Curiously, this is not so far off from what you anticipate as a result of corporate censorship of the Internet.

Rather than hash out how we're going to get out of this dilemma, though—perhaps working through which scenarios are most plausible and which of our freedoms will be impacted most—you find a lot of people reluctant to talk about it. Because there's a reluctance to start a conversation in which a plausible conclusion might be that massive government intervention would be a good thing, or that censorship isn't so bad, or that monopolies are benign as long as we trust our limited government, or that the free market is the source of a problem even in the absence of significant externalities. We're too afraid of upending our assumptions to go to extremes, any extremes, on the right or the left, and thus we're stuck with mediocrity.

Take a look at any recent history of capitalism or post-1500s global trade and you'll see that they developed and spread in tandem. If anything, global trade on the part of European colonial powers created and maintained capitalism as we know it, meaning that anything that you consider a key distinction between capitalism and feudalism (or socialism or whatever) is inextricably tied to and dependent on globalization. Or to put it more simply (albeit admittedly while being a bit reductionist), if it weren't for the British Empire, we wouldn't all be working by the rules of British capitalism.

[citation needed]

God forbid the workers have demands! What they're demanding is good for society. What you want to do to save money, I think is bad for us all. God bless the workers who push the companies to go against the undemanding cogs who knuckle under.

Complete absurdity.

Because they're doing their part to dismantle the suburbs bit by bit, just like the young moneyed classes want them to. They have a vision, and personally I think it's beautiful.

My guess would be that they assumed that Seattle would remain sprawly and low-rise, and that any outsiders who wanted to invest in the local economy by building taller buildings would cower in shame and abandon their plans when the population of the city passive-aggressively refused en masse to recognize said buildings as being reflective of the real Seattle, the gritty, honest, unpretentious city that we grew up in, not that you would know anything about that.

When you're trying to hire from a pool of workers in short supply, you might have to concede to some of their strongest demands. High-paid, highly educated, young workers in the US are disproportionately more likely to want to live in urban environments.

I realize that that's not for everyone, but for some people it really is a huge factor in making a job desirable. And if these workers are in a position to pick and choose among employers, why shouldn't they get to push for corporate urbanization? It's not as if that's a decision that has negative external impacts compared to the alternatives: It reduces transportation mileage and the resulting energy usage and environmental damage, reduces further development on green space, reduces the need for expensive-to-maintain suburban infrastructure, revitalizes shitty urban neighborhoods, allows for a more cost-effective concentration of government services, and so forth. It can even encourage greater human contact and community building in theory, though my experience with Amazon employees in this regard has been negative. Really the only objective negative is that it costs more, but don't companies have the right to spend money as they see fit to strengthen their future earning potential?