The first story was well told, even though its outlines are familiar from so many other stories. I know that convenience can be a huge factor, even before you factor in kids who love salty and sweet and turn their noses up at the time consuming and expensive fresh vegetables... if you find even those at your store.
The retreat of grocery stores seems to be part of the story too. The couple of miles around me is in a patchwork of good and less good neighborhoods. The two closest grocery stores both closed within a few months of a Walmart opening up between them. What had been a fully stocked grocery store will be replaced by a Smart & Final in a few months. Between the grocery store closing and the impending opening of its replacement has been six months of traveling a few miles further or substituting convenience and dollar store shopping for the grocery store.
The fracking thing played out here sort of like in Denton. Except the State Supreme Court said that the state law that prohibited the local laws restricting fracking was too broad.
I very much doubt that the Texas State Supreme Court will do any such thing.
At least when the beaches are ruined you'll be able to move to Mars.
Probably not, but I was astounded by the ability of gas extraction companies to be butthurt and to display this butthurt so openly when Pittsburgh (a city with a density of over 5,000 people per square mile) passed a ban on fracking in the city.
About 2, there are a lot of state-level preemption laws out there, and it seems to me like it's related to one of the weirder bits of cognitive dissonance on the right. It seems that they really want to limit the powers of the federal government, but it's not that they want to devolve authority as much as possible, or they'd let local governments do anything. No, apparently the state government is the ideal place for all decisions to be made, from environmental standards to civil rights to tax laws. Gotta make sure the feds let the states have their way and preempt any local governments that disagree with the rest of their states. The state is the ideal size of government to have that power. Well, not the idea size because states vary hugely in size and population, but their boundaries have to be respected. Well, there's a mountain of noncontroversial precedent defending open borders and free trade between the states and many metropolitan areas span state lines so their borders don't really matter. But still, states are ideal. Somehow.
Realistically I believe that it's outcome-driven rather than principled, and maybe if I actually talked to a right-winger about it they'd have a principled defense of state-level preemption or at least case-by-case arguments for individual instances, but I won't get that because I'm just mocking them in an echo chamber like this. But still: baffling.
My guess is that State governments are just the right size for buying.
Local governments are both too numerous*, and also too small** for money to take a serious foothold. State elections are large enough that you can run your own candidate without everyone wondering where that guy came from, but small enough that they don't get covered as much as federal elections in the news.
When the results are inconvenient for them anyway you'll often see conservatives insisting fiercely that, e.g., the county sheriff is the only person with genuine government authority or something. But if you're on the market for a government State governments are usually your best deal.
*No matter how cheap they are there's a minimum cost involved and there are hundreds of the things.
**As often as not everyone knows the candidates personally and people they don't are strangers.
7: It's baffling until you realize that federalism and local-control arguments are almost always opportunistic and not based on any actual principles. When only a few states allowed gay marriage, gay marriage supporters were all for marriage as a state issue. It's very hard to find anyone who maintains a principled stand on this.
But still,red states are ideal.
Nobody, anywhere, gives a shit about federalism except insofar as it allows them to achieve substantantive goals they'd want anyway. The right size for any polity is the one that creates the policy outcomes that you want. A truly fantastic amount of bullshit, particularly in the US, would go away if people would just admit that (though our constitutional system gives them strong incentives to deny it).
I have very strong feelings on interstate commerce.
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Harkonen v. United States Department of Justice.
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I don't usually enjoy Dune fanfiction, but I might read that.
11: Yep. That's about right.
A real tell is people talking about reduction of government power and 'freedom' when what they mean concretely is determining whether the federal or state government should have a given power. It is possible that there's a policy reason to prefer one or the other generally (I don't think anyone actually has a principled on, but it's not impossible), but your reasons couldn't possibly be stated as being about the reduction of government power generally. The state is a government.
Historical footnote: States' rights to control their own municipalities was a critical issue n the Confederacy, since most of the Southern states had pro-unionist counties here and there. The state governments had to be able to chase down escaped slaves in all of the counties. Virginia basically declared war on its Western counties, which became West Virginia. A century later, Virginia exerted its states rights over Arlington and some other liberal enclaves, prohibiting them from integrating local schools even when they wanted to (until the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in). The Confederate states tend to allow municipalities and counties less autonomy than in other regions to the current day.
16 is very true. Though I think (at least outside liberal cities in very conservative states) it's pretty much a net wash on whether local or state control is better, and totally issue-specific. The key liberal area where people want more state instead of local control is transferring funding for public schools away from local property taxes, and also pace Pittsburgh and Denton running environmental regulation at the state level generally results in stronger controls than local regs (not least because it's so easy for a polluter to move into a nearby, more compliat municipality). But, see 11, there is never any one right answer for polity size and the best-sized one is the one with the best policy outcomes for you.*
*which is why the BEST sized polity is world government under my firm but fair dictatorial leadership, but I digress.
It wasn't just environmental regulations in the PA state law. They wanted to overturn local zoning power. That's why the Supreme Court told them to fuck off.
State preemption was also a big deal in Progressive municipal reform fights.
There's an alliance to be had between federal and local governments, against states, that doesn't really seem to have emerged. One would think, given the structure of the House of Representatives, that such a thing would be possible.
When the results are inconvenient for them anyway you'll often see conservatives insisting fiercely that, e.g., the county sheriff is the only person with genuine government authority or something.
Isn't this the explicit killing-people-who-disagree position of several stripes of right-wing terrorist asshole?
21: Rick Perry, job creator. Just imagine how many jobs that launch site will create! Maybe private security workers! And haz mat crews!
23:
I believe the estimate was something like a few hundred. AFAIK they won't have any engineering teams working full-time down there, either.
Also SpaceX pays no taxes on the land for something like ten years. I actually had a libertarian-type tell me that this made sense since they ought to reap the benefits of the value they would add to the land. Somehow I'm not optimistic that launching rockets on a piece of land adds anything more than soot to the area.
23 was sarcasm (which I think you got, but clarifying just in case). Of course no good jobs, good wages, or protections of the current residents or environment. Some of the fuel is way worse than just soot would be.
They're hiring a welder, though!
http://www.spacex.com/careers/list?location[]=721&location[]=736
22 - It certainly was for the Cliven Bundy crowd (I don't recall if the sheriff ever told them to cut it out, but I doubt they would have done anything if he did). I think it's a particular flavor of sovereign citizen nonsense.
Also SpaceX pays no taxes on the land for something like ten years. I actually had a libertarian-type tell me that this made sense since they ought to reap the benefits of the value they would add to the land.
They could presumably do that by, um, selling the land.
Some of the fuel is way worse than just soot would be.
What? No, it's not. SpaceX runs RP-1/LOX engines on all its birds. Kerosene and liquid oxygen. They're looking at methane/LOX for future versions. They're not using unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine or red fuming nitric acid or any of the really Satanic stuff (see Clark, "Ignition!" passim), there's a little slug of triethylborane and triethylaluminium as an igniter and that's it.
Plus, remember the positive health effects of having a rocket launch base near your house. Every now and again you get to sit on your back porch and WATCH A SPACE ROCKET TAKE OFF. The psychological benefits will be immense.
29: So the linked article saying hydrazine is used at launches is wrong? That's nice, actually. Wonder how they get it to work without a nitrogen source; I thought that was critical.
Rockets launch pads are becoming a part of the transportation infrastructure. Complaining about having one near your house is like complaining there is a highway or an airport near your house. Yeah, it sucks that its near your house, but that shit has to go somewhere.
31: I suppose there might be a bit in the satellites themselves, for manoeuvering and station-keeping. Good point. But they aren't burning it as a fuel in the rockets themselves - there won't be a release of hydrazine under normal operating conditions.