Why doesn't the United States just break up?

NDans who think the virus is a hoax or only kills people who were already sitting on death’s doorstep.

NDans with kids who left ND for the big city and they want to visit their kids/grandkids.

So people who paid into it all their working careers but responsibly ALSO saved for retirement… assuming that their retirement savings would supplement Social Security get screwed over while their co-workers who irresponsibly saved nothing get a bailout.

Terrible idea, IMO.

Make it a flat benefit if you want, but means testing something that is now (rightly or wrongly) viewed as a right of all Americans is not going to go well.

High speed trains seem to be useful in covering middle distances. Distances far enough that driving or local transportation is obnoxious but close enough that flying (with adding a minimum of two hours on to each trip for dealing with airport stuff) is also obnoxious.

LA-San Fran, Dallas-Houston, Chicago-Minneapolis…

5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Self-Driving vehicles

This will be true only up to a point (albeit a very distant point). If most of the cars are autonomous, there would actually be no traffic congestion. Most of the traffic congestion is caused by cars decelerating to a complete stop and then accelerating for whatever reason because people suck at driving. With autonomous vehicles this process will be timed perfectly. Imagine when a red light turns green, every single car in line moves in unison acceleration, not one by one. Heck, if all cars are autonomous, there is no need for traffic lights at all (except for cross walks of course).

I can believe that as a distant future possibility. I don’t see it as either “near” or “intermediate” term.

I can believe that at least one person from ND has traveled to NYC in the last 9 months. I don’t believe that NYC’s ongoing issues with covid are primarily the result of individuals traveling into NYC from “red” states, especially from parts of those states which are very anti-mask. Those people don’t look forward to vacationing in NYC in normal times, much less during the pandemic. I think that most of NYC’s persistent covid problem comes from New Yorkers giving it to one another.

Notice that the first two are within states and the second is between two adjoining states.

I have a certain fascination with the technology of high speed trains. I’d enjoy seeing how they really work in Japan or China. But, not enough fascination to support the federal gov’t sinking billions (trillions?) into things whose benefit is mostly “local”.

Japan is kind of the poster child in this, but Japan has some extremely dense population centers where owning a car is impractical. And it’s a relatively small country where 1 north south line with a couple of spurs can basically go everywhere.

NYC is about 1/4 the population of Tokyo and 1/3 the population of Osaka. No other city in the US is even close to NYC in size. We just aren’t densely populated enough for some of the things other countries do and rail is one of those things.

Lucy’s gonna be pretty busy moving these posts to that other thread.
How about we get back to the OP?

I don’t see that as much of a loss though because that’s mostly necessary to get appropriate spacing between vehicles.

I mean it fixes the issue of the dolt who’s not paying attention and doesn’t accelerate when it’s their turn. But if you have a stop light then, automated or not, the 6th car needs to wait to start up until cars 1-5 have created some space.

Ok, but the claim was that there was no impact to NYC if North Dakota doesn’t require masks.

And while there is certainly a greater impact to ND, there is still some impact to NYC.

And to be clear, even when Cuomo bans travelers from certain places, it still happens because there are exceptions. Health care workers, medical researchers, military and anyone in the cargo industry (air, rail, truck, ship) to name a few. So his ban might greatly reduce the number of folks coming from North Dakota, but not all the way to zero. And then there are the people who were exposed to people who have been to North Dakota…

So the next question is would those people stop crossing the border if it were an international border instead of a state or city border?

In theory, NYC could shut down all cross border traffic. But would it?

Sure, if they wish to starve to death.

That’s silly. There’s are countries that currently don’t allow any tourists to enter that are still importing food. In some cases the pilots and truck drivers are kept well away from to locals, too.

A friend’s daughter is about to move to Australia. She’s been working remotely for an Australian company since shortly before the pandemic. (She just missed being able to move there before the lockdown.) She’s finally gotten a visa to go there. She will be locked in a hotel room, not even allowed down the hallway, at her employer’s expense, for two weeks when she arrives. Then, if she’s still healthy, they’ll let her out.

No US state can impose that kind of restriction on other states.

Yes, I was being silly to make a point. NYC is never going to stop all cross-border traffic because their very survival depends on importing food. So it is always going to be relevant how bad Covid is elsewhere.

Truck drivers can’t really stay isolated when they’re on the road. They will need to use the bathroom and I don’t think most trucks are equipped with toilet facilities.

Pilots possibly, although they still need to rest. Even your friend’s daughter will be flying on an airplane with other people, walking through the airport when she flies in, riding in a vehicle with a local driver when she arrives (although possibly not much contact if she’s in a limo with a partition, but hotel shuttles don’t usually have that) and walking through the hotel lobby when she checks in.

So while she will only be presenting a small risk, there is still risk. You can’t eliminate it; you can only mitigate it.

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It looks to me like the entire international portion of each airport is considered “infected”, and people arriving in Australia (with a couple of exceptions, like foreign diplomats) are ferried by government transport to their designated quarantine site. So I suppose she’ll be riding in a local vehicle, but it will be a vehicle driven by a person wearing a hazmat suit. Not riding freely in a hotel shuttle. And it will take her to one of the government designated quarantine sites. Where she will be locked in a hotel room.

Pilots and other airline employees don’t need to quarantine for 14 days, they may leave on their assigned plane prior to the 14 days. But while they are in the country, they are not allowed out of their airline’s designated quarantine space. (Unless they are there longer than 14 days.)

https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-restrictions/coronavirus-covid-19-advice-for-international-travellers

No nation needs to let foreign truck drivers or other transportation workers mix with the local populace if they choose to prevent that.

Do I think it makes sense for NYC to quarantine itself from the rest of the country? No. Do I think it would be possible, if it were its own nation-state? They’d need to build walls to do it (a la the Berlin wall) since otherwise people could sneak around the official entrance points, but yeah, it would be possible. And doing it wouldn’t condemn the residents to starvation or anything. The wall would include “ports” where goods could go in and out.

If split Trump would never have been President of the US anyway. He still might have become President of NY though.

:confused: i haven’t entirely kept up with this thread, but how would Trump become president of NY? We hate him in NY.

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If NY was it’s own country, that is the only country he could be President of. That’s where he was born and that’s where he lived. He would not be a citizen of the RSA (Rest of the States of America)