You're talking local and sure if you have enough people, money, and professions(i.e. lawyers) willing to put in the work and for years, sure you can get shit done. My community was able to stop a planned roadway expansion behind it but took 7 years and nearly every lawyer living there to help throw their weight in for many years.

But again, that's local and in small areas. Start trying to get cities, counties, and states to do that and consistently.

I worked with multiple State DOTs and my stories here in Florida DOT are the same in at least 30 other states.

Small municipalities (even business owners)can be a huge fuckin thorn in state projects, especially roadway widening but to do it across the board and constantly and definitely where infrastructure is concerned.... good luck without metric fuck ton of work and the need to have huge portions of the community and frankly most people are too busy working to even know what's going on .

You sort of answered it yourself with this phrase:

"about 8 years".

Is there an elected position with a term that long? Probably not. Mayor, Alderman, etc - they all have shorter terms.

That means you are asking elected officials to invest in infrastructure that doesn't pay off until they're out of office and their successor gets to take the credit for it. A lot of political damage comes from the wrong politician being blamed/credited for things where the cause and effect occur more than 1 term apart on the timeline.

Going back to the Amiga it would have been BCPL, one of the ancestors of C

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I guess this can be one way to test G on pregnancy. I do understand not all jets do high g.

I guess that is the way where you live. Honestly about a dozen years ago several communities in my local area took on a multi year project updating all the underground utilities; water, sewer and gas lines. They even put some of the electric underground at the time. It was a pain in the ass for about three years, but it was done and everyone is happy with the result. I know part of the money was from the 2008 bailout, but the rest was financed.

Grew up a few miles south of there. It’s sad how far the water line has fallen. Great place to spend a weekend as a kid. Here’s a picture of the receding levels:

https://i.imgur.com/aZA53aF.jpg

So that picture was AFTER she put makeup on?!?

Having worked for state and local government your kind of thinking is NOT rewarded.

And often your concerns are ignored multiple times and you're told "Just do what we said".

Don't get me started on projects that require municipalities, the state, and the federal government to work together.

Also municipalities often use money in ways that has the shortest ROI. We, the state, told one that we'd be redesigning the medians in the next month so they need to hold off on planting their new landscaping plans. They did it anyway because they knew that not only could they get the state to reimburse them for that, but sue the state and get more money to do whatever they wanted as it was likely not earmarked.

Oh and that municipality blamed the state for everything and the city council members used it as reelection fodder.

Yup! I work in Old City, and have walked past work where they've pulled the wooden mains out for replacing with modern infrastructure. Blew my mind a little bit.

The pressure here on the third floor ain't great either.

I spent a 32 year career in public works at a major P.N.W. city. I can tell you that the electeds were told many times by many people like me that you can’t ignore infrastructure maintenance.I can tell you that city now has major issues with their streets, underground pipes (water and sewer) and most of their concrete structures. The City Council continues to create new bikeways, bike paths and other niceties while the pavement rots. Elect smarter people Portland.

Sort of. It’s so much more complicated, though. If you send water to an aquifer you didn’t mean to, you’re basically giving up your right to that water. If it happens a lot, you do lose it.

Where water comes from and goes in this part of the country is a big deal with many details.

Towns mismanaging it to this extent is more like a feature than a bug. Speculators get morons elected so the town loses their water and then the water is up for grabs. It’s happening all over southern Colorado right now.

Towns like this simply cannot afford modern services. They have a population density of 216 people per square mile and a median household income of $21,000. Too few taxpayers, paying taxes that are too low, spread out over an area that is too large.

Their current way of living simply isn't sustainable.

The town changed their name to be the same as a Game Show to win their contest

If we stop sucking it out.

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Fun fact. I live in PA. The city we were discussing was Philly with its wooden pipes that lose about 30% of their water.

> This seems rather disingenuous since they were forced to leave.

I'm not going to say that the Jewish people have never suffered forced displacement in history. But so have many many many people throughout history, why is the case of Israel so special that it gets to try and undo a historical tragedy by perpetrating a modern one?

>Balfour was in 1917, well before Israel gained independence. It also highlights how people love to claim, without any irony, how undemocratic Israel is while pointing to their alleged victims, who are not even close to being free, democratic states, and are also massively guilty of colonialism

I never said Balfour was after independence, I said it was a hallmark in the colonization of Europeans (most of them Jewish) of the Mandate of Palestine and was encouraged by the colonial power of Britain. Britain never asked the people living in Palestine if they wanted an independent state or wanted mass immigration.

And I never said Israel's neighbors are democratic but two wrongs don't make a right

>What fucking conquest? Israel was attacked, gained control of those areas, which are strategically important for the security of the country, and offered them back in exchange for the simple concessions of accepting their existence.

Taking territory and annexing it through force is conquest. It doesn't matter if the conflict in which these lands were taken was defensive, the fact that they were taken and annexed without the consent of the people living there or the country it belongs to is conquest.

What your describing about offering back the land in exchange for peace is perfectly fine, and what Israel did with Egypt for example when it returned the Sinai. However Israel has made no such offer to return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace, and has in fact annexed the Golan Heights as its own (again without the consent of anyone living there)

Likewise it's occupation of the West Bank is not for the purpose of exchange for peace, it already has peace with Jordan. Instead the intent in the West Bank is clearly settlement, annexation, and displacement of the people who lived there before 1967.

The current government of Israel has explicitly called for annexation of West Bank territories on the basis that it has a "natural right" to the land https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-12-28/ty-article/.premium/natural-right-to-the-land-of-israel-netanyahu-lays-out-west-bank-annexation-plans/00000185-5955-dbd5-abe7-59f5c5d60000

A "natural right" which of course doesn't extend to non-Jewish people living there

>First of all, those things are not mutually exclusive. Second of all, when has that choice ever been made?

It's made every day Israel denies people that it governs representation in government. It was made when the decision that the Mandate of Palestine should be made a homeland for Jewish people and a Jewish majority state, despite the fact that the people actually living there didn't want that and weren't asked.

Ask yourself, in the Zionist movement that motivated hundreds of thousands of people to immigrant to the Palestine Mandate and then Israel was there any part of that where they said "we should do this with the consent of the people already living there?"

Did you know many Palestinians residents of the West Bank are not only under military occupation by Israel, including being tried in military courts, but are also taxed by Israel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Order

Projection, as usual, it seems.

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Yes the US also has an ugly history and it's built on tragic disregard for the lives of people who weren't considered important or were just "in the way"

Anecdote time! We did a gut-job renovation on what is now our home in Philadelphia.

Contractors jack-hammered the street and the sidewalk to run a new connection from the water main in the middle of the street. You need a permit to block the street for a day or two, a backhoe comes out to break up and move the hard stuff, a bunch of dudes with shovels worked through the dirt, put down new pipe, and put steel plates down on the street to cover the work temporarily. The bolts on the steel plate that are meant to keep it fastened to the street inevitably pop out of the street within days, so all day, all night, vehicles drive over the plates with a CLUNK CLUNK that shakes your entire house - especially dump trucks. Flatbed trucks make a sound like a traffic accident when they go over these plates.

New sidewalk is put down pretty quickly. Weeks(?) later, contractors come out to pour concrete over the new work in the street, and put a temporary asphalt patch on top of that. A few weeks later, the asphalt patch has compressed, and that has to be re-filled - which takes a month or two to actually happen. And then anywhere from six to eight months later, the Streets Department comes out, blocks the street for a day, scrapes out the patch job, and finishes the surface properly.

Oh, and we had to pay $200 for a new water meter, too.

Now, this was done as part of a comprehensive construction project. If I wasn't a crazy person, and just bought a regular home that mostly just worked, I could see the appeal of not giving a toss about what's going on between my home and the middle of the street. And as far as the city goes, Philadelphia doesn't even do street sweeping, there is absolutely no way they'd proactively take on an infrastructure upgrade project like this on their own. If the street consistently develops sinkholes, they'll fix it, but now you're looking at months without vehicular access to the street in question, and that kind of disruption can cause catastrophic damage to small businesses.

That said, Truth or Consquences infrastructure is barely a century old, and billionaires own significant tracts of nearby land, this does seem like a solvable problem.

Any extremist ramblings should be tempered with calm rational thought, and anytime theybraise their voice, the cone of silence. Learn to communicate like an adult, you may just start thinking like one. We can always hope can't we?