Good start, but private schools should be banned entirely. Their primary function isn't education, but to serve as a place for the children of the elite to network and calcify their already substantial advantages within society. If you desperately want to spare your kids from the "horrors" of the public education system, then you should either be working to make that system better or else home schooling.

Caught it too. The difference between even a teensy tiny sliver of sun peeking out and actual totality is wild.

I do find well water to be way tastier generally, but in basically all other regards being hooked up to the city is way better. That said, if it were remotely feasible I would LOVE to have some kind of supplemental well that only feeds to the kitchen sink for drinking water.

Be prepared for a mind-blowing amount of traffic if the skies are clear.

People seemed to really like driving old cars back in the day, huh? Saw some black and white photos and those guys were driving, like, crazy old cars that you rarely ever see today. If that trend keeps up, then maybe some day a few decades from now we'll even be driving the cars of the future! Really makes you think...

Sure. Nobody here is suggesting we, like, demolish all existing housing and force everyone to move into apartment blocks constructed exactly with the architecture they used under the Soviet Union or Maoist China. I'm just pointing out that people tend to write off those housing units because they don't look pretty, when the reality is that there are some significant upsides to actually living in them.

Fact of the matter is that social housing can and does work and has been an extremely effective tool for alleviating housing shortages all over the world (including quite a few capitalist nations in the modern day, by the way). You just have to do it right and build with the intention of fostering diverse communities rather than warehousing the poor out of sight as we did here in the States in a prior era.

That's definitely going a bit too far haha, but it's not totally off the mark and a little tiny bit more spent on maintenance and some greenery could have really pushed it over the edge.

One of my favorite apartments ever was actually a big, grey Maoist apartment block in China. It wasn't much to look at, and obviously didn't have any sort of high end fit and finish, but there were little shops and hole-in-the-wall restaurants and the like on the street-facing side of the bottom level and the whole thing was built to enclose a central courtyard on 3 sides where people would hang out or bump into each other and shoot the shit or whatever. It really felt in a lot of ways like a proper neighborhood in spite of being right in the middle of a massive city.

You keep making comments like this in here and I'm genuinely curious what sorts of regulations Vermont has that are particularly restrictive relative to most other places.

We'll see 😬

Not to get too bleak, but honestly the odds are just as good if not better that we just sort of slowly degrade into a more and more openly authoritarian state without much of any significant resistance to speak of.

>life will get to the point where it sucks badly enough for all normal Americans that votes will cease to be the primary method for driving political change

They already have — at least at the national level. We live in an effective oligarchy where the "democratic" institutions at our disposal are so poor that the public serves more of an advisory role than anything else. We've just deluded ourselves into believing our own propaganda about "freedom" and "democracy." At the end of the day, though, most of our problems boil down to precisely a lack of those things.

I think you responded with something cute because you don't actually have an argument against this, but feel some sort of reflexive need to oppose any attempt to use the power of government for good.

Too many people write off social housing. It doesn't even need to be a drain on public coffers, either. Just build something decent that appeals to a mix of income levels and charge enough to cover maintenance/upkeep and you get yourself a long way just by cutting out the profit share. Obviously that wouldn't cover the very bottom of the income spectrum, but it could be a pretty cheap way of making housing a lot more affordable for the the middle class and working poor — with huge knock-on effects for the broader economy.

Yeah I knew someone who would siphon heating oil out of their tank to run their truck because it was cheaper. Hella illegal, but apparently it worked.

It's been making its way around right wing circles. One of em said something somewhere about how if he wandered into a corn maze we'd never see him again. Not a terrible joke, actually, by their standards.

Basically the lowest possible bar, but as much as I think it's misguided to keep voting for him, I think it's fair to say that he governs far more sensibly than most Republicans.

I think a lot of Clinton liberals get off on occasionally voting for a moderate Republican so that they can claim bipartisanship and feel morally superior as a result.

Yes federal law does override state constitutions.

That's what I figured when I first saw the ads, then a poll came out a couple weeks back or whatever showing basically this exact result and I was flabbergasted for the same reason.

In addition to what everyone else mentioned about the subsidies, if your parents work provides healthcare you still qualify to remain on their plans until you are 26. This continues to apply pretty much regardless of any other life circumstances too. Obviously not everyone is so lucky, but I figured I should mention it.

Throw in some smart social housing and you have a recipe for something pretty close to ideal — efficient urban centers with readily available services right out your door within a short walk/bike ride to surrounding nature.

This is a drum I'm going to keep beating. Yes zoning is an issue, but fixing that isn't a panacea. Build social housing that appeals to a variety of income levels then rent it out at a cost which covers a high standard of maintenance and upkeep (require that they be revenue-neutral in the bill, even). Aside from the upfront costs of construction, that gets you affordable high quality housing without any long term budget impact while relieving some of the pressure driving up costs for private rentals in the neighborhood. Hell, you could probably even distribute the construction costs over, say, 30 years and still beat market rates even with interest.

It's worth pointing out that the vast, vast majority don't seem to be.