Adding on to this: there ought to be a focus on how the lack of infrastructure is killing us socially
Demands the current left should be making but aren't
David Gutierrez
Wyatt Taylor
Universal demand, assuming it's even possible, will just plain not be tolerated by Porky. The much-touted reserve army of labor is a linchpin of capitalism. It's all about abusing or downright creating scarcity, and unemployment is deliberately kept high in most of the world in order to create such an artifical scarcity for employment opportunities. The mathematics of it is rather unusual too, being highly non-linear. Porky tries to keep unemployment as high as possible so that the price of labor can tend towards zero, and by the same token, full employment would make the price of labor tend towards infinity. A horribly flawed model of the real situation, of course, but just like high unemployment doesn't depress wages all the way to zero, full employment really would still create the conditions for permanent upwards pressure on salaries.
As for mass transit, I think that, frankly, modern cities are unsustainable. Simply put, urban agglomerations can't grow indefinitely, which is obvious, but the point is, the biggest cities, even in the most developed countries, are have already reached a full-stop in some areas.
Again, it's a matter of linearity. For reasons obvious, the inflow of people in a city can continue unabated with time, but the capacity to provide basic services to them doesn't. It might be their relationship might be considered linear, depending of the technology available at the time, the available budget, and the political will to apply it. For example, Japanese cities obviously provide much, much better living conditions for X people crammed into Y square kilometers than the Phillipines do. Regardless, eventually, any city will lose this linearity, and then they get diminishing returns for their investments into those services. Part of it is connected to the commons. Hong Kong is quite literally sinking into the Earth because of all the water they have to suck up from the water, coupled with the ever-raising skyline. The other part is sheer limitation of physics. Urban transportation has been stalled for ages, having reached its peak with the subway, invented well over a century ago. What was once a "miracle cure" for the low population levels of the time is now a tin of sardines around the globe. Even Japan, considered a model of urban development, has to get its workers to literally cram people inside the cars as much as possible. So as far as transportation goes, cities have a hard and rather low cap already. Then there are other issues like crime, zoning etc. Much like with the environment being ruined beyond repair, the system refuses to face up to the fact that peaceful, orderly urbanization has its limits, and on both areas, we're past the point of living in equilibrium and already face a permanent state of crises and unsustainability. This wouldn't be such a problem if Porky didn't insist on having a growing populace, but tha't more or less necessary for capitalism to exist, so it's not like he'll ever entertain other choices.
Tyler Hughes
A counter narrative should be developed then that questions the use and quality of life in the modern mega-city, instead positing a world of interconnected smaller towns that have their own unique sense of place (something that is quickly fading in the West: all cities feel like versions of NYC or London). Imo, we shouldn't then shy away from utopianism here. If our ultimate goal is to develop a new and humane way of life that can support everyone, we ought to be optimistic about it, it can't be defined in just the negative.
Easton Davis
If you take out everything car-related (roads and parking spaces) from a city you suddenly have twice the amount of space you did before. And while as you say cities can't reach infinite density, they definitely haven't hit the limit yet. And when they hit the limit on density they can expand. In an optimal city, everybody has access to everything they need (work, stores, entertainment) within some time-limit, say 30 minutes. In big American cities, some people end up not having access to any grocery stores because they don't own cars, and grocery stores only exist very far away from each other because they are as big as possible to make more profit. And people have to take time everyday before and after work to do a long commute by car. But if you look in Japanese cities, people have access to work and such by mass transit, which can handle many times more people per density compared to cars, and access to small neighborhood stores and entertainment within walking distance. If you simply manage the layout of the cities right so that everybody has access to what they need, then cities can grow much more dense then they are in the US without sacrificing quality of life.
Jordan Martinez
If living in a country with heavy gun control, promote freer and more relaxed gun laws, pushing for workplace democracy, calling out the bullshit that representative democracy is, workers' self-management, freedom of conscience, etc.
Chase Thomas
ancient fossilized dinosaur dung known as coprolites can be polished…
Bentley Martinez
The end of intellectual property should not mean that creators lose all moral claim to their creations.
They should be entitled to have their name associated with their creation in perpetuity, with everyone else being forbidden by law from claiming property that they have not created as their creation.
Noah Cox
Yes you can polish a turd.
Owen Powell
The Green New Deal but with less succdem bullshit and more nuclear power
John Martinez
this