Aestu wrote:
Oh really? So what, Wall Street or Silicon Valley are going to set up shop in Topeka? Do you think rich people who can live wherever they want would want to live in a state with a population in the tens of millions without air quality laws?
According to most of you, the rich/businessmen/republicans/conservatives don't have any interest in the environment because "profits are more important." You can't have it both ways. So which is it? Are you going to admit that the rich/businessmen/republicans/conservatives are concerned about and/or have a stake in the environment (but don't take their concerns to the extreme 'environmentalists' do and balance their concerns with other, usually economic, concerns) or did you just accidentally admit the obvious yet still think they could give less than a fuck and are just going to follow the money?
Aestu wrote:
Do you think it's practical for some state with no regulation, no infrastructure, no public spending, no international visibility, to support high-capital service industry?
Every state has all of those things to some degree, so your question is...well, stupid. It's akin to asking if it's practical for me to ride a unicorn to work, because the premise of your question involves something that doesn't exist. States like Texas, North Carolina, and Florida that would probably fall into your 'definitions' of those things are already doing it, so I don't see why it wouldn't be.
Aestu wrote:
How successful do you think businesses would be without public universities to educate a workforce and bread & circuses to prevent riots? Do you think the agribusiness firms are going to move to a state that doesn't build water projects?
Most college educations are a waste of time, as most people who aren't engineers or medical professions will admit. The modern American universities are little more than citadels of hypocritical close-mindedness and intellectual darkness. They teach little of true value (hello "women's studies" and other useless degrees), and chiefly serve to force young people and/or their families to borrow backbreaking sums from colluding banks for a (usually meaningless) piece of paper. Technical schools and/or on-the-job training are more efficient methods of education, and any industry seriously interested in developing a skilled work force could develop those tools even without the assistance of government. If anything, you're a prime example of what a waste a college degree can be. How much money/time/resources has been poured into your education into...what was it? Ancient Greek? Yeah,
that's building a value in the workforce that employers are looking for almost as well as people who major in Black Lesbian Orphan Oppression in Chicano Queer Literature. You might as well have been an art history major, and you're trying to get us to buy into the idea that universities build value? Puh-lease.
Aestu wrote:
The wealthy want to pit states against each other to provide worse and worse quality of life for their citizens while the wealthy live in enclaves and pay no tax, and the government pays for the services THEY demand for their businesses by issuing debt rather than taxing their gains.
Since this complaint that "the wealthy pay no tax" (though I believe there was ample evidence to the contrary linked in previous threads) is already as standard a refrain as an "AMEN" after a prayer, I'm not sure what your point is. I'm doubly confused since you're stating that "the wealthy" are making states compete for a "worse quality of life," yet earlier in the same post say "the wealthy" would never leave states like CA because the regulations make things so pristine (explains all the forest fires...). Again, which is it? Your post reads like it was written by Janus after a night with Bacchus.
Your Pal,
Jubber