Realistically red state depopulation is not happening by next census. There has already been substantial net migration towards red states since the last one and it would be quite a tall order to go back to the 2020 status quo in time let alone to substantially reverse those migrations. And the regressive policies of red states aren’t unknown; most people making those moves just consider them less as important than the housing affordability angle as evidenced by them still making those moves even as many are getting more extreme in policies. In theory it would be easy to game the electoral college if people moved in organized ideological ways but most people are moving for mundane kitchen table reasons rather than for their rights and ideology.
Nautalax
I’m not saying it’s unsolvable, just that it’s not solved right now which is why there is currently a stream of people going to red states that are building. That needs to be fixed to stop before that stream can be turned around. I want that solved so more people can afford to live in states that aren’t psycho! Red states have indeed not solved NIMBYism either but their advantage is that building single family homes in sprawl around major cities is easier under current zoning regimes than building up; they can still build that low hanging fruit since they historically were less desired places to live and had lower populations, whereas the best spots for that easy to build sprawl have generally already been built a while back in blue states.
Here’s the chart of vacancy rates. I considered new housing permits more relevant in the last post because people are putting money on the line that the house they’re building is worth it either for themselves to live in or to sell or rent to someone else, so generally that’s tied in with proximity to a local economic center. If considering vacant houses the problem is that say if the local mill shut down and the place has no jobs then maybe they have a ton of vacant homes after much of that community left but no one wants to live there since you can’t make a living. So ex. West Virginia has a huge number of vacant homes but they no longer have the economic centers that made most of them viable so people are generally still moving out rather than in. Whereas say the Carolinas have well developed economies in the areas where they are building & and are building at a huge clip so the large number of vacancies from new construction are desirable and many people are flooding in to buy those relatively cheap homes near decent jobs.
I agree that those laws can be changed and I would like that to happen. There is room for expansion still in blue states - not so much horizontally because generally any place that could be sprawled out within a long commute near a city with a decent economy has had that happen already. People also won’t move to houses built in the middle of nowhere where no jobs are available. But, there can be much more vertical, denser building. Even returning to historic densities would be a big help in buffing blue states politically (ex. Manhattan had a peak population of 2.3 million in 1910 but is now only 1.7 million.) But there is a big NIMBY problem to overcome before getting there since homeowners have big incentives to oppose new housing whatever the source, and those special interests have not disappeared just because the states are blue.
Below are two photos of internal migration by state and new housing permits per capita. Since housing is THE major cost in most people’s budgets there is a flow going towards where housing is cheapest. Some have actually coined the term “New Great Migration” as many African Americans are now coming to the South on net. This is buffing the political power of those states even while the politics are rather rancid.
After a spell of being a NEET I managed to wiggle my way into my old job despite being a fresh out of college grad … they were desperate to hire because they couldn’t hold onto people willing to be regularly on-call, occasionally flipping to nights and working twelves at random and extended times in the worst site of that industry in the worst state of the union, AND it was legally required so they had to have it. Each time they hired someone they had to not only spend usually two years training them while they were on intro engineer salary before they could become useful, but also spend a few tens of thousands of dollars on contractors to teach classes and the valuable time of qualified people as mentors. Then after the trainees got qualified it was like coin flip odds of them either staying for a couple years or instantly booking it and the whole investment wasted.
The bosses were constantly showering the qualified people remaining with promotions, raises and golden handcuffs and so on to placate people to please stay and not have them do more rounds of interviews, even when the people weren’t that good. Of course, that also meant it was a great way to develop the resume for an exit artificially early too.
Talked to a doctor there, there was a deal for foreign doctors to be stationed in undesired places like that in exchange for progress towards getting a green card. On finishing their time the department they joined could be on the verge of dissolving from the older people ditching so then BOOM program director by attrition rather early in their career. Which then looks great on their resume when sent to someone else so the cycle continues lol.
Are you in the US? Just curious since I never heard it called a petrol station here and was wondering if there are a bunch of these being placed globally. I haven’t seen any of these stickers in my (very Republican) state so I’m thinking about getting some.
Unfortunately most of our blue states have shot themselves in the foot by making it too difficult to privately build dense housing while also not using public resources to build densely in sufficient amounts either. Blue states were generally already nicer places to live so they filled up and sprawled out a while back after that it’s been harder to keep stapling on homes near cities with decent economies. Whereas most red states are a lot emptier and still have that room to sprawl out development near their economic engines… so that’s where the building happens and the people are drawn in by more affordable housing. Eventually red states will sprawl out too much and the low hanging fruit will be gone but for the time being they’re still building like crazy in places like South Carolina.
Population is growing and the household sizes have been shrinking so more homes are needed to house fewer people. But existing housing stocks decay and possibly become unusable if not cared for and constantly need to be replenished. If blue states want to grow their population they have to overcome interest groups and obstacles opposed to either making it easier to build housing or the government itself building housing in sufficient quantities.
You know, I’ll take a stab and say Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia! He came in on a reform slate but while they are experiencing quite rapid economic growth the country is boiling with ethnic tensions.
The Tigray War a half decade ago saw Ethiopia’s military join with Eritrea and local militias such as Fano against the TPLF, once the former ruling party of Ethiopia but reduced to controlling the Tigray region. It was a rather nasty affair with a lot of death and displacement (and accusations of genocide), and it was concluded by the Pretoria Agreement between the TPLF and Ethiopia. Other parties got cut out of the peace, which created a rift with Eritrea and Fano militias. Since then the situation worsened. Ethiopia is often having speeches about bringing Eritrea to heel and gaining control of its ports (the deal with Djibouti is expensive) which obviously doesn’t help relations with that neighbor (also Eritrea is claimed to be arming Ethiopian rebels) and Fano has grown stronger and more organized and armed itself after taking much of the rural Amhara countryside. There is still an existing insurgency in the Oromo areas of the country and there were still clashes with the TPLF earlier this year.
Ethiopia is friendly with Somaliland with which it publically wanted to get a port access for recognition deal but then backed down from in the face of international pressure and Turkish mediation with Somalia. The UAE has moved much of its equipment that was based in Yemen, Somaliland and Puntland over to Ethiopia after the debacle from the failure of the South Yemen separatists that also sent the UAE’s relations with Somalia to the dumpster when the separatist leadership was transported to the UAE via Somaliland.
With respect to Sudan it was discovered a while back that Ethiopia has been recruiting and hosting RSF training camps on the UAE’s dime. Sudan is also very recently (Reuters reported it today) claiming it has evidence to prove that drone attacks on Sudan are being launched from an Ethiopian airport. For their part Ethiopia is now claiming that Sudan’s recognized government is supporting the TPLF and infringing on Ethiopia’s territory. (They have a disputed area called Al-Fashaga). I think there is some exile group of Tigray people fighting in Sudan for the SAF but I forget their name, I think it was Army 4-something but I can’t remember and I’m drawing a blank.
So, aside from the ongoing Iran situation, that ring of Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and their internal messes are where I would say there is the least stability and most opportunity for friction between the blocks.
They are in competing blocks now so ties are becoming more frigid.
Pakistan signed the SMDA with Saudi Arabia and is tightening connections with Turkey and Egypt, which is one of the emerging blocks in the region. The UAE is in another emerging block with Israel, India and Ethiopia which is increasingly at odds with the former block.
As background the UAE determined that Islamists were the number one threat to the stability of their monarchies following the Arab Spring and have been supporting whatever coup or civil war faction seems most hostile to Islamists to limit their footholds in the region. So they backed the military coup in Egypt against Morsi, RSF in Sudan (RSF are Arab supremacists but not as Islamist as the SAF), southern separatists in Yemen, Somaliland in Somalia, Haftar in Libya, you get the picture. More secular leaning governments focused on small nationalisms or the like are an easier in for India and Israel to work with than big existing Islamic-leaning countries so they are natural friends as the UAE succeeding will make the environment easier for them; fragmenting Somalia and maybe flipping Sudan also makes Ethiopia more locally powerful and potentially able to access more ports so Ethiopia is on board too and has been helping the UAE in Africa. They are all announcing new deals with each other fairly regularly.
However, the UAE made enemies with the former block this way. The former countries in the Turkey-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia-Egypt block would generally rather maintain and strengthen existing relationships they have invested into rather than see the governments they work with abruptly changed or their countries torn into fragments that then may prefer to work with India, Israel etc. So many of them are supporting groups like the Somalian government, SAF in Sudan, recognized government of Yemen and so on to keep those existing governments alive - Saudi Arabia intervened quite strongly when the southern separatists had basically wiped out the recognized government of Yemen and flipped it so that the southern separatists got extinguished instead. Egypt is a bit of an odd case because it is a secular military government that was originally buddy buddy with the UAE after the UAE helped out their coup, but fragmenting Somalia and the fighting in Sudan is very alarming to Egypt. Egypt wants for Ethiopia to have strong neighbors that Egypt can work with to check Ethiopia’s ambitions since Ethiopia controls most of the flow to the Nile River that Egypt very heavily depends on for life. If allowed to grow too strong, in theory Ethiopia could one day be powerful enough to issue ultimatums for Egypt to do whatever Ethiopia wants if Egypt wants to keep drinking water. So now they are also more down on the UAE and act accordingly, ex. Egypt and the UAE together supported Haftar in Libya against the recognized government Turkey supported but now Egypt is demanding that Haftar choke off the UAE’s Libyan supply routes to the RSF in Sudan if they want to keep Egypt’s support.
They also have different approaches in dealing with Iran now. The UAE is suffering quite a lot from their Hormuz exports being blocked and getting disproportionately blasted by Iran (they are both a soft nearby target and one Iran will very gleefully let loose on with their affiliation with Israel), and the UAE want that to end ASAP with no specter of Hormuz tolling either so they want the US to go in and take out their government. Whereas in the other block although there are frictions (ex. Iran backed Ansar Allah being way stronger than Yemen’s recognized government, Iran backed former Syrian government against Turkish aligned rebels, etc.) neighbors Turkey and Pakistan don’t want instability at their borders that could cause a refugee crisis, damage their economies and encourage local separatists they are heavily moderating the sentiment of the block to trying to go for peace. Saudi Arabia is the most hawkish in that group but they have a large east-west pipeline that eases the pain more than the UAE’s smaller bypass, are a harder target and mostly further away so they can still afford to be way more patient than the UAE can.
So through this move the UAE probably wants to cause Pakistan a lot of pain and avoid getting a bunch of remittances and savings sent over to a country it is increasingly regarding as an unfriendly one. Really awful for the workers caught up in this situation and the families who rely on them.
Dang that was one of the three I was first introduced to as a kid. Teacher recommended using AskJeeves, Dogpile, or what she called her “personal favorite”, Google.
Not sure how Dogpile still exists
I got gigajannied off of Reddit for “supporting terrorism” because I posted a picture of the ISIS flag in a post that was pointing out that the seal they used on that flag was part of a fake counterfeit made by random Europeans to scam the Ottomans… it’s beyond me how that can be interpreted as support when it just makes them look stupid. I just thought it was a fun fact that multiple jihadist groups like them and Al-Shabab that are supposed to care so much about their religion were similarly hoodwinked by a long-known hoax when they independently developed their nearly identical flags, even though they hate each other.
Very frustrating to get permanently locked out of what is now a sizable chunk of the internet. Can’t even browse the real deal Reddit anymore because they’re mandating use of the app on the phone now. : /
Tbh our country re-elected him so I can see why they’d get that impression