Wow, I’m impressed, you actually managed to mention one city that isn’t either in the far north or on the beach. (And it’s not Mexicali, even though you mentioned it twice). It’s almost like you’ve actually visited Mexico before!

When a public utility or something is sold off, then yes, as soon as the privatization happens the service has to get shittier.

But, I don’t think it’s true that the moment there’s a private alternative the public version stops working. I think it’s often just that the public version starts to decay because it doesn’t get the investment it needs.

For example, if you sell the postal service to a private company, it’s going to get either more expensive, or not work as well, or both.

But, if you allow a private parcel delivery service to compete with the post office, for a while you can have both working fairly well. The private service might offer much faster delivery that you can track, while the post office offers slower delivery for a much lower price. For a while the two services can coexist, and people can choose which one they want based on their needs. But, over time you’ll get underinvestment in the public postal option. People will demand that it be run as a business and won’t take into account that it acts as a public service and does things that are unprofitable but good for society.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear, I meant to say that if the public system and private system were equal but you had to pay for the private system, nobody would use it. Sure, if the private system is faster then people will use it even if the public system is free.

In places that allow a mix of private and public, the private system basically finds some flaw in the public system and allows people to pay to bypass that flaw. Things like wait times are one of the main issues. But, it’s sometimes something like certain expensive tests being hard to get in the public system (CAT scans or something). In the public system they might only order those when they’re obviously needed. The private system can let you have one whenever you want, so if your doctor says “well… it could help, but it doesn’t meet the threshold the public system sets” some people will pay for it out of pocket. Or it can be more privacy, or more luxurious hospital rooms. Even if the treatment is otherwise identical, some people will pay for that.

If the private system is allowed to exist, it will always exist. Someone will find something that isn’t done quite as efficiently as the public medical system and charge privately for doing it. Anywhere the private system exists will be better than the public system by definition. Nobody would pay to use the private system if they could get their needs met for free in the public system.

Because of that, if there is a private system, some people will use it. Those same people will vote to try to limit the taxes they pay for the public system, because they’re not using that system. People who can pay for the private system are going to be the richer people, and so their decisions about where their tax money goes has more of an impact. So, eventually, the public system starts to crumble. When that happens, more people use the private system, and the problem gets worse.

I’ve been to Mexico City. It’s absolutely huge. There are probably neighbourhoods where “nomads” are pricing out the locals, but the vast majority of the city isn’t affected. What’s driving up rents in Mexico City is that it’s Mexico City. Most of the people moving there are Mexican.

As for other tourist destinations, yes in tourist destinations there are tourists! Wow. But, there’s a lot of places in Mexico that aren’t tourist destinations, or are destinations only for Mexican tourists. There are entire cities with millions of inhabitants where you’re very unlikely to ever see an American / nomad.

Mexico already has a constitutionally guaranteed right to healthcare:

Every person has the right to health protection. The law shall determine the bases and terms to access health services and shall establish the competence of the Federation and the Local Governments in regard to sanitation according to the item XVI in Article 73 of this Constitution.

In practice, this has meant a bare minimum level of health care is theoretically available to everyone, but most working people have private insurance on top of that, or see private doctors. For the poorest people it has often been very difficult to get the care they need, even if it’s theoretically available and constitutionally guaranteed. It’s also different from American / Canadian / European hospitals in that family is expected to play a major role doing things that in richer countries are done by nurses or orderlies.

IMO, universal healthcare only really works if the middle class / upper middle class and the poor are all in the same system. If the people can pay more and get better care, they’ll do it, and the system used by the poor will be underfunded. You can’t do much about the truly rich. They’ll always just fly to other countries. If this is just filling the gaps between the various reasons people can use the state system, it’s not going to help that much, even if that kind of fix is necessary.

Mexico is hardly gentrified. There are some areas where there are a lot of immigrants, but the population is about 130 million, and less than 1% are foreign born. That’s significantly lower than both USA and Canada.

IMO, one of the key reasons that Trump jumped into the war in Iran is that things went so well with the kidnapping of Maduro. If a few soldiers had been killed in that operation the Iran war might not have happened.

He’s unpredictable and emotional. It’s true that in some ways he hats to be seen as weak. But, he takes offense at absolutely everything, and everything makes him look weak. So, it’s hard to say that any one thing will be the deciding factor. He seems to chicken out a lot more than he seems to double down when things don’t go his way.

The more high-profile losses there are for the US early in this war, the lower the chance of things escalating.

Counting on the Trump Administration to do the right thing is pointless. Counting on them to cave and avoid doing the unpopular thing is possible.

Those seem pretty foreign to me. Definitely not lung tissue.

What’s a non-foreign substance that goes into your lungs?

Yeah, and that’s the core of the Kessler Syndrome issue. Right now, if everything goes well you still have 3 days to get the maneuvers in before stuff starts crashing. But, screw up once and now there’s even more space debris and the window to make those maneuvers gets even smaller. Eventually even if you have full control of the remaining satellites, there are so many collisions happening that you can’t get maneuvers to them fast enough before there are more cascading collisions.

And, recent events showed that you don’t even need a collision. A Starlink satellite just blew up this week on its own. Who knows what happened, but where there used to be 1 satellite they’re now tracking one object surrounded by a bunch of debris.

Yeah. What people don’t seem to realize is that even though space is big, it’s still really crowded in near earth orbits.

The crash clock answers the question:

What is the expected time for a potential collision in LEO between tracked artificial objects — including satellites, debris, and abandoned rocket bodies — if all manoeuvres were to stop?

Say there were some dumb thing like an expired SSL certificate that prevented earth to ground communication. Just 6 years ago, you’d have half a year to resolve the issue before you’d expect there to be a collision. As of March 2026 it’s down to just 3 days.

“Dismiss” is the wrong word to use in that title. Yes, it can mean “fire”, but it can also mean “ignore”. It seems like this is a case where you want to be clear which interpretation you mean.

Because, while I agree that it’s bad to rank various crimes against humanity, I don’t like how Israel tries to weaponize the holocaust as a shield against any kind of criticism.

Sadly, I would bet that it’s the jewish lobby that pushed a lot of countries to oppose this. They have this need to make the holocaust be the worst thing that has ever happened to any people in the history of time.

The holocaust certainly bad, it’s among the worst mass killings of all time, and the fact that it happened in relatively modern times makes it worse because the world generally isn’t as brutal as it once was. Is it worse than the Mongol invasions, which may have killed more than 10% of the entire world’s population at the time? Worse than historical wars in China which killed tens of millions at a time when the entire world’s population was under 200 million? Where would you rank African slavery in that? Is it less bad because fewer people died, or worse because there are things worth than death? I don’t really think it should be something you rank at all. And, I’d also oppose any attempt to rank any of them as “the gravest crime against humanity”, because what’s the point of that?

Isn’t Cuba walkable for the most part?

I haven’t been there, but the videos I’ve seen show that they have a very car-centric culture.

The relatives I’ve had visit have confirmed the classic cars. It isn’t propaganda. It’s that they have a lot of cars from the time just before the US sanctions went into effect. A lot of those cars now have weird engines out of trucks, but because they can’t get new car frames in easily, they’re keeping them for as long as they can.

I don’t think there’s anything stopping them from importing electric vehicles from China

Nothing, except for the money to pay for them.

It seems like you’re living in a dream world where Cuba has a strong economy and great relations with China.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re for emergencies or they’re the main power source. Since the Cuban grid is down, the US embassy could only get power using those generators. So, now they’re as in the dark as the rest of Cuba.

While the Cuban government could still communicate with messengers on motorbikes, the US can hardly do that to communicate with the US mainland, so they’re going to be really cut off.

I assume they have some kind of satellite phone and some spare batteries, but unless they have solar panels or something, once those batteries are gone they’re really cut off.

Cuba is still using cars from the 1950s because of the American trade embargo. Under ideal conditions a transition to pure electric / solar energy would take a decade. With an American embargo in place it would take decades and probably never finish.

Apparently an average fuel tank can hold somewhere between 40 and 80 litres. So, that’s up to (0.75 * 80 = 60) 60 kg of fuel, which can supply 2.74 GJ of energy. If you wanted 2.74 GJ of batteries in your car, it would weigh about 4000 kg. That’s double the weight of an F150, or basically the weight of a F350, engine, fuel tank, wheels, etc. included.

Now, of course, nobody puts that much battery capacity into a car or truck.

The point is, it’s not an apples to oranges comparison when you talk about the energy efficiency of an EV vs. a ICE car. ICE cars are inefficient, but carry around a very energy dense fuel source and can go hundreds, sometimes thousands of km without needing to stop. EVs have much more efficient engines, but have to drag around really heavy batteries that aren’t very energy dense. Their range is very constrained because if you wanted to match the range of an ICE car you’d have to almost double the weight of the car in batteries alone.

Personally, I like mass transit and bikes. But, if I had to own a car I’d get an electric one. Still, I know that the major drawback to electric cars is that battery energy density sucks compared to gasoline.