Keep an eye on Telo and Slate. Maybe electric doesn’t suit your needs, but both of these companies are intending to bring back small trucks. Being electric they don’t have to play games with emission standards loopholes that basically killed the old Ranger and S10 lines. It stinks that none of the current electric truck offerings went small, but there’s hope for future small trucks.

By your content I’m going to discuss regional, not local service. For context I’m in one of the top 10 most populous cities in the country. There is no regional rail service. That’s how bad it is. In order to catch a train, it’s a 2 hour drive to a much smaller city.

But let’s look at a train trip I wanted to take. All west coast, Portland, OR to San Diego, CA. There is at least rail service that would do it. I think it took 48 ish hours with a middle of the night layover in Los Angeles. The drive is about 16 hours. The flight is about 2.

When it exists, it’s slow and super inconvenient.

I had to budget a lot to get mine and I fucking love it. I do wish there was a design choice or an after market mod that would allow me to sacrifice some of that frunk space for better visibility.

The powers that be have no fear of ignoring protestors any more. Or education presents civil rights protests as peaceful and effective, that all we need to do is raise awareness and show solidarity and oppressors will relent. Education speaks of the black panthers, but doesn’t go into depth on how they were the armed wing of the movement.

So now today we’re protesting because we don’t like what’s happening, but what is the consequence to the power hungry? If the protests get anything approaching non peaceful, or even if they just want to, those in charge can escalate to military actions.

We also don’t have a clearly defined win condition. What is going to make things better? When do we stop? Is the goal just to raise awareness to get people to vote for a change in 1-4 years? Or are we looking for something more immediate?

Finally how far are we willing to go? If I’m not willing to die for it, or to risk my current comfortable life style, can I ever really push hard enough against current conditions? They’re willing to kill to keep their power, am I willing to kill to pry it from them?

They don’t fear us because they know we have so much more to lose than they do. We are not yet playing a game with equal stakes.

I don’t have a solution to this, so I’ll at least keep doing the peaceful thing, because it’s better than doing nothing.

If you don’t take AZ and NV with you, you will get your Colorado River water cut off and lose a lot of farming power. That might even require UT. Unless it’s only Northern California included, in which case you still lose that agriculture, and possible land based trade lines to Mexico. It’s not a clean and pretty separation.

I could have been that neighbor. For many years I was a WiFi communist and intentionally kept my AP open. I depended on free WiFi to get through college so I provided free WiFi. Then I got a cease and desist from my ISP for someone pirating a shit ton of porn. Like the list was about 10 full length pornos. Had to lock it down after that. I’ve considered making some deals with my neighbors to extend my mesh network into their house in exchange for space in their driveway, but haven’t gotten around to it.