Old Prague...
Before the car, cities were dirtier. Those who could afford it built passages like this one, in Prague's Tyn Alley, to cross the streets without crossing them.
The rest had to walk on the filthy sidewalks... Or, in Ottoman-dominated Lebanon, they had step into the filthier streets if they belonged to the non-state religion... Christians, Chiites, Druze would be told to had to "shammil" by Ottomans and walk with the donkeys, horses, and their manure.
You could smell a city long before you saw it. Even cities with sewers had streets filled with horse manure, and sometimes open sewers. And even then; in spite of the cholera outbreaks, it took the 1858 "Great Stink" of London for the city to equip the city with water treatment... but it is the gas-powered car and electric-trolleys that liberated the city and cleaned up its air.
The more we progress, the greater the risk of a devolution into a #DimAge Already, our own #technology is growing too complex for us to understand or manage, and scales up faster than our own understanding can keep up.
In todays’ world, transport choke points are unavoidable, a feature of an unsustainable, #globalized world.
The #RedSea passage #BabElMandab is one of those, critical because of the #MiddleEast's central importance to the world's #EnergyEconomy
Agree to the rich world's desired outcome, before building the systems that made it rich? You get one form #CarbonColonialism
Then again, too much of a system focus, you get the excesses of the gilded age.
Better a #FailedState than a crazy kingdom.
A failed state is like a broken clock; it is broken, but may still be right twice day. On the other hand, a crazy kingdom is like an off clock; if it is off by 5%, it is only right once every 10 days.
...In addition, in a failed state, you and your community stand a chance to grow and succeed; the crazy king can't easily reach you, unlike in our modern anarcho-tyranny
