Not having a right to privacy doesn’t mean we should record everyone’s every move if they aren’t locked in their windowless basement. Which they would have to be since its legally OK to have cameras pointing at your neighbors bedroom window or backyard, or to fly a recording drone over their house.

Additionally I think we should have a right to privacy in public. Why does your right to have your own surveillance fiefdom in your building extend to the street where I’m just trying to go for a jog? It interferes with my peace of mind, and it makes neighbors appear more like police than people I should be able to rely on.

I’m also exceptionally skeptical cameras have any impact on crime. I know police rarely investigate or solve property crime, and unless they prevent the crime from happening outright (doubt), or the camera owner has a full time live human monitoring to respond to an immediate action (businesses), it serves no purpose but to give the owner a false sense of security and to peep on your neighbors.

Getting broken into can be a very traumatic and violating experience, and in a better world we would try to help both the person who is driven to robbery and the person who’s space was violated. In the one we live in, people slap cameras and floodlights everywhere, mental health care is nonexistent, and we punish such that the cycle of poverty and crime continues. Thus nothing is solved and the world gets worse.

Police cameras and municipal cameras are even worse in these ways, now it isn’t the guy next door, its the state and all the money and power it holds doing a peep into your bedroom and a follow down the street. They don’t trust you, they don’t want you here, and you had better watch yourself. That message isn’t for everyone of course, but if you’re already marginalized in a community, it sure reads like the message is for you.

If we do install cameras, like red light cameras or speed cameras which have proven to do something, we need to be extraordinarily careful about where we place them and how we use them. And they should only be there until the underlying problem is solved, not placed as a solution themselves.

This or sit down to read a chapter before bed, look up and it’s 6 hours later and I have to pee and I haven’t touched my glass of water and my alarm goes off in 4 hours

Never in between

Lots of people in a pretty small area in relatively dense cities that currently drive or fly between the cities (technically called strong city pairings). There’s also a pretty enormous tourism industry in Florida that captures much of the Midwestern US/anyone not going to California or Hawaii for their beach or disney vacation. Florida is also flat which makes for very cheap high speed rail. Note how the map goes out of its way to avoid the mountains out West.

That being said, I’m not sure this map is one of the ones made with serious city pairing calculations. I’m skeptical that Quincy, IL has a really strong draw for high speed rail, for example, and that long gap between Portland and Sacramento/San Francisco, while beautiful and filled with cool places, is way too sparsely populated to justify 6hrs on high speed rail. I think it’s a sort of meme map that’s been going around for years, though I wish it were real.

That very much depends on when and where you look in history. Many people didn’t live that way at all and still lived in large communities and built things with the only coercion being the ties of community for hundreds to thousands of years.

Being a serf was apparently a lot less work and less miserable than you might think from pop culture. They worked for another, yes, but they also were looked after in return, and they didn’t have to work the whole year. They also could just leave if they wanted to find a new place to live, which was a lot easier then than it is now. It wasn’t the false choice of today where you work or starve.

Slavery, also, depended on the culture. In some cultures slaves were typically people who were captured or traded in compensation for a killing. But rather than be forced labor, they were treated as a sort of trial family member, and once the debt was seen as paid they would often be fully adopted as part of the community.

I recommend a book by David Graeber and David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. It challenges the foundations of what we assume history was like using historical evidence, then reimagines foggy parts and builds an at least as probable image of the past in it’s place.