[oldmanjay]

Norway is culturally optimized for safe equilibrium. America is culturally optimized for risky advancement. It's pretty starkly different and makes direct single-variable comparisons into shallow exercises in meaninglessness

[larsiusprime]

Norway is also tiny and SOVEREIGN. Any similarly inclined USA state must answer to the other 49.

[rpgmaker]

How so? What stops any state in the US from doing similar things? Genuine question. California for example routinely establishes new and stricter (compared to other US states) environmental rules governing emissions and whatnot. Legalizing pot is similarly fairly out of the mainstream and it is being done independently by several states.

[larsiusprime]

> Legalizing pot is similarly fairly out of the mainstream and it is being done independently by several states.

And for a while those states were subject to ongoing raids from the federal government. The Obama administration has held off, but the legal framework that justifies said raids is very much in place. If opinions blow back the other way they could resume any time.

When you're not sovereign, then your sovereign can tell you what you can and can't do. If you're mostly on their side, it's not a problem, but there's no guarantee it will stay that way forever.

Say a conservative supreme court comes to power and says, "Yeah, pot is totally banned and states can't opt out of it." End of discussion.

[barney54]

The Clean Air Act allows the federal government to give CA the ability to set alternative standards for car emission controls, but it isn't likely it allows CA to ban all fueled vehicles.

[jdavis703]

They could almost certainly make the price of gas so expensive via taxes that it effectively bans them though.

[larsiusprime]

...aaaand the federal government (via congress, the executive, or the courts) could find some way to intervene and challenge that and hold it up indefinitely.

[orik]

If you ban sale of gas cars in say, California, everyone will just hop over to Oregon/Nevada/Arizona to purchase vehicles.

[whyenot]

California already has stricter emissions standards than most states. You can't purchase a car in Oklahoma and register it in California without making modification to the emissions system.

[toomuchtodo]

If you ban gas stations instead in California, where will they fill up? The federal government has limited control over state land use regulation.

[orik]

banning gas stations isn't a ban on new gas vehicles, it's a ban on all gas vehicles. very different, and the people will never vote for it until we are in a very different place than we are today.

[fleitz]

It's also much less diverse than America.

[adamnemecek]

How's that relevant?

[larsiusprime]

The more opinions there are from different people the harder it is to reach consensus?

[adamnemecek]

Are we talking about ideological diversity or ethnical diversity?

[larsiusprime]

I'm talking about the former, the latter i guess is at least somewhat correlated with differing opinions too. Reaaly its the vast difference in size that matters -- USA has SO many differing constituencies with differing needs and wants and opinions. Norway is a municipal government by comparison.

[SCAQTony]

I agree: I believe if you look at average incomes, rapid transit, and geography within a given state or city, you would definitely see different needs.

The average income in San Francisco, which has very good rapid transit solutions is $83k. The average income in Lancaster, Ca (a city at the edge of the Mojave) has an average household income of $51k. Busses are its rapid transit du jour. People need cars there, cheap cars, and they drive far each day.

Alabama, Kentucky, New Mexico, could the cities therein afford an electric car?

[adamnemecek]

How do you measure ideological diversity?

Also how do different parts of the US have different needs?

[badsock]

It's dog whistle for "Norway doesn't have black people"

[fleitz]

No, it's dog whistle for Norway is full of Norwegians.

https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... Ethnic groups. Norwegian 94.4% (includes Sami, about 60,000), other European 3.6%, other 2% (2007 estimate)

Of whom 80% belong to one religious denomination

Religions. Church of Norway (Evangelical Lutheran - official) 82.1%, other Christian 3.9%, Muslim 2.3%, Roman Catholic 1.8%, other 2.4%, unspecified 7.5% (2011 est.)

Not even a mix of 'white people', not even Baptists and Methodists, just Norwegian Lutherans.