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California can fit loads more people, it just chooses not to. It is the 11th most densely populated state. They'd just have to have more reasonable housing regulations and rely much more on desalination. Desal would increase the cost of living, but not dramatically so. EDIT: Making a slight...

Unless you have any particular thoughts on why it would be otherwise, assume the same general patterns as historically.

Are movies any more offbeat now than they were 20 or so years ago? Given that I’m positing this trend would have started in 1945, that means that the effects would be felt everywhere in the <55 voting bloc in 2000. While the younger generations (in this case, Gen X) would be larger, so would...

Presume that the annual population growth rate of the US since WW2 is higher - about 25% to 33% higher will do it (so that, in a year in which the US population grew by 1%, it would instead grow by 1.25-1.33%) - so that, by the present day, the US population has hit 400 million. Let us assume...

I disagree, for two reasons: First, gunpowder is the one 'big' tech through history that has no real precursors required. Any society familiar with the ingredients can mix them together while fooling around. That cannot be said for most other technologies. Second, it has the most knock-on...

Paper is not as useful unless you have cheap inputs, which requires cheap cloth. That becomes more of an economic issue. There’s certainly options there, but it isn’t an automatically superior option to papyrus until that is achieved. Conveniently, one of my timelines on the backburner largely...

I would imagine that the US and UK would be quite concerned about this Continental Europe-Russia alliance, as you say. I think the Mediterranean could prove to be a reasonable buffer between the British and Russian spheres of influence. Especially since a UK-US and possibly Japanese alliance...

The question isn’t so much “how” as it is what changes about Russia - besides the borders.

This is somewhat inspired by this thread I posted a short while back: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/wi-geopolitical-and-economic-effects-of-liberalized-russia.493652/ However, I have a slightly more focused question here, and I’d like to broaden the options for how it is...

It is my understanding that syndicalism proposes doing away with the competition, so that all these firms are owned by the same union. In my proposal, they’re still competing, at least nominally. That said, oligopolies tend to love gentlemen’s agreements.

Gotta explain how you get from what I said to that. Note that when I say dominated by, I just mean that there's some major players that tower over the other firms. Why would this be any more dystopian than present day and 20th century Japan/S. Korea if said conglomerates were worker co-ops in...

Sounds interesting. Now, what would a country whose economy was dominated by such firms look like?

This is a pure shower thought, so bear with me. But I was thinking about syndicalism and my mind drifted to the zaibatsus and keiretsus of Japan and the chaebols of Korea, types of conglomerates strongly associated with those countries’ economies. Whether in those countries or anywhere, what if...

Expand the borders of Alaska.

This is a three-parter that could go in any subforum but I figure there was the most variety in republics in the pre-1900 era, so it is here. Part 1: How many chambers can a legislature have before it becomes unwieldy? The typical is unicameral or bicameral, but there have been a few tricameral...

This is one of those very high level, broad strokes, discussions I like to explore. The main thing I'm interested in is the difference between slavery in the classical world (where slaves were 'merely' the lowest rank in a continuum of social ranks) and the early modern world (where the gulf...

Persia has many plateaus, and long frontiers with Central Asia. To the general topic: Italy isn't really suited for cavalry warfare, as a peninsula with a mountainous spine. It isn't that you can't fight a cavalry battle there - you can - but that the landscape and Alps make it less necessary...

Not even close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

I just had this one particular one stuck in my head for awhile: Nixon wins in 1960, loses in 1964, and then runs and wins again in 1968. In and of itself, it doesn't sound like a particularly crazy idea. - Nixon nearly won in 1960 - 12 years of one party in the White House is likely to produce...