Maybe it’s because I think the more of us suffer, the quicker we can all work together on a larger scale to come up with a fix.

I'd love to share that line of thought, but then I remember the COVID response and that initial plan for a patent free vaccine.

Do guerrilla rail, figure out the nearest land contiguous place with a smart grid, and the nearest place with coherent train signalling. if their system isnt shit, adopt the standard. If it is shit, look up whatever the Japanese are using and rip off their shit. Block by block. Just appropriate a traffic lane, say the outside one.

Its not the best way, but I do genuinely think people could fund construction and maintenance of rail lines on their streets. Making them IT and electrical arteries as well (you're already running communication and high voltage lines, possibly small wireless solar setups for signal redundancy) makes sense. Get rural broadband and really good fucking economical transit.

I wish there were a community of extremely obsessive online rail nerds that could be tapped to plan something like this, down to the level of a proper network (with like the tiny tolerances you get in modern rails), so we could just, like, look up our blocks and order the necessary parts off a list and start building.

'Us' starts with u.

I find it depressing/reassuring in equal measure because whilst Scandinavia is better in many respects, it's still no escape from the dominance of neoliberalism.

One of the forces that drove neoliberalism is globalisation, so it feels intuitive to me that neoliberalism itself is a global problem. Like all economic paradigms, it'll be unseated by something else, hopefully sooner rather than later. A post-neoliberal US would look quite different to a post-neoliberal Scandinavia, and I can't imagine either of those, but when change happens, I reckon it'll be a global thing.