I’d like to call your optimism inspiring but from where I sit it looks more like delusion. Don’t get me wrong I would love a huge public transit buildout in the US, I just don’t see any realistic path to making it a reality in the current political and economic climate. I also don’t see that changing within a decade or more at minimum.
It does matter that the US is one big country, but even if it didn’t you still made my point for me. The other things you listed are just as large obstacles as the size of the country itself and there is no easy solution to those other problems but you just blew past them as if naming them would make them go away. The fact that you identified them correctly doesn’t mean you have any realistic chance of overcoming them.
I don’t know. I feel like you need to be predisposed to a product category in order for an advertisement to have any impact on you. I don’t give a shit about most of the products I see advertised. They’re gathering all this data on me but still end up using it in stupid ways. So much so that even the stuff I am interested in gets presented to me in a worse fashion than it probably would with random ads.
For example, I built a new pc about a year ago and to this day I get tons of targeted ads trying to sell me GPUs and other PC parts. Like, cool, you figured out something I was interested in buying at one point but that interest evaporated the moment I made that purchase. Every ad I’ve seen since then has been a waste of everyone’s time and yet they keep showing them to me.
Sure that works great, now since that infrastructure doesn’t exist just go get it built. I’m sure massive government spending that benefits the general public more than corporations will be very easy to secure.