A quibble: Mint didn't "still have" MATE when Gnome3 and Unity came out. At least that's not how I remember it. MATE was created by the Mint community, alongside Cinnamon (a parallel project), *when* Gnome3 came out and pissed everyone off. MATE was really a fork of Gnome2, ported to use the Gtk3 libraries.
Huh? With computers and voting (assuming you're in the US), these are excellent examples of places where there's too little choice. With computers, there's really only 3 OSes right now: Windows, MacOSX, and Linux, and of course those have about 93%, 6%, and 1% marketshare respectively. And it's worse: since you can't just run any software on any OS you please, application software constrains your choice greatly. So if you need to run some particular software package, you likely have only one choice.
Voting is another good one: there just aren't that many people running for office, and our shitty voting system makes it so that it's really hard for any serious alternatives to run. There's only two major parties (two is not what I consider a lot of choice), and our shitty voting system makes it almost impossible for anyone outside those parties to win.
Choice is a great thing. Lack of choice, or constraints on choices, are bad. Your examples fall into the latter category.
I never had that problem, both in ubuntu and contemporary debian (lenny, etc.)
He's not talking about Ubuntu having repo problems, he's probably talking about other distros like Red Hat. A lot of stuff back then was really broken in Linux-land. Ubuntu really helped out a lot, and raised the bar greatly; it's too bad they had to screw things up later.
What geek readership? The true geeks all left a long time ago. The dumbed-down folksy style is a perfect fit for the wannabe geeks and Teatards who still largely inhabit this place.
Honestly, I think this "overload" idea is ridiculous. I *like* having lots of choices for jellies. At most grocery stores, all the regular jelly brands like Smucker's are nasty crap full of HFCS and just have poor taste and quality in general. (HFCS does that, it doesn't taste like regular sugar; HFCS soda similarly tastes crappy.) But when a big selection, I can find some high-quality alternative, usually from France. And these days, it doesn't even cost very much, maybe a dollar or two more than the shitty Smucker's. As for being "bewildered", it's not hard, just look over your choices and try one. If you were choosing a $30,000+ car, then yes, I can understand wanting to make sure you're not making a bad choice. But if you're getting a $4 jar of jelly, how bad can it be? (This is another reason to pay extra for the good stuff; it's very unlikely it'll be shitty, and it just isn't worth saving $1 for something like that and then not wanting to eat it later. And at least for me jelly isn't something I go through a lot of anyway, I might get one jar every few months.
You must not have been paying attention ~10 years ago. Ubuntu rose to #1 because they put an emphasis on easy installation, and achieved it at a time when all the other distros were broken in one way or another. Back then, installing Linux was always a bit of a chore; there was always something broken that you'd have to go manually fix, which of course dissuaded most casual users who weren't familiar with the Unix command line, manually installing device drivers, editing your "easy to manage config files" with vi, etc.
Ubuntu came along and managed to make an installer that really worked, and a casual user could pop into a CD drive and install without any command-line intervention. The rest was history.
Of course, other distros finally caught up mostly, but Ubuntu was the first one there.
Of course, that was long before they came up with crap like Unity, the Amazon lens, etc., and this was also well before Mint came along, since Mint is itself an Ubuntu derivative.
My advice: if you want an easy-to-install distro where you don't have to screw around with stuff, and want a sane though more traditional UI, just pick any one of the Mint flavors. I like the KDE one personally, but the others all have their fans too and seem to be good. All of them have more traditional UIs, and haven't gone for the radical new UI concepts seen in Gnome3, Unity, Windows8+, etc. The whole reason Mint is so popular now is because of Unity; before that, Mint was a tiny derivative of Ubuntu, but then Unity and Gnome3 both came out and pissed everyone off, and Mint launched two projects that were Gnome2 derivatives, and tons of users switched from Ubuntu to Mint in response.
Why should they have respect for the laws? The laws are obviously designed to protect entrenched interests. That's called "corruption". I wouldn't have any respect for them either.
Should I have respect for state laws which prohibit cities from implementing their own broadband services, so that they can protect Comcast from competition?
It is in the US, apparently. And he's talking about Google, which is an American company, so a comparison with governments in America is completely relevant.
I used to live in northern NJ and there were several cab companies there too. They were all horribly lousy. There were only a few of them too, within the service area, so there wasn't that much competition. When Uber and Lyft came along, it was like a godsend. Suddenly I got to ride in nice cars for a fair price and get picked up quickly, instead of waiting 50 minutes to ride in a falling apart POS with a guy who doesn't speak English and then having to pay a fortune (and some of the cabs didn't even have taximeters, you just paid whatever they told you).
So to me, all this anti-Uber stuff seems a lot like Google Fiber moving into a city, putting Comcast out of business after pulling some dirty tricks to get around laws which Comcast wrote and paid legislators to pass to ban any competition, and then a bunch of law-and-order types telling me that Google Fiber is evil and I should stick with, and even be happy with, Comcast and their atrocious service.
None that I know of, but they've been really successful at being a fiber-broadband utility company, something that most governments around the US are absolutely lousy at facilitating. Instead, they stupidly (or corruptly) grant monopolies to shitty companies like Comcrap who then rape consumers with high prices and horrible service. Great job, governments! Yes, there's a few rare exceptions like Chattanooga, but most state governments prefer to ban municipal broadband like Chattanooga's. Again, great job, governments!
What public health care systems have they created and managed?
None, but neither has the US government. Healthcare in the US is a complete disaster.
There are some governments which seem to do a pretty good job at a lot of these services, but they're all over in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Over here, government is totally and utterly dysfunctional and corrupt.
You really think that Uber looks for bad reviews and deletes them, when they have no shortage of people wanting to be drivers for them? You don't think people would start talking about that elsewhere online if that really happened, and people had all kinds of problems with Uber drivers?
That's like thinking that Amazon looks for bad product reviews and deletes them, which is patently absurd. I see harsh reviews on there all the time.
Unlike a cab company, Uber has a reputation to uphold. If you have a bad experience with some cab company, what are you going to do, complain on Google reviews or something? You can, but BFD; there's usually dozens of little cab companies around, so no one really knows them or thinks of them. Can you list off all the cab companies in your area, off the top of your head? But with Uber, everyone who actually pays attention to current events knows what Uber is. Good luck finding someone who *doesn't* know what it is. When you have a well-known multinational company, you have to worry a lot more about your PR than when you're some 10-person local company, unless you're a monopoly like Microsoft. Uber's certainly earned a reputation for not following regular taxi laws, but they've never earned a reputation for falsifying driver reviews.
I don't disagree that a more diverse team (esp. with women) is a better work environment. However, you can't get blood from a stone. So my point with the prior post was basically pointing out that if diversity is sooo important (that you're going to try to get blood from a stone anyway), then you might as well forget about the qualifications part.
It's worse for you too, if you're working for a government (state or national, probably worse for federal jobs though). Not only do you not have a lot of "diverse" candidates to choose from out of the entire labor pool, you probably have even fewer good ones who actually want to work for you and are willing to apply. You don't pay very well, and they'll have to put up with all kinds of ridiculous bullshit on the job because the organization is completely broken. So the good candidates are going to work in private industry instead.
I used to work at an extremely large semiconductor company, and the diversity there was much, much, much better than what you describe. I will say around half of the women, if not more, were Indian (or close, like Bangladeshi). And most of the women I worked with seemed very competent too, in fact most everyone I worked with did. But that was a company that had a very good reputation, had a pretty grueling interview process (to weed out any lackluster candidates), and had excellent benefits and which looked really good on a resume. You probably can't offer most of that, so you're not going to get the greatest applicants, or you're going to get applicants who like some other aspect that you do have to offer (perhaps your location is some out-of-the-way place where locals would like to stay, but you're never going to be able to recruit many Indian women to move to).
What'd be even better than this is some kind of indicator (maybe after opening a new tab or pop-out or something) in Firefox which shows how much CPU and RAM each tab is using up. I'm constantly running into a problem where one of my tabs gobbles up all my CPU time, and I have to forcibly kill Firefox and restart it.
WTF? You sound like a total idiot. Uber's reviews are right there for you to read; it's built into the app. People who are interested will read the reviews, just like they do with Amazon. It has nothing to do with Uber the company "waiting on your every word"; they created a forum so that people can leave reviews for drivers, and other users can then read the reviews. I seriously doubt Uber even bothers reading the reviews unless drivers have too many low ratings, in which case they get booted.
Cab companies do not have apps with review systems.
if the US, as a supposedly modern, rich country do not have proper affordable, public transportation
You sound like a non-American. What ever gave you the idea that the US was an "advanced" or "modern" nation? Because it claims to be? North Korea claims to be the best nation in the world and to have invented all kinds of amazing things and that the Dear Leader is basically a god. Do you believe them too? Microsoft claims Windows 10 has the best UI ever, and that the keylogging feature is just so "improve the user experience". Do you believe them too?
You could say I "would venture" my guess, based on an assumption that Americans aren't self-destructive idiots?
What do you base that assumption on? Have you seen what's going on in our politics and what kind of people we elect? No offense, but you seem to have some serious problems with reality. We Americans happily elect people who work against our own best self-interest, just because those people tell us they'll ban abortion or stop gay marriage or something like that, and also because many of us really think we're going to be millionaires soon so we don't want to tax them much.
but I'm told(!) that other places have functional public transportation
Someone lied to you. I've been to many cities in the US; only a few places have functional public transit, and even then it largely depends on you and your destinations both being in certain places and not other places. You said you've been to New York; you were probably in Manhattan, right? Did you try taking public transit to random destinations in the Bronx or on Staten Island? Of course not, because public transit there sucks, even though they're still in the city. Even Queens sucks for public transit. Brooklyn isn't all that great either, but it's #2. Even Manhattan isn't the greatest, depending on where you're trying to go: it's easy to go along north/south routes, but east/west routes are frequently non-existent so you have to try to take a bus, which doesn't work as well. There's a reason there's so many cabs in that city too; a lot of times it just isn't very speedy to take public transit.
Las Vegas? I've been there a few times, and I don't remember any decent public transit there. Of course, there's a big big difference between the Strip and the rest of the city. If you were only on the Strip, you have no idea what the rest of the city is like.
Anyway, there are some places where public transit is decent, but it's really only a few very dense places like Manhattan, and also DC, where they bothered to build subways. Buses are pretty universally horrible; they're just too slow and stop too much and take routes that meander too much.
If you really want to have excellent public transit, you have to build the SkyTran system. For the density seen in the US, it's the only way.
Why are you worried about the financial situation of your company? The company doesn't belong to you.
What's important is what your bosses want. Do they want diversity, or do they share your attitude? If they're pushing diversity uber alles, then you should propose promoting one of the janitors to high-skill jobs so they can fill those quotas. See what the CxOs say about that.
There isn't that much difference. The main reason you'd want slaves is so that your labor cost is close to zero: the only cost involved with a slave is the initial purchase price, and then the ongoing maintenance costs (mainly food, but also housing and medical care). Of course, these days with government welfare programs it's probably cheaper to hire cheap laborers than to buy slaves: by paying the workers minimum wage, they qualify for government assistance, so you effectively outsource some of the cost of that worker to the government, and by extension the taxpayers at large. With slaves, you have to pay for all their costs, plus you have to go to the trouble of managing their daily lives too, instead of letting them do it themselves like you do with non-slave workers.
I can only hire from the applications I receive, so I can't bring in Latino or African American devs/BAs/PMs/etc
Then you need to do more recruiting. If the corporation is more interested in meeting diversity targets, then you don't need to worry about qualifications; just go find someone and hire them for the job. I'm sure the cafeteria janitor can become a PM or developer.
I have no explanation as to why NY is as popular as it seems to be.
I can give you two possible reasons: 1) it's just about the only place in the US where public transit works really well (as long as you stay in Manhattan), and 2) there's a LOT of single women there, and they aren't fat.
There's also countless places to eat and a lot to do generally, both inside and outside the city, all without needing a car. AFAICT, it's really unique that way in the US.
Maybe you can, but I can't read on a bus when it's bouncing all around and making herky-jerky stops at every traffic light. I've tried it; I can't do it. And it's even worse when you're crammed in there like a sardine because there's too many riders; there's no room to read, write, or code.
, and I'd venture a guess that urban areas are smaller and better serviced, than rural ones.
You would venture this? Based on what? Supposition? Do you have any actual experience?
I've lived in urban areas around the US; the public transit system is completely unusable outside of very dense places like Manhattan. Why do you think Uber is so popular here?
Like where? And do they have jobs for engineers? Of course not.
Sure, there's a bunch of small cities around with low rents and low crime, but there's no work for professionals there. Or, if there is any work, the pay rate is ridiculously low ("we don't need to pay you much because the cost of living is so low!"), and it's the only company there, so if that job doesn't work out, you'll be spending thousands of dollars to relocate. Living in a tech hub avoids this problem.
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A quibble: Mint didn't "still have" MATE when Gnome3 and Unity came out. At least that's not how I remember it. MATE was created by the Mint community, alongside Cinnamon (a parallel project), *when* Gnome3 came out and pissed everyone off. MATE was really a fork of Gnome2, ported to use the Gtk3 libraries.
Huh? With computers and voting (assuming you're in the US), these are excellent examples of places where there's too little choice. With computers, there's really only 3 OSes right now: Windows, MacOSX, and Linux, and of course those have about 93%, 6%, and 1% marketshare respectively. And it's worse: since you can't just run any software on any OS you please, application software constrains your choice greatly. So if you need to run some particular software package, you likely have only one choice.
Voting is another good one: there just aren't that many people running for office, and our shitty voting system makes it so that it's really hard for any serious alternatives to run. There's only two major parties (two is not what I consider a lot of choice), and our shitty voting system makes it almost impossible for anyone outside those parties to win.
Choice is a great thing. Lack of choice, or constraints on choices, are bad. Your examples fall into the latter category.
I never had that problem, both in ubuntu and contemporary debian (lenny, etc.)
He's not talking about Ubuntu having repo problems, he's probably talking about other distros like Red Hat. A lot of stuff back then was really broken in Linux-land. Ubuntu really helped out a lot, and raised the bar greatly; it's too bad they had to screw things up later.
WTF? What kind of home user has a proxy? And why would a nontechnical user want to set up their own partitions manually?
What geek readership? The true geeks all left a long time ago. The dumbed-down folksy style is a perfect fit for the wannabe geeks and Teatards who still largely inhabit this place.
Honestly, I think this "overload" idea is ridiculous. I *like* having lots of choices for jellies. At most grocery stores, all the regular jelly brands like Smucker's are nasty crap full of HFCS and just have poor taste and quality in general. (HFCS does that, it doesn't taste like regular sugar; HFCS soda similarly tastes crappy.) But when a big selection, I can find some high-quality alternative, usually from France. And these days, it doesn't even cost very much, maybe a dollar or two more than the shitty Smucker's. As for being "bewildered", it's not hard, just look over your choices and try one. If you were choosing a $30,000+ car, then yes, I can understand wanting to make sure you're not making a bad choice. But if you're getting a $4 jar of jelly, how bad can it be? (This is another reason to pay extra for the good stuff; it's very unlikely it'll be shitty, and it just isn't worth saving $1 for something like that and then not wanting to eat it later. And at least for me jelly isn't something I go through a lot of anyway, I might get one jar every few months.
You must not have been paying attention ~10 years ago. Ubuntu rose to #1 because they put an emphasis on easy installation, and achieved it at a time when all the other distros were broken in one way or another. Back then, installing Linux was always a bit of a chore; there was always something broken that you'd have to go manually fix, which of course dissuaded most casual users who weren't familiar with the Unix command line, manually installing device drivers, editing your "easy to manage config files" with vi, etc.
Ubuntu came along and managed to make an installer that really worked, and a casual user could pop into a CD drive and install without any command-line intervention. The rest was history.
Of course, other distros finally caught up mostly, but Ubuntu was the first one there.
Of course, that was long before they came up with crap like Unity, the Amazon lens, etc., and this was also well before Mint came along, since Mint is itself an Ubuntu derivative.
My advice: if you want an easy-to-install distro where you don't have to screw around with stuff, and want a sane though more traditional UI, just pick any one of the Mint flavors. I like the KDE one personally, but the others all have their fans too and seem to be good. All of them have more traditional UIs, and haven't gone for the radical new UI concepts seen in Gnome3, Unity, Windows8+, etc. The whole reason Mint is so popular now is because of Unity; before that, Mint was a tiny derivative of Ubuntu, but then Unity and Gnome3 both came out and pissed everyone off, and Mint launched two projects that were Gnome2 derivatives, and tons of users switched from Ubuntu to Mint in response.
Why should they have respect for the laws? The laws are obviously designed to protect entrenched interests. That's called "corruption". I wouldn't have any respect for them either.
Should I have respect for state laws which prohibit cities from implementing their own broadband services, so that they can protect Comcast from competition?
Bullshit. University research has been corporate-funded for decades.
It is in the US, apparently. And he's talking about Google, which is an American company, so a comparison with governments in America is completely relevant.
I used to live in northern NJ and there were several cab companies there too. They were all horribly lousy. There were only a few of them too, within the service area, so there wasn't that much competition. When Uber and Lyft came along, it was like a godsend. Suddenly I got to ride in nice cars for a fair price and get picked up quickly, instead of waiting 50 minutes to ride in a falling apart POS with a guy who doesn't speak English and then having to pay a fortune (and some of the cabs didn't even have taximeters, you just paid whatever they told you).
So to me, all this anti-Uber stuff seems a lot like Google Fiber moving into a city, putting Comcast out of business after pulling some dirty tricks to get around laws which Comcast wrote and paid legislators to pass to ban any competition, and then a bunch of law-and-order types telling me that Google Fiber is evil and I should stick with, and even be happy with, Comcast and their atrocious service.
What water and electricity utilities?
None that I know of, but they've been really successful at being a fiber-broadband utility company, something that most governments around the US are absolutely lousy at facilitating. Instead, they stupidly (or corruptly) grant monopolies to shitty companies like Comcrap who then rape consumers with high prices and horrible service. Great job, governments! Yes, there's a few rare exceptions like Chattanooga, but most state governments prefer to ban municipal broadband like Chattanooga's. Again, great job, governments!
What public health care systems have they created and managed?
None, but neither has the US government. Healthcare in the US is a complete disaster.
There are some governments which seem to do a pretty good job at a lot of these services, but they're all over in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Over here, government is totally and utterly dysfunctional and corrupt.
How so? The research they do is usually corporate-funded.
You really think that Uber looks for bad reviews and deletes them, when they have no shortage of people wanting to be drivers for them? You don't think people would start talking about that elsewhere online if that really happened, and people had all kinds of problems with Uber drivers?
That's like thinking that Amazon looks for bad product reviews and deletes them, which is patently absurd. I see harsh reviews on there all the time.
Unlike a cab company, Uber has a reputation to uphold. If you have a bad experience with some cab company, what are you going to do, complain on Google reviews or something? You can, but BFD; there's usually dozens of little cab companies around, so no one really knows them or thinks of them. Can you list off all the cab companies in your area, off the top of your head? But with Uber, everyone who actually pays attention to current events knows what Uber is. Good luck finding someone who *doesn't* know what it is. When you have a well-known multinational company, you have to worry a lot more about your PR than when you're some 10-person local company, unless you're a monopoly like Microsoft. Uber's certainly earned a reputation for not following regular taxi laws, but they've never earned a reputation for falsifying driver reviews.
I don't disagree that a more diverse team (esp. with women) is a better work environment. However, you can't get blood from a stone. So my point with the prior post was basically pointing out that if diversity is sooo important (that you're going to try to get blood from a stone anyway), then you might as well forget about the qualifications part.
It's worse for you too, if you're working for a government (state or national, probably worse for federal jobs though). Not only do you not have a lot of "diverse" candidates to choose from out of the entire labor pool, you probably have even fewer good ones who actually want to work for you and are willing to apply. You don't pay very well, and they'll have to put up with all kinds of ridiculous bullshit on the job because the organization is completely broken. So the good candidates are going to work in private industry instead.
I used to work at an extremely large semiconductor company, and the diversity there was much, much, much better than what you describe. I will say around half of the women, if not more, were Indian (or close, like Bangladeshi). And most of the women I worked with seemed very competent too, in fact most everyone I worked with did. But that was a company that had a very good reputation, had a pretty grueling interview process (to weed out any lackluster candidates), and had excellent benefits and which looked really good on a resume. You probably can't offer most of that, so you're not going to get the greatest applicants, or you're going to get applicants who like some other aspect that you do have to offer (perhaps your location is some out-of-the-way place where locals would like to stay, but you're never going to be able to recruit many Indian women to move to).
What'd be even better than this is some kind of indicator (maybe after opening a new tab or pop-out or something) in Firefox which shows how much CPU and RAM each tab is using up. I'm constantly running into a problem where one of my tabs gobbles up all my CPU time, and I have to forcibly kill Firefox and restart it.
WTF? You sound like a total idiot. Uber's reviews are right there for you to read; it's built into the app. People who are interested will read the reviews, just like they do with Amazon. It has nothing to do with Uber the company "waiting on your every word"; they created a forum so that people can leave reviews for drivers, and other users can then read the reviews. I seriously doubt Uber even bothers reading the reviews unless drivers have too many low ratings, in which case they get booted.
Cab companies do not have apps with review systems.
if the US, as a supposedly modern, rich country do not have proper affordable, public transportation
You sound like a non-American. What ever gave you the idea that the US was an "advanced" or "modern" nation? Because it claims to be? North Korea claims to be the best nation in the world and to have invented all kinds of amazing things and that the Dear Leader is basically a god. Do you believe them too? Microsoft claims Windows 10 has the best UI ever, and that the keylogging feature is just so "improve the user experience". Do you believe them too?
You could say I "would venture" my guess, based on an assumption that Americans aren't self-destructive idiots?
What do you base that assumption on? Have you seen what's going on in our politics and what kind of people we elect? No offense, but you seem to have some serious problems with reality. We Americans happily elect people who work against our own best self-interest, just because those people tell us they'll ban abortion or stop gay marriage or something like that, and also because many of us really think we're going to be millionaires soon so we don't want to tax them much.
but I'm told(!) that other places have functional public transportation
Someone lied to you. I've been to many cities in the US; only a few places have functional public transit, and even then it largely depends on you and your destinations both being in certain places and not other places. You said you've been to New York; you were probably in Manhattan, right? Did you try taking public transit to random destinations in the Bronx or on Staten Island? Of course not, because public transit there sucks, even though they're still in the city. Even Queens sucks for public transit. Brooklyn isn't all that great either, but it's #2. Even Manhattan isn't the greatest, depending on where you're trying to go: it's easy to go along north/south routes, but east/west routes are frequently non-existent so you have to try to take a bus, which doesn't work as well. There's a reason there's so many cabs in that city too; a lot of times it just isn't very speedy to take public transit.
Las Vegas? I've been there a few times, and I don't remember any decent public transit there. Of course, there's a big big difference between the Strip and the rest of the city. If you were only on the Strip, you have no idea what the rest of the city is like.
Anyway, there are some places where public transit is decent, but it's really only a few very dense places like Manhattan, and also DC, where they bothered to build subways. Buses are pretty universally horrible; they're just too slow and stop too much and take routes that meander too much.
If you really want to have excellent public transit, you have to build the SkyTran system. For the density seen in the US, it's the only way.
Why are you worried about the financial situation of your company? The company doesn't belong to you.
What's important is what your bosses want. Do they want diversity, or do they share your attitude? If they're pushing diversity uber alles, then you should propose promoting one of the janitors to high-skill jobs so they can fill those quotas. See what the CxOs say about that.
There isn't that much difference. The main reason you'd want slaves is so that your labor cost is close to zero: the only cost involved with a slave is the initial purchase price, and then the ongoing maintenance costs (mainly food, but also housing and medical care). Of course, these days with government welfare programs it's probably cheaper to hire cheap laborers than to buy slaves: by paying the workers minimum wage, they qualify for government assistance, so you effectively outsource some of the cost of that worker to the government, and by extension the taxpayers at large. With slaves, you have to pay for all their costs, plus you have to go to the trouble of managing their daily lives too, instead of letting them do it themselves like you do with non-slave workers.
I can only hire from the applications I receive, so I can't bring in Latino or African American devs/BAs/PMs/etc
Then you need to do more recruiting. If the corporation is more interested in meeting diversity targets, then you don't need to worry about qualifications; just go find someone and hire them for the job. I'm sure the cafeteria janitor can become a PM or developer.
I have no explanation as to why NY is as popular as it seems to be.
I can give you two possible reasons: 1) it's just about the only place in the US where public transit works really well (as long as you stay in Manhattan), and 2) there's a LOT of single women there, and they aren't fat.
There's also countless places to eat and a lot to do generally, both inside and outside the city, all without needing a car. AFAICT, it's really unique that way in the US.
Maybe you can, but I can't read on a bus when it's bouncing all around and making herky-jerky stops at every traffic light. I've tried it; I can't do it. And it's even worse when you're crammed in there like a sardine because there's too many riders; there's no room to read, write, or code.
, and I'd venture a guess that urban areas are smaller and better serviced, than rural ones.
You would venture this? Based on what? Supposition? Do you have any actual experience?
I've lived in urban areas around the US; the public transit system is completely unusable outside of very dense places like Manhattan. Why do you think Uber is so popular here?
Like where? And do they have jobs for engineers? Of course not.
Sure, there's a bunch of small cities around with low rents and low crime, but there's no work for professionals there. Or, if there is any work, the pay rate is ridiculously low ("we don't need to pay you much because the cost of living is so low!"), and it's the only company there, so if that job doesn't work out, you'll be spending thousands of dollars to relocate. Living in a tech hub avoids this problem.