I've been using bing for years mostly because I didn't want there to be only one search engine. Try them out. They have boolean searches. I know... the evil microsoft... but the search engine is good.
As to bad schools, the education statistics say the opposite. But if facts are hard for you then I can understand why you'd have a hard time with that.
As to rednecks, that depends entirely on where you've set down roots. There are different places with very different sorts of people. Its not like the area outside the cities is homogenious. Some of those areas will have rednecks. And lots of others will not.
A lot of them are just a little old fashioned. Think of your grand parents. But then you have some that are as up to date as anyone. You wouldn't know the difference at all in some places.
As to social isolation, you're less isolated because potentially everyone you meet will be someone you know. Where as in the city you know practically no one. They're not part of your social circle. So pretending they are is silly. How many people in a city do you actually know? Less then a thousand probably. Okay... so why do you need the other 10 million people? Any of them could die and you wouldn't even know or really care.
As to physical isolation, depends, you can live in the town at which point you will see people all the time. You can walk to the coffee shop, order food at the restaurant, etc. You have fewer choices but at the same time you will know these people so if you want something else just tell them. They'll figure out what that costs in time and ingredients and probably give you a good deal on it. They might even name a menu item after you because why not. Try to get that in a big city.
As to not wanting to drive, you can avoid driving in a small town if you want. Just live in the small town itself and its no big deal. You'll walk less there then in most big cities and you won't even need to deal with mass transit. A town of 70 thousand can be walked from one end to the other in about 5 to 10 minutes depending on how much of a hurry you're in.
As to poor services, again it depends on what you mean by that? Generally anything a city provides you can be found in small towns without any trouble at all. What do you mean by this?
As to few jobs, that is a valid point however, I think with the internet there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to telecommute to any job anywhere in the world that simply requires us to do mental labor. If you need my physical hands to do something then sure I can't telecommute. But I doubt those are the jobs you're saying you can't get unless you live in the city.
lets say you want to be an investment banker or a programmer or any of the more typical jobs you'll find in a city. Why can't you do that anywhere on earth with decent internet?
As to going out your door and doing something, you're going to have to define that. They have that in small towns as well so I don't think you're aware of the options. Many small towns make a great effort to provide social activities, concerts, some have full opera companies, plays, etc. So I don't know what you're talking about here. Night clubs? They have night clubs in small towns as well... you just won't see too many new people in them.
As to it being different in different places. I've lived in a lot of places. You just have know what to look for... you can find a place for everyone.
What I find galling is that the cities exert political control over the countryside while at the same time only being able to do that because of the subsidies that allow for that population density.
Make areas more autonomous or cut the subsidies off and I'm happy.
Its unacceptable if any third party controls it. If I buy the phone and its mine... then I am the ONLY one that should be able to brick it.
Something we should push for at some level is physical access to the ROM on these smartphones. The "drives" or "disks" used to store whatever. They only get away with this protected bootloader crap because we can't just pull the drive out, pop it into another machine, overwrite it with what we want, and then reinsert it.
How impractical would it be if the phones for example had no "chip" that stored the firmware but rather everything was stored on a micro SD card in the guts of the phone. If it worked that way you could take a screw driver to the phone, pop the microsd card out, and get complete write access to the whole thing.
Just pick up a knife and come at me... I'm tired of all the little games from you people. You want to fight? Come on... and when one of us is dead, the other can decide how things will be... till then... I reserve the right to ignore, undermine, and mock you.
Without the subsidies that allow those people to live in those cities, the cities themselves would likely collapse.
Imagine if the cost of labor went up to compensate for everyone that lives there actually paying the full price for rent?
That would squeeze the middle class which would force them to increase their cost of labor on the companies that operate in NYC.
That would drive those companies out of the city in a search for more economical labor. Which would mean the middle class wouldn't be able to find jobs. Which would mean they would leave. Which would mean you'd lose low income population to the same process until the density dropped low enough that that the cost of rent/lease/ownership dropped low enough that someone on a low income wage would actually afford to live there without subsidy.
Care to guess how low NYC's population would have to drop for that to happen? We can only guess. But the point is that you couldn't maintain those cities without the subsidies.
The country side doesn't need subsidies to exist. Those little towns are so close to the ground in most cases that some of them might even be able to self support if they were willing to accept doing away with some modern conveniences. The cities are utterly dependent on importing all sorts of things and people literally die if that doesn't happen. In the small towns and rural communities... they're often on well water and could if needed provide their own food in many cases.
I'm just pointing out that the cities are utterly reliant on trade to literally survive. Where as the rural communities LIKE the trade and economically need it. But if they were in a disaster situation they could probably survive.
100,000 in the 21st century isn't really a city. Its not even a million people.
I gave other examples of cities with populations lower then that with full opera companies. The point is that you can have big city entertainment in a small city or large town without much trouble.
You're assuming they are able to put taps on the email servers. We can lock down or decentralize our email systems enough that putting taps on our email is not practical.
For example, lets say rather then putting all our email in big ISP servers or gmail we instead put all the email in small private hosts. Tiny operations that might have only a couple thousand clients. Or possibly better yet you just self host your email.
Technically there is no reason email cannot be self hosted. The biggest problem with this idea now is that email spammers use self hosting to spam so big email servers reject small email servers. But there are other ways to either authenticate your server so it is accepted and keep spammers out.
My objective here is not to make it impossible for the NSA to snoop on me... just impractical enough that they wouldn't bother unless they really wanted to snoop on me specifically. That alone is going to protect 99 percent of the population from spying.
For the remaining 1 percent... some of them we want to be spied upon because they might actually be bad people. And for the small portion that is both of interest to the NSA and not at fault... they can encrypt and use other security precautions.
The politics are fucked sir... I won't waste my time on them. Find a technological solution.
As to congressman... you have a parliament... in the context of this discussion is there a relevant distinction?
As to runways, finland might be similar to Alaska in the US. They deal with that situation with sea planes and ski planes. For small communities of a few thousand people that should be enough.
As to the interstate system, I was talking to some other people that were expanding the discussion to something about cities and rural areas in general and not just finland. What is more, the point remains apt for finland.
Lets say everyone left the rural areas entirely and lived only in the cities. Would you then not need roads in the rural areas? Obviously you would need them still so you could get out there efficiently. Thus the road maintenance is a zero sum game. Which was my point about rural areas and roads. Whether people live out there or not you will need the roads. Possibly slightly less of them and possibly you won't have to maintain them as much. But you can then only bill the rural areas for that difference.
As to being afraid of dying of exposure in the wild. Very few people actually die from that. Worst case, you stay by the road and someone will help you out. You might need to pay to get your car towed but you won't die.
As to being disgusted by the need to drive to get groceries, the local restaurants you frequent drive to get groceries... or things are delivered by truck. What does it matter if you do some big shopping runs at weekly or even monthly intervals that keep you supplied? I have an aunt that uses a specialty butcher that has deals with local cattle ranches. She gets the best beef you could imagine. She also gets fresh eggs, fresh produce, and locally made cheese.
I'm sorry... but you can't compete with that food in the city unless you're paying an arm and a leg. Most people that live in the city eat cheap food. In the country cheap food can also be GREAT food. Another of my relatives lives near an apple orchard. They can get all the apples they want for basically nothing.
As to it being cheaper for the very poor... only because they're subsidized. You take away the rent control, the EBT cards, and other crap and they could not afford to live in the city. And without that, many of the economic systems that rely on their labor would collapse... and that would mean much of what keeps the modern city viable would fall apart. Those same people would probably be a lot happier in small towns where they could at least feel like they are a part of a community rather then just a number in a machine.
I'm sorry, but that is 180 degrees off correct. Rural communities have the lowest crime anywhere. Suburban areas have slightly more crime and the cities have the most crime. Typically the crime rate goes up with population. Think about it... more victims and more anonymity. If someone starts doing that in a small town... very quickly everyone will simply know who you are and what you do. It doesn't work. The sort of criminal you get in small towns tends to be drifters... traveling criminals. But they're not very common.
As to why one would prefer to live in the rural area... well... you're entitled to your own opinions... but not your own facts. Your information is wrong. By all means, have any opinion about ACTUAL facts but you don't get to just make things up.
You are more social in a small town. You actually know people and they actually know you.
As to distant farms... go to your grosery store and tell me where the fruit in the produce section came from. Bet its farther then 500 miles. If you're in the north east it could be well over two thousand miles. So that's just a silly statement.
As to live music at night, you can get that anywhere. Go to a rural Italian farming village. They have music every night. Its THEIR music made by THEIR people for THEIR people. You act like music didn't exist before this absurd population crush. The ancient city of Athens 2000 years ago had only about 140 thousand people. Of that only about 40 thousand were both male and not slaves. Want to bet they had music, art, plays, etc?
You don't need a big population for any of that. You just need culture.
A modern example would be Santa Fe New Mexico. They have a population of about 70 thousand... and a full Opera company, plays, music festivals, many art galleries, a big artist community, etc etc etc.
As to cities being easier on the environment, you're only saying that as an alternative to an endless suburban sprawl. I would agree that packing people in would be better then an endless Los Angeles with single story houses going on for hundreds of miles.
However that is not what I am talking about. I am instead talking about small scattered towns with lots of empty space between. You can't tell me the small town is hurting the environment more then the mega cities. That's just silly. The concentrated waste that comes out of those cities takes massive facilities to make anything less then horrifically toxic.
As to cities subsidizing the rest of the country, that is a product of our political system not a need of rural communities. Rural communities send their representatives to washington to ask for lower taxes and less regulation. If/when they cannot get that, the representatives ask for what they CAN get instead. Over the years the rural communities have gotten these compromises instead of what they actually wanted which was to be left alone.
Logistically, there is no reason they couldn't provide most of these services themselves. If anything, the cities have made efforts to stop small towns from setting up their own ISPs. We get articles about it on slashdot all the time. read one of them.
As to racists, idiots, etc... those are found everywhere. Literally. Everywhere. You can get concentrations of them in some towns and maybe a town might be run by such people. But that's just a roll of the dice. You get similar things in big cities. I will grant the big cities tend to have very bland consistent ineffectual politicians that don't especially represent or inspire anyone. Yes, they're rarely racists but they're also much more often corrupt products of machine politics. That is, they're not racists because what they really are is opportunists in it for the money.
As to ignorance, I've lived in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. I question whether you've ever stepped outside of your bubble. And that being the likely case, I question your right to call anyone else ignorant on the issue. Your arguments were mostly stereotypes perpetuated by television that drones buy into because they don't know any better.
In the US, professional football is actually sustained by television... not stadium attendance. What is more, you have many teams in small cities or even towns that do quite well.
The Green Bay Packers for example are based in Green Bay Wisconsin... which has a population of about 100,000.
So there you go... football team... at 100,000... now explain why you need to have 15 million people in the same place?
As to bands and other entertainment venues, you can't be telling me you live in the city to go to music concerts and football games.
For one thing, you could commute for that sort of thing. Consider the motorcycle conventions. People ride them from hundreds if not thousands of miles away just to all show up in the same place and have a convention. They could do it anywhere. One of the bigger ones "Sturgis" happens in Sturgis south Dakota every year and draws about half a MILLION people every year. Guess what the population of Sturgis is normally? About six thousand.
So I call bunk on your whole notion. It makes no sense. I know a lot of people that live in New York and they never go to plays, theater, shows, concerts, or anything. They just live there. And what portion of that city's population do you think actually does any of that stuff? A small fraction of the population does a lot of it. That and tourists. But most of the people that actually live there? Not so much.
I really have no patience for these cherry picked statistical games.
Yes, the cities also generate a lot of revenue but most of that revenue comes the top 10 percent of the earning population in those cities. While a large portion of the city's population is heavily subsidized one way or the other.
The difference between rich and poor is a good deal flatter outside the cities. And the rate and nature of subsidization is very different.
Most subsidization of rural communities you would point to would be things like rural airports, roads, and telephone service. However, in most of these communities they don't actually need it. They just get it because their congressman felt he had to get his district something. People in those regions generally only want one thing... low taxes and being left alone. That's pretty much the only thing they ask from their politicians. And when that isn't going to happen because the political winds have blown otherwise, their politicians instead try to get their rural constituents SOMETHING for their money.
Over time his builds up to the subsidies you're talking about. But these are consequences of our political system... not logistical needs.
Airports are not expensive to set up and maintain... especially small airfields. A dirt runway is perfectly servicable if the airport doesn't see much traffic. And a simple asphalt runway is no big deal either. You see these on Pacific islands. Nothing wrong with them and they're not expensive. You can't land big planes on them but rural communities don't need big planes.
As to roads, the interstate system was set up mostly for military reasons after WW2. It is therefore a national expense and not anything specific to rural communities. The roads not part of the interstate do not need to be subsidized. Some of the might turn into dirt roads if you did that but without exception any road with so little traffic that that was an issue would naturally not be badly effected by the change.
As to telephone lines, this is something of a self fulfilling prophesy at this point. If you offer them something they will use it. If you shut down the copper line phone system in some of the really remote areas people would just start using radio repeaters. That is assuming the FCC doesn't block the move which is fairly typical of them.
TLDR? Rural areas could adapt very easily and change very little if the subsidies got cut off. if you did the same in the cities the whole pathetic mess would collapse in on itself.
Complexity. the "vertical" transport system only goes to given floors in a given building. The roads go everywhere. I can drive from NYC to Los Angeles... and anywhere in between.
This whole congestion issue is a product of poor urban planning. We already have to heavily subsidize and incentivize city dwelling to keep the density this high. And these transport projects are just doubling down on the concept to pack people tighter and tighter for no apparent reason.
Just go live in the suburbs or some other place. Why do you need to live in that city? How tiny of an apartment are you willing to live in just for that privilege?
I question whether that is a real thing. If you consider our history, we didn't live in anything like this density. What is more, instinctually we have no bond with practically anyone in the city. They're just faces. They mean nothing to you. You don't know who they are and they have no lasting impact on your life. Any one of those faces could die tomorrow and you wouldn't even notice.
So tell me again about this herding instinct because it frankly sounds like bullshit.
I'll never live anywhere that won't let me have a car or where for whatever reason cars are uneconomical. I just refuse to live like that. Some people like living in cities where only mass transit is practical. I really don't see why people pack themselves in that tightly. What is the point of doing that in the 21st century. In the pre-digital pre-airplane world I could see the point. But today? Why...
It makes no sense. Spread out, people. Its a big world. Doesn't anyone want to listen to music without having to worry about whether the neighbors will object? Doesn't anyone want a dog or a garden or just some space that is theirs?
I think the big cities are anachronisms at this point. I don't see why we bother with them. With the right communications we could run the same economy with employees distributed across the country pretty much where ever they wanted to live.
This is not an attack on cities... if you really like living cheek by jowl with people then by all means... pack yourself in. It just seems there are increasing problems with the idea.
Security/crime issues, education issues, political issues, transport issues, economic issues... just lots of stuff. I'm sure it has good qualities but I don't see how the pros outweigh the cons for any but the enthusiast.
just because family members share passwords doesn't mean its insecure. I know the password to most of my parents email and accounts. But so what... I won't do anything they wouldn't approve of and know them well enough to know what they would and would not approve of... so who cares.
And as to companies... most of them are small and medium sized businesses that have overlapping responsibilities. In those cases, SOME people know some passwords. But rarely does everyone in the office know all the passwords.
Actually, yes it does make it okay. Your aphorism refers to situations where people might not do it if it were not seen as acceptable.
This is not the case. Spying will happen. Nations will do it. They always have. They always will. Just as they will always make war. They will always play political games. There will always be taxes. And I am sorry to say we will all die.
Now, that doesn't mean I am accepting the status quo. This spying typically doesn't involve normal people like you. That is new. I would suggest we find ways to make it impractical for the spies to involve us in their games so they must instead focus on their actual job.
That is as good as it is going to get in this world.
As to holding the NSA to the law... you have no means to actually do that sans some sort of auditing agency which will either have to be as good at knowing what the NSA is is actually doing as the NSA is at hiding what it is doing.That is unlikely. What is more, your best method of actually doing that would be crippling the NSA so badly that they're incompetent. And that then endangers the US and the free world as a whole because the Chinese, Russians, etc will not stop spying simply because you've knee capped the NSA.
This is where these discussions become unproductive. You have some civil rights points which I agree with but you have to acknowledge the security, military, political, economic, and geo political realities here your argument has no place in this discussion. I do not mean that as a slight or as an attempt to invalidate your opinion. I am saying your argument must encompass these issues as well or we are not talking about the same thing.
Your civil rights point isn't big enough. Take a couple steps back and incorporate the other issues into the whole. I am not your enemy here. I just am highly dubious of claims we don't need to guard the city walls when we have a long history of barbarians climbing over them.
What makes the NSA revelations unacceptable is not what they're doing but how well they're doing it and how insidious they are at it.
THAT is the issue. Not that they're doing it. EVERYONE IS DOING IT.
The NSA is just really good at it.
Which actually means that what we should be doing is upgrading network security and generally being a good deal more paranoid about how we connect things. I have no interest in telling the NSA what they can and cannot do. For one thing they'll just lie to me if they find my restrictions inconvenient. They see that as their job in fact.
What we need to do is upgrade security. Then the NSA can do whatever they want and it simply won't be worth their time to collect data on people that are not actually threats.
I hope the german experiment does well. But keep in mind that it is unlikely that it has gone flawlessly or that there are no consequences for making the shift.
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I've been using bing for years mostly because I didn't want there to be only one search engine. Try them out. They have boolean searches. I know... the evil microsoft... but the search engine is good.
As to bad schools, the education statistics say the opposite. But if facts are hard for you then I can understand why you'd have a hard time with that.
As to rednecks, that depends entirely on where you've set down roots. There are different places with very different sorts of people. Its not like the area outside the cities is homogenious. Some of those areas will have rednecks. And lots of others will not.
A lot of them are just a little old fashioned. Think of your grand parents. But then you have some that are as up to date as anyone. You wouldn't know the difference at all in some places.
As to social isolation, you're less isolated because potentially everyone you meet will be someone you know. Where as in the city you know practically no one. They're not part of your social circle. So pretending they are is silly. How many people in a city do you actually know? Less then a thousand probably. Okay... so why do you need the other 10 million people? Any of them could die and you wouldn't even know or really care.
As to physical isolation, depends, you can live in the town at which point you will see people all the time. You can walk to the coffee shop, order food at the restaurant, etc. You have fewer choices but at the same time you will know these people so if you want something else just tell them. They'll figure out what that costs in time and ingredients and probably give you a good deal on it. They might even name a menu item after you because why not. Try to get that in a big city.
As to not wanting to drive, you can avoid driving in a small town if you want. Just live in the small town itself and its no big deal. You'll walk less there then in most big cities and you won't even need to deal with mass transit. A town of 70 thousand can be walked from one end to the other in about 5 to 10 minutes depending on how much of a hurry you're in.
As to poor services, again it depends on what you mean by that? Generally anything a city provides you can be found in small towns without any trouble at all. What do you mean by this?
As to few jobs, that is a valid point however, I think with the internet there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to telecommute to any job anywhere in the world that simply requires us to do mental labor. If you need my physical hands to do something then sure I can't telecommute. But I doubt those are the jobs you're saying you can't get unless you live in the city.
lets say you want to be an investment banker or a programmer or any of the more typical jobs you'll find in a city. Why can't you do that anywhere on earth with decent internet?
As to going out your door and doing something, you're going to have to define that. They have that in small towns as well so I don't think you're aware of the options. Many small towns make a great effort to provide social activities, concerts, some have full opera companies, plays, etc. So I don't know what you're talking about here. Night clubs? They have night clubs in small towns as well... you just won't see too many new people in them.
As to it being different in different places. I've lived in a lot of places. You just have know what to look for... you can find a place for everyone.
What I find galling is that the cities exert political control over the countryside while at the same time only being able to do that because of the subsidies that allow for that population density.
Make areas more autonomous or cut the subsidies off and I'm happy.
but noscript does. ADblock + NoScript + Flashblock = no ads at all.
Its unacceptable if any third party controls it. If I buy the phone and its mine... then I am the ONLY one that should be able to brick it.
Something we should push for at some level is physical access to the ROM on these smartphones. The "drives" or "disks" used to store whatever. They only get away with this protected bootloader crap because we can't just pull the drive out, pop it into another machine, overwrite it with what we want, and then reinsert it.
How impractical would it be if the phones for example had no "chip" that stored the firmware but rather everything was stored on a micro SD card in the guts of the phone. If it worked that way you could take a screw driver to the phone, pop the microsd card out, and get complete write access to the whole thing.
why not.
Just pick up a knife and come at me... I'm tired of all the little games from you people. You want to fight? Come on... and when one of us is dead, the other can decide how things will be... till then... I reserve the right to ignore, undermine, and mock you.
Without the subsidies that allow those people to live in those cities, the cities themselves would likely collapse.
Imagine if the cost of labor went up to compensate for everyone that lives there actually paying the full price for rent?
That would squeeze the middle class which would force them to increase their cost of labor on the companies that operate in NYC.
That would drive those companies out of the city in a search for more economical labor. Which would mean the middle class wouldn't be able to find jobs. Which would mean they would leave. Which would mean you'd lose low income population to the same process until the density dropped low enough that that the cost of rent/lease/ownership dropped low enough that someone on a low income wage would actually afford to live there without subsidy.
Care to guess how low NYC's population would have to drop for that to happen? We can only guess. But the point is that you couldn't maintain those cities without the subsidies.
The country side doesn't need subsidies to exist. Those little towns are so close to the ground in most cases that some of them might even be able to self support if they were willing to accept doing away with some modern conveniences. The cities are utterly dependent on importing all sorts of things and people literally die if that doesn't happen. In the small towns and rural communities... they're often on well water and could if needed provide their own food in many cases.
I'm just pointing out that the cities are utterly reliant on trade to literally survive. Where as the rural communities LIKE the trade and economically need it. But if they were in a disaster situation they could probably survive.
100,000 in the 21st century isn't really a city. Its not even a million people.
I gave other examples of cities with populations lower then that with full opera companies. The point is that you can have big city entertainment in a small city or large town without much trouble.
Wrong.
You're assuming they are able to put taps on the email servers. We can lock down or decentralize our email systems enough that putting taps on our email is not practical.
For example, lets say rather then putting all our email in big ISP servers or gmail we instead put all the email in small private hosts. Tiny operations that might have only a couple thousand clients. Or possibly better yet you just self host your email.
Technically there is no reason email cannot be self hosted. The biggest problem with this idea now is that email spammers use self hosting to spam so big email servers reject small email servers. But there are other ways to either authenticate your server so it is accepted and keep spammers out.
My objective here is not to make it impossible for the NSA to snoop on me... just impractical enough that they wouldn't bother unless they really wanted to snoop on me specifically. That alone is going to protect 99 percent of the population from spying.
For the remaining 1 percent... some of them we want to be spied upon because they might actually be bad people. And for the small portion that is both of interest to the NSA and not at fault... they can encrypt and use other security precautions.
The politics are fucked sir... I won't waste my time on them. Find a technological solution.
As to congressman... you have a parliament... in the context of this discussion is there a relevant distinction?
As to runways, finland might be similar to Alaska in the US. They deal with that situation with sea planes and ski planes. For small communities of a few thousand people that should be enough.
As to the interstate system, I was talking to some other people that were expanding the discussion to something about cities and rural areas in general and not just finland. What is more, the point remains apt for finland.
Lets say everyone left the rural areas entirely and lived only in the cities. Would you then not need roads in the rural areas? Obviously you would need them still so you could get out there efficiently. Thus the road maintenance is a zero sum game. Which was my point about rural areas and roads. Whether people live out there or not you will need the roads. Possibly slightly less of them and possibly you won't have to maintain them as much. But you can then only bill the rural areas for that difference.
As to being afraid of dying of exposure in the wild. Very few people actually die from that. Worst case, you stay by the road and someone will help you out. You might need to pay to get your car towed but you won't die.
As to being disgusted by the need to drive to get groceries, the local restaurants you frequent drive to get groceries... or things are delivered by truck. What does it matter if you do some big shopping runs at weekly or even monthly intervals that keep you supplied? I have an aunt that uses a specialty butcher that has deals with local cattle ranches. She gets the best beef you could imagine. She also gets fresh eggs, fresh produce, and locally made cheese.
I'm sorry... but you can't compete with that food in the city unless you're paying an arm and a leg. Most people that live in the city eat cheap food. In the country cheap food can also be GREAT food. Another of my relatives lives near an apple orchard. They can get all the apples they want for basically nothing.
As to it being cheaper for the very poor... only because they're subsidized. You take away the rent control, the EBT cards, and other crap and they could not afford to live in the city. And without that, many of the economic systems that rely on their labor would collapse... and that would mean much of what keeps the modern city viable would fall apart. Those same people would probably be a lot happier in small towns where they could at least feel like they are a part of a community rather then just a number in a machine.
As to crime being lower in cities... you must be joking:
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?t...
I'm sorry, but that is 180 degrees off correct. Rural communities have the lowest crime anywhere. Suburban areas have slightly more crime and the cities have the most crime. Typically the crime rate goes up with population. Think about it... more victims and more anonymity. If someone starts doing that in a small town... very quickly everyone will simply know who you are and what you do. It doesn't work. The sort of criminal you get in small towns tends to be drifters... traveling criminals. But they're not very common.
As to why one would prefer to live in the rural area... well... you're entitled to your own opinions... but not your own facts. Your information is wrong. By all means, have any opinion about ACTUAL facts but you don't get to just make things up.
How is it good that you as a social creature are completely alienated from everyone else?
You're calling this natural but its not.
You are more social in a small town. You actually know people and they actually know you.
As to distant farms... go to your grosery store and tell me where the fruit in the produce section came from. Bet its farther then 500 miles. If you're in the north east it could be well over two thousand miles. So that's just a silly statement.
As to live music at night, you can get that anywhere. Go to a rural Italian farming village. They have music every night. Its THEIR music made by THEIR people for THEIR people. You act like music didn't exist before this absurd population crush. The ancient city of Athens 2000 years ago had only about 140 thousand people. Of that only about 40 thousand were both male and not slaves. Want to bet they had music, art, plays, etc?
You don't need a big population for any of that. You just need culture.
A modern example would be Santa Fe New Mexico. They have a population of about 70 thousand... and a full Opera company, plays, music festivals, many art galleries, a big artist community, etc etc etc.
As to cities being easier on the environment, you're only saying that as an alternative to an endless suburban sprawl. I would agree that packing people in would be better then an endless Los Angeles with single story houses going on for hundreds of miles.
However that is not what I am talking about. I am instead talking about small scattered towns with lots of empty space between. You can't tell me the small town is hurting the environment more then the mega cities. That's just silly. The concentrated waste that comes out of those cities takes massive facilities to make anything less then horrifically toxic.
As to cities subsidizing the rest of the country, that is a product of our political system not a need of rural communities. Rural communities send their representatives to washington to ask for lower taxes and less regulation. If/when they cannot get that, the representatives ask for what they CAN get instead. Over the years the rural communities have gotten these compromises instead of what they actually wanted which was to be left alone.
Logistically, there is no reason they couldn't provide most of these services themselves. If anything, the cities have made efforts to stop small towns from setting up their own ISPs. We get articles about it on slashdot all the time. read one of them.
As to racists, idiots, etc... those are found everywhere. Literally. Everywhere. You can get concentrations of them in some towns and maybe a town might be run by such people. But that's just a roll of the dice. You get similar things in big cities. I will grant the big cities tend to have very bland consistent ineffectual politicians that don't especially represent or inspire anyone. Yes, they're rarely racists but they're also much more often corrupt products of machine politics. That is, they're not racists because what they really are is opportunists in it for the money.
As to ignorance, I've lived in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. I question whether you've ever stepped outside of your bubble. And that being the likely case, I question your right to call anyone else ignorant on the issue. Your arguments were mostly stereotypes perpetuated by television that drones buy into because they don't know any better.
In the US, professional football is actually sustained by television... not stadium attendance. What is more, you have many teams in small cities or even towns that do quite well.
The Green Bay Packers for example are based in Green Bay Wisconsin... which has a population of about 100,000.
So there you go... football team... at 100,000... now explain why you need to have 15 million people in the same place?
As to bands and other entertainment venues, you can't be telling me you live in the city to go to music concerts and football games.
For one thing, you could commute for that sort of thing. Consider the motorcycle conventions. People ride them from hundreds if not thousands of miles away just to all show up in the same place and have a convention. They could do it anywhere. One of the bigger ones "Sturgis" happens in Sturgis south Dakota every year and draws about half a MILLION people every year. Guess what the population of Sturgis is normally? About six thousand.
So I call bunk on your whole notion. It makes no sense. I know a lot of people that live in New York and they never go to plays, theater, shows, concerts, or anything. They just live there. And what portion of that city's population do you think actually does any of that stuff? A small fraction of the population does a lot of it. That and tourists. But most of the people that actually live there? Not so much.
Rent control.
Project housing.
EBT cards.
etc...
I really have no patience for these cherry picked statistical games.
Yes, the cities also generate a lot of revenue but most of that revenue comes the top 10 percent of the earning population in those cities. While a large portion of the city's population is heavily subsidized one way or the other.
The difference between rich and poor is a good deal flatter outside the cities. And the rate and nature of subsidization is very different.
Most subsidization of rural communities you would point to would be things like rural airports, roads, and telephone service. However, in most of these communities they don't actually need it. They just get it because their congressman felt he had to get his district something. People in those regions generally only want one thing... low taxes and being left alone. That's pretty much the only thing they ask from their politicians. And when that isn't going to happen because the political winds have blown otherwise, their politicians instead try to get their rural constituents SOMETHING for their money.
Over time his builds up to the subsidies you're talking about. But these are consequences of our political system... not logistical needs.
Airports are not expensive to set up and maintain... especially small airfields. A dirt runway is perfectly servicable if the airport doesn't see much traffic. And a simple asphalt runway is no big deal either. You see these on Pacific islands. Nothing wrong with them and they're not expensive. You can't land big planes on them but rural communities don't need big planes.
As to roads, the interstate system was set up mostly for military reasons after WW2. It is therefore a national expense and not anything specific to rural communities. The roads not part of the interstate do not need to be subsidized. Some of the might turn into dirt roads if you did that but without exception any road with so little traffic that that was an issue would naturally not be badly effected by the change.
As to telephone lines, this is something of a self fulfilling prophesy at this point. If you offer them something they will use it. If you shut down the copper line phone system in some of the really remote areas people would just start using radio repeaters. That is assuming the FCC doesn't block the move which is fairly typical of them.
TLDR? Rural areas could adapt very easily and change very little if the subsidies got cut off. if you did the same in the cities the whole pathetic mess would collapse in on itself.
If the mediated market sets prices and sets terms then they could control who participates.
More to the point, you're making it hard for me to just have a car which limits my independence.
Yes... someone makes a critical argument about a dumb idea and they're automatically luddites. You're unworthy of an opinion.
Complexity. the "vertical" transport system only goes to given floors in a given building. The roads go everywhere. I can drive from NYC to Los Angeles... and anywhere in between.
This whole congestion issue is a product of poor urban planning. We already have to heavily subsidize and incentivize city dwelling to keep the density this high. And these transport projects are just doubling down on the concept to pack people tighter and tighter for no apparent reason.
Just go live in the suburbs or some other place. Why do you need to live in that city? How tiny of an apartment are you willing to live in just for that privilege?
I question whether that is a real thing. If you consider our history, we didn't live in anything like this density. What is more, instinctually we have no bond with practically anyone in the city. They're just faces. They mean nothing to you. You don't know who they are and they have no lasting impact on your life. Any one of those faces could die tomorrow and you wouldn't even notice.
So tell me again about this herding instinct because it frankly sounds like bullshit.
Sure, but not the cars, taxis, buses, etc.
I'll never live anywhere that won't let me have a car or where for whatever reason cars are uneconomical. I just refuse to live like that. Some people like living in cities where only mass transit is practical. I really don't see why people pack themselves in that tightly. What is the point of doing that in the 21st century. In the pre-digital pre-airplane world I could see the point. But today? Why...
It makes no sense. Spread out, people. Its a big world. Doesn't anyone want to listen to music without having to worry about whether the neighbors will object? Doesn't anyone want a dog or a garden or just some space that is theirs?
I think the big cities are anachronisms at this point. I don't see why we bother with them. With the right communications we could run the same economy with employees distributed across the country pretty much where ever they wanted to live.
This is not an attack on cities... if you really like living cheek by jowl with people then by all means... pack yourself in. It just seems there are increasing problems with the idea.
Security/crime issues, education issues, political issues, transport issues, economic issues... just lots of stuff. I'm sure it has good qualities but I don't see how the pros outweigh the cons for any but the enthusiast.
count me out... this sort of stuff just makes me want to live on a remote tropical island and spend my days fishing.
just because family members share passwords doesn't mean its insecure. I know the password to most of my parents email and accounts. But so what... I won't do anything they wouldn't approve of and know them well enough to know what they would and would not approve of... so who cares.
And as to companies... most of them are small and medium sized businesses that have overlapping responsibilities. In those cases, SOME people know some passwords. But rarely does everyone in the office know all the passwords.
Its not unreasonable.
Actually, yes it does make it okay. Your aphorism refers to situations where people might not do it if it were not seen as acceptable.
This is not the case. Spying will happen. Nations will do it. They always have. They always will. Just as they will always make war. They will always play political games. There will always be taxes. And I am sorry to say we will all die.
Now, that doesn't mean I am accepting the status quo. This spying typically doesn't involve normal people like you. That is new. I would suggest we find ways to make it impractical for the spies to involve us in their games so they must instead focus on their actual job.
That is as good as it is going to get in this world.
As to holding the NSA to the law... you have no means to actually do that sans some sort of auditing agency which will either have to be as good at knowing what the NSA is is actually doing as the NSA is at hiding what it is doing.That is unlikely. What is more, your best method of actually doing that would be crippling the NSA so badly that they're incompetent. And that then endangers the US and the free world as a whole because the Chinese, Russians, etc will not stop spying simply because you've knee capped the NSA.
This is where these discussions become unproductive. You have some civil rights points which I agree with but you have to acknowledge the security, military, political, economic, and geo political realities here your argument has no place in this discussion. I do not mean that as a slight or as an attempt to invalidate your opinion. I am saying your argument must encompass these issues as well or we are not talking about the same thing.
Your civil rights point isn't big enough. Take a couple steps back and incorporate the other issues into the whole. I am not your enemy here. I just am highly dubious of claims we don't need to guard the city walls when we have a long history of barbarians climbing over them.
... and always has.
What makes the NSA revelations unacceptable is not what they're doing but how well they're doing it and how insidious they are at it.
THAT is the issue. Not that they're doing it. EVERYONE IS DOING IT.
The NSA is just really good at it.
Which actually means that what we should be doing is upgrading network security and generally being a good deal more paranoid about how we connect things. I have no interest in telling the NSA what they can and cannot do. For one thing they'll just lie to me if they find my restrictions inconvenient. They see that as their job in fact.
What we need to do is upgrade security. Then the NSA can do whatever they want and it simply won't be worth their time to collect data on people that are not actually threats.
I keep saying its impressive and I think that has to be remembered... that said...
http://www.newrepublic.com/art...
I hope the german experiment does well. But keep in mind that it is unlikely that it has gone flawlessly or that there are no consequences for making the shift.
sandbox the programming student's work.... just one option.