Because right now, same-sex couples aren't being treated any differently than any other non-married pair of people, or single person.
But they're certainly treated differently from married couples, which is the point you're attempting to sidestep.
Inheritance rules, hospital visitations, adoptions, tax reasons... and if you're going to argue that tax benefits to being married exist for the benefit of children, why do my wife and I -- who have no intention of ever procreating -- receive them, while our good friends who recently adopted a child (but whose marriage is not recognized by the State of Texas on account of their gender) don't?
I hope the Human Rights Campaign (which my wife and I donate regularly to) takes note of this and lowers Google's ranking over it.
Nobody from Google made that judgement; rather, TV Tropes' own users did... though the summary is certainly edited in such a way as to imply otherwise.
That said, the users from TV Tropes are self-censoring conservatively on account of not knowing exactly what Google dinged them for... which is clearly Not Cool.
Re:metaprogramming FTW!
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 3, Interesting
...which is why Clojure (by providing tools to interoperate with its host VM's class system and providing its own collections framework -- the latter tightly integrated with the language and supporting copy-on-write support to ease functional programming with immutable objects) has the potential to pull LISP into widespread, real-world use.
I've actually had a (Fortune 50) employer put Clojure to use for a tool parsing an extremely high-volume data feed in near-real-time; the project was a roaring success, and the choice of tools was no small factor.
Re:metaprogramming FTW!
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Speaking as someone who does a lot of real-world programming in non-LISPy languages, I don't think so.
I love Python, and it's considerably more capable than Java or C in terms of metaprogramming... but I can't tell you how many times I wish I could add a bit of syntactic sugar to replace an awkward construct built to work around Python's no-sharp-edges syntax. LISP-style macros may be abusable, but they're also beautiful, beautiful things.
... its assets are held to be used only in acceptable ways to advance that purpose,
That's your opinion, but not the law. [...] Or Progressive Insurance, which has that name not because they sell progressive insurance.
I believe the parent was referring to the corporate charter, not the name. That said -- charters have indeed been far less effectively limiting since 1819 or therebouts.
Just curious -- what is the car you speak of? An electric-assist velomobile, perhaps? Some of those (particularly the 3-wheeled models) look very interesting, though I'm a touch paranoid regarding rear visibility (living as I do in the land of heavy trucks as status symbols). Not that a flag can't do a great deal of good, of course.
(I've been going lower-speed these days -- a Bike Friday Tikit adjusted for riding upright, towing a large CycleTote for the occasional Costco run -- but the Wifely One is pondering an electric-assist conversion for her trike to make it our heavy cargo hauler after her Ma Ferguson is done)
To the contrary -- it makes you not current on modern applications of Darwin's work.
The short form is that "survival of the fittest" operates on multiple levels -- not just individuals, but communities. A community with less waste caused by feeding, raising and supporting individuals who are ultimately killed off by chance accidents[*] is more fit than one where individual "self preservation" measures make the group as a whole unsafe.
[*] - "chance", in this context, meaning "not tied to individual fitness"
I'm gonna guess you're one of those dicks that takes up a whole lane while riding. It's not the fucking biker's road, they aren't paying a vehicle tax. Get on the goddamn sidewalk.
Actually -- vehicle taxes pay for state-managed highways, not city streets. City streets are paid for by property taxes and sales taxes -- which cyclists pay at least as much of.
By the way -- get ticketed for a bicycle offense in many jurisdictions and the cycling equivalent to drivers's ed is TS101, curriculum developed by the LAB. Where do they tell you is the safest place to ride? Far enough into the rightmost safe and legal lane to prevent cars from passing you too close... which is probably exactly what you're calling "right in the middle of the road". (Mind you, cyclists sometimes have more options regarding "legal lanes" -- we're allowed to use improved shoulders in most states, for instance).
Riding on the sadewalk is actually one of the three largest causes of accidents, as folks pulling in and out of driveways can't see you there. (The other two are riding at night without lights and riding on the wrong side of the road).
Reading your state's transportation code might do some good. I can't speak for PA or AZ, but I can quote chapter-and-verse for TX.
I guess I still don't understand your logic. Driving a small car puts you at risk for every drunk/high driver out there, and protecting yourself from them is no different than taking up arms to protect yourself against someone who is going to unjustly do you harm.
There's a massive difference: Pointing a gun at a criminal invading my home principally increases risk to that criminal, a party who put themselves in harm's way by their own unjust actions.
Driving a heavy vehicle increases risk to everyone else on the road, by no fault of their own compared to the case where I chose a lighter vehicle.
You just have to learn to drive defensively. You just make sure you know what's happening further down the road so you have extra distance to stop. Most people don't do that, they drive paying attention to what's right in front of them. Depending on your speed you pay attention to what's happening anywhere from from a hundred yards to 1/2 a mile ahead of you.
That's risk mitigation, not risk elimination. It's necessary and responsible, to be sure -- but the risk that you're mitigating is risk that you created and imposed on third parties without their consent.
I grant that people know that they're taking some level of risk when they use a public roadway, and that implicit consent exists for the necessary risk imposed as a matter of using this shared resource. However, selecting a heavy vehicle -- as some people do -- principally because they believe its increased mass will "win" in a crash, killing the other vehicle's occupants rather than themselves -- is not "necessary" risk, but rather selfishness to the point of being willing to kill an innocent stranger for the sake of one's own self-preservation.
Moreover, it leads to an escalating effect -- wherein everyone ends up driving larger, heavier and deadlier vehicles (at higher speeds, as a risk compensation effect due to their increase in perceived safety), to the detriment of fuel efficiency, pedestrians and cyclists.
I was only speaking to the parent (a self-proclaimed New Yorker) about necessity, and didn't mean to make a global statement. (There was a fun article recently about a Vespa racing a Ferrari around New York and beating it handily... but New York is of course a special case).
That said, I don't agree that the statement you're making applies to the whole of the USA (even with exceptions... a list to which Boulder and Portland should also be added), at least if you're referring to folks who don't make lifestyle choices in a vacuum. There certainly are areas like yours, where a safe cycling route simply doesn't exist -- but a 10-mile radius around one's workplace (reasonable even for folks who are less than entirely fit or in a hurry if one is willing to consider electric assist) provides a whole lot of real estate to choose from, enough in most places to be outside of the "astoundingly expensive" area.
Does this mean factoring in your commute choices to other decisions as well? Absolutely. One of the reasons I didn't take a recent job offer very seriously was that it would have been a 2-hour commute by bike. Now, I could have made a habit of taking the motorcycle -- but I didn't trust myself to make a habit of spending time in the gym to make up for the missing commute, a lack of trust I still believe well-placed.:)
Anyhow, short story -- we're well beyond the scope of the grandparent, which was intended only to refer to New York, but:
Yes, I believe you when you say you don't have a safe commute route from where you live now.
I'm not sure I buy that it's only a minority who could set themselves up for safe cycle commuting within their current communities if it were a goal they were keeping in mind when choosing places to live and work, even within their existing budgetary constraints and without making tradeoffs they find personally unreasonable. Certainly, though, not everyone can do that right now. However...
The more people try making a human-powered commute a personal goal, the more roads will be built with usability in mind; accommodating a given volume of cyclists is much cheaper than the same volume of single-occupancy-vehicle drivers (not only in terms of roadway space but also parking -- a particularly huge expense in high-volume areas), so it's very much in a city's best interests to encourage if they can make an argument that such facilities will be used.
(I wonder what the individual who started this thread drives -- a velomobile, perhaps? Could even be an Optibike, as it's their marketing staff who put work into popularizing the "human-electric hybrid" phrase... that said, a velomobile is much more a "car" than an Optibike is).
If, like me, you put 1000km on your car in a few days for work driving all over the countryside, its nice to have a vehicle that performs predictably on the highway.
Yup. Low-speed and/or low-mass vehicles aren't for everyone; it's selecting something contrary strictly for the safety benefits that concerns me. If you need something big and heavy for your work, carry on -- but please be mindful when operating it.:)
I highly doubt this. Unless of course your collectivist attitude has totally killed off your survival instinct.
It's the first, foremost and primary reason my first motor vehicle was a motorcycle rather than a car -- I honestly was scared that I'd kill someone else -- and one among the many reasons I do most of my commuting by bicycle today. I'm happy to be judged by my actions rather than my words.
(Funny about "collectivist"; when I was younger, I considered elevating the well-being of others above myself part of being a good Christian, and modern western Christians certainly don't tend to consider themselves friends of political "collectivists").
That's a stand I've never seen before. What you're basically saying is that you consider it unethical to protect yourself. I don't get it. Self-protection has always been considered ethical. Why do you consider it unethical?
Taking up arms against someone who intends to unjustly do you physical harm? Absolutely and unquestionably ethical.
Creating a situation which risks the lives of innocent third parties, in the interests of furthering your own safety? That's much further into grey area.
Clearly not everything can be justified under the rubric of "self-protection". Setting traps to blindly kill intruders on your land isn't ethical (or legal). If I walked around in a suit of power armor which could electrocute people next to me, it surely wouldn't get a free pass as "self-protection", and I wouldn't be able to get off scott-free by general agreement that any event that fell out of it was "just an accident".
So -- I don't consider protecting myself unethical, in and of itself. I consider risking the lives of innocent third parties to be an action which requires serious and sober reflection, and don't trust myself sufficiently behind the wheel of a heavy vehicle to justify the act.
"Indirectly"? There's nothing indirect about a car crash.
As for my views regarding self-preservation, we would live in a far better world if they were shared. Let me make it clear -- I have no problem with killing in legitimate self-defense, or killing in the course of a just war... but choosing a heavier vehicle and increasing risk to the lives of innocent third parties just to decrease risk to yourself leads to a snowball effect where everyone is less safe.
You can point to some random Italian group I've never heard of, but I'll take the IIHS numbers any day -- being a group of insurance companies, they're the people who are actually laying down money on the matter.
If you get hit by another car, which driver will be more injured?
I'd rather take the risk of being killed by someone else than the risk of killing someone else. Moreover, I have serious misgivings regarding the morality of the contrary position.
Also, how fast does it achieve 100km/h? You don't need that in a city, but going to another city that's 300km away I sure like being able to drive near the speed limit (in my country it's 90-130 km/h depending on the road).
But how often do you do that? If (like me) you only leave town twice a year, it makes more sense to rent on those occasions.
If you read the parent the way their statement was clearly meant, it would have been more like the following:
"Nobody uses VMs to improve their systems' performance"...and it would be true. Your comment is interesting and useful, sure -- but accusing someone of "hogwash" based on a clear misreading is going a bit far.
That's great that you were able to work with Optibike to get more functionality out of your bike! Does it use Bluetooth for reporting battery health / charging status / etc.?
Exactly -- battery status, motor RPMs and temperature, throttle voltage; part of my original idea was to be able to generate a map for any given ride describing, among other things, how battery efficiency changed over time (ie. plotting against speed, cadence and grade -- the former two being independently collected with a Garmin 305) and where and how much I "cheated" with the motor:)
At one point I put together a tool for overlaying this metadata on top of ride videos; never used it myself, as I never got around to getting a helmet cam, but did briefly use it for a few brief videos from a fellow rider in Australia (with some drop-dead gorgeous scenery). That said, Garmin's cycle computers are astonishingly inaccurate; the same Aussie also has an iBike Pro, and the numbers from that are much, much better.
I visited Austin in 2003 but I don't recall seeing places where bikes were safe to get around. Maybe my memories were overpowered by visions of MOPAC and I-35 though... are there bike lanes on less crowded streets, and/or dedicated bike paths?
Nothing like Boulder, but it's a lot better than it was. There are some dedicated bike paths, though they aren't located too conveniently for me, and lots of sharrows and bike lanes. The latter are of widely varying quality -- not only in terms of their engineering and placement, but also usability for legal reasons; whether parking in the bike lanes is permitted is effectively controlled on a street-by-street basis.
That said, things aren't so bad -- there are a lot of cyclists on the road, particularly downtown, and drivers are accustomed to looking for us; more importantly (for the long term), we now have an active and effective local lobbying organization, the League of Bicycling Voters, which stays in close contact with the city council, planning offices, transportation departments, police department, etc.
We almost had a first-class north/south bicycle boulevard -- it was part of the city's long-term bicycle plan, and the necessary studies before getting started were well underway, when a dedicated set of business owners on the proposed route organized to shoot themselves (and their property values) in their respective feet by getting the plans scrapped. *sigh*.
Ahh, Boulder -- beautiful place! My first visit was to hang out at the Optibike offices and work on a library for interacting with their bikes' Bluetooth interface (they were building one for me at the time -- my Austin-based employer had been acquired by Dell, and Austin to Round Rock was outside my comfortable unassisted commute radius, so an ebike seemed just the thing).
Since then, I've gone to visit the city again on its own merits (location near some old friends in Denver also helps). The huge bus-and-bike lanes are indeed a thing to be envied -- though I wonder just how seasonal that rideshare number happens to be, given as y'all actually have real winters; it's a thing to be remembered here when we get a single day of snow.
I could pay $2000/mo in downtown Austin if I wanted to -- but I could also buy a 1200sqft condo for $150K, with a much lower payment than what you posit for rent.
My condo has a communal garden and a big shared lawn to play with our dogs -- and as a cycle commuter, I get my exercise in a more enjoyable way than spin class.
I don't mean to knock small-town life -- I've done that and it has its charms -- but if LA is your template for the idea of big-city living, you're selling a lot of other cities short.
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But they're certainly treated differently from married couples, which is the point you're attempting to sidestep.
Inheritance rules, hospital visitations, adoptions, tax reasons... and if you're going to argue that tax benefits to being married exist for the benefit of children, why do my wife and I -- who have no intention of ever procreating -- receive them, while our good friends who recently adopted a child (but whose marriage is not recognized by the State of Texas on account of their gender) don't?
Nobody from Google made that judgement; rather, TV Tropes' own users did... though the summary is certainly edited in such a way as to imply otherwise.
That said, the users from TV Tropes are self-censoring conservatively on account of not knowing exactly what Google dinged them for... which is clearly Not Cool.
...which is why Clojure (by providing tools to interoperate with its host VM's class system and providing its own collections framework -- the latter tightly integrated with the language and supporting copy-on-write support to ease functional programming with immutable objects) has the potential to pull LISP into widespread, real-world use.
I've actually had a (Fortune 50) employer put Clojure to use for a tool parsing an extremely high-volume data feed in near-real-time; the project was a roaring success, and the choice of tools was no small factor.
Speaking as someone who does a lot of real-world programming in non-LISPy languages, I don't think so.
I love Python, and it's considerably more capable than Java or C in terms of metaprogramming... but I can't tell you how many times I wish I could add a bit of syntactic sugar to replace an awkward construct built to work around Python's no-sharp-edges syntax. LISP-style macros may be abusable, but they're also beautiful, beautiful things.
I believe the parent was referring to the corporate charter, not the name. That said -- charters have indeed been far less effectively limiting since 1819 or therebouts.
See Jeff Radke's Speed Costs Power for a scholarly discussion on the subject.
Short answer -- not really. Which, for urban use, is pretty much fine.
Just curious -- what is the car you speak of? An electric-assist velomobile, perhaps? Some of those (particularly the 3-wheeled models) look very interesting, though I'm a touch paranoid regarding rear visibility (living as I do in the land of heavy trucks as status symbols). Not that a flag can't do a great deal of good, of course.
(I've been going lower-speed these days -- a Bike Friday Tikit adjusted for riding upright, towing a large CycleTote for the occasional Costco run -- but the Wifely One is pondering an electric-assist conversion for her trike to make it our heavy cargo hauler after her Ma Ferguson is done)
Oops, you're right -- parent was in DC, not New York. Reading comprehension FAIL.
To the contrary -- it makes you not current on modern applications of Darwin's work.
The short form is that "survival of the fittest" operates on multiple levels -- not just individuals, but communities. A community with less waste caused by feeding, raising and supporting individuals who are ultimately killed off by chance accidents[*] is more fit than one where individual "self preservation" measures make the group as a whole unsafe.
[*] - "chance", in this context, meaning "not tied to individual fitness"
I stand corrected; thanks for the response!
Actually -- vehicle taxes pay for state-managed highways, not city streets. City streets are paid for by property taxes and sales taxes -- which cyclists pay at least as much of.
By the way -- get ticketed for a bicycle offense in many jurisdictions and the cycling equivalent to drivers's ed is TS101, curriculum developed by the LAB. Where do they tell you is the safest place to ride? Far enough into the rightmost safe and legal lane to prevent cars from passing you too close... which is probably exactly what you're calling "right in the middle of the road". (Mind you, cyclists sometimes have more options regarding "legal lanes" -- we're allowed to use improved shoulders in most states, for instance).
Riding on the sadewalk is actually one of the three largest causes of accidents, as folks pulling in and out of driveways can't see you there. (The other two are riding at night without lights and riding on the wrong side of the road).
Reading your state's transportation code might do some good. I can't speak for PA or AZ, but I can quote chapter-and-verse for TX.
I guess I still don't understand your logic. Driving a small car puts you at risk for every drunk/high driver out there, and protecting yourself from them is no different than taking up arms to protect yourself against someone who is going to unjustly do you harm.
There's a massive difference: Pointing a gun at a criminal invading my home principally increases risk to that criminal, a party who put themselves in harm's way by their own unjust actions.
Driving a heavy vehicle increases risk to everyone else on the road, by no fault of their own compared to the case where I chose a lighter vehicle.
You just have to learn to drive defensively. You just make sure you know what's happening further down the road so you have extra distance to stop. Most people don't do that, they drive paying attention to what's right in front of them. Depending on your speed you pay attention to what's happening anywhere from from a hundred yards to 1/2 a mile ahead of you.
That's risk mitigation, not risk elimination. It's necessary and responsible, to be sure -- but the risk that you're mitigating is risk that you created and imposed on third parties without their consent.
I grant that people know that they're taking some level of risk when they use a public roadway, and that implicit consent exists for the necessary risk imposed as a matter of using this shared resource. However, selecting a heavy vehicle -- as some people do -- principally because they believe its increased mass will "win" in a crash, killing the other vehicle's occupants rather than themselves -- is not "necessary" risk, but rather selfishness to the point of being willing to kill an innocent stranger for the sake of one's own self-preservation.
Moreover, it leads to an escalating effect -- wherein everyone ends up driving larger, heavier and deadlier vehicles (at higher speeds, as a risk compensation effect due to their increase in perceived safety), to the detriment of fuel efficiency, pedestrians and cyclists.
I was only speaking to the parent (a self-proclaimed New Yorker) about necessity, and didn't mean to make a global statement. (There was a fun article recently about a Vespa racing a Ferrari around New York and beating it handily... but New York is of course a special case).
That said, I don't agree that the statement you're making applies to the whole of the USA (even with exceptions... a list to which Boulder and Portland should also be added), at least if you're referring to folks who don't make lifestyle choices in a vacuum. There certainly are areas like yours, where a safe cycling route simply doesn't exist -- but a 10-mile radius around one's workplace (reasonable even for folks who are less than entirely fit or in a hurry if one is willing to consider electric assist) provides a whole lot of real estate to choose from, enough in most places to be outside of the "astoundingly expensive" area.
Does this mean factoring in your commute choices to other decisions as well? Absolutely. One of the reasons I didn't take a recent job offer very seriously was that it would have been a 2-hour commute by bike. Now, I could have made a habit of taking the motorcycle -- but I didn't trust myself to make a habit of spending time in the gym to make up for the missing commute, a lack of trust I still believe well-placed. :)
Anyhow, short story -- we're well beyond the scope of the grandparent, which was intended only to refer to New York, but:
(I wonder what the individual who started this thread drives -- a velomobile, perhaps? Could even be an Optibike, as it's their marketing staff who put work into popularizing the "human-electric hybrid" phrase... that said, a velomobile is much more a "car" than an Optibike is).
Yup. Low-speed and/or low-mass vehicles aren't for everyone; it's selecting something contrary strictly for the safety benefits that concerns me. If you need something big and heavy for your work, carry on -- but please be mindful when operating it. :)
It's the first, foremost and primary reason my first motor vehicle was a motorcycle rather than a car -- I honestly was scared that I'd kill someone else -- and one among the many reasons I do most of my commuting by bicycle today. I'm happy to be judged by my actions rather than my words.
(Funny about "collectivist"; when I was younger, I considered elevating the well-being of others above myself part of being a good Christian, and modern western Christians certainly don't tend to consider themselves friends of political "collectivists").
Taking up arms against someone who intends to unjustly do you physical harm? Absolutely and unquestionably ethical.
Creating a situation which risks the lives of innocent third parties, in the interests of furthering your own safety? That's much further into grey area.
Clearly not everything can be justified under the rubric of "self-protection". Setting traps to blindly kill intruders on your land isn't ethical (or legal). If I walked around in a suit of power armor which could electrocute people next to me, it surely wouldn't get a free pass as "self-protection", and I wouldn't be able to get off scott-free by general agreement that any event that fell out of it was "just an accident".
So -- I don't consider protecting myself unethical, in and of itself. I consider risking the lives of innocent third parties to be an action which requires serious and sober reflection, and don't trust myself sufficiently behind the wheel of a heavy vehicle to justify the act.
Condo in downtown Austin. Comfortable 10-mile bike ride to work, train a few blocks away.
Given how few folks in New York own cars, I find your claim of "necessity" unconvincing.
"Indirectly"? There's nothing indirect about a car crash.
As for my views regarding self-preservation, we would live in a far better world if they were shared. Let me make it clear -- I have no problem with killing in legitimate self-defense, or killing in the course of a just war... but choosing a heavier vehicle and increasing risk to the lives of innocent third parties just to decrease risk to yourself leads to a snowball effect where everyone is less safe.
You can point to some random Italian group I've never heard of, but I'll take the IIHS numbers any day -- being a group of insurance companies, they're the people who are actually laying down money on the matter.
Have a look at the IIHS crash test ratings for the Smart Fortwo.
It's modern engineering features that make for safer cars -- not just pure mass.
I'd rather take the risk of being killed by someone else than the risk of killing someone else. Moreover, I have serious misgivings regarding the morality of the contrary position.
But how often do you do that? If (like me) you only leave town twice a year, it makes more sense to rent on those occasions.
If you read the parent the way their statement was clearly meant, it would have been more like the following:
"Nobody uses VMs to improve their systems' performance" ...and it would be true. Your comment is interesting and useful, sure -- but accusing someone of "hogwash" based on a clear misreading is going a bit far.
Exactly -- battery status, motor RPMs and temperature, throttle voltage; part of my original idea was to be able to generate a map for any given ride describing, among other things, how battery efficiency changed over time (ie. plotting against speed, cadence and grade -- the former two being independently collected with a Garmin 305) and where and how much I "cheated" with the motor :)
At one point I put together a tool for overlaying this metadata on top of ride videos; never used it myself, as I never got around to getting a helmet cam, but did briefly use it for a few brief videos from a fellow rider in Australia (with some drop-dead gorgeous scenery). That said, Garmin's cycle computers are astonishingly inaccurate; the same Aussie also has an iBike Pro, and the numbers from that are much, much better.
Nothing like Boulder, but it's a lot better than it was. There are some dedicated bike paths, though they aren't located too conveniently for me, and lots of sharrows and bike lanes. The latter are of widely varying quality -- not only in terms of their engineering and placement, but also usability for legal reasons; whether parking in the bike lanes is permitted is effectively controlled on a street-by-street basis.
That said, things aren't so bad -- there are a lot of cyclists on the road, particularly downtown, and drivers are accustomed to looking for us; more importantly (for the long term), we now have an active and effective local lobbying organization, the League of Bicycling Voters, which stays in close contact with the city council, planning offices, transportation departments, police department, etc.
We almost had a first-class north/south bicycle boulevard -- it was part of the city's long-term bicycle plan, and the necessary studies before getting started were well underway, when a dedicated set of business owners on the proposed route organized to shoot themselves (and their property values) in their respective feet by getting the plans scrapped. *sigh*.
Ahh, Boulder -- beautiful place! My first visit was to hang out at the Optibike offices and work on a library for interacting with their bikes' Bluetooth interface (they were building one for me at the time -- my Austin-based employer had been acquired by Dell, and Austin to Round Rock was outside my comfortable unassisted commute radius, so an ebike seemed just the thing).
Since then, I've gone to visit the city again on its own merits (location near some old friends in Denver also helps). The huge bus-and-bike lanes are indeed a thing to be envied -- though I wonder just how seasonal that rideshare number happens to be, given as y'all actually have real winters; it's a thing to be remembered here when we get a single day of snow.
Not all cities are LA, SFO, NY...
I could pay $2000/mo in downtown Austin if I wanted to -- but I could also buy a 1200sqft condo for $150K, with a much lower payment than what you posit for rent.
My condo has a communal garden and a big shared lawn to play with our dogs -- and as a cycle commuter, I get my exercise in a more enjoyable way than spin class.
I don't mean to knock small-town life -- I've done that and it has its charms -- but if LA is your template for the idea of big-city living, you're selling a lot of other cities short.