admiralteal

Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?

Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.

Particularly goofy because ChatGPT is hardly the only bot and you can use the free version of e.g., Claude and get those better results now, for free.

Or any of the nearly-unavoidable-because-it's-a-monopoly evil big corpos like Amazon. Chase handles their credit card and definitely significant other financial parts for them.

I'll never argue with someone who wants that true, rural/countryside/homestead life. The appeal is there for me too, even if my own calculus says the cons wildly outweigh the pros.

I'm pretty skeptical you're going to find it 5 miles from a healthy town, though.

Big cities let people find their community because therefore a lot of different ones to try.

You should read the horror stories from so many of those NYC co-ops. Some would make even the most jackbooted HOA presidents blush.

I don't really think this is unique to cities of some specific size. I definitely agree that it's going to be harder to find a perfect fit in a smaller town. But it's also harder to meet people at all in an anonymous metropolis where you have to work 75 hours a week just to make rent.

If you take away anything from what I have written, it's that I think this dichotomy is bad. We need a compromise. The lowrise old-world city is what worked for our species for at least 5 millenia -- it's only in the past couple of decades we decided to rethink it and force a schism between the fake rural aesthetic of the suburbs and the productive, efficient downtown -- and in so doing we destroyed both city life (by making it ungodly expensive thanks to the immense financial drain the suburbs and lack of continuing infill development represent) and the peaceful countryside life (by putting to death small towns in favor of the interstate highway big box store commercial strip). The only lifestyle that has weathered and still works pretty well in this day and age is the homesteader life, and to say that way of living is not for everyone is definitely an understatement.

Also known as a SASSS

If you put a TV in a Faraday cage that blocked the relevant radio spectrum, would there be no static on it? I expected the answer to be a quick Google, but it wasn't.

This entire question is completely distorted by the poor-qualtiy postwar urbanism that is rampant everywhere.

The reality is, there shouldn't be much difference. Lowrise cities -- 2-4 story buildings/townhomes, small apartments, walkable neighborhoods/mass transit, corner groceries, all that stuff that people think can ONLY exist in big cities should be the norm for nearly all towns.

I don't think many people would describe a place like, say, Bordeaux as a "big city". 250kish people in 50 square kilometers is hardly Paris. It's a small city, or maybe a big town. And it has everything you can want from a city and more. Shows, museums, beautiful multimodal neighborhoods, a robust tram system, restaurants and cafes and bars. All this kind of stuff.

The problem is we've all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC. Or else we've been trained to think of a "city" like the bullshit they have in Texas, where it combines all the worst features of those island suburbs/car dependence with all the worst parts of city (crazy prices, noise, exposure to nearby-feeling crime, etc).

While a lot of the US big cities are trying to sort out the knots they've tied themselves in, your best bet to find beautiful, livable urban-ism is in those much smaller <500k cities that don't even show up on the typical lists of cities. Especially if they are historic, since the more historic a place is the less likely it got bulldozed in the 60s to make room for more highways (destroying local neighborhoods in the process) Some kind of a big university also tends to be a plus, though it's a mixed bag. Check for places that do not have an interstate carving through the middle of the city.

We can only get the amenities of modern urbanism in the biggest metropolises these days because of how badly the "suburban experiment" has distorted and destroyed our community life. And there can only be so many metropolises, so they've naturally turned absurdly expensive. People can't afford to live in them because of how much people want to live in them. So they settle for suburbia, since financial poverty feels way worse than poverty of community.

Outside of the US, you can get a 10k or less electric mini-van, mini-truck, or mini-car which would serve 90% of most peoples' needs. Most US trips are under 3 miles after all and giant fast luxurious vehicles for those bike-range trips is just totally silly.

Meanwhile the cheapest new car in the US is what, a Mitsubishi hatchback for $18k? It's ridiculous. The US Automakers are in a tacit conspiracy to squeeze us as hard as they can by refusing to sell anything affordable -- by inflating sizes and bloating features to justify way higher MSRPs. Meanwhile the French have access to cheap ICEs like the Skoda Citygo and even ultralight city EVs like the Citroen Ami for half that price while still being easily 90% as capable for most people.

Or for roughly the same price as that bottom-of-the-market US ICE car you can get a totally workable EV like the Dacia Spring.

The US subsidizes huge vehicles in a million pointless ways. I absolutely refuse to believe that vehicle inflation is just caused by some cultural woo. It's mostly just that we create giant roads, giant parking spots, giant highways, and have automakers that intentionally go as big as the market can bear because bigger means more money. And sprinkle on some bullshit tax loopholes and state agencies/NHSTA being ultra-conservative and you have a disaster. Smaller cars thrive in the old world because the old world doesn't make it as convenient as possible to have a goddamn road yacht. They'd go big too, but it would just be a nightmare dealing with those huge cars because their governments don't prioritize making way for them in every way possible.

And that's not even getting into the frankly fine $2-3k EVs you can get in China. This is all just Europe.

All of those headings are single words.

Taste is subjective, but mine says either color the whole heading or don't color it at all.

They are very useful for outlining and similar "where do I start" writing projects. They help break the dam and just get some damn words on the screen, at which point it's often easy to continue and flesh things out to a complete thought.