There’s a middle ground. I’m in a true small city of 10K and I love it. The city is all of 10 miles square. It has all the basics movie theater, most chains, etc. The city isn’t walkable, but it is bikeable and I’ve found that to be good enough. I grew up in a city like this and I wanted that for my kid. We still drive into the local metro maybe once a month, but I don’t ever need to go into the metro for basics.

But I’m not talking about moving fuck all no where. I’m talking about expanding the range impact of cities. We got this way because people all moved to cities. If people spread like a wave away from cities, then the power impact decreases. My town is went from a Christian stronghold where you couldn’t drink and everything was closed on Sunday to a place where a Republicans have to battle for local spots and most highly religious laws have been repealed.

Im halfway between 2 major cities. One is the major metro and the other a mid-size city. It used to be very red going 30 minutes away from either, but now we have a sea of purple. And areas are only getting bluer.

Everywhere in GA outside of like 4 cities is bumbfuck, but being I proximity of cities and growing small towns into midsized cities is the way to win. When I was a kid my hometown was bumfuck, GA. Now it’s a major city (for GA. I mean it’s sub-1 million by a lot) and solidly blue when it used to be very red.

We won’t see an AOC type for a long time, but a moderate republican (not a Manchin type) is a way better platform than any republican.

Public school? You mean that place that children are mandated to be? Also you forgot government. It was a whole thing. So if you’re a Muslim and you want to be a part of the French government, then I hope you don’t have any attachment to those head scarves. There are other religions ornamentation, but the head scarves one was the last one I saw. And whether school or a DMV clerk, it’s dumb.

Also noticed I used two different labels for France rather than China. I think China is fascist with what they’re doing. France is xenophobic with what they’re doing.

Honestly, I feel the same about both: it’s absurd. With France I get the “freedom from religion” spiel from some Frenchman, but it’s veiled xenophobia to me. When you ban a kind of clothing but only for one group of people, that’s basically the definition. Here, it’s just fascism. At least the Chinese people are speaking out.

It’s a problem because of free movement. I live in GA which us now gloriously purple. Do you know the biggest problem GA has right now? The homesteading movement. A lot of urbanites are spreading from cities. My county (which I just move to lol) was so close to flipping blue they split it in two. And that doesn’t matter because I’ve seen democrat leaning people from the city movement even further past me deeper into rural GA.

To me, this is why they’re fighting municipal broadband. I actually fucking hate cities. I’ve lived in the heart or Atlanta, of DC and more. I hate it. I’d rather a real small town (not bullshit suburbs). I can live here because the town has city sponsored fiber internet. It has made the whole ass area a magnet for tech people. Locals hate it. The city loves that sweet, sweet tax money. And it’s like a virus prompting neighboring cities to give it a whirl. But you get just a drop of city folk to move and suddenly a whole district is blue.

That’s why this widening divide is a horrible problem. I know a lot of people like me, liberal city haters who are chained to cities for jobs. Some people move because they can, but a lot more people are moving because they have to. My sister lives in bumfuck, GA because that’s where she can afford rent and that is a stealth problem for the GOP IMO. Kids are going to show up and gentrify their small towns as broadcast rolls out and remote work is more common

The issue for the GOP is millennials are not getting more conservative as they age. IIRC it’s like a 55/45 split in dems favor and it’s gets more starkly blue the younger you go. If this trend continues of young people not getting more conservative, the GOP is beyond fucked.

Let’s just be simple about this: pensions and oth3r old age support. Who pays for those? Young people. If young people have to support a lot of old people, you’re gonna have a bad time. Everyone. The young people have have larger amounts taken out of their pay and old people who get less support because there are just literally not enough resources. And because old people outnumber young people young are pressured more and more under democracy to give more to older people.

That is only one terrible thing from demographic collapse.

Honestly, if everyone woman only had 2 children that would still reduce the population without causing demographic collapse which is what Japan is undergoing. A rapid decline in population creates misery for everyone. You really what a birth rate that hovers around 2 for gentle population decline.

Football? American Football has no restrictions on gender, it’s just that no woman can compete after puberty truly sets in. What that guys says is true about physical sports. Women can’t compete and never could. I can’t think of a single sport where a woman could outcompete a man in a physical sense. Even something like gymnastics, I think men still overcome the natural female advantage that comes from being small.

Chess from what I recall created a woman’s division because of the systematic biases and pressures girls faced. However, if I’m recalling correctly, it’s not particularly weird for a woman to complete in the open division. It’s just not a welcoming place for woman, so beginners often start in the women’s division. With that in mind I don’t see why transpeople shouldn’t be allowed. They wouldn’t be welcome much either in the open division, but also I’m not sure they’d be welcome in the women’s division either, so it’s kind of a wash.

I’m pretty sure zoning laws are outside of the Fed reach. They can carrot and stick via funding requirements, but mediated expansion has shown that states can be very petty if they don’t want to comply. I wouldn’t want the feds to set the tempo for zoning anyway. They just can’t be aware of every area’s needs. It’s not a one size fits all situation. I’ve seen housing go up fast and the result is just a shitshow because the infrastructure doesn’t keep up with the growth. I’ve seen dead cities where nothing wad built and only the people who got there first could afford a place to live, so effectively you had to leave town for everything because no retail workers could afford to live nearby. There’s a middle ground between the two and no way will the feds know how to rate limit how housing gets built anywhere. Housing to me is a local election problem because people don’t vote in local elections and then when the problem gets too bad, only nimbys cam live and vote there. Those places always collapse eventually (unless the population is very well off, see: SF), but when people get a chance to move back in they gotta remember to vote for local people who align their values.

I don’t know anything about Singapore besides what a friend who grew up there said. She came here to the US as an adult. Tried very hard to stay and worked very hard to bring her parents over to the US. Very confusing given that she had nothing but great things to say about the place and got very mad if I said that the US might be better in any small way. She had a lot of complaints about the US and many I found unfair even if many were totally fair.

So then I asked her: do you think that I a black woman could do what you did here in the US in Singapore. And she skipped over my question and continued her rant about how great Singapore is. That’s all I personally need to know. Singapore probably is great, but only if you’re the right kind of person, the acceptable person. I get the feeling that she and her family weren’t those kinds of people and that’s why she left and she’s pulling her family here to the US.

In a lot of areas voting isn’t easy. It’s something you have to work to do. Why stand in the freezing November air worried you’re gonna be late for work and lose your job if you’re not excited? Why do it in the morning? Because maybe you’re me in your 20s and don’t have a car and you can actually make it to when the polls open in the morning but not the evening with how the schedules run.

Why go up to the election office and force them to take your mail in ballet after it was rejected twice because your signature “didn’t match” if you’re not excited?

Why finagle a time in your day when you can stand in the cold for an hour without your baby if you’re not excited?

Why stand until you want to literally because the line was way longer than you thought it was and you didn’t bring a chair this time if you’re not excited?

All this happened to me over the course of me voting in my adult life. This doesn’t count how voting locations constantly move on me for reasons unknown. It’s not that the voting location moved. For some reason I was just assigned a different location. The times where I’ve been given the run around about where I should vote. The times where I tried to vote, but whoops all the machines are broken and I decided that I didn’t want to wait for a repair which could take hours.

Voting is hard. It can be a breezy affair, but I’ve never experienced that in presidential elections or midterms, only really in special state elections or pure local elections. The system is definitely rigged against you and you have to ask yourself if it’s worth fighting. Is denying my kid’s time with me worth this? Is enduring this strain on my body worth this? Is the mental energy when I’m tired from work worth this? I get what you’d say no even if I always say yes

Not when it can take an hour or more to vote in some places. In one county I used to live in, it was common to break a chair to sit on in order to vote, because you were going to be there a while. Even in my much better district with more sites, etc, it took me standing for 30mins in order to early vote during the last midterm. Absolutely not would I bring even a single child to that. Not in the cold and outside since elections happen in November.

It’s hard. I took out a loan against my 401K to do it when rates were rock bottom. I’m glad I did because at the time I considered just waiting until the pandemic was over, but that would have priced me put of this town if I did that.

I had such a raw disgust reading that headline. I wondered what fucking state would do that. Then I got to the end. So Italy is just speed running to open fascism. That sucks.

I don’t believe this will last. AirBnBs are crashing in non-tourist towns because people don’t have money. I firmly believe the remote revolution will push people out from cities and build up small towns so that work that has to be done in a physical location can thrive too. Small towns have the opposite problem of city centers where they have too much housing.

I picked up a house in one of these areas. It was I’m the 3rd ring of a metro and thus too rural for most. I bought right when the first Starbucks got finished and now they have expensive “luxury” apartments like crazy. I’m pleading with my sister to take a house one more ring out because she has a chance to get a house before they’re too expensive. I got my house for 200K, but it’s worth over double that and it’s only been 2 years crazy.

To say I’m within an hour’s drive of a big city I rarely go’s because this city was a small town first not a suburb, so it has all you need really and they build responsibility knowing that most of the population has no taste for going more than the next small town over.

I feel like movement back to these small towns is the future. The internet will let us keep jobs there.

I’m not sure what they expected. An EU country (I can’t remember if it was Spain or Italy) tried this and Google just left. Then the news outlets begged for the law to be repealed. Google has a monopoly on search. If people can’t find you there, you’re gonna have a bad time because of your traffic free fall.

At least they gave us Rocko to let us know what adulting would be like before we got there.