Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities. You can decide you don't care about any of that, but understand that type of that decision will ripple through to future generations, e.g. your grandkids will be less educated.
The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back. Will the cycle repeat itself?
>Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities
But it won't "all else equal", there are so many variables at play here that it's meaningless to talk about a hypothetical "all else equal" scenario. Also there have been so many successful people who were born and raised in what you'd call "less competitive" areas.
>The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back.
What's ironic about people going to places chasing things they desire? Big cities and small towns offer different things, and those things value differently to different people. The people who are leaving small towns chasing after opportunities and the people who want to move back to small towns from big cities are obviously at different stages in their lives and value different things.
> Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities
That’s absolute horse shit.
And whilst I don’t have any evidence to sprout, I think that those from more diverse and unusual backgrounds are better adapted for modern life. Growing up in a ‘competitive’ city is a licence for blandness (opinions mine)
Agreed, being from a city is a replacement for a personality for some. If you've ever met someone from NYC you know it because they tell you about it within 2 minutes of meeting them.
There are pros and cons to growing up in a smaller metro. While having access to top tier culture and internships are great, there’s also a grueling competition to stand out.
In SV, the pressure on kids and parents seems extreme even at the median. While there are less opportunities and resources overall in a small metro, it’s all available to an ambitious child.
In the end, at least some small town kids are out-sprinting the “competitive city” kids and taking their loot back home. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all these articles about it.
Maybe true of typical residents of said locations, on average.
But tech transplants by and large should not be considered typical residents.
What you say definitely does have elements of truth to it, but I’d wager the effects of parenting and income are, on average, much larger than your direct setting when it comes to succeeding beyond the median of their peer group.
The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out
Doesn't seem like you know much about small towns. I grew up in one. The educated people are there because they want to be. That's sort of by definition, and follows from the fact that they're educated -- they have been somewhere else (you don't get "educated" in a small town, not in the way you mean), and they chose to go there.
The ones who want to leave are the uneducated ones, who would love to have an opportunity to get "educated" in that sense.
Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities
Not everyone wants to be part of this rat race you're talking about, nor do they want their children to be. Having ended up at FAANG (despite my small town upbringing), I talk with a lot of young people (interns, new hires) who are products of this rat race. By and large my impression is that:
1. They haven't lived much. They haven't done many things. They've been too busy in their competitive classes in competitive schools trying to get into competitive schools.
2. They don't seem very happy. They tend to be high strung. Nervous seeming. Scared of failure.
that decision will ripple through to future generations, e.g. your grandkids will be less educated.
How would you even know this? How do you know parental education status isn't the real factor?
You and I share some similar observations but come away with very different interpretations.
"The educated people are there because they want to be" the parents, sure, but their children are there because the parents chose for them.
"1. [children from big cities] haven't lived much. They haven't done many things." Are you seriously suggesting that there are more things to do in Boise than Manhattan?
"2. They don't seem very happy." That certainly described everyone I knew who wasn't a cultist in Salt Lake City.
In my experience, the ones who want to leave are the smart kids who find their surroundings culturally stifling and intellectually decrepit.
Are you seriously suggesting that there are more things to do in Boise than Manhattan?
It's not about how many things there are to do. It's about what life experiences you've had.
I'm not talking museums here. I'm talking working tough jobs, dealing with addiction or death (in family or acquaintances, having a job, living on your own, etc etc. The kids I'm talking about have had very sheltered lives.
That certainly described everyone I knew who wasn't a cultist in Salt Lake City.
We may have different definitions of "small town". Salt Lake City is unique in many ways and not representative of rural or rust belt small towns.
All small towns are not created equal, imagining they are is going to lead you to invalid conclusions.
Desirable towns popular with outdoor recreation enthusiasts are generally not suffering any sort of widespread brain drain issue (if anything, they have the opposite issue - too many highly educated people, not enough of the people to do the jobs lower on the ladder).
They have about nothing in common with some rural town in the Great Plains that's been slowly depopulating for a century.
Shared family environment (which by definition includes where your parents choose to live) has near zero impact on long term adult outcomes. This has been confirmed again and again by countless twin studies.
Do you mean twin studies where the twins are separated at birth and raised by different parents? This is a rare thing for parents to do so I think you are exaggerating when you say there are "countless" twin studies saying family environments don't matter? I would be surprised if there were more than a few such studies?
And yet, we know anecdotally that certain places produce far more than their share of "talented" people, so I don't think those twin studies are complete or conclusive.
That's just the genetic heritability of intelligence and other personality factors. High IQ, high achieving people are disproportionately attracted to certain job markets. Those people tend to have high IQ kids. Those high IQ kids tend to grow up and become high achieving adults. The outcomes would largely be the same whether those same kids grew up in Palo Alto or Peoria. Don't confuse correlation for causation.
Similarly, I'd be virtually certain that children who grew up with a Tesla as their family car are much more likely to attend elite universities. That doesn't mean that Elon Musk has solved the problem of getting your kids into Harvard. It's just that Teslas are expensive, and therefore rich, high-achieving families are more likely to own them.
You're not addressing the thing I was talking about.
Take for instance the bevy of amazing mathematicians produced by early 20th century Budapest. That wasn't just genetics, it was the culture of the city and the teachers those people had. Likewise you could look at the rise of soccer greatness in Rio; that wasn't genetic, it was due to features of life in Rio and a culture of passion for soccer.
IQ is less important and more malleable than you think. It should be called nutrition and nurturing quotient instead.
Or maybe people can take responsibility for their kids rather than forget them with an underpaid, under-motivated teachers. You can cram 12 years of public school bullshit in 4-6 years, and have 6-8 years to teach them useful things like programming and construction.
As a kid who graduated with a class of 28 students in rural small town America, I’d say we had a disproportionately high number of kids go to the Ivies, Stanford, or the Academies. I never once felt handicapped. Resumes look pretty good when you letter in every sport, star in every play, and run student government. And today I’m raising my children in small town America.
Is Israel that much different? It seems like if you're committed to empowering all BIPOC you would not restrict their access to the weaponry needed to defend their homelands.
Is this some kind of a bad joke? Because some countries have BIPOC if they want nukes to not hinder their empowerment nobody should intervene.
If all the countries in MENA have nukes, this would be terrible for everybody, it would exponentially rise the risk of nuclear warheads being used.
Israel is not governed by religious law, and has full rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ. Its basis for most policy is a blend of social democracy and neoliberalism. Its military is purely defensive. I cannot say any of those things about Iran in good faith.
Also, the what-about-ism is not a great defense of anything geopolitical btw.
Not governed by religious law? 9000 Israelis get married in neighbouring countries each year because their relationship wouldn't satisfy the Orthodox rabbis who run the show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel
What do you mean? Can a Senegalese become a citizen of the USA (or of almost any country on Earth) without a lengthy naturalization? If not, is the USA discriminatory.
Of course the right of return is just for Jews. Every country gets to set its own rules for citizenship. But Israeli citizens enjoy a reasonable democracy, with advanced civil rights, and respect human rights of others, too. Of course not at 100% but way better then all of their neighbors
Think of judaism as ethnicity. You can be an atheist jew and be granted Israeli citizenship. Israel is the historic homeland of the jewish culture/people.
I'd liken it to something like Country X giving special immigration privileges if you have ancestry from country X.
They don't deny citizenship if you're palestinian, granted it's as difficult if you were trying to get citizenship coming from any other country
In general, I am opposed to ethnostates and granting nationality based on what bloodline you come from. I think it is ironic that there is a right of "return" for Jewish people, but no such right of return for people who were displaced during the Nakba.
I'll be honest - I'm also opposed to "ethnostates" in general, and would much prefer the world moved beyond looking at each other based on ethnicity.
But given the fact that Israel was kind of explicitly created because the world hasn't moved past looking at ethnicity, I'm not sure what my solution is. I'm an Israeli
Jew - I know that if Israel wouldn't exist, my life would be far more dangerous. And that's not a hypothetical - a huge chunk of my family were murdered for no other reason than being Jewish. The only guarantee I have that this won't happen again is that there is a strong Jewish state.
Do I like that the world is like this? No! Not at all. But that's the way the world is. And considering that most other groups do have effectively their own countries, I don't see a reason that Jews shouldn't also have their own country.
(This is all talking about the concept of an "ethnostate" in specific, not getting into the question of whether Israel being founded in the location it is was wrong in the first place - the arguments above would work just as well if Israel had been founded anywhere else.)
Sorry, what was this about "not being governed by religious law"?
> full rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ
So not full rights for religious minorities. Moreover, conversion is quite difficult and the process is made much easier if you have a parent who is Jewish (which generally forms an ethnic group). Only recently were non-Orthodox conversions recognized for this purpose: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/world/middleeast/israel-j...
ie. specifically on the basis of your ethnicity &/or national origin.
I find it hard to take seriously claims of equal & full rights for minorities when those rights require converting to a different religion or being of a different ethnicity in order to apply to you.
It's important for people to understand that Judaism is a minority religion that has been historically persecuted. There is nothing wrong with working to preserve the tradition and culture, and if it ends in a small amount of ethnic homogeneity then it has to be accepted as necessary, especially since "Jewish" is both a religion and an ethnicity, so in the current historical context failing to preserve Judaism means failing to preserve Jews.
Empowering BIPOC isn't about expecting all the same things. It's about giving BIPOC the resources they need for their ethnic and cultural self-determination.
> There is nothing wrong with working to preserve the tradition and culture, and if it ends in a small amount of ethnic homogeneity then it has to be accepted as necessary
"a small amount of ethnic homogeneity" seems like a deliberate minimization.
Israel is an apartheid state that has been persecuting based on ethnicity and religion for decades.
What do you think would happen if the US and all of Europe completely pulled out of the Middle East? Would Israel stay the size it is now? If not, can you really say it's "purely defensive"?
I am not sure what you are implying. Can you elaborate? Are you saying Israel would go attack its neighbors and seize land? From Egypt? Jordan? Lebanon? If so, that's an absurd proposition with absolutely no geopolitical data points to back it.
I don't think it's too absurd to imply that a country would expand into weaker neighboring countries if it could. One example where the US has intervened is Egypt -- without the US the Sinai Peninsula would surely be part of Israel right now. So yes I'd say it would seize land from Egypt, as it already has.
If the US and Europe pulled out of the Middle East it would be too chaotic to predict anything. It depends on the presence of other superpowers (Russia, China) and the pecking order that would be established between the regional powers (Turkey, Israel, Iran, Egypt + the Sunni world).
Also, "pulling out" is too simplistic. There are not only troops on the ground, but also military bases, joint exercises, weapon sales, commercial ties, industrial ties, scientific collaborations, cultural influences, and so on and so forth. Short of disappearing from the globe the US cannot just 'pull out'
It's understandable. He's routinely allowed right-wing radicals such as Abby Martin and Gavin McInnes and Dave Rubin on his show. I personally would stop using Spotify if they started promoting such hateful content. Paradox of tolerance, etc.
> In September 2015, Martin launched The Empire Files, an interview and documentary series. She has hosted guests including Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Richard D. Wolff, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.
I can't tell whether you're running a satire account.
According to the law they have to provide a price list, you're probably just asking for the wrong thing. No one's going to go through the price list and translate what you're looking for into medical jargon. My experience has been that you can usually find a list of direct-to-consumer prices online.
Paid ~$5k/m 2br rent in NYC. $225/m 10x10 storage unit to go mobile this year. So quite a bit less in many cases, especially folks living with less in urban environments, but yes, a whole house, vehicles, etc.. will be pricier to store.
