It feels pretty similar, but more chill. Distances are shorter. The sky doesn't fill with smoke for a week every year. The weather is much more interesting -- honestly I got really bored with Bay Area weather after 15 years. I even like the heat in the summer, in short intervals. There are enough tech people here to be interesting, but not enough that a random person you meet on the street is likely to be in tech.
One thing I appreciate is that there is tons of building happening. Housing prices went up during the pandemic, but there is new housing being built everywhere you look, and as a result the prices are now going down quite a bit! (Which I'm fine with, even as a homeowner, because I wasn't planning to sell anytime soon anyway and I like to see problems getting solved.) The downtown skyline keeps changing -- the tallest tower when I arrived is now hardly notable!
All that said I'm not sure I personally am very affected by where I live. When I moved from Minneapolis to the Bay Area, people asked me if it was a culture shock, but all I really noticed was less snow and more left turn lanes...
Having lived in the Midwest, Texas and Bay Area I can soundly say there is no comparison which can be made about the natural splendor. Bay Area, even with smoke in the air for a week, is orders of magnitude more comfortable and interesting. In Texas people cloister into giant houses and say goodbye to enjoying nature, it’s really sad that people prefer such a reality. It lets them forget just how grand a world there is worth saving and fighting for instead of letting it all become privatized and exploited unsustainably.
I do a lot of biking, and TBH I've had an easier time finding enjoyable bike routes near my house in Austin than I did in Palo Alto. During the summer I go biking at dawn and it's great, and during the winter there are usually 70-degree days regularly enough.
Of course, on that measure, Minneapolis blows both of them out of the water -- at least during the half of the year when biking is enjoyable.
As a fellow cyclist I find this strange. I visited austin to see what the hype was about and left knowing I couldn’t live there. Massive 6 lane stroads running through suburban sprawl for miles in every direction. Barely any elevation to speak of. Strangely humid despite there being no water in sight.
Most people I know that are happy with the move to Texas from California are the types that never cared for going outside in the first place. It’s a good place to build a big house and fill it with toys, which is exactly what you’ve done, so nice work there!
I’ve never biked in Texas, but the routes even a short distance west from Palo Alto are excellent. You need to be willing to go uphill, though :). LAN party house v1 would have been maybe 15 minutes from where Page Mill starts to get spectacular, not to mention spectacularly steep.
In the modern e-bike era, the hills are more accessible, too.
Oh I biked down Page Mill and into the hills a lot, that was my main bike route. And yes, it was great. But there was really only one part of those hills that was close enough to get to without driving first. In Austin I have a few more options nearby.
I’ve made this same observation which might explain why there is such a divergent world view between people living in different parts of the country.
A neighbor of mine recently moved (back to) Texas. Where we live is 1/4 of a mile from a massive state park, right on the ocean full of mountainous trails. Dude admitted he had only visited it once in 5+ years, but complained about taxes and the price of gas constantly. It’s no wonder he wanted to go back.
I suspect it will be interesting when people all realize too much fluoride is very bad and isn’t actually disinformation. It’s obviously not an intentional conspiracy to make people dumb but it happens to be outdated science to fluoridate city water at levels we do in the US.
This is factually incorrect. In fact recent studies show that up to 25% of cavities are still prevented by fluoridating water. On top of that, multiple Canadian cities are adding fluoride back in their water after 10 years of having it removed because of excellent evidence that the lack of fluoridation in the water is what led to the increase in cavities in those cities, since they had neighboring cities who kept fluoride in the water during the same period
It's factually correct that too much fluoride is correlated with decreased average IQ.
By "too much" a factor of > 10x western safe levels is meant and by "correlated with" is meant a slew of other heavy metals are generally present.
This comes from studies that look at places in China, in Africa, and elsewhere that have unusally high levels of fluoride and other elements naturally occurring in water or as a by product of other industrial processing going on.
Where the problem lies is in the "fill in the missing line" extrapolations that the anti-fluoride folk do to "conclude" that if really high levels of stuff in water makes you stupid and affects your health then it surely must follow that small amounts make you a bit stupid and a bit unhealthy.
This is despite no such evidence existing even given large western populations with meticulously kept water quality and health records in the UK, Canada, Australia, US, etc.
The G20 recommended fluoride levels are safe by all the evidence to date and work to decrease cavity rates.
What is significant political progress is that such measures are now allowed to be debated if they are justified or not. Western political culture clearly shifted far towards dogmatism and needed a course correction. We shouldn’t be afraid to question scientists and studies.
It is factually correct fluoride can be dangerous and studies have shown that. It is also factually correct fluoride in water reduces cavities. The debate is the risk rewards lines and safety.
> Federal officials have recommended a fluoridation level of 0.7 milligrams per liter of water as of 2015. This is a decrease from the recommended upper ranger of 1.2 milligrams from the 50 years before that. Meanwhile, the EP has a longstanding requirement that water systems cannot have over 4 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water. For comparison, the international safe limit for fluoride in drinking water as stated by the World Health Organization (WHO) is 1.5 milligrams
The A/B testing you reference in Canada is interesting data obviously. It’s also possible reducing cavities with fluoride comes at an IQ cost isn’t it?
The Chinese civil war never officially ended. There was no agreement whatsoever, and the ROC never declared itself as separate, etc. Taiwan is simply a province within the ROC, and the ROC still consists of the mainland. That's what the ROC constitution states.
I live in northern Italy, half a day trip include most of the peninsula and southern France.
Sure job opportunityes are few, especially of the interesting kind, and pay is awful, but overall it's very hard to beat.
I don't really get the point of people pretending it's for the entartainment, especially if whatever you do starts with a three hours drove to get out of the urban area.
That doesn't really sound a high quality lifestyle, but to each their own.
Even ignoring traffic, you are counting the same park multiple times. Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Yosemite, Lassen Volcanic, Pinnacles is not bad but it's not 8.
Accurate. On one hand, we didn't want to fuel the fire, but on the other, that inflammatory article forced the attacker to reveal their hand. So it was actually to our benefit, strangely enough.
I think two key parts of what you said are "most people" and "normal people". This normativity is taken for granted here. Preference for terse messages is ultimately a matter of taste and I've yet to see evidence that one belongs to a clear majority.
It may not be a clear majority of people, but it's pretty obviously a majority of people who set expectations in public discourse. That's why it's normative.
I like to think of dog training as programming an emotional computer. There are lots of similarities (breaking up problems into smal steps for one) and the payoff feels just as great.
