Small town Canada here. In winter all the kids above school toboggan and slide down the roads (GT racers). All the kids below trudge up carrying their slider of choice. In the afternoon the roles are reversed.
Not an adult in sight.
At the ski hill kids 5+ roam free- it’s always fun getting on the chairlift and a little kid says “ can you help me get on?” And you have to physically pick them up onto the moving (fixed grip) chairlift. There’s no cell service.
Mountain bike trails around town are full of groups of kids 5+.
My advice: move to a small town, it’s like going back in time in a very good way.
I learned to snowboard in Wapiti Valley which is a little river valley skislope setup way out in the middle of nowhere saskatchewan. I know what you're talking about. I took the lift up with both 6 year olds and 86 year olds and both would offer advice to a new learner. I drove 3 hours in from "big city" Saskatoon but most of the attendees were kids and adults from the nearby towns. Loved the literal 30-second wait times to catch a lift back up - it was a really great environment to learn in.
That said, "move to a small town" is easier said than done when you have a family and kid :)
In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient.
This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Asian nations, on the other hand, have been very crowded, for a very long time.
This has resulted in a much more interdependent mindset.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. There's really no nation on Earth that is as good at "ganging up" on a problem, as Japan. Korea and China are catching up quick, though. The US is very good at manufacturing footguns. We don't tend to play well with others.
It really is hard for exceptional people to make their way, in Japanese society, though. They have a saying "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down."
Rice cultivation requires collective water management, so you get more collectivist cultures. Growing grain mostly depends on rain, so your harvest depends on your own work.
>In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient.
This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.
Australia is much less dense and more remote that the US (I drove 1,050 miles in Australia through the desert without seeing a vehicle or person, in the US you can’t get more than 100 miles from McDonald’s) but Australian’s work together and don’t have this “ fiercely independent “ nonsense that keeps everyone at each others throats.
I have no strong opinion on the original thesis but your fact doesn't make the point you think it does; you're right that no one lives in most of Australia, nearly everyone is concentrated together on the coast. Australia is a bit more urban than the USA overall from a population perspective, despite being vastly less dense overall due to the areas that no one lives in. So there would be fewer people to carry the cultural individualism.
About 9 out of 10 Americans live in cities (incl burbs) and the same holds for Australians. Sure, there's fewer notable population centers in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and you got nearly everyone), but there's also just 10x fewer people than in the US so that kind of matches too. I think the picture you link to distorts this, it does not account for the fact that there's simply way fewer Australians.
I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
That's a rather expansive view of cities based on what the US Census categorizes as urban vs. rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on close to 100 acres, but that's urban according to the census because we're not that far from a major city and fairly close to some smaller ones.
> I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
I don't think so either, but because of the climate and geography, I also don't think there'd be 10x more cities, similar populations, I think you might end up with 2-3x more, really, at most.
Australia also has many issues the US had. Car dependence. They also don't have high speed rail despite their cities being near perfect for it.
Also in Australia the waste majority of the population arrived much later and most were always attached to coastal cities. These cities were dominated by British aristocrat early on and later the British labor movement and reflects the culture of London. Australia politically was a part of Britain in many ways for 100s of years after the US had gone its own way.
The same is true to a lesser degree for the North East Coast in the US, arguably it works more like Britain/Australia but the South and everything West is quite different.
I think this is not a smart read of the situation. The US has built a tremendous amount of rail and other transit (eg NYC subway) back when it was an even more individualistic society than today.
In fact they country was clearly able to come together for the public good many times throughout their history.
Francis Fukuyama is now arguing that the US in now a substantiantively lower trust society than it was in 1995 when he published his second book "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity."
>In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.
>Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you.
I didn't realize the link but I agree with the decline in trust.
One obvious axis is that in 1995 (I came to the US right around then) the country had a high church attendance rate, racial homogeneity, % of people who are parents, and % of people who were born here.
In the 30 years that passed all of these numbers had become significantly lower and obviously each factor on its own contributed to a decline in societal trust.
Most all of that old rail was done by private companies seeking to make a profit. Just like Japan. Look at nyc subway building rates after it was publicly owned. Almost zero expansion. Contractions even.
Same in The Netherlands. There are companies that buy plots of lands near existing rail just to massively screw over the government if they ever want to expend rail. Double digit million euro deals over small patches of land.
>more and more rural regions around the world are wired for fiber.
Ecuador has the highest rate of cell phone ownership in the world, because they never built landlines and just went straight to wireless.
Same with electricity in many African countries -no grid, straight to local solar.
When I see comments like this it’s obvious you’re talking about West Virginia or Nevada as “rural regions around the world”
Go spend time in the Canadian arctic, the Congo, Sudan, Bolivia, Mongolia, Remote Australia and dozens and dozens more if you want to see where starlink shines and is rapidly changing the world.
Was the Wright brothers’ first flight useless, or did it teach us lessons that lead to the Concorde and 777?
Was the first automobile so slow and clunky it was useless, or did it lead to the F1 cars of today?
Was Alan Touring’s computer so slow it was useless, or did it lead to this comment being typed on a device that is many orders of magnitude faster and smaller?
Going to Mars will teach us a lot. In the future when we go further it will be useful in ways we can’t imagine today.
> In the future when we go further it will be useful in ways we can’t imagine today.
There. Is. No. Further.
That's my issue with all that. It's pretty basic: check how far the next solar system is (I know you don't: it's 4+ light-years). Check the speeds we get when we send something out of the solar system (e.g. Voyager).
Sending something to the next solar system at speeds orders of magnitudes faster than we reach today (which we can't reach because... orbital mechanics) would take us tens of thousands of years (hundreds of thousands actually, I can't remember and at this point it does not matter).
Unless someone discovers wormholes or a similar revolution in physics, we are not going to another solar system, period. Contaminating Mars is not even helping doing that. It's like hoping that the Wright brothers' work would help discover vaccination.
That is exactly the point.
You simply can’t know what the future holds.
After the Wright brother’s flight do you think people thought we would cross the Atlantic faster than the speed of sound sipping champagne, or go to the moon?
“Impossible”
And so on.
You have no idea what will be possible on the future, but I hope we can get there by learning, not sticking our heads in the sand.
Which is why this narrative of caring about his family is so absurd.
A defense contractor is in the business of war. In supplying the war machine, you should be living in a fortress. Tall walls, check your drink for poison, live in paranoia. Every person in the business of war knows what they are getting in to, and how to protect their family.
How is someone that is near the face of AI this naive about such an ancient thing?
The business of war is fine. It is ancient. It is part of humanity. Making some morality plea towards family and "violence is never the answer" while in the business of violence is NOT okay.
Everyone in the defense industry knows the risks. Blood money is not free. You sacrifice a peaceful life for the wealth.
To keep your family safe you have to use a meager sum of that money to have tall walls, guards, and security. DoD contractor 101.
Alternatively, live in obscurity, don't talk about your work, and it is usually fine.
A world-wide known CEO doesn't have this luxury so again, use a small portion of unfathomable wealth to protect your family. I have a feeling this war is just starting.
When in the business of death, you no longer get to live with the rules of peace.
It’s almost like these people believe Being in the business of violence and death is fine. Killing other people, making their lives a living nightmare, etc.
Suddenly it’s not ok when a tiny fraction of that violence comes home.
These arguments make perfect logical sense. Sam Altman has ceased to be a civilian, he has waived those rights with his DoD deal, I don't know why people are acting like he is one. I think it's cowardly that both of you are so downvoted without any responses at all against you, much less good counterarguments.
you could dekulak all 3500 billionaires, magically transmute their make believe money into hard cash, and that $20 trillion would yield less than $2500 per human. hooray?
You say that as if there aren’t an enormous amount of people for whom $2500 isn’t an enormous amount of money. Even in wealthy nations like the US, that equates to approximately 7% of the personal income for the average person. But for the 65% of the world’s population living on $10 or less per day, that is an increase of 77% or more on their yearly income.
But more important than the cash is the power that money buys. Defenestrating the uber-wealthy of their undue influence in society would have far reaching benefits beyond just money in people’s bank accounts.
Moving away from the US also felt great.
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