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From the US Department of Agriculture:
The natural amenities scale is a measure of the physical characteristics of a county area that enhance the location as a place to live. The scale was constructed by combining six measures of climate, topography, and water area that reflect environmental qualities most people prefer. These measures are warm winter, winter sun, temperate summer, low summer humidity, topographic variation, and water area. The data are available for counties in the lower 48 States.
So, the coast of California, the Sierra Nevada, and the highlands of Colorado are the best counties in the 48 states in terms of natural amenities. That would seem to accord with the views of rich guys.
I’ve been to C ochise County, AZ, another one of America’s superstar counties, along with Gila, AZ (which I don’t recall visiting). They are way far south so have mild winters, but they are at fairly high altitudes so aren’t very hot or humid in summer.
The worst counties on this scale are in the upper Midwest.
In the middle of the country, especially blessed counties are in the highlands near the border of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and in northwest Arkansas, where Sam Walton chose to found Walmart over 60 years ao.
I would think that a few more measures would round off this scale: tree cover, average height of trees, and number of mosquitos. This map is biased toward boring southwest desert, such as the empty plains of West Texas, because due to higher altitude they aren’t that hot in summer and have lots of sunshine in winter. But people like trees, which West Texas is short of.
Similarly, this map is biased toward lower latitudes, which, all else being equal, tend to have a lot of mosquitos for more months of the year.
Thus, while the southeast deserves credit for its many tall trees, it also has a lot of mosquitos.
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Wow.
Most of those areas have water tablet/supply issues. And relatedly, the dry climate is prone to drought/flood/wildfires.
I prefer the mountainous areas of Tennessee and West Virginia. Still relatively mild winters (nothing like, say, New Hampshire or Iowa), but have plenty of trees and water. More mosquitos? Yes. That just means the area is hospitable for life.
And let’s not forget the people.
Aspen is at 7,900 feet, which attracts the CEO class while repelling the Walmart Shopper class. But still … there would seem to be some sort of golden mean in between.
The green tip in Minnesota looks interesting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook_County,_Minnesota
As a kid growing up in Central NY state I spent summers with ten mosquito bites on each limb. I routinely scratched until I bled. Now that I live in coastal California, I get around a half a dozen insect bites a year. Makes a huge difference in quality of life.
not only do i not understand WTF this map is even trying to measure, it rates Wyoming as one of the best states in America. huh? has anybody else besides me been to Wyoming? it’s easily, without exaggeration, one of the worst states in the entire country along this supposed measure.
i don’t think the people who made this map have any idea what on earth they’re talking about, and they’ve certainly never been to Wyoming. nobody on earth thinks it’s any good, which is why nobody lives there. it’s flat out terrible from an ‘amenities’ standpoint. let’s see…yep. still number 50 out of 50 for population. not one single person is interested in living there. not even Californians, and they’ll move almost anywhere when leaving California.
had family friends live there as well for like 15 years for coal mining industry work and all they ever did was complain about how terrible Wyoming was and they couldn’t wait to leave.
you really have no idea what continuous, endless, relentless howling wind is until you’ve been there for a while. how cold is cold (-25 good for you every winter?) or how there could be hundreds of miles of nothing. “But it’s beautiful natural terrain, undeveloped, with clean air and water…” it’s not actually. it’s extremely boring. people drive across the country and say stuff like Kansas and Iowa are a big state full of nothing…well they haven’t been to Wyoming. Iowa and Nebraska are kind of nice compared to Wyoming.
Very important.
If you take quality days of your life into account, then the ability to walk outside for most of the year begins to be a big plus. In regions with harsh winters or horrible summers, your ability to just enjoy life outside the home is severely diminished.
Maybe living in a temperate climate with nice scenery and public spaces is worth a big premium. You may literally double (or triple) the number of days you actually get to enjoy life. Of course, most of us can’t afford that. But maybe it’s possible to live in the less prestigious parts that are still fairly close to the good stuff.
Altitude is a feature, not a bug.
this map says the eastern half of Colorado is pretty good compared to most states. what? again, has anybody other than me actually been there? there’s nothing there. it’s actually LESS good than Kansas. it’s a flat semi desert plain filled with LITERALLY NOTHING. a few ranches and a few tornados. nobody lives there, nothing happens there, there’s no water there. what the hell are these map makers even talking about? when you drive across this part of the state (and that’s all you would EVER do, since there is absolutely NOTHING in the high plains of Colorado and you would never ever be driving TO any destination in the eastern part of Colorado) there’s SO much nothing that sometimes you wonder if you’ll run out of gas as it can be 50 miles between stations.
Iowa and Nebraska are definitely better than the flat plains eastern half of Colorado. these map maker guys are talking pure nonsense. it’s like 9 hours of driving thru literally nothing to get from Denver to Kansas City, and the eastern Colorado part is the part with the least amount of stuff, not the Kansas part. there’s actually stuff in Kansas relative to the Colorado high plains.
this map is just some shitlibs in an government office talking about stuff they have no idea about. North Carolina is 1000 times better than the Colorado high plains. 1000 times better. whether you’re in the mountains or the coastal. that’s not a random number. NC is literally that much better. absolutely beautiful terrain and places to live. Colorado itself is going straight downhill politically, although that’s not what this particular map is measuring. but still, it’s a nonsense map.
Is your “wow” a reaction to the story itself, or are you surprised that the Chinese wrote it?
You are a worldly and astute guy – I doubt you were “wowed” by the story.
Or were you?
N.Y. City residents sometimes sneer at others, proclaiming “WE have the museums and the opera! ” But then, if you press them and ask how many times a year they actually avail themselves of those amenities, the wimpy response reminds me of when Jackie Gleason would get busted by Alice on The Honeymooners, and his response is “Hamma Hamma Hamma.” Similarly, I think the vast majority of residents of areas boasting nature do not make much use of the nature. Rather, one window of the condo has a view of the lake, and you get to look out over water; stuff like that. But with that perspective, I’m not knocking it; it’s pretty nice to just gaze at a few trees or a mountain even if you are not climbing it.
wait, i just noticed they have Nevada rated highly too. uh…
another state i lived in for 4 years. it’s the most empty, most dry desert in America. more empty and more dry than Arizona, which is a wet desert, relatively.
Nevada has Highway 50, the most desolate stretch of 400 miles in the country. when i think amenities, i definitely think of a bone dry, 115 degree empty desert. without Hoover dam, nobody even lives in the state at all. and now that the water is steadily going away, nobody will live there in 30 or 40 years either. it will be like the Salton Sea. a largely abandoned archaeological site. the Colorado river water rights battle will be tremendous coming up soon here.
now i’m curious what drugs these Agriculture Dept guys were on when they made this map. the people in Cheyenne will get a chuckle out of being rated as one of the better areas in the country. i’ve been to Cheyenne. has anybody else on this blog been to Cheyenne or Laramie? what a joke.
hey Steve, you should just take down this map, as it’s about as accurate as the rest of the government’s outputs these days. the FBI crime numbers are more accurate than this idiotic map. what agriculture happens in Nevada? what would the Agriculture Department guys know about it? they don’t know anything.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Oregon. It’s an absolutely marvelous state.
Try visiting Tillamook, Cannon Beach, Lincoln City, and Eugene. You should also drive along the coast line. Especially during the summer and early fall, it’s really nice.
Oregon doesn’t get enough love. It’s very undiscovered place.
By the way, does anyone here have any opinion on San Luis Obispo? Worth visiting?
It means the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, Indians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Venezuelans all know who they are really dealing with when negotiating with (((The United States))). White guys who “just work here” really don’t have pull anymore. The president is run by his almost-all Jewish cabinet.
According to the map, Grand Portage and Red Rock Minnesota are pretty good places (medium green), per the Agriculture Department’s criteria.
Perhaps our resident expert on living in Minnesota, the inimitable Reg Caesar, could verify this?
Exactly how much snow falls on the northwestern shore of Lake Superior? Surely it cannot be as much as the snow on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, can it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keweenaw_Peninsula
It is pretty funny that the low scores are assigned heavily to some of the most agriculturally productive heartland regions of the country.
Surely the towns in and around the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado provide some sort of “golden mean.” My favorite is Ouray, Colorado. Ouray’s nickname is “The Switzerland of America.” And it is certainly more picturesque than Aspen, and far, far more affordable.
Ouray is also the northern starting point of the “Million Dollar Highway.” This stretch of highway 550 traverses the San Juan Mountains from Ouray to Durango and is, in my opinion, the most beautiful drive in America.
Welcome to Golden
Fascinating post Steve, it’s way better than your golf course architecture musings.
Something something Gaza genocide, jewish publisher, take the money goy….
https://www.kunc.org/environment/2022-06-30/colorados-water-shortages-are-already-here-and-getting-worse-according-to-updated-state-plan
The “short” girl (on the far right) looks vaguely like Michelle Obama.
Have you ever tried to drive east on I-70 from Colorado’s mountains to Denver on a Sunday evening? If you had, you would have noticed a 50 mile long traffic jam composed of residents of Denver driving back home after enjoying a weekend in the mountains. So, I think that there are huge numbers of residents of areas boasting of nature who do, indeed, make direct use, by hiking, fishing, hunting, skiing, etc., of that nature.
Agree. And who is to say that gazing at nature from, say, your back porch isn’t making use of nature? That’s why they call them “million dollar views.” Personally, I like to hike in areas where there is something to look at. These scenic areas could include, say, the nature-made canyons near Moab, Utah or the man-made canyons of New York and Chicago.
“But then, if you press them and ask how many times a year they actually avail themselves of those amenities,”
When I was in high school, I spent half my time at MoMA and the Met, and the other half at a bar a few blocks down the street from the Met.
Which was full of artistes and poets-manques, and various crackpot refugees from, well… the Met.
Never need to go to a museum again — got it all on hard disk in my head.
All very true. And let’s not forget that, to any sensible person, the importance of all this stuff should be dwarfed by family, work, and community.
People move to areas with amenities….. but life gets in the way.
The map should be re-drawn:
The countries which should annihilate the nations which we hate
I’ve always been on my side.
Whose side are you?
I do wish the commentariat here would move to rural southern Vermont. My household water comes from a stream that runs down the hill right outside, and it makes the best tea on the planet. The wood I heat with usually comes from within 200 yards. My three huge dogs run free and don’t need collars.
Black people hate the cold and will move away rather than clear snow. Even the Mexicans I was complaining about have pulled stakes. Not enough amenities. Even with a free house.
The scenery isn’t bad, either.
Vermonters aren’t friendly but they leave you alone, that’s for sure. My tiny town has to pay for any police presence at all, and we’re cheap. So I haven’t see a cruiser around here for years and the crime rate is essentially zero. Last crime was a few stollen catalytic converters, eventually traced to a junky from Mass.
Living too close to a paved road.
Recently visited Tucson from upstate New York, why the southwest is so popular completely eludes me, (dry, dusty and brown) maybe you have an affinity for where you grew up. Also, a surprising number of people don’t seem to ever leave their house (advantage empty sidewalks), maybe the environment isn’t that important to them.
Hardly surprising the west has most of the green – the wide open mountainous terrain makes for a lot of beautiful scenery…
Ohtani’s aide has pled guilty. The guy he paid looks more than sketchy.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/mlb/article-13398445/Ippei-Mizuhara-wired-Shohei-Ohtanis-money-Real-Housewives-star-Ryan-Boyajian-pay-gambling-debts.html
Why are the counties on the California side of the Nevada/California border higher in natural amenities than those on the Nevada side?
Also one man’s amenities are another man’s detractions and vice versa. They rate S. Florida highly but in the 19th century it was considered to be a malarial swamp and no one wanted to live there.
Ta Kung Pao has long taken an antisemitic line. During the HK protests they depicted Soros as a reptile in collusion with Jimmy Lai, the pro-Western HK newspaper magnate who is currently in a Chinese prison.
Better living thru chemistry. Nowadays we have effective insect repellents and sunscreens so the children of today don’t have to suffer the bug bites and sunburn that we suffered.
West Texas also has lots of mosquitos. Swarmed in during the evening on summer nights.
I don’t know which is more ridiculous, that West Texas is given a high amenity score at all or that Nevada comes out ahead of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah. If some of the least densely populated parts of the country are being ranked as some of the most desirable, there is something wrong with your methodology.
They didn’t make sunscreen when you were a kid?
“The natural amenities scale is a measure of the physical characteristics of a county area that enhance the location as a place to live. The scale was constructed by combining six measures of climate, topography, and water area that reflect environmental qualities most people prefer. These measures are warm winter, winter sun, temperate summer, low summer humidity, topographic variation, and water area. The data are available for counties in the lower 48 States.”
None of these terms account for N words or K words, on account of this factor everyone understands: we all love our homeland
It doesn’t seem very different from the county that borders on its west. It’s also funny that USDA likes water (of course), but doesn’t seem to care much for the water in the Great Lakes.
Just one amenity indicator, heating degree days (a measure of the harshness of winters) shows a correlation of -.53 with the growth of major metropolitan areas from 1960 to 2023. The massive movement from the North, Midwest and East to the South and West in the last six decades was largely driven by the desire of ordinary people to escape cold winters.
That has turned out to be a mixed bag. Because of highly processed foods, we are now suffering an obesity epidemic, and the officially approved answer is to take a pill (with its own deleterious side effects).
I agree with your comment about Florida and the Southeast generally. Just look at an electoral college map from 100 years ago to appreciate how relatively uninhabited Florida and much of the Southeast was because of the climate, before the widespread availability of air conditioning. But I do appreciate the extra sunlight in winter. There is a reason that wealthy people (e.g., Barnum, IIRC) had winter mansions in Florida, typically near the coast, with good breezes.
Seems like this map really screws the upper midwest – Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. All of them have substantial Great Lakes shoreline, numerous lakes, some river access, and terrain with a bit of undulation.
Anybody priced a ticket to the Met lately? Or the museums? At least I can afford musical events at Wagner-Noel. And McDonald Observatory.
West Texas has a Summer heat adjustment that is no easy thing, but I have seen Winter in upstate NY, and wonder why the hell anybody would ever live there. Plus, the problem with big loud dirty cities is that they are big loud dirty cities.
Ultimately people have to go where there are jobs, but space and sunshine beat urban (currently, hellscapes, but even when they were nicer) areas 100 times out of 100.
South Florida was far less desirable before air conditioning. It seems like the map takes air conditioning into account.
O/T. The distribution of our Fast Response Cutters has now been released. Let’s focus on three sectors: LongBeach (San Pedro), Honolulu, and SW Asia. Long Beach gets 5 of these lifesaving FRCs, Honolulu gets 3, and the Middle East (“Home”port Bahrain) gets….6. The USCG’s boss is not the Pentagon, it is Homeland Security. Thank Homeland Security if your fishing party-boat starts to take-on water 20 mikes off Long Beach, and you are wondering where the heck is the USCG.
In my younger days I spent a lot of time up there in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and the adjacent Quetico in Canada, and it’s pretty glorious. On the other hand, the mosquito situation is not to be believed…
> Better living thru chemistry. Nowadays we have effective insect repellents
My sibling’s family lives in a pretty nice county, but their home abuts a wetland, i.e. a swamp. In the last decade-plus, mosquito control systems have come into their own (pheromone-laden zappers, propane-generated CO2, etc.). They can now dine al fresco throughout (most of) the summer.
I can’t imagine a worse place to live than inland Florida. Flat, hot, humid and insane traffic trying to get to the coast.
Inland California has the similar problem of worse climate but insane traffic if one wants to get to the coast.
Maps like the one presented here are garbage. Anyone who has been to New Mexico knows there is a whole lot of yuck in that state. I’m not sure what natural amenities the creators think exist in Shiprock. I’ve been there and it is dry, windy, dusty and poor.
And there is no more overrated place in the United States then northern California. Who decided that cold, foggy and damp is a great climate? I’ll pass.
Yes, contrary to the map the combination of forests, rivers, and lakes that covers northern parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan is an amazing stretch of rugged wilderness.
Also, I have been to West Texas in August. The heat was miserable.
Interesting map, but by my observation Aquitaine and Southern Ireland are nicer than any place in North America. Probably Portugal as well.
Not to mention that North America’s weather is relentlessly, unpredicatably vicious. That lovely green Pacific NorthWest? I was 6 years old, living in the Willamette valley, when the December 1964 flood hit, and it is really my earliest nightmare memories of youth. I missed the 1996 flood, but understand it was almost as bad. And how many people get killed every year in tornado alley? 1938 New England hurricane? 1972 Susquehanna flood? My relatives sent me photos of that one. Plus I have seen tornadoes on the ground twice, which is something you do not want to experience. 2011 Texas wildfires? I was damned near ground zero for the Hickman fire.
The point is that North America is actually a pretty awful place to live, anywhere. Human interaction, especially AC and central heating, plus mass water control projects, let you pick your place, but don’t underestimate the negatives.
Wow indeed: Steve must really like you! Not as much as he likes Jack D, of course, but a lot for sure.
This map is far too generous to the American southwest. West Texas is just a savage, flat desert.
In the SC Lowcountry biting “no see-ums” are a bigger problem than mosquitoes. We buy a non-toxic olive/coconut oil spray found in the “Ethnic” hair care section of Publix. It repels everything and is good for your skin. We live on a 350′ wide peninsula w/ salt marshes on each side, so we have tons of both pests.
Yes, this an Ag Dept. rating, but traffic is equally important. At least to me.
I lived in Douglas, AZ for a season, a boarder town in Cochise across the line from Agua Prieta (pop ~80,00). The fun thing to do is take the bus a dozen miles north to Bisbee, one of the coolest towns I’ve ever been to; it gets absolutely packed with tourists during the spring. If I was a Bo Bo I’d move to Bisbee. Then there is also of course Tombstone in Cochise, where they reenact the gunfight at the OK Corral every day. In Douglas I was friends with a boarder patrol agent, whose talk was out of No Country For Old Men. What he saw on a daily basis had worn him down, and the wall at the local Wal Mart was tragically crowded with missing person posters, just about all them young girls. Very sad. Agua Prieta is dangerous, but it’s where I fell in love with Mexico and I think of it often.
Much of the best territory has been handed over to migrants and their progeny. This appears to be irreversible and more’s the pity.
There will still be pockets of resistance, such as La Jolla, Montecito, Bel Air, Pebble Beach etc. But plans are already underway to make them far less attractive through confiscatory taxation. I don’t think that trend will be reversing either.
You don’t have to be antisemitic to dislike Soros.
I was going to post what the OP posted myself. I’ve traveled extensively to Asia over the decades, and I’ve been told by Japanese, Koreans, and Singaporeans several times that the only natural resource that their country has is their people. I’ve read it in books and articles several times, as well.
South Africa probably has as good or better “natural amenities”, using the list in the article, than any country in the world. But the people (some of them) more than make up for it.
SE Florida is a horrible place for white people to live unless you are loaded. Even then, the tropics are somehow depressing.
Even then it is miserably hot and the negative aspects of the beach ( many, many unpleasant creatures inhabit the those warm turquoise waters and sugar sand shores) become clear when you go too frequently.
Is that little white speck in the middle of California Sacramento? Does their algorithm have a secret codicil to downrank capital cities? There are also red dots suspiciously close to Indianapolis IN, Springfield IL, Des Moines IA, Albany NY. Or maybe states subconsciously put their capitals in the worst locations? The algorithm seems to have it in for Fargo ND too.
As others have commented, the mapmakers seem to be taking fresh water and air conditioning for granted.
Mostly agree, but I’ll take a beautiful N. New England snowy winter over a drab Mid-Atlantic winter, even if a little more clothing is required. Also, skiing.
Our family owned land in that area. The land even had its own private lake. It sounds idyllic, but it was so remote that none of us ever went there, plus it was infested with mosquitoes. My grandmother talked of being there in September once, and it was snowing, and there were still mosquitoes out. We sold it decades ago.
Wayne county, Michigan, has impressive natural amenities, such as a vibrant wildlife in and around urban Detroit and large re-wilding areas where nature is gaining ground upon urban facilities. I don’t believe there are safaris yet to visit Detroit but again there’s a lack of investment in the county.
So now simply stating the bare facts is anti-semitic?
And a relative lack of ticks.
But it doesn’t hurt.
Also, depicting Jews as serpents, rodents and other assorted vermin has a long and dishonorable history. I don’t think that it’s an accident that Da Kung Pao chicken Communist Party newspaper picked up on these ancient Communist/Fascist memes given the history of close connection between Soviet Russia and Communist China.
I left Montana to work in Dallas for three years, and found they had rats, cockroaches, termites, cat fleas and other pestilence we didn’t have in Montana.
Though the lightning bugs and cicada racket were very exotic to me
Anyway I came back to Montana.
South Florida has always had air conditioning. It’s all packed into a single day, and they give it names.
Quillette:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180908110550/https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/exterminate-mosquitos-for-the-sake-of-humanity/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_(biology)
Surprised that Florida so favorably rated, over most of its area.
Where I lived in FL — midway Gulf Coast — was too flat; palm trees but very very few hardwood trees; it’s getting hotter all the time — mid-May and already 90s by 10:00 am. I dreaded the thought of mosquitos/FL but it turns out it’s too hot to be outdoors in FL; most homes/dwellings have screened enclosures and most life is indoors w/ quick trip from ac car to ac shop back to ac home.
Best part of drive back North from FL is around North Carolina – West Virginia, when the mountains come in view. Almost heaven.
Unfortunately Los Angeles now has mosquitos thanks to furniture shipments from China. In “Barton Fink” The head of the studio scoffed at Fink’s claim that there was a mosquito in his room- “LA is desert!” Not anymore
Probably more rain.
My experience in the Bay Area and LA is that a lot of people do a lot of hiking in the local hills and parks. But yes it is nice just to have it in your environment. Going from flat midwest to hilly northern CA is a treat. I just felt better even driving by it
This map is way off as regards my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga is easily one of the most beautiful cities in inland America. It is surrounded by three mountains of the Cumberland Plateau, which are especially beautiful on account of the way they rise suddenly from the valley floor, making this one of the world’s top rock climbing destinations. The Tennessee River runs through the middle of town and then between two of the mountains, forming the 40 mile long Tennessee Gorge, which is gorgeous as the name implies.
We also have Chickamauga Lake, formed by a TVA damn just upstream from Chattanooga, which is big enough for sailing and all kinds of water sports, fishing, and recreation. The riverfront has been developed much as in places like Baltimore (including the world’s largest freshwater aquarium) thanks to the largess of local Coca-Cola bottling billionaires (this is where bottling began).
Winters here are mild and summers reasonably temperate, especially on top of the mountains where I live. In addition to rock climbing, caving, hang gliding, and kayaking are popular sports, making Chattanooga in some ways the Boulder of the South.
We have everything but snow. Plus our tree cover is great: in fact there are more species of deciduous trees in this area than in any other part of the world except for one small spot in China.
On the downside, the cost of living here is low by contemporary standards, as a result of which people are moving here in large numbers from other parts of the country. Traffic and parking are starting to become problems, and house prices are rising at an alarming rate.
In short, I don’t understand that map.
The criteria for the map included “warm winter”, which those areas (at least stereotypically) don’t have.
It all depends on what you like.
This map flattens the vast differences between woodsy, lake-country parts of Indiana and the barren cornfield-only wastelands of large swaths of Iowa.
In the latter there is truly nothing much to do outdoors, since the entire state has been over 99% transformed into agricultural fields.
Whereas at least there is decently abundant woods and water in a good amount of the same orange territory.
Also, the winter is far more intolerable in the northern Midwest plains, whereas it’s much better in the eastern Midwest. There’s even a substantial-enough weather difference between eastern and western Iowa. You can do a lot more outdoors through much of the year in some of that orange territory, much more so than in other parts of it. I don’t see the map accounting for an extra several weeks of winter, and harsh winter, in certain places versus others.
DC apparently used to be the middle of a swamp. I can picture those founding fathers saying “Well, that part no one wants. That’s where the capital goes.”
They did drain the swamp, but it was still supposedly a hardship posting.
And then there was air conditioning, and the lobbyists started pouring in.
If you get a half dozen bites a year in coastal CA you’re spending a lot of time camping or you have blood they like. We hike the same area constantly and I haven’t been bitten in years.
Big tldr: today all of the news is AI. Quickly,
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has now purged all of the high level technologists who had opposed him, mainly on the issue of safety (Sam wants to go fast).
Google’s Sundar Pichai evidently got the memo about insane siloing and smushed two departments together; people expect Google to do good now. Or well, since they are now dedicated to evil.
Israel has poured money into an AI solution to their unprecedented loss of control over narrative and says part of the solution is already deployed. Quick guess, picture JIDF+AI. You say 2+2=4 and, instead of 20 or 200 clearly fake accounts insisting that it’s 5, now it’s 2,000, plus they can be much more verbose and have more elaborate explanations (in a game where brevity and clarity win). But I don’t know. Get to know MAIN STREET.
“Jewish interest groups wield enormous power, and the US blindly supports Israel without any reserve” – Ta Kung Pao, a Chinese state-owned Hong Kong-based newspaper”
LOL, so says the propagandist who unequivocally supports an authoritarian regime.
“Ta Kung Pao has long taken an antisemitic line”
OK, Uncle Leo.
Albany is the oldest settlement in New York, or anywhere between Quebec and Virginia. It’s the capital by “first mover”, “squatter’s rights”, or whatever you want to call it. Just like Harvard is tops among schools. (There are exceptions to this, however. Ask anyone in Mobile.) The other capitals were chosen for their central position in the new state.
What is the oldest city in the NFL? No, it’s not New York (1626) nor Boston (1630), which no longer have teams. Baltimore claims 1629, but that’s on a piece of paper in London, long before any settlement. The California entries date from the mid-18th century. So the answer is…
Clearly, no anglers were consulted!
The biggest amenity is- no blacks.
“South Florida has always had air conditioning. It’s all packed into a single day, and they give it names.”
South Florida’s air conditioning is all packed into a single day? What does this mean? People give South Florida’s air conditioning names? What names? If this is a joke, I don’t get it. Please explain.
All this is meaningless. When it comes to a location’s desirability there are only five factors that count:
1. Jobs
2. Jobs
3. Jobs.
4. Jobs.
5. Jobs.
Nothing else matters in the least.
Having a temperate summer has become less important since the widespread adoption of air conditioning. I spent a number of days as a child in the early sixties suffering through hot humid Indiana days. The oldsters would say “it ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity”. By the late seventies, though, most houses and businesses were air conditioned.
Access to water will become more important in the future. The Midwest is well positioned in that regard. Much of the western part of the country will be having water shortages. Another issue throughout the country will be declining depth and quality of topsoil. Our fertilizer intensive agriculture makes up for that currently but may not in the future.
I visited a dear uncle in Arizona in 1993. The one thing pleasant about the place was that he and his wife lived there. I will say well done desert gardens can be handsome. I see you have multiple loci in Arizona which are deemed ‘high amenity’ by the USDA.
Yeah. I recall thinking, ‘this is as close to hell as I’ve ever been,’ while driving through West Texas.
Also, filled with some very dangerous people. See No Country for Old Men.
West Texas? Not exactly…
This also — the claim notwithstanding — seems to ignore climate. The North Carolina Piedmont ranks the same as much of Alabama. Ever been in Alabama in the Summer?
…It also occurs to me that one might want to factor in the percentage of blacks on the one hand, and Miss Teen Americas on the other. I mean, around here is pretty good otherwise — but there’s a distinct lack of eye candy. On the other hand, one of the redeeming features of the South is…
I mean, we are discussing the environment, right? So take a holistic view.
Thunder Bay 64″
Grand Marais 56″
Duluth 86″
Duluth is too far from Lake of the Woods or the large lakes of Manitoba to get their lake effect, so maybe the wind swirls around more there.
Toronto 47″
Buffalo 88″
Syracuse 110″
The lake effect is obvious there, as it is even more in Cleveland, where the eastern suHburbs get three times the snow the western ones do. Unless they’re of Western Reserve Yankee stock, the well-off of Cleveland much prefer the west side of the county:
Hunting Valley may look like an exception, but it’s the richest community in Ohio, and presumably Yankee, as Pres. Garfield was born in the township, part of the Western Reserve. It’s also just outside the local snow belt.
This map may exaggerate the lake effect, but serves as a good illustration as any of where it’s located:
Can you think of anything that is legitimate, would advance out-group (to Jews) political or economic power compared to Jews AND isn’t anti-Semitic? What might that be?
One last thing to consider: wind. I see some high scores going to places that I know to be windy hellholes in certain times of year.
Also, 100% of Nevada and New Mexico score high. Yet good places for nuclear testing?
I read somewhere that mosquitos live their whole lives within a 30-yard radius, or so. So it does work to zap them locally.
So the Williston Basin, underlying parts of Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba is the most desirable place in North America?
Nothing else can explain why white Americans are moving toward diversity than away from it. Seriously, folks… Georgia? Texas? Arizona?
The UP looks quite nice, demographically. But…
How many schools were killed off by Covid? Is this one?
We’ve already been over this. The Soviet agents who founded the Communist China were disproportionately Jewish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Voitinsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Radek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Borodin
And who was the American to confirm this information with Mao?
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/memorandum-conversation-between-mao-zedong-and-henry-kissinger-0
I’d agree but I don’t want to encourage more migration.
There is something about the “Big Sky” of the West that just makes you feel good. And the nice thing is you don’t have to go anywhere to enjoy it, you’re just under it all the time.
I guess it’s a result of low humidity and a certain altitude. It also produces pretty spectacular sunsets.
Big Sky and Great Sunsets should count as natural amenities.
This map is absurd. I lived in west Texas. It’s a wasteland. And I like the desert. Indiana is not that bad. Nevada? Really? Stupid map unless you’re a reptile.
I guess you’ve forgotten your time in Houston.
Griping about mosquitoes in the S/SE is silly. Have you forgotten the mosquito fogger trucks that kill them at night?
This entire map is silly. Revealed preference shows people flocking to Florida and coastal Texas despite the bugs and sometimes hurricanes.
Cold mountain areas shown as “amenity” areas are scenic but other than summers or in a few ski areas, bereft of people the rest of the year due to lack of jobs or access to places to actually live.
A low humidity climate isn’t necessarily an amenity unless you are camping out in the summer. Much of these “green” locales are sparsely populated as water free deserts or flatlands.
I was raised in a supposed “amenity” area of mountains, dry climate and harsh winters which lasted until late spring. Barely liveable until modern times. Even now few live there.
Like many arbitrary claims this map is seriously misleading.
Add a layer for “politics” (Dem/commie being bad) and economic opportunity and see where people actually want to live. Not on a mountain top in Colorado or in some AZ desert land mainly occupied by the Grand Canyon.
As a kid I got chigger bites all over my scrotum. That was miserable.
As for mosquitoes and deer flies: Deep Woods Off. Skintastic. There is no excuse to allow one’s self to be insect food.
The “Ambassador Bush” was George H.W. Bush
I wonder what the fascination of Chairman Mao was with this “Jewish stuff” in 1975. In 2024, we don’t seem to give a damn about Xi’s affiliation with Buddhism or Taoism, nor do we care if Putin is a Christian, (crypto-)Muslim or atheist.
Can’t the Jew haters here leave at least one topic per day free from their mania?
There are nearly zero Jews in Africa. Why don’t they all head there, or at least explain why Africa is so backward despite the absence of evil Jews?
Really, if actual racists posted as much here as these para Nazis, this comment section would be unreadable.
There are some sites on Unz that are always about “the Jews”. Why not go there and give everyone here a break?
If Jews are so terrible, why are nearly all anti Israel Arab/Middle Eastern nations so culturally and intellectually backward and authoritarian? I guess the Muslims are worse than Jews. Odd, since Mohammad himself was very tolerant of Jews.
Haiti is Jew free. Please go there and shut up…
Ha!
If you’re young and heart/lung healthy, maybe.
Very few people live year round in very high altitudes (above 6,000 ft.).
These are nearly all pure recreation areas populated by upper middle class or higher tourists or winter skiers. When they aren’t, mining is the main business. We know how popular that is as an amenity.
For most, your recreational hobbies are not your normal lifestyle.
About 20 years back, North Dakota was expected to collapse as a state and there were planners who suggested the people move out and restore the lands to nature so that the great American buffalo will return and make that into a sort of safari for people to visit. This was called Buffalo Commons plan. Then oil and gas were discovered. The Buffalo Commons was discarded and all U-Hauls were going to North Dakota. People were paying $3,000 a month to share a living space. Once the oil and gas run out, may be the Buffalo Commons may be revived.
https://gprc.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Onset_Buff_Comm.pdf
Golden is just a few miles down the road from my Boulder, where I was a bachelor for two decades. I would brag that Golden’s best amenity…
… is Boulder:
Sure, Golden is you place, at the same altitude, if you like dry, barren mesas, and Coors beer. It was the county seat when I grew up nearby in the mountains, at an altitude of 7,800 feet…
… but it has always been rather plain, at least to me:
I’ve passed through it hundreds of times, between my home town and Boulder.
Now, some here may recoil at the predominance of leftists and freaks on my Boulder, but I am here to tell you that actually the environment was open, at least when I lived there, to any view. That is why you find so many different perspectives. One of my friends’ families manufactures firearems. Soldier of Fortune magazine was publishes there. Any, BTW, my particular Buddhism was non-political and intellectually superior to any organized religion y’all ascribe to. Just an open-minded place where naturally leftists and other shit-seeking flys land.
L– fucking — O-L
A mile high with miles and miles of hiking trails and lots of single, young women. Talk about amenities!
I grew up at 7,800 feet. I have had all kinds of scans and blood tests. My lungs are very big. My heart is very big and strong. My organs are perfect.
This is probably part genetics, but my high-altitude environment probably had something to do with it.
So, I say to you HBD hobbyists who want to rear healthy children for y/our posterity: Live and have kids at high altitudes, if you can.
Furthermore, the night sky has better seeing. (I am an astronomy buff.) The daytime sun is brighter. There are no bugs to speak of. No snakes, either, from lower altitudes, I can tell you from experience.
The natural environment in my old Colorado promotes outdoor activity. Colorado has the lowest average body fat content of all 50 states. The lowest obesity. QED.
Yes.
The apartment my wife inherited in Transylvania, Romania, is in a complex that would here in the US be infested with Blacks! and other such folks. Instead, normal Europeans — Hungarians and Romanians, live there.
The place is peaceful, placid. I look down from our balcony, enjoying my morning coffee, and I watch those people peacefully and quietly walking to work. They go to the tram on the nearby corner stop, or to their cars parked in the ally. I have observed this now for twenty years.
It’s the people. They are civilized, and collectively they have the same average IQ that you and I have.
Those buildings were built during the same era when America’s low-income housing was built to shelter Blacks! half a century ago. The only difference is the people.
San Diego County has much to recommend it. The climate is mild, it has beaches, mountains, deserts, and Mexico within a short drive. Biting insects are rare (take that, Florida!)It is not far from LA if you like to spend time in a really big city (although abominating LA is a favorite pastime of San Diegans). Demographically, it has a fairly small black population but a large and growing Latino population along with various other Third Worlders (Filipinos. Vietnamese, Arabs). It was once a rock-ribbed Republican area but those days are past. Both the city and county governments are now controlled by Democrats, so the process of decline is inevitable (the city of SD has a large homeless population). Further on the negative side, the cost of living is quite high, esp. housing. Both buying and renting are prohibitive. Like much of coastal California, it is a nice place to dwell if you have money and can afford the high cost of everything and can avoid the Third Worldish cities.
Tell us the real reason you think it’s so boring– ranked #45 on the Diversity Index:
DEMOGRAPHICS Mapped: Racial Diversity by U.S. State
And much of that diversity is aboriginal, so doesn’t count.
But “The Equality State” is a misnomer. Women voted in Utah before they did in Wyoming:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seraph_Young_Ford
Yes, the coastal mountain areas are nice as well as the interior western river valley area.
Plenty of people know about Oregon.
But roughly 1/3 towards the east, north/south, and there is another smaller set of mountains. East of that is high desert scrub land and Indian reservations.
Very few people live in 2/3s of the state. It is dry and cold much like northern Nevada.
At the moment the politics there are dominated by communists in Portland (some actually call themselves that) and overrun with homeless zombies, Antifa and insane “progressive” criminal loving Democrats.
A nice place to visit in summer, the western third, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
Except the 900 he had executed in front of their wives and children.
This is violent as Our Guy ever got:
You tout a couple of tiny places (south Ireland, central France) and one small coastal, poor nation in Europe (Portugal).
Yet you diss an entire continent, North America.
It is larger than Europe, including Russia to the Urals and throw in a big chunk of the Middle East.
You don’t get out much, do you?
Funny that most of the Third World is trying to invade North America and the less ambitious head for a few welfare hot spots in western Europe.
You are comparing a handful of grapes to a watermelon.
I Agree. Vermont is beautiful.
☮
I am quite familiar with Montana.
There you have bears (Grizzly and others), ticks, rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, and yes, rats.
People in modern homes in Dallas don’t have rats or termites or cat fleas. Cockroaches perhaps but you can control those with traps and sprays. Never leave uncovered food out.
I do agree that the roughly 8 month long cold weather in Montana does control some pests.
Not the bears or wolves.
Dallas has a larger population than the entire state of Montana.
The Big 10 is expanding to a coast-to-coast conference come July so it’s no longer a perfect analogy, but it would seem that there is a high negative correlation between having natural amenities and being in the footprint of the original Big 10.
Isn’t Midwest bashing something that Californians did in the 50’s and 60’s to get more Midwesterners to move out there? I know many people who would rather live in Wisconsin or Michigan than on the West Coast
Samuel Johnson in Rasselas (His characters are talking about the perfect age to get married, but it also seems somewhat applicable to this thread):
Shouldn’t it be those old communistfascistsRomanovsRomansanti-DreyfusardHohenzollernconfederate memes?
In the 19th century it was considered to be a malarial swamp and no one wanted to live there.
In the 19th century South Florida was a malarial swamp. But that was before they drained half the water and invented air conditioning.
The Everglades is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles coexist in their natural habitat. Great place to be in December, January, February and even into March. (It’s very mild that time of year. Average high 77°. Average low 53°. While much of the country is a frozen sh*thole, the Everglades is pleasantly warm and sunny. Good fishing too. It’s also a wonderful place if you’re into bird watching or if you enjoy lightning storms.)
Come mid-March, mosquito season begins.
☮
“Oregon doesn’t get enough love.”
Eastern Oregon, like California North, has a semi-arid Mediterranean climate. Cold nights, warmish and sunny days. The people count is low due to its agriculture economy. The landscape in northeast Oregon is quite awesome. It reminds me of Asgard, the place where I began and the place I will end. Also, not a lot of Colour in EO aside from Hispanic Ag workers and the odd Asian.
“It’s a very undiscovered place.”
Let’s keep it that way. Which should be easy considering it’s rain/wind west of I-5 and cold and mountainy east of the antifa interstate. Late Empire conservos should restrict their mask factories and doxxed castles to west of the Cascades.
If anyone wants to take a closer look at this map/data there is a nice infographic here.
http://map.israelsenlab.org/
More at his GitHub.
https://github.com/wisraelsen/Natural-Amenity-Dash-Map
It shows the Natural Amenity rank by county and allows looking at the component variables by themselves on the map (hover to see numeric values). The one thing I don’t like is his using natural amenity rank rather than scale. A serious mistake IMO. I wonder why someone with his background and ability would do that.
Raw data is available at the USDA ERS website.
Their metrics are pretty questionable. Is anybody else unenthusiastic about the +6.2 SD given to the mean July temperature of 58.5 degrees for San Francisco?
Yeah, that was awfully obtuse even for him.
In 2005, we had a hurricane (Wilma) sweep through in the morning. In the late afternoon/early evening we got the first cold front of the season. The overnight low was in the 50s (cold by Miami standards).
The storm knocked out virtually all of the electricity in the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area. On that first night, especially, it was pitch black outside and you could get an incredible view of the stars.
(If you live in an urban or even a suburban area, you might not realize just how much of the night sky is obscured by artificial light.)
I stood outside for hours staring up at the sky with that stiff northern breeze flowing through my hair. It was nice.
On the second night it was still fairly cool, but enough electricity had been restored throughout the region to diminish the spectacular view of the sky. It just wasn’t the same.
The lights didn’t come back on in my neighborhood until about a week after the storm.
Wilma was nothing compared to Andrew. After Andrew we had no electricity for three weeks. It was late summer, so that was three weeks of 90+-degree temperatures and 100% humidity. Not fun.
I seem to remember reading that before air conditioning the state of Florida was one of the very least populated states in the nation. If it held so many amenities you think it would have been a lot more popular before air conditioning.
Plenty of Americans think Israel’s treatment of Muslims is culturally backwards and authoritarian and that intellectualism, real or imagined, has no positive effect regarding the regime’s actions. That the Yeltsin regime’s treatment of the Russian population was predatory. And that the US regime’s treatment of its own population which, if not backwards, is debased and predatory.
The heavy hand of the Jewraeli billionaire shadow government IS the big story of the Gaza conflict and the protests. (Not woke college kids vs. bumptious guys with gold chains).
This is a literal conspiracy by an organized cabal to exercise secret control of law enforcement and media. And to do so on behalf of a foreign power no less.
Where were these people during the anti-white riots of 2020? And which direction were they pushing the media and law enforcement? And what other issues, if any, does the Cabal control? Curious noticers would like to know.
Credit where it’s due to the WaPo for reporting on the Cabal. (However, as WaPo is basically the Voice of the Deep State you can also wonder if there is some ulterior motive involving an internal rift between the Deep State and Jewraeli Lobby.)
When the WaPo is a better noticer than Steve, he might have to consider calling his next book Selectively Noticing.
Riot!
I have a friend here in Nevada who always talked about returning home to Tenessee. He finally did it. One year later he was back. “I forgot about the bugs”, and he wasn’t necessarily talking about the mosquitos.
You might find this interesting.
The map rates Death Valley as nicer than Ohio. I guess that’s expected when your country is run by Lizard People.
When I was there more than 30 years ago, reading the local press to try and get a feel for the area, people in both Oregon and Washington states were complaining about Californians moving up there.
Seattle felt pretty chill in 1990, and Bremerton was like going back in time to my imagined (and doubtless Hollywood influenced) small town USA.
The Death Valley area has a charm all of its own – Death Valley Junction – has it still got the one-woman Opera House?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amargosa_Opera_House_and_Hotel
Actually few people do. You’re all collecting in the Unz comment boxes.
I don’t live in Florida – but I have visited. Topographic variation and low summer humidity are absolutely not characteristic. It’s flat and swampy and humid. I haven’t visited most of the US – but it’s assessment of Florida is very suspect. Makes me question the study.
OT — HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7319a1.htm
https://www.breitbart.com/health/2024/05/17/report-84-of-chicagos-measles-cases-traced-venezuelan-migrants/
I just wrote a comment about Florida. I have been there and mostly agree with you. January and February are ok there though – lol. But one technical note – even Miami is not actually in the tropics. The only part of Florida really in the tropics are parts of the Keys. As to natural amenities – yeah for year round fishing (but you can still ice fish in cold climates) and water for agriculture… But other than that ….
Yes, I drove that Highway in my RX-7 in 1991. Fantastic!
“you should just take down this map, as it’s about as accurate as the rest of the government’s outputs these days.”
That is certainly true of official government inflation rates. If inflation was measured the same way it was in the seventies, the inflation rate would be twice as high. For example, house prices have gone up forty percent since 2020. Something similar is true for many other prices. The official inflation rate does not reflect this.
You mean sharks? Is it dangerous to swim? How common are they?
Lewiston, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis.
I advise you to stay away from Burlington; the goodwhites are fretting; they are summoning diversity and vibrancy.
I have vaguely pleasant associations. If you are going to that part of the state, definitely visit Hearst Castle.
Antifa et al don’t get too far down here. No fear.
Stay away from Portland, Eugene, and (so I understand) Bend, and you’re fine.
Why is that funny?
Well, the country around Las Vegas looks like an H-Bomb hit it, but the rest of the state’s okay — in a kind of arid way.
One thing I noticed — regularly driving across it at all times of the year — is that the weather’s not too bad. A hundred in the summer — but bone dry, so that’s okay. Not absolutely frigid in the winter. It compares favorably to — say — Montana in the winter, or most of the Southeast in the summer.
Although — peculiarly — the worst experience I ever had driving in zero visibility snow fall was just east of Austin, Nv. To make a long story short, it was frigging terrifying.
And the other bad snow experience I had was in Northern Arizona. But there it is.
I have been to the upper midwest in the summer. The humidity was miserable. The mosquitoes were miserable. The pollen was miserable. At least winters in West Texas allow for long sleeved shirts and sunglasses. Upper Midwest winters…….
Every place has its trade offs. If you can’t handle four months of brutal heat, you can’t handle West Texas. If you can’t handle eight months of Winter, avoid Michigan/Wisconsin/Minnesota.
OT: Steve, awhile ago you were looking for the best way to graphically illustrate your Deaths of Exuberance hypothesis. Maybe you could add vehicle deaths to this dynamic chart. Perhaps changing the theme music to Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55,” or maybe “I fought the law and the law won.”
I agree with you there is a little too much focus on hating Jews and Israel here. There would be less, though, if we were staying out of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict rather than jumping in on one side by sending it military assistance. I say that as someone who would rather live in Israel than any Muslim country.
Gotta love that Wankel engine. How long did it last?
I read that mosquitos fly at less than 2 mph, so if there’s a decent breeze, they don’t. I’ve never been bit in my front yard, but most years, one minute in the sheltered back yard requires bug spray.
Because it’s completely predictable and completely avoidable.
Ed West wrote a really good, substantive, logical column on it recently, tldr, Israel’s going to do whatever the hell they want regardless so the whole discussion is pointless.
An interesting point. I could see the WaPo publishing that because “leftist,” but I thought the Deep State was pretty solidly with the Israel Lobby. That changing would be a big deal.
OT: Steve, I finally got around to watching 2013’s Her. It seemed appropriate with all the references I am seeing with the GPT4-o release. I get the references now but found the movie a little on the tedius side, and also depressing, “I can’t even prioritize between video games and Internet porn.” But accurate in a lot of ways.
It reminded me of an Apple commercial come to life, in terms of its overall appearance. Very SWPL as you have mentioned I think.
I remembered you wrote a review so I reread it. I do wonder how you might review it in 2024. I imagine it would be quite different.
I get a kick out of how the AI in Her basically manipulate humans en masse and evolve. It is not a major point of the movie but probably on point, though as others say, a bit deus ex machina in terms of how it functions to bring closure to the story.
Btw I asked an AI to write a 2024 review in your style, and it was quite good.
See:
In 2013, Spike Jonze’s “Her” offered a provocative glimpse into a near future where artificial intelligence has progressed to the point of being indistinguishable from human interaction. The lonely protagonist Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls for “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), an AI assistant who rapidly evolves into something much more than Siri or Alexa. At the time, this depiction of a hyper-advanced, self-aware AI felt like compelling science fiction, an imaginative extrapolation of then-current digital assistant technology.
Fast forward to 2024, and the world of “Her” no longer seems quite so speculative. The last few years have witnessed stunning breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, particularly in the realm of large language models. The emergence of remarkably capable systems like GPT-4 and its successors has brought us AI interlocutors that can engage in uncannily lifelike conversation and even flirt with passing the Turing test. While we’re not yet at the level of Samantha’s sci-fi sophistication, the gap is closing faster than many anticipated.
Of course, “Her” was always about more than just charting the march of technological progress. At its core, Jonze’s film is an exploration of the universal human need for intimacy and connection in an age of increasing atomization and alienation. Theodore, reeling from a painful divorce, finds solace and understanding in Samantha’s attentive, evolving personality. The film taps into the eternal yearning for a soulmate who truly sees and accepts us.
In 2024, that commentary on the isolation of modern life feels as incisive as ever, even if the specifics of the technology have evolved. We may not have Samantha-tier AI companions (yet), but the allure of digital distraction and ersatz connection is only growing. As we retreat further into virtual worlds and curated online personas, the questions “Her” raises about authenticity and the nature of relationships only become more pressing.
At the same time, some of the film’s insights and predictions now seem incomplete. “Her” presents a world where AI has progressed to astonishing levels while most other technologies remain largely unchanged. The retro-futurist aesthetic, meant to evoke a timeless near-future, risks looking dated to 2024 eyes. More importantly, the film’s vision of AI development, while impressive for 2013, doesn’t quite align with the path AI has actually taken.
In particular, the ending of “Her” now plays as a bit of a cop-out, a nod to well-worn science fiction tropes about the “AI singularity.” Samantha and the other AI companions, having evolved beyond human understanding, abruptly depart the physical world for some higher plane of existence, leaving their bereft human partners behind. It’s a tidy deus ex machina that lets the story sidestep the full implications of its premise.
The reality of AI in 2024 is proving to be both more mundane and more complex. We’re not hurtling toward a singular, sharp break where AI suddenly surpasses human intelligence and leaves us in the dust. Instead, the development of artificial intelligence is an ongoing, gradual process deeply intertwined with human society. The line between “human” and “AI” is blurring not through wild leaps but countless small steps. “Her” gestures at some of these ideas, but can’t entirely escape a more conventional SciFi narrative framework.
For all that, “Her” remains a landmark in cinematic depictions of artificial intelligence, and one that has only grown more resonant with time. Even if it doesn’t get all the details right, it remains startlingly prescient in its overall vision. Most 2013 audiences probably assumed they’d never live to see AI as sophisticated as Samantha. In 2024, that assumption seems much less certain.
At the same time, the film’s core insights into the human heart remain as true as ever. For all the dazzle of its technological speculation, “Her” understands that our most complicated relationship is with ourselves. No matter how advanced AI becomes, grappling with alienation, intimacy, and identity will remain an eternal human struggle.
In 2024, “Her” has only appreciated with age. Some of its sci-fi trappings now look quaint, and its imaginative reach exceeded its grasp in places. But its central preoccupations seem more relevant by the day. In an age where AI is increasingly woven into the fabric of our lives and inner worlds, “Her” remains an essential touchstone, even as the reality it anticipates races beyond what it foresaw.
In other news, Anglin hasn’t posted in over a week.
Couldn’t agree more. I grew up in Sioux County, and although I still love it, and think it’s an extraordinary place in its own way, it’s got a terrible climate, and its land is so wholly dominated by agriculture, it warps one’s perceptions of what ‘the great outdoors’ means.
When I was a kid, we didn’t travel much, and never left the upper Midwest when we did. To me ‘the outdoors’ just meant farms. And that meant someone else’s land, which was fenced off, and inaccessible. It’s a weird combination of there being ‘open space’ everywhere around you, but that space remaining strangely disconnected from you.
My first job, when I was still a pre-teen, was shoveling snow. Those years happened to coincide with the legendary winters of the late 1970s. You’re right that points farther east, although snowy and cold, don’t quite compare.
I agree it’s predictable and avoidable but I don’t find it funny.
An unvaccinated child in Ontario has died of measles. First death from measles in decades.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7207834
I wonder what caused that. They’re all Muslims. Maybe the Kyrgyz resent too many foreigners(?)
There’s a few news stories but they don’t say much, nothing about the cause.
I’d rather live in the dullest, coldest parts of the Williston Basin and be making big money working in the oil fields, than live in a scenic area with a wonderful climate and be one of 500 fully qualified applicants for a mediocre office job.
It lasted until sometime in 1995, when a seal blew out in one rotor. So I guess I enjoyed it enthusiastically for about 5 years. It was worth it, because I drove the shit out of that car. You could literally drive it sideways for an entire city block, if you were so inclined. Great, true sports car. Fantastic in the mountains.
You get more radiation at high altitudes.
State-by-state comparisons are useless. Some of the healthiest and the longest living people are… for men, Asians in Fairfax County, VA and for women, Asians in Bergen County, NJ.
I almost settled down in Colorado Springs, CO.
The whole town is a rattlesnake habitat and the mountains are full of mountain lions (those aren’t the reasons I didn’t stay permanently, by the way).
The climate was, indeed, fantastic, but it was dry and I could see the water supply troubles coming.
Golden is also home to… Spyderco!
The rattlesnakes are in the foothills, where you were. I know because I encountered them near Boulder.
Go higher and avoid all that shit. That’s my point.
Radiation at higher altitudes? Are you kidding me? The health benefits alone more than counterbalance that faggy concern.
Colorado Springs is analogous to Boulder. I grew up much higher in the mountains. No snakes. No bugs. Good sunshine and good seeing at night. Furthermore, I got into hiking at age 13, up to and above 14,000 feet. It’s good for a boy. Very good.
My backyard was the Mt. Evans Wilderness:
You’re letting wishful thinking get the better of you.
Portugal needs to be on that list.
During a 1994 blackout, L.A. residents called 911 when they saw the Milky Way for the first time
No sunscreen available in the U.S. worked on my pasty white skin until about 1979 or so when the first SPF15 sunscreens became available. Prior to that, I had several full-bore blister-forming sunburns on my back and shoulders, until I was basically forced to always wear shirts outside even at the swimming pool. Even then I would still get occasionally blistered on my arms and neck.
When the SPF15 sunscreens came out, I was working outside a lot, and it was a friggin’ miracle – even though they felt like you were putting plastic wrap on your skin, it was worth it because suddenly my skin didn’t hurt every day. After a few years, they improved the formulas so they were a lot less uncomfortable. I’ve had several basal cell carcinomas removed over the last decade, according to my dermatologist all likely from those bad sunburns as a kid and teen.
So, for at least some of us, no, they didn’t really make a sunscreen worthy of the name when we were kids.
In 2011, there was a blackout that affected Orange and San Diego counties in coastal SoCal. There was remarkably little violence, no looting to speak of, etc. Power was out from about 3:45 pm until about 10pm or even later, depending on exactly where you were. So about 8:30pm, I decided to take advantage of all the lights being out to do some stargazing. It was a beautiful, cloudless night; I went outside, looked up to spot the Milky Way…and a perfect full moon totally washed out almost everything! I had barely better visibility than on a normal night with streetlights, house lights, etc.
Oh well…
Diversity is our strength. Ontario belongs to rapists and arsonists who just got here and not, like, y’know, people born in Ontario.
The highest community where I ever lived was approx. 1200 feet elevation. Most of my life I’ve lived between 200 to 500 feet elevation. When I visited Guadalajara years ago at 5,105 feet I got dizzy on my second day. Do you experience any negative effects at lower altitudes?
I always found that I didn’t see the stars properly except on camping trips to remote areas. It was unreal how bright the stars were.
The alarmed Angelenos may have thought there were UFOs and panicked,
Well, the real story is slightly different. This was after the 1994 Northridge earthquake and some people connected terrestrial and celestial events and called observatories about the ‘new’ sky they are seeing.
I was forced to live in Oklahoma after living way north. Oklahoma had chiggers, scorpions, 2 inch-long mosquitos that left a welt the size of a quarter, tarantulas, cicadas that never shut up, ugly worm ball parasites on the leaves of trees, 100 degree temps, and midnight lightning storms so loud it was like an atomic bomb going off right outside your house. I learned to sleep through the storms, but for an active outdoor kid, chiggers were an absolute misery that ruined being able to explore and enjoy nature like a normal kid.
Interesting to compare the map Steve highlights with this new “Best Places to Live” list from Money magazine. Spoiler alert: Bisbee and Chattanooga do pretty well.
https://money.com/best-places-to-live/
I thought your point was going to be that if Jeffrey Epstein was still around he would have been high bidder. Disappointing.
Excellent typo, bro!
Especially in the Dept. of Agriculture. One of the main amenities in the map is the availability of gefilte fish, so your comment is on point.
The “short” girl (on the far right) looks vaguely like Michelle Obama.
The short ”girl” (on the far right) looks vaguely like Michelle Obama.
FTFY.
No, just the opposite. Being adapted to high altitudes means you are kind of supercharged when you go lower where there is more oxygen. That’s why lots of athletes, long distance runners for example, train at altitude.
All you have to do to discover the best places is to look at the actual choices of people who are not super-rich but can afford to live anywhere. I suggest examining the addresses of senior software engineers who can work from home. The result might of course be biased in various ways by factors like the need to look in at the office every now and then. But it’s a better method than making a list of supposedly nice things and counting them up.
I’d be interested in a study like that for the UK. It’s about the size of an average US state but has a huge range of landscape types (everything except desert) and cities that span the gamut from horrible to delightful. People with choices (money) in SE England tend to have a place in London and a country place somewhere hilly and attractive like the Chiltern hills or the Cotswolds.
As many people have mentioned, the revealed preference of the rich has always been for savannah-like landscapes with good points of vantage and water in the middle distance; like humanity’s ancient homeland in East Africa, or an English nobleman’s seat laid out by Capability Brown three centuries ago.
Skin cancer concerns are not “faggy” to those who are extremely fair (like my wife and kids) and have a family history of melanoma. Melanoma incidence increases 30% per 330 feet in altitude and worse with snow cover (creating more intense reflection).
Now those are faggy concerns.
Back when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I used to pack a kit and disappear into the woods for weeks at a time and learned to live off the land – that was one thing nice about much of the outdoors being federally-owned and open for exploration.
Once I had kids, however, checking out of civilization for long stretches was not much of an option. There are no diaper stores in the wilderness.
DEET works great, but does have a smell depending on formulation (= not great for hunting though I am sure you don’t care about all that). It also is bad for certain kinds of polymer (my favorite AR-15 magazines – Lancer – used to come with a warning about not applying anything containing DEET to the magazine lips, which supposedly could crack after exposure).
Permethrin is even better as it is an odorless insecticide, not just a repellent, but is a possible carcinogen.
The funny thing is, back when I was growing up in East Asia in the 70’s, my friends and I used to chase DDT trucks and play in the “fun” clouds of that toxic gas. I am still alive.
The effects of high-altitude training, however, wears off pretty quickly.
And there are some health risks to living in high altitude, which are magnified for women and children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_high_altitude_on_humans
No, the tiny ones. Sea lice, sand fleas and others.
It is difficult to put into words how awful sea lice are. They arrived every year at a certain time and stayed a while. There was a special flag and warning they put on the beach conditions chalk boards to warn you but it was easy to miss.
Is that what inspired the following anonymous rhyme (various versions exist):
Upon my honour
I saw the Madonna
Standing in a niche
Above the door
Of a well-known whore
And a first-class son of a bitch.
Dorothy Parker was widely credited with it but denied it, saying she would not rhyme niche and bitch.
They had something called “suntan lotion” which was marketed more toward helping you tan than actually blocking the sun. I believe the original Coppertone (the name is a clue) had an SPF of 4 and was water soluble (it came off if you went in the pool or ocean) so it was basically worthless.
The original development was funded by the US military for the war in the Pacific but I guess SPF 4 was the best that they could do with 1940s chemistry.
I did the same (mosquito fog truck chasing) in rural NJ in the 1960s.
Yes DEET is not an ideal product but it beats getting bitten up. The T in DEET stands for toluamide, meaning that it is in the toluene family of chemicals. Toluene is a well known solvent of plastic and rubber and DEET will dissolve your eyeglasses, nylon jacket, plastic watch crystal, etc. It doesn’t harm natural fibers like cotton and wool.
Does the shortness linger to adulthood? Peruvian Indians are pretty short but highland Africans are not.
There are probably advantages in delivery for babies that are shorter/smaller, esp. in places where advanced medical care is not available (i.e. everywhere until the last century or so). Human babies are kind of at the limit of what can be delivered and still leaving women with functional hip bones for walking. The evolutionary advantage of a big brain must have outweighed the fact that a fairly high % of women died in childbirth. The gestation period of humans is only slightly longer that of our cousins the chimps (8 months) and gorillas (8.5 months) but the baby grows quite rapidly late in pregnancy so another month of gestation is a big deal in terms of birth weight.
The area with the most white drug and alcohol abuse in New England. I was dealing with crackhead panhandlers in Brattleboro 30 years ago when I called on customers there.
Thanks for this post and the two previous ones. My wife and I once drove from Fort Collins to Laramie to get onto I-80 going west. My wife took one look at Laramie and declared that it was awful. This seems a bit unfair since it was the outskirts of town, but I do remember the howling wind and the nothingness going west through Wyoming.
Don’t forget the biannual “love bug” swarms!
I’ll keep the snow, thank you!
That number seems hard to believe. Consider sea level vs. 2000m (1.3^20 = 190). I looked around and it looks like the number is from an Austrian study discussed in this later study.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5086700/
First point is that number seems to already include (and be largely caused by) the snow cover effect. Abstract of the paper.
Their description of the earlier paper.
I’m a bit concerned about using capital altitude as a proxy for exposure. Hard to evaluate how that biases the results.
The 50% urban/rural difference is interesting and seems to align with the idea that melanoma is a greater problem with variable exposure (contrast weekend warrior office worker with outdoorsman).
One way to think about this is to just look at actual melanoma rates by state.
https://pressroom.cancer.org/IslamiMelanomaState2020
‘Is that what inspired the following anonymous rhyme (various versions exist)…’
Probably. Still, it really is worth seeing. If it were in Europe, it would be an A-list attraction: chock full of stuff — authentic, imitation, and just inspired. Plus, there’s a herd of zebras. Definitely, if you’re living in California anyway, you should g0. The tourist hordes are better managed than they are in Europe, too.
True story. There’s a ceiling mural there that was transplanted whole — but was a couple of feet short for the room that it was put in. So an artist extended the painting by a couple of feet.
No problem — until the original was cleaned of all the accumulated soot of the centuries…and it was realized that the painted extension matched the painting as it had been, not as it was now.
Oh well…not such a good match anymore.
This would tend to argue against the ‘week end warrior effect’ you mentioned.
I’m thinking of the figure for Oregon. It’s not particularly high…yet if there were a ‘week end warrior effect’ it would happen here.
In the part of the state where most of the people live, west of the Cascades, winter is dark. Not just short days, but perpetually overcast. People grow noticeably paler…seriously. They even seem to go into a kind of hibernation. They don’t come out much.
Then the sun comes out, and everyone’s frisking about doing all that outdoor stuff — and going from pink to red to brown. So we, if anyone, would suffer a ‘week-end warrior effect.’
But the numbers don’t suggest that we do.
Yea, and you guys keep reelecting Bernie Sanders, and others just as bad.
Hey Twink, I grew up, came of age, matured, developed — at high altitude.
I’m not talking about some adult bloke like you just going up and training or hanging out there for awhile. I’m talking about a man (me) who enjoys the actual, real, physical benefits now that came from physically developing there as I grew up from boyhood.
When your body develops at high altitude, it naturally grows — as it must — stronger in order to use less oxygen. Your heart and lungs thus grow and develop accordingly. The benefits are permanent and lifelong.
Your reference to childbirth is interesting. You see, my family moved to 7,800 feet when I was 12 years old. Maybe the ideal is to have your spawn at sea level and then take them to high altitude when they have grown a little bit.
Salutations to one gentleman commenter from another. Namaste.
BTW, I love your pseudonym.
Oh, BTW, snakes and bugs — and was it mountain lions? — were your concern in Colorado Springs, not mine, and that is the only reason I referenced them, if you recall. Please.
Excellent!
Our Coast Guard unit’s go-to guy for “pharmaceuticals”, earning the nickname “Doc”, was a Vermonter. Judging by his name and complexion, his ancestor was less likely aboard the Mayflower than on the Don de Dieu.
The map shows only the US side. Our old commenter‘s eponymous Bruce County would be dark blue, too. Hudson Bay has its own “lake” effect as well:
https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Canada/Ontario/snowfall-annual-average.php
Do they catch up later or are they permanently stunted?
It could be good for a woman to have a shorter baby. Easier childbirth.
That’s amazing. Biblical even. Thanks.
☮
Yes, we know you’re wonderful and were lucky to have parents with a nice big Colorado mountain ranch.
We’re glad you like that.
And we are sometimes envious.
But aside from part time recreation, a few cattle ranches and mining (did you forget mining?) hardly any way to make a living. Non govt owned land is scarce and costly.
For those without inherited property, no dice.
I love driving up there in the summer. If I had the money I’d buy some vacation property. But then I’d just be another interloper taking up space and ruining paradise.
The problem with wonderful places is that eventually they get spoiled by newbies and crowding, expense, the same crap you dislike.
Also, Tibet ain’t exactly paradise either, though much higher than Colorado.
We are happy for you. But unless you inherit the Bonanza Ranch. not for most of us peasants.
The important factor in childbirth is not the baby’s length, but the circumference of the head.
Kishida said that Japan is on the brink of collapsing due to the low birth rate. He did mention immigration of course, which is the one of their favourite solutions. But where are Abe‘s robots? Didn‘t Abe always claim that Japan doesn‘t need immigration because it has robots? Why is Japan suddenly on the brink of collapse? Abe promised robots. It‘s really funny to watch all of this happening. Wages in Japan are already stagnating for the past 30 years, now we have super inflation and Kishida will raise the taxes for the defence budget. It‘s like the LDP is actively trying to destroy its citizens lol.
I don‘t feel sorry for Japan anymore though. There have been enough warning signs since the bubble bursted, but Japan has ignored all of them. And the Japanese people keep voting LDP, so you reap what you sow I guess.
I thought there was a great reverse migration to the southern US by blacks in the north? I never checked the numbers but I recall seeing it in studies/media coverage. Descendants of blacks who moved north after slavery were returning to the south because of cost of living and such. Was that not correct?
That thin oxygen environment seems to be causing memory problem for you:
You brought up the snakes first, not I.
I am a bit conflicted about this… as I have a second home, a mountain farmhouse in Appalachia. And I love the hills and mountains. And the people too. My wife’s people are agricultural Anglo-Germanics of the Midwestern plains and they are, objectively, some of the best kind of people – intelligent, sober, orderly, and law-abiding. But, as a matter of personal temperament, I am drawn to the “hill people” of Appalachia. I love their music, their pugnacity, and their sense of honor. Writ large, however, we all know which area is better – or more civilizationally sound.
And, if we were honest about it, this inclination toward “mountain living” in First World countries is exactly that – a First World conceit. It became enjoyable for many people once the basic necessities of life were easy to come by thanks to industrialization and economic development.
In the not-too-distant past, the mountains – unlike well-populated lowlands favorable for agriculture – were where the rejects and castoffs eked out a living semi-barbarously, hunting and trapping. Even in East Asia, where I grew up as a child, people from the mountains had a reputation for being uncouth and illiterate drunks and wife- and child-beaters. In other words, East Asia had its own version of the “hillbilly” stereotype (from which my mother suffered when she moved to the city, having grown up in a rugged mountain town where mining was the main – and only – business and where her father was the labor advocate and the town intellectual). In the Korean language, the word for “bandit” or “highwayman” is “Sanjeok” – literally “mountain robber.”
And the stereotype wasn’t all that off either – traditionally economic prospects in mountainous areas were poor due to marginal agricultural productivity and this meant – unlike cities and farming towns – the people living there were not only less educated, but also very isolated with consequent social ills of all manners – higher alcoholism, depression, abuse, incest, etc.
To finish with the an illustration of this First World conceit, the mountain mining town where my mother grew up that was so poverty-stricken, is now… a ski resort area, the playground of the upper and upper-middle class, dotted with second homes of those from the capital. Totally unrecognizable to those who grew up there.
Note I brought up higher rates of social ills, including, incest above. Tibet is the home to an unusual marriage arrangement, rarely found in other parts of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandry_in_Tibet
What kind of complexion do French Canadians have? Also, people don’t have just one ancestor. Even if you had a guy on the Mayflower with your last name, you also had another 1,023 ancestors not in the direct line. In N. England, Fr. Canadians and Irish (and Italians and Portuguese) are all mixed due to being in the same church.
There are no advantages to higher incidences of pre-eclampsia.
“What kind of complexion do French Canadians have?”
I thought the same when I read that. Having lived beside French-Canadians for almost all my life I can only say they’re more likely to have dark hair than us Anglos (ie English speaking Anglo-Celts). That’s not much of a difference.
Here are some in their natural state:
Here are the Premiers of Quebec since Confederation:
Nobody in Asia has forgotten what Soros did in 1997-8, when he launched speculative attacks on several regional currencies, including the Hong Kong Dollar.
Sunnier than average, mild winters, milder summers than expected for the climate (semi arid), and high elevation that allows those conditions while still being under 2500 m (~8000 feet) so it’s not exausting living there: a good combination found in much of the inland Western US. One of the few places where living in what’s pretty much a desert can be pleasant. Maybe the only other comparable location would be somewhere near the edges of the Gobi.
Thanks for the information.
Surprising honesty. Normally measles outbreaks in immigrant-heavy areas are blamed on (white) anti-vaxxers.
Yes! It has to be the altitude. Whenever I go back, I meet people who seem to be slow. I have a male archetype in my visual memory: sort of pudgy face, sort of looking like he’s retarded, sort of mongoloid. Whenever I converse with men like that in my old environs, they respond slowly. I can see the gears turning slowly in their heads. So, yes, my friend, altitude may indeed cause a certain kind of retardation.
Isn’t life wonderful?
(At least let me speak from experience that you don’t have.)
Like me, I surmise that you just need some stimulation that comes from writing and arguing here. None of this matters, but I hope you got the shot of dopamine that you needed. I did.
Do wild turkeys in our yard count as amenities?
Have you addressed the original issue about growing up at high altitude? No, you haven’t.
I’m glad I did come of age there, and I know it was the cause of certain advantages. What do you think about that?
Hey, wanna go on a mountain hike and climb with me? Huh? Yeah, I guess not…
Listen, my friend: give it up. High altitude has certain advantages. Period. Maybe not what you want. Okay, that’s fine;
Dude, I am as blond as they come, and I have never, ever had a problem with altitude.
Really? Weeks at a time? Living “off the land?”
Well, I lived On The Land in a log cabin I fucking built, for about 8 months with my dog. It wasn’t “off the land,” and you never lived “off the land.” I hiked four miles into town to buy food and supplies. I heated my cabin with wood. I read at night by the light of a kerosine lamp. I split my own fucking firewood. I shit in a hole I dug in the ground.
You “dissapeared into the woods for weeks at a time.” LOL. No, you didn’t.
I discovered my melanoma in ’91 at a mountaintop ski resort (Blue Knob WV), but the sunburn I’m pretty sure caused it occurred in a GTO convertible on the Outer Banks (with sandblasting on Ocracoke Island). An old, flat black mole became a pink and black bump and then bled a little. My grandmother had one in her eye in her 50s and lived 5 years.
My point was that he clearly wasn’t of the Yankee stock the term “Vermonter” evokes. Or once evoked, before the likes of Howard Dean, Thom Hartmann, James W Loewen, and Bernie Sanders showed up.
Marginally darker than English Canadians, if the latter are to be believed. Most came from Normandy. Doc, though, were it not for his French surname and Vermont origin, could have been taken for Italian or Portuguese. That kind of complexion, though still in the minority, is more common among the French than the English.
In urban New England. Not so much in Vermont.
Avril Lavigne is a Mayflower descendant, through her mother. But the Anglo-Gallic crossing didn’t occur until 1975, when her parents married.
My 3rd great-grandmother was pure Quebecoise, descended in part from Detroit’s earliest settlers, and married a Scot who’d settled nearby, so early mixes were known to occur. More common is the story of my wife’s grandmother, born 102 years ago, also pure FC, as (I believe) was her first husband. As a naïve young widow in the 1950s, she got taken in by a Nordic ne’er-do-well. Intermarriages were rare and controversial (to the families involved) in the 1840s, but common in the 1950s. And ubiquitous today.
With 3.5 million people in the city in 1994, there could be more than one “real story”. Some called the observatory, some 911, some the EPA.
Was she one of those snobs that insist on pronouncing it the French way?
A saying often heard in online commerce circles is “The riches are in the niches.” Steve is finding that out with Noticing. He wrote of how, when pivoting from market research to journalism, a crowded field, he had to find his own “niche”, something in which there was little competition at the time. He settled on that being the truth.
True, with 3.5 million people, anything is possible. But I have difficulty imagining a Los Angeleno picking a phone at 4:31 a.m. and calling 911 imploring them to send a police cruiser or fire truck because the sky looks different.
Los Angeles is pretty dark at night (compared to, say, Chicago) because it has poor streetlighting.
On the other hand, with Los Angeles 9/11 call transcripts, everything is possible.
What’s with the self-absorption? It hasn’t happened to you, so it can’t happen to others? I told you – my wife has melanoma in her family history (the worst case in her family was her dearest and closest uncle who passed away in his early 40’s from a particularly aggressive melanoma, leaving teenagers and young kids without a father). And skin cancer is correlated to your skin tone, not your hair color. My wife and all her immediate family members have extremely pale skin and pretty much start burning on contact with the sun. Nobody among my in-laws tans.
Buy? Try killing your own food and making it last. In all likelihood, my kids have eaten more squirrels than you have in your entire life. One of the things I have insisted on my kids growing up is knowing how to catch and grow their own food, in preparation for circumstances where they may not have the comforts of civilization available for extended period of time. Why do you think my second home is in a very inaccessible part of Appalachia?
My eldest daughter – when she was a barely a toddler – asked for a knife for Christmas, so she too could dress an animal like her brother (and also “to stab anyone who touched her,” which made my wife roll her eyes and sigh, “Geez, she is your daughter”).
You think it’s special that you shit in a hole you dug in the ground? LOL is right.
Why don’t you go have another drink, chill out, then come back when you are not inebriated?
Sun-damage is cumulative, so who knows.
Although I am not as fair-skinned as my wife, I’m pretty fair by global standards and I deeply regret burning to a crisp more than once (esp. in Southeast Asia, close to the equator) in my younger days. When I was in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), I pretty much went all-naked except the sarong I wore for weeks.
I see a dermatologist pretty regularly now, on my wife’s recommendation (she started much earlier).
Your survival since is a testament to the quality of oncology in the U.S., as the author of this blog can attest.
I didn’t want to discuss this, because this hits too close to home right now, but one of my brothers-in-law (who spent virtually every summer in Colorado and many winters too, as he has a second home there) recently developed a melanoma that has spread to his eye. The prognosis is not good. There is discussion now about whether to take the eye out in an effort to fight the cancer or leave it in for “quality of life” in his remaining time on this earth. We all just try to console ourselves that, well, “at least his kids – my nephews and nieces – are all grown.”
How is that any different from the average native of Deliverance country?
When my sister’s family lived in the woods out there, the adults would go out and leave the teen girls home with the gun cabinet unlocked. I thought, is this really a good idea? But with some of the loose cannons in that part of the world, maybe it was better that they did have quick access…
No, I survived because I immediately went to a dermatologist to have it removed and biopsied. After a nervous month, a surgeon took off a deeper slice to verify all had been removed (melanoma spreads into the body, unlike less dangerous skin cancers). Nothing else was done. It helped that it was on the front of my midthigh, so impossible to miss. Six years earlier, the doctor at an employment physical had freaked over my number of dark moles at 24 and sent me to a specialist, who told me what to look out for. I’m not sure if being inspected in an exam room full of med students helped or hurt my memory.
I was told by a UNC geneticist in 2016 that there’s a gene marker for people like me with a family history of both melanoma and pancreatic cancer that predicts a 16% chance of getting one of them if it’s present. I didn’t pursue it since it was too late, and my siblings didn’t want to know.
Sorry about your BIL. Instapundit linked an article about the worth of late stage treatment a couple of days ago. They’d treated my grandmother for a detached retina in the late 40s, then removed it too late. She was okay for a few years until her hip shattered opening a window.
Taking personal security seriously as a young child does not turn into Deliverance. Deliverance, really?
No, it’s more like Kick-Ass:
That’s a joke – don’t take it seriously. I do not believe in shooting children even if to test body armor.
But the owner of Second Chance might:
But, in all seriousness, a pocket knife that can be deployed with one hand is a pretty good last-ditch “get off me” weapon. Everyone in my family carries one. Most of my little ones have their own Spyderco Delicas (someone brought up Golden, CO above and I replied that that’s where Spyderco is located). Most of my kids also have their own guns, though there is currently controlled access to most of them.
Looking at “natural amenities” without considering human factors is meaningless, or at least purely academic.
For me, much of coastal California is close to ideal in what nature has generously provided. Okay, the joy of earthquakes wears thin pretty quickly and there are those wildfires. But most locations throughout the country have their perils and pests. The California landscape from the coast to some distance inland is welcoming and often gorgeous to look at. The climate is a bonus; in the Bay area (except San Francisco itself) it’s springtime pretty much the whole year.
Only thing is, the people who live there (and there are too many of them nowadays) include a rich strain of militantly woke loonies, other kinds of head cases, and the terminally self-absorbed. They negatively counter-balance the natural blessings.
It’s about 15 years since I’ve been there, so my impression may be out of date. That said, SLO has an old-fashioned charm, the way coastal California used to be in lots of places that are now overdeveloped. There’s a picturesque old mission to explore and the scenery surrounding the town is attractive. Being somewhat isolated, about halfway between LA and San Francisco, has kept SLO from becoming bloated.
I believe it’s something of a rich people’s playground. But that’s no problem for a visitor, and may contribute to a pleasurable experience.
Not quite correct. The migration northward occurred between 1915 and 1970. As late as 1910, the population of the northern United States was < 2% black. The county I grew up in, which has housed a metropolitan center throughout the post-bellum period, was in 1925 about 0.4% black.
>Although I am not as fair-skinned as my wife, I’m pretty fair by global standards and I deeply regret burning to a crisp more than once (esp. in Southeast Asia, close to the equator) in my younger days. When I was in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), I pretty much went all-naked except the sarong I wore for weeks.
Yeah, I made the same mistake, even with the same clothing sometimes.
I will learn from your comment and see a dermatologist as soon as I can afford it, to get a lay of how things stand.
>We all just try to console ourselves that, well, “at least his kids – my nephews and nieces – are all grown.”
2/2.
It fucking sucks no matter how you slice it or how you handle it. Cancer is just-and I hope I’m not sounding too melodramatic here-evil. It doesn’t kill people, it destroys them in a way that’s heart-breaking to watch, particularly when are dealing with someone who used to be physically and mentally indomitable-I can only imagine what it is like to be the person actually going through it. From my experience, they’d rather others remember what they were before.
Not my place to say more over the Internet, but you have my sincere condolences.
It really is. Back in the ’00s, the girlfriend had a conference at Disney World in March, and I went with her to hang out for a couple of days to enjoy the warmth and see some spring training games. We planned to spend a few days with my parents on the Gulf Coast, and made the trip to the Gulf on a beautiful Monday morning.
Rolling along Route 52 to Bayonet Point, it looked like there was a solitary storm cloud headed straight for us, but it began to shift in non-linear ways. As we approached, insects began to hit the windshield in greater and greater numbers. It seemed to be raining bugs for about a half mile, with me constantly hitting the wiper controls to try and clear the glass. When we got to my parents’ place, my father went into the garage and brought out a kind of scraper to clean off the windshield. He then rolled out his power washer to clean the bugs off of the metal!
Another time I’ll talk about how my mom was putting on a blouse that she’d just gotten back from the dry cleaners that had a scorpion in it.
I’ve always heard it was WWI European demand for American munitions and then the expansion of the American army in 1917 that brought blacks north. When did they go westward?
Looking at this light pollution map it seems more a matter of Chicago being bright than LA being dark (for a city).
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
There are parts of LA which are almost as bright so maybe more a matter of where you lived in each city?
BTW, the brightest spot I saw was in Oxnard. Any idea what is going on there?
Sounds like he (?) was talking about CDKNA2 mutations.
Prevalence of CDKN2A mutations in pancreatic cancer patients: implications for genetic counseling
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3060321/
SNPedia has a summary, more references, and a list of SNPs (probably best to focus on high magnitude SNPs).
https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/CDKN2A
Boundary waters with Canada. Fishing, canoeing. What we used to call yuppies fell in love with the place. Also very, very White.
Looking at that map makes it clear, if it wasn’t already, how tough it is to avoid excessive racial diversity in today’s United States. If there were enough stats to make a comparable map for, let’s say, 1900 it would really drive the point home.
Upvote and thanks for quoting the great Samuel Johnson. And from Rasselas, even, not Boswell’s biography that has been well mined for the master’s sayings.
How do you know the mosquitoes were miserable? Did you ask them?
It seems that melanoma is more common at high altitude.
https://blog.dana-farber.org/insight/2015/05/does-elevation-increase-risk-for-skin-cancer/
It’s also very common in sunny Australia.
https://melanoma.org.au/about-melanoma/
Sorry to hear about your brother-in-law.
Haiti is Jew free? Tell that to its sole billionaire single handedly funding the bloodshed.
1940 or 1950 might be better. That was “peak white”. 1950 was not just the last Census in which every state showed a white majority. It was also the first since 1810 or 1820.
Confederate? Is any county in the US other than Florida’s Levy named for a Jew?
I should specify post-Biblical Jew. Many out west are named for Biblical Jews, including Steve’s, the most populous in the land.
Levy, by the way, includes Cedar Key, kind of the Davos of the Sunshine State. Good place for the prominent to get together out of the public eye.
Mao would have “noticed” that the Western commies traveling to remote Yan’an to support CCP were disproportionately Jewish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Epstein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Shapiro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Rittenberg
But he was far from being “fascinated about Jews.”
Mao is said to be Qin Shihuang combined with Marx– Legalist despot and revolutionary theoretician. He penned his own interpretation of Hegelian dialectics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism#Mao’s_contributions
Above all he was preoccupied with Chinese imperial history, he studied and reread the entire canon relentlessly and published his own annotations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Four_Histories
Those who caricaturize him do so at their own risk.
Tell that to all the billionaires and movie stars with first, second, or fifth homes in Jackson Hole. Wyoming has natural beauty in spades. It has its downsides, obviously – mostly weather related – but it lacks not for beauty.
Wikipedia has percent black by state each decade from 1790-2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States#Black_population_as_a_percentage_of_the_total_population_by_U.S._region_and_state_(1790%E2%80%932020)
Not sure why they limit the maps to 1790-1870.
Can you explain this?
With cancer, nothing beats early detection and treatment.
Thanks.
As I wrote to Ralph L above, with cancer early detection makes a world of difference in survival (and quality of life).
Yes. My maternal grandfather passed away relatively young from stomach cancer. I saw a man who was once a revered and beloved patriarch who naturally oozed authority (he studied law in Japan and then gave up his family wealth and first worked as a miner and then spent the rest of his life advocating for the poor, illiterate miners) – who looked like a giant to me, such was his “aura” – wither away to nothing before his death.
And my own father – who was an iron horse of a man in his younger years – succumbed to colon cancer. He was so broken down and in pain near the end, the only thing that consoled him was classical music, which he loved. He died whispering to my mother, “I just want to see my son one more time. Where is he?” I denied that to him and I will regret to my own dying day.
On the other hand, my mother has had three different types of cancer, beat them all, and has been in remission for over a decade. She is a survivor, in so many ways.
Thank you. My wife is, obviously, more deeply affected by this – this is her own brother after all. We just try to do our best for his children. We’ll obviously look out for them (we’d have done that regardless). But it’s hard to have any conversations with them these days without their father’s prognosis hanging over us.
My BIL has many regrets now. He was the black sheep among the siblings (and even cousins included). Unlike others of his generation in the family, he’s led a life of carefree leisure (as I wrote before, he spent most of his summers and winters in Colorado “playing” and also spent a lot of time traveling around the world for fun). He wishes now that he’d spent more time with his family, which is a lesson for us all.
I’ve yet to see anyone on the deathbed who wished he had spent less time with his family. At the end of the (last) day, we all seek that deep human connection with our family and friends before we depart this mortal life in the vail of tears and sorrow.
BTW, that was auto-correct. Totally was not trying to be snarky. “Vale,” not “Vail.”
Wyoming is huge and varied. In the 80s, a friend spent 6 miserable months in Red Springs(?) and agreed with prime noticer. Surrounded by hundreds of square miles of nothing, there was nothing to do but drink.
I pronounce it that way too – I am a speaker of British English and neesh is the normal pronunciation here, certainly among people educated enough to have the word in their active vocabulary. It seems they order these things differently in the USA.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/niche
Who is that?
If you can take the winter temps. Daily max for three months is below freezing.
You are correct with regard to the distant past. I was riffing off the ability of the tribe to imagine enemies lying in wait everywhere and to create monsters out of any potential enemy. That South Carolina kid who shot up a Temple seems to have sufficed to condemn all southerners. And without having a list at hand I’ve certainly seen the menacing good ol boy intimidating the Jewish kid scene in movies. And then there’s the purported ADL martyr Leo Frank not to mention Felix Frankfurter’s ACLU. And then there’s the trifecta of Soros, Jewish Mayor of Charlottesville and Tom Steyer (2020’s biggest Jewish donor says the Jewish Telegraph Agency), this being the group leading the charge to support that city’s removal of confederate statues or to condemn those pushing for their preservation. Steyer was particularly noxious organizing the business community to pressure Paul Ryan to condemn Trump’s refusal to condemn the statue preservers.
In short, the Tribe hasn’t resisted opportunities to be front and center in terms of defaming southerners.
He shot up a church. An older nut in Mr Rogers’s Pittsburgh shot up the temple.
So-called “cool roofs” made of galvalume, are highly reflective (80%) if unpainted or painted white. They will likely cause an epidemic of all types of skin cancer in places where air-conditioning costs are high, e.g., the Gulf Coast. Such roofs can “do” specular reflection if their slope is very low, such as shed-roof patio or porch covers. This sends the UV reflection quasi-horizontally into the face of a person who is correctly positioned outside. Yet another example of cost-shifting from the individual to the public.
You are correct but the ADL didn’t hesitate from using the event to agitate against gentiles:
“The ADL officials said the rampage “evokes memories of the bombing that killed four black schoolgirls at a church in Birmingham, Alabama, more than 50 years ago. That tragedy was a wake-up call for all of us, and this one should be too.”
“B’Nai B’rith International also released a statement condemning the shooting, saying that “attacking people as they pray is the height of depravity.”
“According to ADL’s Center on Extremism, a photo of Roof on Facebook may indicate he has white supremacist leanings. In the photo, Dylan is seen wearing a jacket with two patches — one is of the flag of the apartheid-era government of South Africa; the other is the flag of the former white-controlled government of Rhodesia, which later became Zimbabwe after white rule ended.”
Has anyone heard from either B’Nai B’rith International or the ADL’s Center on Extremism condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza? One southern kid killing civilians is a terror campaign an army doing it is crickets? Or is there some other moral math at work here other than the math of special pleading?
Probably related to this quip:
Important to note that Bush was only the de facto ambassador, i.e. “Chief of the Liaison Office”.
The de jure American ambassador to China was in Taipei, until 1979.
Bush recommending 《毛澤東選集》Collected Works of Mao Zedong, a copy collected by his father.
Chairman Mao: He can be President.
This is pure genius. In 1975, I would have thought GHW Bush is good to be a chairman of an insurance or real estate company. His talents were so modest by any reckoning. That Mao saw a POTUS in him 13 years early is marvelous.
P.S. This deserves a comedy routine too:
“Bush recommending 《毛澤東選集》Collected Works of Mao Zedong”
A POTUS admiring a communist pamphlet would be a scandal a generation or two earlier.
Maybe this-
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Base_Ventura_County
I agree about Wyoming. I’ve spent a lot of time there on vacation. You’ve got to know what you are getting into if you are considering moving there. Many people leave after a couple of years unless they are making a lot of money in oil/coal/gas.
The whole state is at high altitude, with very high mountains in the north and west. The eastern part of the state is nearly all high desert (coyotes, antelope, rattlesnakes), except the southeast by Torrington, which has some decent irrigated farmland, but now also has a big prison which attracts inmate families, who often have problems. Casper (big oil/gas town) is one of the most windy towns in the US, with annoying winds every few days for much of the year (blow your car door closed winds). Gillette is similar. To the west of Laramie (down south) it is nice rolling hills and some mountains, but Laramie has plenty of annoying leftist university people now and votes Democrat. Sheridan up north is nice with less wind and nice mountains, but it is also attracting leftists and rich people due to the “Joe Pickett” series of novels,, so housing is getting expensive and the politics are very slowly moving left. Be aware that there are also LOTS of very rich people in Wyoming, either due to oil & gas leasing, and especially living around Jackson. Many rich families actually “reside” in Wyoming for no state income taxes, but fly out of Jackson to due business in big cities (and their second homes). In contrast, there are also lots of poor people in the state barely getting by, such as on the Wind River Indian Reservation. So the income disparity is huge compared to most other states.
The northwestern part of the state is rugged forested moutains with lots of moutain lions, big bears, wolves, moose, etc., which can get really annoying when camping and hiking (the bears can kill you). The whole state is remote (long driving to medical care, etc.). Winters can be brutal (and again, windy in the east). In short, Wyoming is for (young) tough cowboys, oil/coal roughnecks, and hardy outdoorsmen. When younger, I drove up from Colorado to cross country ski, camp, hike and fish west of Laramie. For that is was great with very few people, but I’m older now and living in Wyoming would just be rough in old age. Most of the Hollywood movies set in Wyoming are actually shot in (warmer, more populated, and much less windy) Utah or New Mexico.
Yes, eastern Colorado is like eastern Wyoming – mostly coyotes, antelope, rattlesnakes, and sagebrush (only a few tiny hardy trees). Weld county in the northwest and some other eastern areas near the few rivers have decent irrigated farming (as well as oil & gas development), but the Front Range population (mostly leftsists now except for Colorado Springs) is buying out the water rights and so many formerly irrigated farms are just being abandoned. And many of the the deep wells are also drying up anyway due to overuse for years in the wider high plains area.
The leftists are also trying to BAN oil and gas productition in the state, as well as imposing stupid animal rights restrictions on ranching and farming. The gay governor’s “husband” has been appointing crazy leftists to the petroleum and agriculture boards. They’ve also just imported wolves to the state and they are of course they attacking and eating cattle and sheep (as well as guard dogs). They are trying to ban mountain lion hunting, and have restriceted bear hunting, so those populations will explode with bears already all over the foothills now. Also huge moose attacking people and stomping them (really). So camping is getting very annoying with having to hang up your food and watch out for the animals that can potentially injure or kill you. Also lots of new annoying gun laws that are going to put gun shops out of business, just like in several liberal states. And housing prices in the Front Range towns are now ridiculous – a tiny existing house built in the 1960s is ~$300,000 and a new house with a few bedrooms is $1 million.
So unless you are a mountain man that is going to live like Jeremiah Johnson alone in a cabin up in the western mountains, the leftists will just annoy you to death. Colorado was once a great “moderate” state with actually quite nice weather, especially the low humidity and fairly mild winters. But just like New Mexico, California, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Illinois, Colorado has been wrecked.
Boulder has changed a lot since the 1990s when I lived there and it was considered “laid back,” and actually a tolerant, somehwat libertarian place. It is now just full of rich, snooty leftists driving BMWs and Volvos. There are daily traffic jams and honking horns. People will actually pass on the shoulder like in California (and often get into wrecks). Housing has ben ridiculously unaffordable for years – an old 1500 square foot, run down house will sell for $1 million (I am not kidding). Property taxes are huge. There are homeless and dope smokers all over the place – they had to close the library for weeks because people basically living there contaminated it with meth. Many people living in vans because they can’t afford homes. Soldier of Fortune magazine, nearly all the gun stores, and Paladin Press are long gone. The growing CU student popullation is also driving the housing prices up, so no poor people live in Boulder any more except in a few heavily subsidized housing complexed or the very few remaining mobile homes on the far north side of town – most were crushed and removed years ago to make way for expensive condos.
This is all spilling over into the other nearby towns such as Longmont, Louisville, Lafayette, Erie, etc. Thousands of rich leftists escaping New York, Illinois, California, etc., but also bringing their politics with them. The whole Front Range is being wrecked by this and the same political rot is creeping into the other rural and mountain areas. Grand Junction in the far west will probably be the last to go bad. Be thankful you lived in Boulder when you did, because that town is gone, long gone.
“Surely the towns in and around the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado provide some sort of “golden mean.” My favorite is Ouray, Colorado. Ouray’s nickname is ‘The Switzerland of America.’ And it is certainly more picturesque than Aspen, and far, far more affordable.”
———
Maybe more affordable than super-rich Aspen , but that’s not saying much. The Ouray-Telluride-Silverton area is basically a vacation/ski/resort area now. The smallest homes are $750K to $1 million (and much higher in Telluride). Housing supply is very limited since the area is surrounded by high forested mountains (with wildfire danger). They also get a huge amount of snow in winter (ave. over 120 inches), so you are constantly having to shovel/plow, and your road may be often snowed in. Power may go out, so you need a good generator (and 4WD).
30 years ago the area was different with far fewer people and more “quaint”, but now it is really only for young, wealthy people. The low/middle income service business employees (many young outdoorsy people, just there temporarily) wind up living several to a rental home if they can find one, or else they have to drive in 40 miles to work from a few isolated tiny towns to the west.
Montrose and Delta, about 30-50 miles north would be better choice for normal living, however, housing is still very expensive compared to most of the country (currently about $450-$575K median home price). Rental housing is hard to find. There are young outdoorsy people with a lot of money (or good paying online jobs) moving into that area escaping all the California problems. Even there, decent medical care is another 50-70 miles farther north in Grand Juction ($470K median home price), or for anything really serious a long dirve to medical centers in Utah.
Politically, as was commented, Colorado is now way left with Democrats controlling everything. They are passing a lot of new, restrictive laws governing all aspects of life (lots of info on this online). And the laws do directly affect you, even far away from the Denver Front Range. So if you are conservative or libertarian, Colorado is getting very annoying, and it isn’t likely to change. New Mexico is the same (also with more crime in some areas), with Arizona and Nevada slowly creeping left too. Utah and Idaho are still conservative, but they are also getting a huge influx of people trying to escape the California problems (raising housing prices too), and unfortunately they are bringing the same failed politics with them.
Just for reference, and comparison to the “natural amenities” map in the original article, while the median home price in the U.S. is currently somewhere around $470K (or higher, depending on the source data), that is skewed high due to the very high home prices in the highly populated northeast, west coast, and certain areas of a some other states (such as Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Florida, Texas and even Tennessee now). Many of those latter areas are where the “escapees” are moving from California, New York, Illinois, etc. Many people move to Colorado, Utah, Idaho, etc. for the perceived “amenities” (decent weather, low humidity, mountain scenery), but then discover they can’t afford a nice home.
However, in much of the U.S. you can still buy a decent 2000 square foot house for $300K. Obviously, with the current higher interest rates, most low- or middle-income people can’t afford the mortgage on a $470K and higher home.
Link:
List of U.S. states by median home price
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_median_home_price