You and I have vastly different experiences of cities. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in a town of 5,000 and I would never even consider moving back to a rural area, or even a suburb. I own a house in a city that is on the list above, but I’d prefer to have an apartment in nyc. As for traffic, live in the right place and you don’t have to drive. I’ve been car free for years. I recognize that is not an option in a lot of US cities, but it should be. I also don’t really have any issue with crowds and I think the trash problem is very exaggerated.

I’m not saying that cities are better for everyone, but a lot of people genuinely prefer them.

Refer to the title of the info-graphic. Salary required to buy a home in the 50 largest cities in the US.

Obviously people with money exist in rural areas. I never claimed that there were no good jobs. I said if your industry does not exist outside of large cities then you are basically forced to live and work there. Take for example a hardware engineer for a tech company. They absolutely have marketable skills, but the work cannot be done remote thus without changing industries how are they supposed to move to a rural area?

If you have those same marketable skills you can make a ton of money in large cities. Senior software engineers can realistically make $300K or more in nyc. If they go into fintech then they can make absolutely absurd amounts of money. Even in traditionally wealthy neighborhoods like the uws or ues the median household income is $130k. They are not hurting for cash or sacrificing any sort of lifestyle to be there.

There is no way that this graphic isn’t including the entire metro area. The city I currently live in is on the list and so is the city that I am planning to relocate to. Prices shown do not accurately reflect the prices of houses/condos that I would consider “in the city”.

Roughly 80% of the population in the US live in urban areas. This graphic is already definitely taking the entire metro area into account, which can include fairly rural areas depending on the city.

People are very aware that rural areas are significantly cheaper. They are cheaper precisely because the demand is low. People either do not want to live there, or they cannot live there given the industry that they work in.

You also need to realize that with a more expensive metro area comes higher median wages, so you’re not necessarily even coming out on top living in a rural area.

I didn’t go into tech for the money, but after several years of grinding I’m definitely at the point where I’m only still in it for the money. I don’t even want to think about computers outside of work anymore.

I think they’re trying to say that less people would fly than currently drive due to the cost of flying. Although, if we subsidized personal planes at the same rate that we do personal vehicles I’m not entirely sure that flying would continue to be so expensive.

I wish you could buy a decent house for 500k in NYC…

I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.

It’s mostly bullshit. Certain types of emissions create particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth, thus masking some of the warming that we have created through green house gas emissions. Banning sulphur emissions isn’t the cause of the problem, greenhouse gasses are. Banning sulphur just made our observed warming closer to what our actual warming is.

You’ll find people making the same claims about transitioning to electric cars accelerating warming since cars produce similar particles. It’s just maintain the status quo bullshit passively enabling the continuation of oil and gas. The solution isn’t to keep burning certain types of fuel because it masks our warming. Obviously the solution is to stop producing as much greenhouse gas as we possibly can.

If you decide not to go the BSD route, you should look into Void Linux. The maintainers used to be BSD people and they have carried some of that influence into Void.