I think you are way too confident in both your valuation of non-monetary benefits and harms, and your belief that big cities are possible without support from smaller communities (they aren't).
I don't think you understood my thread. Nobody understands the scale of subsidies they benefit from and those subsidies flow in all directions and aren't always monetary. That includes rural areas that benefit from ag subsidies and it includes cities that externalize costs to surrounding areas.
The kind of rural guy you are alluding to here does not exist in politically meaningful numbers. He is party of a constituency that is mostly imagined by people who live in both cities and suburbs, of both parties.
I have lived in a big cities, small cities, and villages surrounded by farms. All of these kinds of places are dependent on each other, and pretending that isn't true doesn't help anyone or fix any problems.
To you, I would say we do vote for Democrats.
7/7 city council members are Democrats.
We have had only Democratic mayors since 1997, and only 2 Republican mayors in the last century.
GOP-voting towns don't deserve to be replaced by warehouses because you order too much stuff on Amazon, either.
Now to David's point, you might be thinking, "well surely if Bethlehem voted for Democrats, many of these issues would be fixed. These people just hate me and the virtuous and cultured urban life I lead."
Electricity is cabled in from wherever it is produced, often by fossil fuels. Food is imported. Trash is exported. And because NYC has externalized its housing crisis to effectively all of northern NJ, it's impossible to even build a train through it that can get me to New York from Bethlehem.
Public transit is better for the environment and cheaper to maintain. It is great to live in a neighborhood where you can walk most places you need to go. It is also true that life in cities is possible because they externalize costs to surrounding areas. Water is treated + piped in from reservoirs.
This has happened all across this part of PA, mostly within the last 15 years, to the extent that some towns, like Fogelsville, barely exist anymore except as a cluster of warehouses along a highway.
Is it true that living in cities is more efficient? Yes. Power and water are easier to deliver.
basically the size of the entire rest of South Bethlehem, including Lehigh University and the former Bethlehem Steel.
All of these warehouses mean that we have extremely dense truck traffic on both of our major E-W highways, I-78 and 22, that chew up our roads and make driving more dangerous.
which serves 2500 students. This box includes 3 large class buildings (one of which contains 2 large gyms and a pool), a football field with a track, a baseball field, a football pitch, several tennis courts, a parking lot, and a large lawn.
The warehouse district in the southeast of the city is
satellite image of bethlehem, with a small red box near the middle, an orange blob, a bit bigger to its northwest, and 2 huge pink blobs at the top-center and bottom-right of the image.
Here is a satellite picture of Bethlehem.
The areas surrounded by pink consist almost entirely of warehouses. For scale, I have drawn an orange shape around the public golf club, which includes 18-hole and 9-hole courses + a driving range. I have also drawn a red box around my public high school,
What you probably don't know is that if you live in the northeast and buy stuff online, there is a pretty good chance that stuff has also been stored in and transported from one of the warehouses that are swallowing my town.
and only slightly further from NYC. It only has about 76k people, but you might recognize it as the town where the steel for the Empire State Building, MSG, Rockefeller Center, the Golden Gate, GW, and Verrazanno-Narrows Bridges, and a substantial portion of the US Navy in WWs I and II was made.
When I say things like "libertarian Abundance is a idea cooked up by people in cities who don't understand or care about anyone else's needs or interests and is a political dead-end", this is exactly the kind of guy I am talking about.
I grew up in Bethlehem, PA, ~90 minutes from Philly
Photograph of a fossil fish skull in right lateral view. The bone is dark brown/black against a gray matrix.
Out now in Contributions from me and @gilespalaeo.bsky.social, a deep dive into an early member of the sturgeon and paddlefish lineage. Bear with me, but there’s a long backstory highlighting uncertainty about the anatomy of living species and how well-studied fossils can still yield new insights.
I’ll start to regularly post photos of Lebanese fossils alongside links to charities supporting the thousands displaced in this war. Even the smallest donations can save lives
Fossils on display at Memory of Time, Jbeil, and you can donate here: gofund.me/24a3cee49
Our paper is out in @Science! The Atlantic silverside spans Earth's steepest latitudinal gradient in coastal sea-surface temperature. Despite high gene flow, populations show clinal genetic variation in multiple locally adapted traits. doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Immediate impeachment. We either have a constitution or we do not.
You know US military bases also have schools on them, right?
Counterpoint: we are all fish
📢 Now accepting proposals for the Graduate Research Excellence Grants! These provide evolutionary biology research funds for early and advanced Master’s and PhD students. Applicants must be members of SSE. Deadline: May 18, 2026
www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...
The author of this piece works in what was, 150 years ago, a vast chestnut forest stretching continuously from Mississippi to Maine that has been obliterated by invasive species.
@springernature.com, if you don't ditch Straive, I won't be submitting to your journals again unless I don't have any choice in the matter. Easily the worst post-acceptance experience I've had with a paper.
You should be extremely skeptical of anyone in STEM that uses AI in any part of the writing process. Many journals prohibit it completely. The only thing that the original post is right about is that most papers do not need to be 30 pages, but the answer to that is just to write more concisely.
it is really bad how many people across the political spectrum on social media seem to discuss things in terms of discredited genetic pseudoscience when it comes to identity
most under-rated fruit is prickly pear
Buddha's Hand Citron. I don't think I have ever actually tasted it, but how would I know? It would have had to be just zest because this thing is all rind. No flesh, no seeds, just rind.
Also, aesthetically displeasing.
old journal articles really are incredible. No standardization of style, just a bunch of eccentric weirdos writing about the stuff they were doing in the hopes somebody could make sense of it.
Here's the opening of this unhinged spider article, and the next one, which is basically a prose poem.
Can confirm. The robots aren't telling me how to de-blur my figures that were sent as nice crisp pdfs
