Well, nice to meet you, I'm a city dweller who works from home and can technically live where ever I want. I choose the city because I like it and I want my family to have nice things. I like walking to the kid's school and not owning a car and being close to amenities.

Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities

Umm what? Humans are social animals and many people LIKE living in cities in close proximity to other people and close to amenities. I do not see a future where we decentralize and spread out because of AI.

Imagine if a tobacco executive said "you remove cigarettes and people will just replace it with alcohol or other drugs or another vice altogether". It may be true for some people but overall we've reduced harm by fighting back against cigarettes

Modern social media is choosing from a vast pool of content and the algorithm's entire goal is to maximize engagement for monetary gain (at whatever cost to society). There's only so much "engagement maxing" you can do with an email sorting algorithm especially if the premise for an email inbox is that you'll always only ever see your emails and nothing else.

Of course, every person is different. Anecdotally, my knees and hips are so much stronger now than they were 15 years ago after running over 20k miles.

I'm saying that we could enact policies that encourage better habits by default. For example, we don't have to build car-dependent suburbia. Car-dependency is a choice we made. We've largely outlawed the building of walkable cities through zoning codes. There are literally millions upon millions of people who are forced into car-dependent suburbia and stuck with 9-5 jobs where they have to spend 1.5 hours commuting. It's no wonder people find it difficult to exercise. Add kids into the mix and it becomes almost impossible to find the time to drive to a gym to exercise 5 days a week. Many of these suburban cities are openly hostile to people not in cars.

That whole thing I just described is a series of policy choices. We can't save people from themselves but we can encourage better lifestyle choices. People would walk more if there were more stuff to walk to. People would bike to work if it were made possible.

Also, honestly, a world with fewer cars would be a much better place.

My body has been completely transformed from 15 years of running. I'm 5'7" and 135 pounds at age 41. My face looks thin, I have a better body than most 20 year olds. I gave myself the best gift that I could possibly give myself.

If they could distill 15 years of running (5x per week) and put it in pill form, I truly believe it would be the most valuable thing medicine has ever created.

All it takes is 45 minutes per day for 5 days per week. And you can actually have fun while doing it! It takes a long time to get to that point but it's so worth it.

I went to the mall recently (big mistake) and I had to get lunch at the food court. I don't think there was a single gram of fiber across the 10 or so restaurants. So much of America is drive-thru garbage. Yup -- you don't even have to stand up to get your Big Mac. You can endanger other people by eating it while you drive.

We tell people to get exercise and then force them to have 9-5 desk jobs that have a 45 minute car-commute each way. And what's so much worse is that people are paying a ton of money for that car that's slowly killing them. It's not entirely their fault though -- that's just the way our society is set up. Walkability is a luxury only the rich can afford.

Then, 20 years later you show up to the doctor and the standard course of action is to prescribe a bunch of medications. The doctor says "you should exercise more and eat better" and many people just don't.

So much is broken.

If only doctors could prescribe it and have people adhere to the prescription.

If only American culture weren't so car-centric and our daily lives involved some natural amount of exercising. We've built a society where only the privileged few can walk or bike to work. It's just too easy these days to barely move in our normal life. Drive to work, drive to the store, drive the kids places... you literally have to specifically schedule exercise (and ironically, many people will drive to the gym to walk on a treadmill).

Your mortgage is the lowest amount you'll pay. On top of that you have to manage the upkeep of the house, which costs both time and money. Lots of people go through phases in their lives where they move around and owning just doesn't make sense for a few 1 to 2 year stretches.

On the other hand, rent is the highest amount you'll pay. You generally don't have to worry about upkeep, and you're free to move. The commitment is lower and that has real value for certain people at certain stages of their lives.

I rented for 6 years in different areas until I figured out what I liked, and then I bought a house. Those 6 years weren't just wasted years. Those were very valuable years where renting really made the most sense.

As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.

A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.

The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.

The comparison to _literal super heroes_ from comic books definitely made me roll my eyes

My problem with billionaires is that their gains are in part from exploitation. I just don't believe that one person can actually produce billions of dollars of value all by themselves. They extract that value from other people and our whole system is structured to promote this.

There are probably millions people who could have been Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Elon Musk or whoever. A million people with the right skills who maybe were born a few years too late or didn't have the right connections or just didn't have rich enough parents. It's a little too "winner take all" for my taste. And then those few winners end up having disproportionate affect on politics and issues that affect us all. It's just not a great system.