More than half the population of CO was born outside of the state. I would be surprised if it was still a top 5 state for educational attainment when looking only at those born and raised in the state.
> higher altitudes within the US have fewer environmental contaminants
Living in Denver, I routinely see headlines (and see with my own eyes) about how terrible the air quality is here, at certain times of the year at least. Wonder if that data controls for whether someone is in a high-altitude city or at the summit of a 14,000+ ft mountain.
HEPA filters work really well, it's worth just buying a few big ones and running them inside.
I got a few in CA because of the fires, but I run them all of the time and they work. I also have some AQI sensors and I can see the pm2.5 drop rapidly when the air filters kick in.
I don’t think it’s just particulates, Denver and the front range are routinely in the news for ozone issues [0]. I think that might be altitude related as well, though it may just be pollution. Den doesn’t quite make the top ten list of US cities with ozone problems, but it’s gotta be close [1].
I haven't found exact data for the contribution of ICE vehicles to PM 2.5 levels in Denver, but I've found some evidence of ozone [0] and carbon dioxide [1] contributions in Denver being around 30%, as well as contribution to PM 2.5 in "developed countries" being 25–30% [2].
Later edit: this EPA paper from 25 years ago [3] says "Vehicle exhaust was the largest PM 2.5 carbon contributor, constituting ~85% of PM 2.5 carbon at sites in the Denver metropolitan area".
Yes, I researched this for evaluating my son's previous school - there's a sharp drop off even from the 10-20-30 metre range to the 100-150 metre one, and things like wind directions certainly matter.
AusGov in their infinite wisdom built this primary school right on top of one of the busiest Melbourne streets for east-west through traffic, with long periods of bumper-to-bumper including the heavy trucks which are the worst. (You'd think cars in Aus have bad standards, but then there's the trucks.)
I'm willing to bet no-one even cared, as evidenced by the complete lack of air purifiers in the classrooms.
Yeah, the smell that comes with it in the fall and winter is something else. I like Denver, but the brown cloud is no fun. It’s a downer coming out of the hills on I70 into the city and seeing it hanging there.
As someone with autoimmune issues who rarely checks HN but is very interested in your work, do you have a newsletter I could sign up for or an email address I could reach out to to receive updates on your work?
Yes, I also am dying to just talk to anyone about my work and what I am trying to do. I am very approachable and I CRAVE the most vicious, critical feedback that I can find. You can email me (email on profile) as the newsletter stuff will not be done for at least 1 month.
Well, this was finally the thing that made me get an HN account, because I am really interested in talking with someone about that kind of stuff. I can't see an e-mail in your profile though, and as far as I understand noone can see your email you supplied in the email field, and your about section looks empty to me.
I'm curious, what is your approach to some of the most common distractions in society? Namely TV (youtube?), movies, video games, and social media. Personally I have completely removed TV, social media, and video games. I only watch 1, maybe 2 movies per month. I know that I am much much happier having removed those things from my life, but I still have a hard time focusing. Wondering what other steps I could take.
My current approach is probably dumb, but the main thing I am trying to eliminate is me unconsciously accessing distractions (Reddit, YouTube etc.). I have basically conditioned myself to always go to such sites, and my body just opens them, even when trying to focus on some task, without it being a conscious decision.
I have partially solved this by blocking all distractions I usually go to with my DNS (PiHole), so every time I unconsciously try to access such sites I get an error and snap back into reality, so to speak. I do sometimes unblock things, but I make sure that it is a conscious decision.
Try to practice a ritual like writing the names of websites down and then throwing the piece of paper into the trash. I find that it helps to interrupt the mindless opening of the distracting sites. It gives me a brief moment as I'm opening the distraction where I remember that I chose to sacrifice this thing, and I bail out. This requires regular practice of whatever ritual you create.
> towns of that type had to be mostly independent in terms of income for money inflow....small factories, mining, farming and ranching, etc.
> I'd say that this movement of people who can afford it just another side effect of something bigger.
It sort of sounds like you answer your own question (/hypothesis): consolidation of industry. Which also seems to be a pretty big driver in wealth inequality. I've no idea what the correct response is here -- greater regulation to increase competition, so that there are more smaller players across any given industry? Who knows.
There's always the chance that the past is viewed with the optimism of youth of course. There's certainly a difference in social glue in a world where everyone is either self-employed or has a single layer of management above them. Plus, truly local companies are better local citizens (sports teams sponsors, money for charities, build decent and long-lasting buildings).
Dunno what the answer is besides accumulate a financial warchest, live where you like, watch the battle at a distance.
I agree with this sentiment in cities, however, I believe that this approach in the mountains would result in skyscrapers being built in areas of natural beauty, and be harmful to all of the wildlife that live there. The Eagle (Vail) Valley is relatively small to begin with.
No, it might look something like Innsbruck, Austria, which is a beautiful city.
It may come as a shock to Americans raised in suburbia, but there are housing types between single family units and skyscrapers that are very human-scale and attractive. Look at pretty much any mountain town in Europe.
As an American with an EU passport, thanks for the idea. I had been leaning towards moving/retiring to Grenoble, France for the engineering university nestled in the Alps, but I will look further afield.
Vail, and most Colorado ski resorts, are already full of 10+ story hotels. I’m not sure how building a residential or office tower would be any more impactful.
Sorry but that is false. Please name even 1 hotel in Vail that is 10+ stories. The tallest that I can think of is 5, maybe 6 stories.
edit: having been a ski bum in Vail, I can't say that I've visited every resort in CO. But across Vail, Breck, Keystone, A Basin, Loveland, Monarch, Cooper, Copper, Beaver Creek, Steamboat, Wolf Creek, Crested Butte, all 5 mountains of Aspen, there are no 10+ story towers. I'm trying to take back some of the pedantic tone of my original comment.
Fine. 10+ was my memory failing me. But the Four Seasons and whatever houses Matsuihisa sushi are 9 (when viewed from the mountain, not the highway).
Overall point here is that Vail and other ski resort towns happily build very large buildings for vacationers and second home owners. I just don’t buy that having very large office and residential buildings would have that much greater of an environmental, or even quality of life, impact.
Good point. I guess you could say that its the contents of skyscrapers that are harmful to wildlife: humans. Lots of traffic (whether car, bicycle, foot, alpine touring skiing, etc) causes the wildlife herds to be pushed further away from where they originally may have inhabited.
With density you can afford transit which would reduce traffic. See Japan for an example. Most people take the train or bus to the ski area. There’s barely anyone in the parking lot.
I like it. How would the bank make its money? The standard exploitative practices of other banks, just with smaller fees ($5 overdraft fee instead of $37?, or lower interest rate spreads?) or just charge $50 a year, and do away with those fees? Would that lead to too many people taking advantage of it?
To be honest, I don't know what the business model would be, but it seems like it should be in the banks long-term best interest to create rich, prosperous people with invest-able funds. They are literally in a position to create their own wealthy customer base.
What would it actually do for a big bank, if it were the exception rather than the rule, that their low/middle-class account holders had enough savings to cover several months of expenses and small/medium emergencies without relying on credit, had a reasonable portfolio of retirement investments, and on their way to being in a financial position to get involved with other kinds of investments, eventually?
The banks could automate all the best practices of personal finance for most their account holders, to make all of the above happen for their average customer. Software is cool like that.
- They could divert a percentage of all deposits to emergency funds by default.
- They could set aside money for expenses, based on your cash-flow history by default.
- They could set aside spending money, also based on your cash-flow history by default.
- They could manage a persons credit debt (think pay minimums while savings/cushion is built, then use the extra cash flow from savings goals into debt payments).
- If the customer dip into savings because your car broke down or something - starting filling up the emergency fund again.
- If credit debt is paid up, savings goals are hit, they could start automatically put portions of savings into low risk long term investments (IRA's etc).
(Simple.com does some of the above kind-of but its a manual process - but quite nice compared to what 21st century online banking has been, so far)
And I'm sure there's much much more - and for the people who do really well, then they can funnel those people into more customized investment approaches. Are market forces so screwy, that all this would actually be bad for the banks bottom line, in the long run?
Banks make a lot of money (averaging a bit over 12¢ per dollar lent) on credit cards. It would likely be overall disadvantageous for them to pull people out of credit card debt, out of debt in general, and to eliminate overdraft situations.
> To be honest, I don't know what the business model would be, but it seems like it should be in the banks long-term best interest to create rich, prosperous people with invest-able funds. They are literally in a position to create their own wealthy customer base.
You're right! It's absolutely in the best interest of a bank to help create a prosperous, happy, long-term customer with investable funds.
Of course, this seems like it would only apply to banks that manage investments effectively - which is the bigger ones. And they'd have to do so at least as well as specialist investment management funds, otherwise anyone who this bank helps become wealthy will invest with someone else. And they'd have to be able to successfully help people become wealthy at scale, instead of making it marginally easy for people to keep their heads above water.
Also, it might be worth considering that many people are at least somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of a robot managing all their finances for them. I use a bunch of automation to do a lot of the stuff you've mentioned, but it's all stuff I set up myself for the control that gives me.
Being as good at low-cost effective investing as Vanguard while convincing people to be happy with robots managing all their money and making people wealthy over time seems like it could be a tall order.
> Are market forces so screwy, that all this would actually be bad for the banks bottom line, in the long run?
Depends. How much are you willing to pay, each and every month, for this set of features? So far you seem to want it for free, with the idea that it could become profitable for this bank's investment arm three or four decades down the road. That's a rather long timescale to gamble on and a fairly substantial set of costs against a known successful business model.
Again, you're completely right! It's so painfully obviously in the interests of banks to encourage their customers to be happy, wealthy, long-term customers that it's very odd that they don't seem interested in investing in it. Are they just all collectively oblivious? Or could there maybe be something else worth considering?
The market cant see past the next quarter. Long term thinking requires visionaries that can sell the idea, without them you get 3÷ growth at any cost (including signing up customers for services they didn't ask for, Wells Fargo). Banks are late up with Too Big To Fail these days to care about the long term.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, maybe its some SF NIMBYers? Anyways, your second sentence brings me an interesting idea. What if someone built a website with links to easily email local representatives (kind of like the Craigslist webmail links, maybe also with a message body filled in), so that people could quickly and easily send in complaints about housing/zoning restrictions? This idea partially inspired by the Airnoise button: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18792029
> sob stories about people who spent half their lives pursuing 3 uneconomical degrees, had 3 more kids than they could afford, in cities with some of the highest costs of living in the world, and now complain that they're living paycheck to paycheck.
So the person who ....
- never attended any sort of college, but did graduate high school
- is single and childless, in fact have no family at all as their parents died poor and young
- is living paycheck to paycheck, whether in a city or rural area
...just doesn't exist? And if they do exist, please enlighten me on what steps they should take to correct their situation?
Just curious, but are your parents college educated?
> media like these focus exclusively on this negative minority and exaggerate the negativity of the status quo.
Can you expand on 'this negative minority' ? Because I think there are a lot more poor people than 'upper middle class' people in this country.
> I have little sympathy for people who consistently plan poorly and make bad decisions
Why not? Self control isn't some moral, righteousness, trait. To possess a certain level of self control, is to be lucky in its own right. Turns out its generally dictated by the Pre Frontal Cortex. And when that gets damaged (whether via head injury, lead poisoning as a child, malnourishment, any number of reasons), people lose self control: https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/71/6/720
>Why not? Self control isn't some moral, righteousness, trait.
Exhibit B. Personal responsibility is increasingly fading from the collective American vocabulary, and articles like these, which normalize nonsensical, narcicisstic decisions, like throwing away a decade pursuing 3 low demand liberal arts degrees, make the media complicit. Self control absolutely is a moral, righteous trait, particularly because those without it lower the standards of living for those around them.
Somehow other cultures tend to place virtue in the development of discipline, a personal responsibility which can mitigate all kinds of external erosions of self control. But in the U.S. a sizable minority, if not a majority, expect the world to throw money at them and their 3 children in LA for an advanced English degree.
Not OP, but also ex-Soviet: Russia is one example. Ruskis have been robbed blind by feudalism, communism, and lately capitalism - from both public and private sector - for over 200 years. This created a deep (almost traumatic) generational mistrust of any system or organized body. Since I was a toddler I was told that everything is my personal responsibility and to never expect external support. I live in NYC now and what passes for “self reliance” or “discipline” here is sweet.
It is the philosophical opposite of “safe spaces” that would make Jordan Peterson shudder, but it does create survivors. It’s an unhealthy environment that breeds mistrust and misery, and I would never want my kids to grow up in such Ayn Rand’esque culture.
You don't think that you are lucky to have been born into an upper middle class family, without any serious psychological issues?
Someone born with mental problems is automatically an immoral, bad person?
> Somehow other cultures tend to place virtue in the development of discipline, a personal responsibility which can mitigate all kinds of external erosions of self control.
But what about all of the social safety nets in Europe? Seems like they take care of people in hard times, rather than tell them to just develop more discipline...?
>expect the world to throw money at them and their 3 children in LA for an advanced English degree.
Would you agree that hindsight is 20/20? How were these people supposed to know that they won't make money with their graduate degrees, years ago? They are in a tough spot because of bad choices made in the past, and so they deserve no sympathy now? They should be homeless?
Your parents, who fought their way to upper middle class as immigrants, what percent of your college did they pay for?
>You don't think that you are lucky to have been born into an upper middle class family, without any serious psychological issues?
You know nothing of my psychology or my personal struggles. It is infuriating to hear people tell me how easy I had it simply because now my parents are well off. Kindly take your classist prejudice elsewhere. My parents were lower middle class until about the time I went off to college. For which I took out student loans. Which I am not struggling to pay back because I chose a practical degree and a reasonable city to live in. Like anyone else could have done with due dilligence of researching salaries and demand for various degrees, rather than pursuing whatever they were interested in without consideration of practicality.
>Someone born with mental problems is automatically an immoral, bad person?
Why do you stretch so thinly to paint me as though I am blind with privilege? Mental illness is as irrelevant to this discussion as my personal experiences; unless you want to tell me that >4/10 Americans are mentally ill to the point that they cannot plan and work for stable futures. You seem totally to deny the roles that personal responsibility and self discipline play in societal outcomes.
Look. The point is that when you handwave away every negative outcome with some external cause, and refuse to admit that very often people make bad choices because of poor personality traits, and not mental illness, you do bad to both yourself and society, because you ignore the option of self improvement. And when a large enough proportion of the populace is incompetent because they were taught to blame everything but themselves, your social safety nets will only hasten the erosion of your society as fewer and fewer are capable of carrying the rest. This isn't about being heartless. This is a question of practicality.
I’ve noticed this on HN has well. In response to the perceived “it’s all your fault” Republican message, a lot of HN has swung to the opposite side with “none of this is your fault!”.
Spent all your money on junk? Victim of advertisers.
Lost your money in investments? Victim of big banks.
This has nothing to do with victimhood. This is about judging individuals based on percieved group advantages. It is as much of a fallacy as judging an individual according to race or gender.
I'm not even implying personal struggle, only that one cannot judge the validity of an opinion based on percieved advantages from on one nebulous trait without considering individual disadvantages.
>For someone lacking in empathy
You mistake objectivity for coldness. Further, you apparently cannot differentiate between unfortunate events and poor decision making.
Please stop continuing the personal attacks that the other poster initiated.
You're trying to say that both of your parents being college educated didn't provide you with any kind of advantage over someone born into poverty with uneducated parents? "Classist prejudice" is false?? Wealthier people, don't have an easier time growing up? Where is the disconnect there?
We're getting off track here. Upthread, you mentioned this negative minority who are unlucky and downtrodden. I countered that the majority of people in America are poor. I think that's something we could agree on? Some were unlucky, some were born into shitty situations, some made bad decisions. I want to know what you think all of those people should do to improve their situations? All 3 groups I mentioned. Just develop better self discipline and work harder? Genuinely curious. My contention is that the system is stacked against them, capitalism has swung too far in favor of Owners of Capital.
