Because.. it's not a website. It's an 'experience'! which is just newspeak for the assumption that users need/want it fed to them through a needle because they don't know what's best for themselves. This mentality has infected local software and UIs too.

It gets in the way of getting shit done because it adds too much bureaucratic overhead, which is its own form of tyranny.

So do so-called 'progressive's. The real delineation is one of ideological conflict with reality. The more the defended ideology conflicts, the more often its defenders justify censorship to keep it afloat. The last 100 years of politics should've taught us all this.

In what way are they more energy efficient?

Every statistic I've seen along those lines laughably compares rural households to apartments... ignoring office buildings, shopping malls, the energy cost of all the public buildings, the energy cost of basically everything but the apartments.

For the stat to mean anything you'd want the total gross energy consumption of the city divided by the population vs the total gross energy consumption of some other area divided by its population.

I've never seen anyone cite that stat so I'm a little dubious that anyone has it.

Would we knowingly and purposefully infect humans with Ebola?

This depends only on three factors:
1. Skin colour
2. The expected profit
3. The expectation to get away with it

I like to be able to toggle flash on and off. What is more, i whitelist some sites only to have them annoy me with flash videos.

I've been using bing for years mostly because I didn't want there to be only one search engine. Try them out. They have boolean searches. I know... the evil microsoft... but the search engine is good.

As to bad schools, the education statistics say the opposite. But if facts are hard for you then I can understand why you'd have a hard time with that.

As to rednecks, that depends entirely on where you've set down roots. There are different places with very different sorts of people. Its not like the area outside the cities is homogenious. Some of those areas will have rednecks. And lots of others will not.

A lot of them are just a little old fashioned. Think of your grand parents. But then you have some that are as up to date as anyone. You wouldn't know the difference at all in some places.

As to social isolation, you're less isolated because potentially everyone you meet will be someone you know. Where as in the city you know practically no one. They're not part of your social circle. So pretending they are is silly. How many people in a city do you actually know? Less then a thousand probably. Okay... so why do you need the other 10 million people? Any of them could die and you wouldn't even know or really care.

As to physical isolation, depends, you can live in the town at which point you will see people all the time. You can walk to the coffee shop, order food at the restaurant, etc. You have fewer choices but at the same time you will know these people so if you want something else just tell them. They'll figure out what that costs in time and ingredients and probably give you a good deal on it. They might even name a menu item after you because why not. Try to get that in a big city.

As to not wanting to drive, you can avoid driving in a small town if you want. Just live in the small town itself and its no big deal. You'll walk less there then in most big cities and you won't even need to deal with mass transit. A town of 70 thousand can be walked from one end to the other in about 5 to 10 minutes depending on how much of a hurry you're in.

As to poor services, again it depends on what you mean by that? Generally anything a city provides you can be found in small towns without any trouble at all. What do you mean by this?

As to few jobs, that is a valid point however, I think with the internet there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to telecommute to any job anywhere in the world that simply requires us to do mental labor. If you need my physical hands to do something then sure I can't telecommute. But I doubt those are the jobs you're saying you can't get unless you live in the city.

lets say you want to be an investment banker or a programmer or any of the more typical jobs you'll find in a city. Why can't you do that anywhere on earth with decent internet?

As to going out your door and doing something, you're going to have to define that. They have that in small towns as well so I don't think you're aware of the options. Many small towns make a great effort to provide social activities, concerts, some have full opera companies, plays, etc. So I don't know what you're talking about here. Night clubs? They have night clubs in small towns as well... you just won't see too many new people in them.

As to it being different in different places. I've lived in a lot of places. You just have know what to look for... you can find a place for everyone.

What I find galling is that the cities exert political control over the countryside while at the same time only being able to do that because of the subsidies that allow for that population density.

Make areas more autonomous or cut the subsidies off and I'm happy.

but noscript does. ADblock + NoScript + Flashblock = no ads at all.

Its unacceptable if any third party controls it. If I buy the phone and its mine... then I am the ONLY one that should be able to brick it.

Something we should push for at some level is physical access to the ROM on these smartphones. The "drives" or "disks" used to store whatever. They only get away with this protected bootloader crap because we can't just pull the drive out, pop it into another machine, overwrite it with what we want, and then reinsert it.

How impractical would it be if the phones for example had no "chip" that stored the firmware but rather everything was stored on a micro SD card in the guts of the phone. If it worked that way you could take a screw driver to the phone, pop the microsd card out, and get complete write access to the whole thing.

why not.

Just pick up a knife and come at me... I'm tired of all the little games from you people. You want to fight? Come on... and when one of us is dead, the other can decide how things will be... till then... I reserve the right to ignore, undermine, and mock you.

Without the subsidies that allow those people to live in those cities, the cities themselves would likely collapse.

Imagine if the cost of labor went up to compensate for everyone that lives there actually paying the full price for rent?

That would squeeze the middle class which would force them to increase their cost of labor on the companies that operate in NYC.

That would drive those companies out of the city in a search for more economical labor. Which would mean the middle class wouldn't be able to find jobs. Which would mean they would leave. Which would mean you'd lose low income population to the same process until the density dropped low enough that that the cost of rent/lease/ownership dropped low enough that someone on a low income wage would actually afford to live there without subsidy.

Care to guess how low NYC's population would have to drop for that to happen? We can only guess. But the point is that you couldn't maintain those cities without the subsidies.

The country side doesn't need subsidies to exist. Those little towns are so close to the ground in most cases that some of them might even be able to self support if they were willing to accept doing away with some modern conveniences. The cities are utterly dependent on importing all sorts of things and people literally die if that doesn't happen. In the small towns and rural communities... they're often on well water and could if needed provide their own food in many cases.

I'm just pointing out that the cities are utterly reliant on trade to literally survive. Where as the rural communities LIKE the trade and economically need it. But if they were in a disaster situation they could probably survive.

100,000 in the 21st century isn't really a city. Its not even a million people.

I gave other examples of cities with populations lower then that with full opera companies. The point is that you can have big city entertainment in a small city or large town without much trouble.

Wrong.

You're assuming they are able to put taps on the email servers. We can lock down or decentralize our email systems enough that putting taps on our email is not practical.

For example, lets say rather then putting all our email in big ISP servers or gmail we instead put all the email in small private hosts. Tiny operations that might have only a couple thousand clients. Or possibly better yet you just self host your email.

Technically there is no reason email cannot be self hosted. The biggest problem with this idea now is that email spammers use self hosting to spam so big email servers reject small email servers. But there are other ways to either authenticate your server so it is accepted and keep spammers out.

My objective here is not to make it impossible for the NSA to snoop on me... just impractical enough that they wouldn't bother unless they really wanted to snoop on me specifically. That alone is going to protect 99 percent of the population from spying.

  For the remaining 1 percent... some of them we want to be spied upon because they might actually be bad people. And for the small portion that is both of interest to the NSA and not at fault... they can encrypt and use other security precautions.

The politics are fucked sir... I won't waste my time on them. Find a technological solution.

Web apps will always be second class to local applications and data. In terms of access control they can't be beat.