If everything north of I-80 were deemed a new state, most of Chicago's problems would go away too.

You can't call anything but the emergency numbers if you don't have credit.

UCLA and UC Irvine do their email in-house as well.. I'm sure it's just a University of California thing. So many smart people here, but so many dumb decisions are made every day.

To be fair, New York runs 10 car trains than run every 2-3 minutes and those are also very much so standing room only. It's just Denver not being remotely dense enough.

An advanced degree is usually considered one that is post-graduate. A Ph.D, usually. Those are free.

If you're in a major metro area, T-Mobile is by far the best and cheapest. They also let you tether with all their smartphones without an additional tethering charge. If you're in the boonies, it seems Verizon is the only way to go.

The IMR is never a good statistic to use because in almost every other country in the world, a baby has to meet certain conditions to be declared official "alive", and as such, those conditions have to be met to the baby to end up dying. The US considers any baby that came out of the womb alive, and so any baby that dies adds to the IMR. Lastly, we have a lot of minority groups that tend to be poor and have a very high rate of premature births. This is a double-edged sword in which they can't afford insurance and they're more likely to have a problem, whereas in Europe and most other countries with health care, societies are still very homogeneous and there isn't a high rate of prematurity. Sweden has 1/2 the premature birthrate of the US.

I'm from Chicago too, and it's not even a bad neighborhood. There are plenty of white yuppies that live right there. There's a difference between walking through a bombed out area and seeing mexicans and flipping out about how it's unsavory.