One pet peeve I have concerns the fact that most governments insist upon paying people to reproduce. When I am president of a country, the first law I enact will be to remove child benefits. I may even imitate my favourite government, that of the People’s Republic of China, and instate some sort of penalty for having children. Life will be great. House prices will go through the floor. There’ll never be any traffic. You’ll never be put on hold when you call tech support. Hmm, wait, maybe they’ll reduce the number of support staff. Scratch that last one. Anyway, the world will be a way better place, and all the people who decide to have children will pay appropriately for the privilege. Don’t get me wrong – I like children. In fact, I’ve been trying to persuade the wife to help me produce some. They’re just the least environmentally friendly thing we could be doing right now, and for some reason they attract government grants. It’s like subsidising Buicks.
This rant was intended to lead into an almost wholly unrelated topic. That unrelated topic was the fact that America is quite sparsely populated, although the rest of the world doesn’t really know it. Take a look at Wikipedia’s list of countries by population density. America is number 177 of the 238 countries in there. It’s less densely populated than Zimbabwe and Bhutan. There are ten times as many people in a square kilometre of Israel as there are in a square kilometre of America. There’s nobody here. For its size, it’s a ghost country.
This is good because I like hiking, and I like hiking without bumping into other people all the time. I used to go hiking a lot when I lived in London – you could get to the Peak District in four hours, but to get to any mountains higher than Trump Tower you’d be looking at the Lake District, which meant six or seven hours in the car. And even once you’re in the Lake District, it still has the trappings of a fairly densely populated place. You’re never too far from an Olde Worlde Tea Shoppe, or a McDonalds, or some roadworks. This, of course, is mostly due to the very high population density in the UK. As far as rating London against other cities goes, I don’t think population density captures quite what I’m talking about. I’ve developed a new unit of measure to quantify this. Which I will now explain. In the next paragraph.
Were I to start the car in downtown Seattle on a Saturday afternoon and drive purposefully out of town, I’d be in the countryside reasonably quickly. Of course, my idea of the countryside might not match yours, so in order to reliably measure this we need to agree on some sort of standard fixture that is present in the countryside but not in town. This is the cow. Seattle, therefore, has a rating of somewhere around thirty minutes to cow. In London I think I’d be looking at well over 90MTC. Edinburgh, where my family lives, is about 25-30MTC. Manhattan is probably 120MTC. Of course, Bumfluff Arizona is probably a mere 1MTC, but you wouldn’t want to live there. This is why you should be careful to bear in mind population size when considering MTC ratings. I tried to come up with a simple way to work it in, but I couldn’t come up with any measure that didn’t make Los Angeles seem like a dairy farm. Suggestions appreciated.
GB is likely to sink soon with all the overcrowding going on at the moment.
There’s something to be said for them wide open spaces over there in America… ( a song somewhere in there). I was over there a couple of years ago visiting family and in comparison to here, it was very sparsely populated… and that was only New England.
Yes, maybe a limit on production would be a good idea or at least a reduction in the money benefits they dish out to the unmarried mother’s.
I live in Daytona Beach, Florida and we are probably about 15 MTC here. There is a lot of farmland not far outside Daytona proper and onward and inward into the state. Cows are abundant behind miles and miles of fencing. When not embroiled in special events, i.e. Race Week, Spring Break and Bike Weeks, its pretty uncrowded even in town, and along our 23 miles of beach. Maybe you should visit someday. :o)
Where I grew up, you woke up and looked out the window if you wanted to see a cow. So that’s aout 1STC. No cows here, but it’s about 5MTS (sheep).
If you headed northeast from LA proper, you would eventually get into the more agricultural parts of central CA. So — maybe 3 HTC if you head the right direction at the right time of day.
LA’s population is nowhere as dense as Manhattan, but it is spread out over such a vast area, it’s pretty easy to start from anywhere, and drive a couple of hours, and still really be in the metropolitan area.
I hate it, btw, and love England (just took our third London trip in December) and am really enjoying your blog!
What would you call it if there was a cow farm in front of the middle school and junior high school? My town (well, they call it a village) is 0MTC, but my house is probably 3MTC. XD You’ll have to drive maybe 8-10 minutes to see any sheep, though it’s less if you want to see goats (some lady in the centre of town actually has a license for goats).
The Cows to People Ratio can be useful–might work well in combination with MTC. One can also use the Likelihood of People Playing Cow-Pat Bingo as a School Fundraiser (I kid you not) as a measure.
Cass County Indiana has 2.5 hogs per person. (The four-legged variety, not the two-wheeled. See next post.) Not sure what the CPP (cows per person) ratio is, but I’m sure it’s not nearly as high. I moved there from Chicago as a newlywed; lived there for as long as I could stand it. Almost two years.
There’s nothing wrong with Bumfluff, AZ it’s a quaint town consisting of a church with a South-west scale sign (think IMAX screen) proclaiming the lord has risen and doom is nigh, one store with another sign of roughly the same size saying ‘GUNS’ and a gas station which is the only reason they ever see someone from a city. Ever.
And with typical American efficiency Arizonan cows come pre-cooked to medium while still on the hoof around this time of year. I’m sure the fact it’s a dry heat is of great comfort to them.
Cheers from a Phoenix dwelling fellow ex-pat. 🙂
“…my favourite government, that of the People’s Republic of China…”
Wow. Really? Not funny, if not…
Errm D´oh
Have you heard of the word irony? Irony is something that seems to go totally over the heads of Americans. I really do believe his comment was intended to be ironic.
Cheers, grammar
You should have gone further north mate. Beyond the touristy bit of Scotland and into the Relative emptiness of Sutherland and the Flow country. Man is it empty, one of the lowest pop densities in Europe. Of course it’s all owned by rich absentee assholes so you can only look at it from the road like.
Actually when I moved here (NW-NC) I had been expecting more in the way of open spaces but in fact there is population everywhere sparse in places but there.