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.
