Agree on the quote. I love that our house is bounded on three sides by 100 acres of undeveloped wilderness in Western NJ. In a two minute walk I can get away from houses, see the mountain park across the valley, hear the coyotes and owls, maybe spot a fox. At night, the stars are bright because we have no street lights here.
Humanity can intrude, but even that can be sounds from a bygone era, like the steam train blowing its whistle as it’s leaving the New Hope station across the Delaware from us. There are few sounds more warming than a train whistle echoing off of valleys.
By comparison it takes some getting used to driving into even moderate suburbs.
I read that airports grate on people because there's an omnipresent chance of something occuring that's completely outside of their control, and that possibility is therefore always in their mind.
Nature, for me, is the antithesis of that -- things move and happen in the physical rather than the potential. And that's relaxing!
>...an omnipresent chance of something occuring that's completely outside of their control, and that possibility is therefore always in their mind. Nature, for me, is the antithesis of that -- things move and happen in the physical rather than the potential.
Whether that angry grizzly bear is going to attack you or not is just as much out of your control as anything that happens in an airport.
... security policies changing (shoes on or off?), repeated "ATTENTION, BY IMMEDIATE ORDER OF THE TSA" announcements, people doing dumb things, people being rude, baggage getting lost, flights being overbooked...
There's a lot.
Most of the time it works out, but that was the point of the observation: most can still be pretty stressful.
One way to make the airlines care more about your luggage and make it highly unlikely for them to lose it is to check a firearm as described in Deviant Ollam's famous talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfqtYfaILHw
In this case undeveloped. We Also have a lot of preserved land around us, but it is not ubiquitous.
Even then, preserved land can be tricky. A lot of State-preserved farms and lands were recently threatened by a project that was seeking Federal eminent domain rights. Federal ED would have wiped out the State level conservation.
Fortunately we were able to persuade the developer to give up (over the course of 7 or so year fight).
“Underutilized”, that’s a notable word choice. It implies that the land should be utilized more? With whose interests in mind? Who decides? Over what time frame?
Talking about utilization in this way is a decent predictor of a libertarian framing. It is worth saying in tech forums that libertarianism isn’t the only political philosophy that includes market forces as a key analysis mechanism.
I prefer the study of political economy over traditional economics, because it admits a much wider lens of the underlying aims of a well functioning economic system. It doesn’t have to be economic efficiency as defined by a summation of individual utilities. That is only one mathematically convenient objective function; there are others.
Economics is a big tent. Economists have varying political philosophies. Relatively few educated economists hold idealistic notions about how well actual markets function to optimize a social welfare function.
But from what I’ve seen, relatively few outspoken libertarians rigorously challenge their assumptions about markets or the overall objective function. Many conflate a descriptive theory with a normative value system.
Yes, this is a long reply to a seven word comment. Why bother? Given the context around the thread, plus some consistent blind spots from HN comments, suggests to me that many here should go deeper and ask more questions about political economy.
Humanity can intrude, but even that can be sounds from a bygone era, like the steam train blowing its whistle as it’s leaving the New Hope station across the Delaware from us. There are few sounds more warming than a train whistle echoing off of valleys.
By comparison it takes some getting used to driving into even moderate suburbs.