Why aren't the small to mid-sized cities more vibrant tho?

That is the problem.

As I said, it's a political choice. "Compelling need" is certainly one standard you could adopt for letting people live in the cities they want to live in.

If I had more time (need to run to get on a road trip atm) I think it might be interesting to compare the sizes of some of the smaller cities considered "vibrant" (i.e. Portland is def on the small end of "big city" at ~600k population and ~2m metro area) with some of the larger ones that aren't.

Yeah, Houston is the 4th largest city in the country and it's dull as ****. But when I moved to Austin in the early 90's it was still a sleepy college town, and I had an absolute blast.

New bart stations are being built to connect the east bay to San Jose. It's absurd that there aren't high rise apartments built in a walking radius around them. Those would offer many of the benefits of SF at a fraction of the cost. Nobody even thinks about it.

Just listen to their music and they'll tell ya all why. There are seriously a thousand songs that go like this:

Now, I grew up down an old dirt road in a town you wouldn't know
My pop's picked the place up for fifteen hundred bucks back in 1964
My grandfather was a drinker, back in the day, he put him down
But a war is known to change a man and the whiskey's known to change a man, but

That's not me
I rarely drink from the bottle but I'll smoke a little weed
I still live in the sticks where you wouldn't go
In a town of twelve hundred off an old dirt road
And a country boy is all I'll ever be

Now, its been twelve years since I sold my soul to the devil in L.A.
He said sign your name here on the dotted line and your songs, they all will play
He set up shop on Sunset, he put me up at the Marquee
He said "you want to sell a million records boy, you better listen to me"
He said "change your style, whiten your smile, you can lose a couple of pounds
If you want to live this life, you better lose that wife, do you need your friends around?"

And I said, no, that's not me
Cause the biggest things in life are your friends and family
And I like my jeans and my old t-shirts
And a couple extra pounds never really hurt
'Cause a country boy is all I'll ever be

^

Houston isnt boring to me at all. Better museums and food than 95% of cities.

Some guy holding a fan with Trump and Melania, funny, I guess, but not that funny. I must be missing something, who's the guy?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b01eab7a2de4d2

So he's gay, and Trump took a White House photo with someone flexing their homosexuality. Trumpkins will give him a pass for the faux pas.

There's bound to be a lot of cowboys in the closet, Trump's just playing 4D chess again.

https://twitter.com/MJMcKean/status/876088276255477760

hundreds of obituaries praising helmuth kohl got pulled out of the desk drawers today, but the guardian's is the only one ive seen that's funny and interesting https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-kohl-obituary

This is kind of a depressing chart:

I'm not sure how annoyed I should be that the Trump thread has become the catchall for all politics posting regardless of whether it has anything to do with Trump, but I am finding it annoying.

Network effects be strong yo.

i almost said something before. Wasn't annoying enough to make a stir and i was lazy.

Chart seems to confirm what most of us would think, no?

GOP coalitions are more loosely tied together based on economic issues and thus they use the social issues/identity/nationalism stuff to bring it together.

And the Dems are more of a monolith at this present time.

And no one's libertarian.

If you ask a lot people where they are politically, the phrase "I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal" is pretty common (atleast in my experience and others I've talked to) and yet no one really is.

I dunno if it'll ever come to a boiling point but the GOP attitude between the donor/business class and working class populists on immigration seems like it'll have to rear it's ugly head eventually. Republicans always paid lip service to the populists on immigration but now Trump has made it a bigger issue than it has ever been and it seems like there is no going back.

Even he doesn't seem to be proposing reductions in legal immigration though now that the party leaders have gotten ahold of him though.

Just by eyeballing the chart, it actually looks like the blue dots are more spread along the x-axis and clustered on the y-axis, and the red dots are clustered on the x-axis and spread on the y. But the reason it's depressing is that the quadrant that's good doesn't have any dots in it!

That could be because that quadrant is basically a myth.