> ... I'm old ... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.
I'm in my 50s and I don't know where this stance comes from. Sure, you physically can in the same sense that anywhere can be walked to if you're willing to walk long enough. But so many businesses and services have gone "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" to the point that if you're traveling for leisure you're doing extra work on your vacation, and if you're traveling for business you're wasting time that could be used doing your job. Just as a first order, the denizens of every airline subreddit will tell you that the most useful tool during a trip is the airline's mobile app and that's either tied with or just above or below the Flighty app if anything goes wrong.
Combine that with QR codes for everything from menus to parking, public transit tickets and fare cards that can be easily loaded into a phone instead of using a ticket machine made when we were kids, or paper maps increasingly hard to find if they're available at all, and you're looking at a real challenge. How are you going to talk to and plan with your travel partner or colleagues with payphones removed?
It's also not incumbent upon us to make the government's life easier by making our lives harder. "Just leave your phone at home" is ludicrous behavior to expect when it's the government being the intrusive jerks.
> I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages.
Except we are.
> We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water.
Most of our water comes from snowpack that melts over the spring and summer. Almost every year for the last several years, snowpack has been abnormal and has affected downstream flows.
> A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.
No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.
> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...
What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.
People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.
All travelers do but all border inspection people do not. Or if they do, they apply their discretion very unevenly in some Very Interesting Ways.
I've watched it happen twice since COVID, both times traveling abroad for work and coming back into the United States with coworkers (different coworkers each trip) who are not nearly as pale as I am. Neither of us had Global Entry or anything like that back then. Both times, I got waved through with barely a glance and my US-passport-holding coworker got grilled. "Where do you live", "why did you go on this trip", "who do you work for", and so on.
To reiterate: All of us are citizens, all of us were born here, and we were taking the exact same trips at the exact same times coming back with the usual things you take with you on a business trip.
Anecdotes from friends who are darker than a sheet of printer paper tell me this situation has not improved.
> Absolutely; I didn't mean to underplay how privileged I still am
Just to be clear, I was all but certain we were in agreement, and I didn't think you were (deliberately) leaving anyone out. What I wrote was more of a "this is gonna suck...for most of us...pretty damn soon...and we all know it...and that sucks."
> I simply don't know where else to go; it seems like every nice-to-live-in medium-sized city that isn't SF is going through this same song and dance.
Not to sound too defeatist about it, since let's be honest we are still sitting pretty high on the list of people doing pretty well for ourselves, but I'm not sure there is any real escape.
In addition to more people moving here, one of the other reasons the Puget Sound housing market has shot up so dramatically is because lots of us didn't lose our jobs during this pandemic, but we for damn sure lost what we usually spend money on. With so much money sloshing around, people make the decision of "well, surely now I should buy a house, right?" And then they do. And since more money is available to them, housing prices are driven upward.
What sucks is if we have this worry, those of us of the high-five-figure/low-six-figure brigade, how must it be to be of even lesser means? If we're feeling the creep--the only reason I didn't get hit with yet another $100/month rent increase is because the Governor said they couldn't--then what is everyone else doing? I am anxious not only for my family, but for society at large.
I don't know how much longer that can last. Maybe it can last forever, since the monetary policy in this country seems to be that housing prices Must Never, Ever, Ever Fall, because housing is both a required good and the primary "investment" vehicle of everyone with lower net worth than an Apple executive.
My employer has taken up the work from wherever mantle and has said that where our company has offices, even internationally, are places where living is acceptable. As I'm an EU citizen, I wouldn't need work permission to go live there, maybe I give there a go for the second half of my life.
The problem is, from my perspective (and having lived there), the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is neither resilient nor a megacity. Outside of the 635 and 820 loops, it is just suburban sprawl that gets scorching hot in the summer and everyone who lives there has to be reliant on a car.
DFW is going to be in a world of hurt when the water runs out and that day is coming somewhat soon. There are already places in central Texas where the aquifers are dry and the lakes don't refill during the formerly-rainy season. North Texas is reliant on a set of manmade lakes that are already slower and slower to refill, with more and more taps being added every year.
> I held out a small hope that covid and the remote-work wave would stem things a little bit, but it's hard to say whether that's happened. If anything, the influx could have increased due to the exodus from SF.
This is exactly what we're seeing in the Seattle area. A lot of people in the various circles I'm in thought, as we entered the early stages of this pandemic really settling in for the long-haul, "well, phew, at least it'll put a breather on housing costs."
Nope.
Because of the "work wherever you want" and Seattle and Puget Sound still being a wonderfully attractive place to live, the pace has accelerated. Housing prices here have shot up by double-digit numbers, even inside the city limits from which people are supposedly "fleeing." Both the north and south ends of Seattle, even West Seattle where the main road link has been severed for a year (as of today), have seen massive upticks.
The Department of Licensing has released statistics that show that the number of California driving licenses and vehicle titles exchanged for Washington ones is the second-highest it's been in ten years, with only 2018 being higher, and that's with most DOL offices being closed or heavily restricted due to in-person limits from the virus. (The influx of cars isn't going to do our "pristine environment" any favors, either, and I look forward to the even-louder rants about how terrible traffic is driving by oneself from Marysville to Queen Anne for a hockey game).
Meanwhile, people around here continue to insist that building is bad and, I shit you not, that if we simply don't build then the people will stop coming. I don't know why anyone still thinks this; it hasn't been true for twenty years, why should now be any different? And the new arrivals aren't keen on building more or making sure newer arrivals have space because, well, they moved here, to this spot because they liked it that way and, gosh-darn-it, this space is going to stay like this forever.
It's getting quite frustrating. After many, many years of waiting and hoping and moving around, I finally live near where a light rail station will be opening in the coming year-ish and I fear, even on my moderately good tech salary, I'm not going to be able to afford to live here before the train arrives, or shortly thereafter.