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Where would you recommend one visit if they wanted to experience this "real world"? Better yet, what's the realest place one could visit, based on your metrics

Where would you recommend one visit if they wanted to experience this "real world"? Better yet, what's the realest place one could visit, based on your metrics of restaurants and personal accessories? edit: thank you all for your travel suggestions, but this was a tongue-in-cheek way of trying to point out the absurdity of the OP's comment about DC not being the "real world".

f-securus 3y ago
St Louis?
throwaway38475 3y ago
Pittsburgh! Cool working class people and the personal accessories are usually the local sports teams.
qbasic_forever 3y ago
Queens or the Bronx in NYC. They're big city but full of real, working class people and immigrants. Parts of Brooklyn are good too (but also parts of Brooklyn are just as bad and worse than DC). Definitely not Manhattan, lol--it's DC attitude and costs but everyone works for banks and finance instead of the government.
- whats_a_quasar 3y ago
  I live in SF at the moment but have family originally from the Bronx. Spending time in NYC neighborhoods is so satisfying, I agree that there's a sense of that you don't get in more expensive areas.
fwungy 3y ago
Take a long ride around Seattle, for one example.
manicennui 3y ago
Chicago. It's interesting that the article doesn't mention Chicago and its metro area at all. The Chicago metro area is still one of the largest in the US, and is relatively affordable. There are also tons of jobs here and its culture and entertainment is only rivaled by a couple cities in the US.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Chicago has interestingly varied density. In an area that is otherwise low-rise, there will be one extremely tall skyscraper. I wonder what kind of land use policy creates this phenomenon.
  - manicennui 3y ago
    Probably the fact that the mayor and aldermen only care about property developers, and it is probably cheaper to buy some old building in an area with no skyscrapers.
diveandfight 3y ago
Wouldn't necessarily agree with the source of OP's metrics, but I would agree with the sentiment I believe they are expressing. Comparatively, the other major metropolitan areas in the U.S. produce some product/service that is competitive in the common market: tech things (SF-Bay Area), financial services (NY), entertainment (LA), more tech things (Seattle), etc. [0] Another way I think about it is that these other metro areas have to produce something that people would want to exchange dollars for because they provide more value to them than their dollars. The thing that separates D.C. from these other metros (and for lack of a better term, "the real world") is that the value-determination mechanism of exchanging dollars for goods/services is completely different than the other cities (and I would argue much worse). Government has little incentive to spend less and consequently seek goods/services that provide the best value. In fact, the U.S. federal government has quite the opposite motivation. Every department is incentivized to spend as much as possible within their allotted budget (which hardly ever decreases year-over-year), lest they demonstrate that they could actually perform their functions with less money than has been allotted to them (gasp!). This phenomenon can be observed in the frenzy to spend all the budgeted money by the end of the fiscal year. [2] The end result is a city that continuously spends more money for goods/services that are almost orthogonal to providing value (since that is not their point). There's something perverse in the fact that of the ten highest median income counties in the U.S., 50% of them are in this area that produces goods/services of dubious to no value. [1] [0] Apologies to anyone if I caused offense at these gross oversimplifications of their cities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie... [2] Anecdote: I literally worked on a project for a three-letter agency to develop an ML model that would identify which budgeted funds were "in danger" of going unspent by the end of the fiscal year. Leadership loved it. What was a manual process involving countless person-hours that usually began in late spring to comb through the budget, could be supplemented by a model-based prediction in February.
ren_engineer 3y ago
>absurdity of the OP's comment about DC not being the "real world". DC is absurd, it consists almost entirely of people who live off the rest of the nation's tax dollars and yet look down upon the people who subsidize their lives. OP was pointing out the fact that the rest of the nation was suffering during the recession but DC was untouched because their jobs and lifestyle are ensured by government funds
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  You're confusing DC with a very small subset of DC which is affluent or government jobs. The vast majority of people who work in DC do not live in DC. Over half of DC's residents are below the poverty line, with terrible schools, barely can get school lunches, child care, or halfway decent jobs. They don't get shit from the nation's tax dollars.
  - fwungy 3y ago
    You can't have an over class without an under class. Rich people need poor people to do the work.
steve76 3y ago
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f-securus 3y ago

St Louis?

throwaway38475 3y ago

Pittsburgh! Cool working class people and the personal accessories are usually the local sports teams.

qbasic_forever 3y ago

Queens or the Bronx in NYC. They're big city but full of real, working class people and immigrants. Parts of Brooklyn are good too (but also parts of Brooklyn are just as bad and worse than DC). Definitely not Manhattan, lol--it's DC attitude and costs but everyone works for banks and finance instead of the government.

whats_a_quasar 3y ago
I live in SF at the moment but have family originally from the Bronx. Spending time in NYC neighborhoods is so satisfying, I agree that there's a sense of that you don't get in more expensive areas.

fwungy 3y ago

Take a long ride around Seattle, for one example.

manicennui 3y ago

Chicago. It's interesting that the article doesn't mention Chicago and its metro area at all. The Chicago metro area is still one of the largest in the US, and is relatively affordable. There are also tons of jobs here and its culture and entertainment is only rivaled by a couple cities in the US.

euroderf 3y ago
Chicago has interestingly varied density. In an area that is otherwise low-rise, there will be one extremely tall skyscraper. I wonder what kind of land use policy creates this phenomenon.
- manicennui 3y ago
  Probably the fact that the mayor and aldermen only care about property developers, and it is probably cheaper to buy some old building in an area with no skyscrapers.

diveandfight 3y ago

Wouldn't necessarily agree with the source of OP's metrics, but I would agree with the sentiment I believe they are expressing. Comparatively, the other major metropolitan areas in the U.S. produce some product/service that is competitive in the common market: tech things (SF-Bay Area), financial services (NY), entertainment (LA), more tech things (Seattle), etc. [0] Another way I think about it is that these other metro areas have to produce something that people would want to exchange dollars for because they provide more value to them than their dollars. The thing that separates D.C. from these other metros (and for lack of a better term, "the real world") is that the value-determination mechanism of exchanging dollars for goods/services is completely different than the other cities (and I would argue much worse). Government has little incentive to spend less and consequently seek goods/services that provide the best value. In fact, the U.S. federal government has quite the opposite motivation. Every department is incentivized to spend as much as possible within their allotted budget (which hardly ever decreases year-over-year), lest they demonstrate that they could actually perform their functions with less money than has been allotted to them (gasp!). This phenomenon can be observed in the frenzy to spend all the budgeted money by the end of the fiscal year. [2] The end result is a city that continuously spends more money for goods/services that are almost orthogonal to providing value (since that is not their point). There's something perverse in the fact that of the ten highest median income counties in the U.S., 50% of them are in this area that produces goods/services of dubious to no value. [1] [0] Apologies to anyone if I caused offense at these gross oversimplifications of their cities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie... [2] Anecdote: I literally worked on a project for a three-letter agency to develop an ML model that would identify which budgeted funds were "in danger" of going unspent by the end of the fiscal year. Leadership loved it. What was a manual process involving countless person-hours that usually began in late spring to comb through the budget, could be supplemented by a model-based prediction in February.

ren_engineer 3y ago

>absurdity of the OP's comment about DC not being the "real world". DC is absurd, it consists almost entirely of people who live off the rest of the nation's tax dollars and yet look down upon the people who subsidize their lives. OP was pointing out the fact that the rest of the nation was suffering during the recession but DC was untouched because their jobs and lifestyle are ensured by government funds

0xbadcafebee 3y ago
You're confusing DC with a very small subset of DC which is affluent or government jobs. The vast majority of people who work in DC do not live in DC. Over half of DC's residents are below the poverty line, with terrible schools, barely can get school lunches, child care, or halfway decent jobs. They don't get shit from the nation's tax dollars.
- fwungy 3y ago
  You can't have an over class without an under class. Rich people need poor people to do the work.

steve76 3y ago

[dead]