corncob15

It's unfortunate - I was going to send this around because it's an excellent thing to think about, but then there's that bit that comes out of nowhere and if I send that to someone they'll think certain things about me.

I can vote with an out-of-state driver's license in Pennsylvania, it just means that I have to provide a signature to them instead of it getting auto-populated from my driver's license. I'm pretty sure this should be the case in any state.

Obsidian stores all your files as Markdown as well, and has plugins to automatically back up your vault using Git on a set interval. I'm pretty sure across my various cloud sync and disk backup setups my Obsidian vault is fully recoverable from five different independent data sources, only one of which (Obsidian Sync) has any dependency on Obsidian itself.

A lot of these comments could read very differently depending on the age and living situation of the commenter. I'm a college student who likes to travel and usually doesn't have access to a personal vehicle (or I'm in cities where using a car is more annoying than not). I could probably keep up a perfectly fulfilling social life only using my laptop and its chat services, although I would definitely find it annoying. If I was forced to live without a smartphone, I'd be much more worried about the non-social things, mostly to do with transportation. I use my phone to pay public transit fare, unlock e-bikes or e-scooters, request rideshare services, display airline boarding passes, generally find my way in unfamiliar places, and so on. If I spent 99% of my time in the same city and mostly drove a personal car around, I wouldn't need those things as much.

Reminds me of the perennial reports from the American Society of Civil Engineers talking about how the US's infrastructure is degraded and everyone had better hire a lot of civil engineers to fix it.

Small-parcel courier services (read: USPS, UPS, FedEx) are far, far more expensive than the freight shipping that moves most things around. It costs about $1/kg to ship things all the way from China to the US by ocean container (much more expensive than it used to be because supply chain issues).

This is true, but also doesn't conflict in any way with the 20% first-generation statistic. After all, the corollary of "20% first-generation" is that the vast majority of Harvard students do have one or more parents with a college degree.