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I can hardly afford to be all that picky, especially since I'm hellbent on Psychiatry if I manage to match into it.
In an ideal world, I'd go to the Bay Area and find my fellow rats (and then form an enormous ratking through Aella's orgies), but even if I ended up in one of the more rundown parts of the nation, I expect to have some degree of geographic mobility when I'm done with the residency.
At the end of the day, energy is still cheap there. Why does it matter if things would get worse if it isn't likely? There's no real risk of that that I can see, the fracking boom did great things for domestic oil production.
A great deal of what we consider progress hinges on the availability of massive amounts of energy, and cheaply. The amounts involved have been getting larger and usually cheaper, and a graph of wealth compared to energy consumption is quite linear from what I recall.
It's a massive flex to build a city or golf club in the middle of a desert, and I'm all for humanity telling Nature to go fuck itself, we're here to terraform at scale.
Well yeah, as long as you have resources to burn. But do we? And it gets to a point where "yippee, I can waste water in the desert" is just showing off for the sake of it. I mean, for those to whom this is impressive, great. But I'd much rather (for instance) that something was done about the coastal erosion on a local road in my locality, which any day now really is going to topple into the sea because the soft earth of the cliffside is being eaten away.
But again, this is not to say that you're wrong or dumb. If the Bay Area is your dream of the Earthly Paradise, I hope you get there one day. Me, I like where I am and even if given a free ticket to the Big Cities wouldn't take it. Each to their own.
Desalination at industrial scale has gone from being a pipedream (heh) to now making Israel a net exporter of water. It's only getting cheaper, and if there's one thing we're not running out of, it's sea water.
Good luck finding a place you like, or saving that path. I don't think my preferences are anything but my own either!
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