"Disingenuous" is a bridge too far (and worth mentioning because it impugns intent.) It's easy to get drawn to the cities with friends and high pay, then feel like path dependency precludes one from returning to the lower COL hometown. You tell your story in the third and fourth paragraphs because you find it worthy of mention.
But yeah, this lifestyle is mostly madness. I watched others stay at home and they have decades of memories, families, and paid off houses. Grass is greener.
A real issue until recently, with remote work as an option, was the lack of opportunity to pursue more intellectual forms of work in a small rural area. I grew up raising cattle and a number of my extended family members were loggers. However, I had an aptitude for science and math and was bitten by the programming bug when I was a teenager. I didn't leave my rural community for fame and fortune but for work that was more interesting to me.
That said, now that I'm near the end of my career I've taken full advantage of remote work by moving to a rural area while maintaining similar pay. Honestly I don't know why more people haven't taken advantage of this significant arbitrage opportunity. To each his own.
I was born in the suburbs, of a moderately large city (think low millions) and have lived here all my life. We often spend weekends out in the countryside in the quiet rural towns.
These towns are somewhat popular with retirees, rural and quiet enough but within 2 to 3 hours of the city, international Airport, and so on.
Getting closer to my own retirement, discussions about "where" have occurred.
Thing is, I actively don't want to retire there. Frankly because there's nothing to do.
As I'm slowly gaining more free time, I want to learn new things (music, ceramics, etc) go out more, play more golf etc. Small towns with their small shops are lovely to unwind in, but personally, not for me full-time.
So yeah, to each his own. Which is great, we are all different, with different circumstances, different opportunities, different goals.
And yes, high speed internet removes a huge part of "have to leave" (or at least adds a big part of "can come back") to the equation. Plus remote work can pump significant revenue into a small-town economy.
Conversely, the flaw of the civil servant plan during Trump 1 was that stonewalling the top of your org chart can really bite you if he sticks around too long or, maybe worse, comes back.
In any case, the President will keep having too much power until Congress starts taking theirs back.
I see two risks with your analysis. First, you generally underestimate a person if you try to distill his personality into one negative trait (or, for that matter, if you select a bunch of negative traits but assume no positive.)
Second, he's still the president, so I don't see what pull the Penn degree has vs. that.
I have to teach non-engineers C programming for an undergrad course, which is basically trying to teach very explicit attention to punctuation (among many other things). "Watch those double quotes!", "single quotes, not double!", "where's your semi-colon??", and so on.
Then, three weeks into the course, we're passing values by reference with &, and I get the question, "isn't that scanf missing the and-sign in front of the string name?", and I'm forced to answer, "that punctuation doesn't matter, this time," because the C standard makes & do nothing in front of a string specifically because so many people were confused about that fact that a string's variable name is already passing by reference.
Growing up in the 90s and 2000s, my mom trained by brothers and me to forcefully demand to call her if we thought 911 had been called so she could race down to intercept and send them packing, lest we get a crazy ambulance ride bill. The calls ranged from total non-issues to things that in no way required ambulance transport, though a hospital visit be necessary.
Oh, indeed. It is ridiculous to rely on ambulances just to get to the hospital. In so many situations.
What happens out on the streets here is that someone has an oopsie, maybe they go unresponsive, or have massive pains or something, and some well-meaning dope contacts 9-1-1.
Then the EMTs show up and the circus begins, and inevitably the ambulance transports the patient and gets them to the E.R., post-haste dispatch.
When I broke my leg while roller skating, I was firmly expecting an ambulance ride. Thankfully I was in a large group of very sane and pragmatic individuals who said "just call a taxi!" It's not like I would die of a broken leg if the taxi took an extra 30 minutes! [Unfortunately, taxis do not like bodily fluids that soil their interiors.]
I once dipped into the hot tub where I live. Due to the pandemic, all our pool furniture had been disappeared, and so when I exited the hot tub, I just lay on the ground to bliss out and enjoy the relaxation. A neighbor immediately began shouting at me and brandished her phone to call 9-1-1. I told her to please cease and desist. Well-meaning citizens have a hair trigger on emergency services and it's exceedingly unnecessary. But your insurance doesn't need to pre-auth an EMT/ED circus.
Conversely, I had an urgent visit with my PCP once, and feebly attempted to describe symptoms. He shrugged. No testing, no diagnosis, no speculation. I can't do nothin' for ya, man. Two days later I was ambulanced to the E.R. with a kidney stone. And yet, no hospital was necessary. Nothing my PCP could've done for a kidney stone. 6 hours, let it pass. It was painful but it passed. All that medical care? Unnecessary. PCP? No reason to sue -- he did nothing wrong. He could've referred me to a CT scan -- for what reason? Let it pass. No lawsuits.
Karen Ann Quinlan's case had a poignancy that touched my heart. I had heard of Terri Schiavo, but Karen Q was before my time. Karen's parents weren't malicious -- they didn't want her to die -- they simply wanted to take away her pain. Physicians insisted that "pulling the plug" would be tantamount to murder! Her parents fought the state and the medical establishment, and ultimately, won for her nine years of life and peace.
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