Mainstream economics reads like a flat earth Facebook group when you see how many times it's failed to predict booms and busts despite being considered acceptable as such.
I think we spend too much time trying to ascribe an internal consistency to famous people. Finding internal consistency with somebody doesn't change the destructive trajectory of their politics.
The value of your labor is how much the company is able to leverage it for a return. It has next to nothing to do with where you live. It's on the company to answer this question, not you or some third party to the negotiation between you and your employer.
Let's be realistic, while you can see denialism of science across the spectrum, there's only one side of it that denies it in the face of extinction-level events. Scientists can't hope to transcend politics (an unrealistic and meaningless goal anyway) when the Right is so given to removing them from the discourse. They need to enter politics and lean in with everybody else.
China's population is concentrated in one part of the country. That makes it easier to serve them more efficiently with mass transit. This isn't true for the United States. The population resides on the coasts, which you can serve with high-speed rail, but connecting the two coasts with the inland population centers via rail is a much, much bigger project.
The shortcoming with that line of reasoning is that it's still not wholly satisfying. Falsifiability is probably necessary but not sufficient for what most people consider to be science. The problem of induction still stands and falsifiability doesn't have much to say about it. Focusing on falsifiability seems incomplete as a philosophy of science.
Calling farmers professionals as it relates to the conscious application of dangerous pesticides is a serious stretch. We're approving new pesticides at an unreal rate. These guys have no idea how this stuff works or its impact on the greater environment. They need to use it because plants and insects are becoming resistant to the old stuff and farms are in the business to make money. Externalities be damned.
Suburban lawn care has been going on for decades, using largely the same approach it always has. Mainly fertilizers applied once or twice a year if you bother to care. Broadleaf weed killers, maybe grub killer. The primary way to getting a nice lawn, though, is to overseed so often you choke out weeds. On the other side of the coin, agriculture is engaging in a broad spectrum application of herbacides, pesticides, etc with new formulas coming all the time. At an insane scale.
There is no comparison to yards. It's agriculture.
I've lived in Portland OR, Mid MO, and the Kansas City area. In mid-Missouri, the brown recluse is the standard house spider. Pretty much every spider in my house there was a brown recluse. I had a weird bruise-y/necrotic bite on my hip that I assumed came from one that got in bed with me. It healed up fine without any medical intervention even though it lingered for awhile. I suspect a lot of people get bitten over the span of their lives but the bites aren't really noticeable. Spiders get in your bed or get into your clothes sometimes. It takes a bit of work/luck to get a recluse bite. They're not aggressive and they're not looking for trouble.
The West Coast, in my experience, has very little on the Midwest when it comes to spiders and bugs. In Oregon I was blown away by the lack of bugs. I could leave my doors and windows open at night and nothing seemed to come in. Unreal! The only major thing Portland seemed to have on the middle states is slugs. Waking up in the morning to find slug trails in my kitchen and in the dog bowl was a weird experience. Live and learn!
He's right about one thing. You will die of boredom in Lincoln. There are plenty of other nearby Midwestern cities with character and interesting stuff to do (and people to see). Omaha and Kansas City are a couple. I'd probably pick Des Moines over Lincoln, too. It really is as described: sprawling new developments on old farmland in a (sort of) Big 10 college town.
A lot of folks in the Valley who are the hardest hit by these economic changes grew up in California. It's ironic to me that somebody from the Midwest move there and then criticize the residents for not moving to where they moved away from.
If you wear clothes and/or aren't near the equator it's not gonna make a big enough of a difference. Also you're gonna have to balance that with negative sun exposure. Salmon is probably a top vitamin d source, but supplements are probably the cheapest way to pack it in.
If by "the left" you also mean every prominent suburban area in America, then yes!
It's right to bring up the military and the trades as viable options, but let's not oversell that stuff. The trades aren't just a shoo-in easy crack at six figures like folks spout off. You gotta work for that master-tradesman slot. It'd probably take you 10+ years to get there if you're good enough. The trades are designed to limit the number of people entering them...it's part of why they make so much money. It's also incredibly hard work and tears up your body as you age.
I think the drawbacks to joining the military are pretty obvious and go without saying.