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The only thing these nations share is a military and a fiscal/monetary system. Otherwise they’re now more divergent as Europe. Even language isn’t as shared as it seems, despite mutual intelligibility. Acela-speak, Trump-speak, and Tech-speak are meta-English dialects.
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Got here via attempts to identify cities in the US that are neutral and couldn’t think of any. Some conclusions surprised me. Like Seattle is not part of SV, just a big supplier. SV’s only true outpost is Austin (I haven’t been to Boulder since 2003 but I think it’s more Acela)
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Seattle, I’m convinced, is unique. It is shaped by fishing, shipping, Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon into something that really has strong globalist DNA but not a natural extension of SV despite the big overlap.
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PNW is more ideologically distinct as a region than people realize. It’s not part of a California superset really.
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One reason “where to move” decisions are so hard is that moving within one of these nations feels easy, but across their boundaries is now horrendously hard. I’ve lived in hillbilly, Acela, SV (Austin), Seattle, and drought nation. Only nations haven’t lived in is Reaction.
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The rise of Miami as a weird new candidate, I suspect, has a lot to do with the reactionary turn in SV coupled with a desire to forge an alliance between Anglo and Latino (Cuban-Venezuelan) reactionary strains. Austin is how Acelans move to SV.
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Replying to
I tend to think more in terms of an archipelago of the United Cities of America. Little Rock has more in common with Seattle than it has with the rest of Arkansas, relatively speaking, and this repeats itself fractal-like down to the county seat level.
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But if what you're saying is that culturally dominant megacities like NY, LA, SV-area, maybe even Atlanta, create their own gravity and are different in kind as well as scale, I wouldn't disagree.
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