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Comment by JCharante | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice self fulfilling prophecy. Smaller cities shouldn't exist. Imagine the internship opportunities available to high school students that kids can get in a big city vs small ones. My peers had tech companies in their hometowns whereas I didn't. Small cities put children in a disadvantage and should not exist. Big cities also have the scale to have specialized schools that match students with their interests while small cities just have a classroom for the whole grade.

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When we are saying smaller cities in South Korea we are still talking about million plus cities. There are five of them not in Seoul’s orbit.

Germany famously lacks a dominant city and has a pretty good economy. So does the US. Decentralization is also diversification; if one region is falling behind it does not take the whole country with them.

decentralization provides certain benefits at the cost of pure efficiency. People with your mindset are why our supply chains are still fucked up years after the Covid lockdowns. Maximizing efficiency kills durability and reliability

Big cities are way more expensive. People who live there have almost no kids. Rural and small cities have kept the US population from crashing completely. Big cities are currently dismantling their specialty high schools. I don't think the facts on the ground support that big cities are better for kids.

“People who live there have almost no kids” - that’s just not true and super North America specific. Some personal data points - my entire family was born and raised in city of >3M population, everyone whom I know in Europe with kids live in fairly big cities.

The European big cities are much smaller than Seoul, which is 26M.

Cities in this size range in East Asia all have massive fertility issues (Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing)

> Small cities put children in a disadvantage and should not exist

This is the kind of radical bat shit craziness, from posters who are so intelligent they can rationalize anything, craziness that I love to find on HN.

I went to high school in a specialized class in Sweden anyway and I didnt have any internship because if you study all your waking hours to get max grades you don't have time for interning.

Who said internships can't be fun? What I do as a software develop building CRUD apps is basically what I did as a teen, except working in a team is way more fun and there's senior people to help you if you have issues instead of spending 3 days trying out stackoverflow suggestions.

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