There are plenty of public spaces which are also really nice and calm considering you're pretty much in the thick of it. You can sometimes even hear the Guildhall students practising which is a lovely treat
your largest city is 9 times smaller than London, admittedly it has some dirtiness as all cities do but I'd say it's cleaner than Berlin (having worked there) which is a quarter the size, certainly cleaner than Paris (although Paris is larger of course), and cleaner than New York (also having worked there) which is fairly close in population.
comedians no longer complain about that, contemporary comedy is merely repeating the commonly accepted societal mantrae, and laughing at and trivialising opposition or criticism to or of it.
Wit, satire, and criticism are still funny, but aren't permissible.
They dispute The Road to Serfdom's conclusion that any sort of social programs like that the which Nordic countries have would lead to an authoritarian regime, they argue there's always a red queen race between society and state for power and there are many avenues so to speak to get to the sweet spot in "The Narrow Corridor" and being dogmatic like The Road to Serfdom is not productive thinking.
I'd be interested to see how that is measured... dogs and cats are significantly different, but I'm not sure I'd call cats less intelligent. Case in point with mine - she figured out how to weaponize my electronic stand-up desk as a way to get me to stand up so that she could steal my chair. Another figured out how to open doors so he could go wherever he wanted in the house. No, they don't go around sniffing out mines or earthquake victims - they instead have convinced people to give them a total life of leisure.
There's another part to their intelligence I wish we could study... multiple times I've had cats show up on my front porch as though they somehow know my house is safe. Example: several years ago a cat knocked on my door and by the time we got things detangled we understood that it lived several blocks away and likely had been in a really abusive situation. Somehow that cat understood that if came to my house it would be safe, whereas my neighbors on either side would have at best ignored it. I've now had this happen multiple time such that there is some kind of pattern - pheromones?
Did you ensure that this cat didn't try elsewhere, first?
Hypothesis: you have (or had) at least a cat at home, while your neighbors didn't, and a cat showing up on your front porch may think "better here because at least a cat can live here, even if it triggers a territorial conflict".
Yeah I guess that's part of my curiosity and how one might set up a test case - did they come to my house because they detected the cat hormones at my house?
I think it's a wash personally, cats are far better problem solvers and have better comprehension of temporal and spatial displacement, but dogs are far more socially intelligent, intuit disposition and intent of even other species very quickly.
That said they must be fairly well matched intellectually or we wouldn't even be able to have this discussion.
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