Really I pay $25 a month in the UK and that's for a high end one not the cheapo ISP's like plusnet. An your paying almost as much as my last employer did for ELM when we moved offices at short notice < a month.

Shows the positive side of local loop unbundling.

Is there any data to support that rural dwellers spend more time outside than dense urban dwellers? I’d expect the opposite, especially in cold weather.

They're more likely to have outdoor jobs and tons more likely to spend any recreational time outdoors.

City people drink their beer in a bar. Country people drink their beer standing around a pile of burning pallets.

> City people drink their beer in a bar.

Er, no, we mostly don't.

> Country people drink their beer standing around a pile of burning pallets.

I suspect they city and country people both mostly drink their beer outside of business establishments, though, sure, standing around a pile of burning pallets specifically may be more common for country folk.

During the summer, our local "biker" bar offered bonfire seating. The fire was fed with, among other stuff, old pallets. Also landscaping waste, contributed by patrons. And the occasional deadfall and collapsed shed.

City people stand around burning barrels.

Maybe burning pallets in barrels. And trash, of course.

Compare the nature of available forms of employment and recreation in urban areas to those in rural areas.

The outdoor options for recreation are somewhat more sparse in urban areas.

The indoor options for employment are much more sparse in rural areas. White collar jobs are overwhelmingly located in urban and suburban areas. You've got teachers and dentists and stuff like that in rural areas but those scale with population so they don't affect the proportional difference between urban/rural.

In rural areas, almost all jobs are indoor jobs.

I mostly agree that rural areas have a higher proportion of outdoor jobs, but it’s still a super small fraction.

> “The outdoor options for recreation are somewhat more sparse in urban areas.”

Do you have evidence for that? My initial reaction is that it’s very likely false. And if it’s not false, the actual difference is not enough to be meaningful in terms of population statistics of how much indoor time / outdoor time people spend as dense urban dwellers vs rural dwellers.

For example, in the northeast US, I exercise outdoors all year except when the weather literally prevents it. But then, it also prevents it in rural places too, likely more often given the city resources that can clear areas for running / biking that couldn’t be similarly cleared in rural areas.

Having grown up in the rural Midwest, I can only say anecdotally that people in large east coast cities exercise much more, do outdoor activities year round much more, go to public beaches, have large city parks, and generally spend more time doing outdoor activities.

Where I’m from in the Midwest, people exercise less, only use cars to go anywhere (even short distances), and the rural roads are such safety hazards that they can’t be reliably used for jogging or biking and people end up driving to fitness centers to do that stuff indoors.

It's a lot easier to go for a hike, paddle a canoe down a river, go fishing, hunting, climb a mountain, etc... in a rural area than in an urban one.

I’ve lived in Boston and Manhattan before and it was super easy to do all those things apart from climbing a mountain (which is hard to do anywhere there’s not a mountain, regardless ofbeing rural or urban) or hunting.

In fact, I would usually just walk or take a train to these activities, and likely could commute to do them faster than people not in a city. Hunting is probably the main exception, but I don’t think it's meaningful for the point of this thread.

One of my primary hobbies in Boston was taking a bus to the Middlesex Fells nature reserve and hiking all day to find geocaches. Most people I knew also primarly engaged in outdoor, physically vigorous activities like kayaking/rowing, long distance jogging and bicycle riding.