I think I understand this post now, it was really hard to find any specific point you were making but I totally get it AND agree with you. Growing up in Rutland county I had to drive about 15 mins to work and school, even longer to hang out with friends and do other fun things like swimming holes etc. Now that I live in Burlington I absolutely relish in the fact that I can walk to the grocery store. We definitely need to walk places more, but the big issue is how do we build up our urban areas to be more affordable to live in? Rutland has so much sprawl, Burlington continued to get flooded with UVMers. I appreciate your perspective though, for future research I'd recommend looking into the differences between electric and fossil fuel heating. Then call your reps and senators, theres a super important bill called the Affordable Heat Act making its way through the state house. Keep an eye on it

A solid case for why we don't use horses anymore?

I was born and raised in Vermont. My mom is from Long Island, and on my dads side i have an ancestor who is buried in Montpelier, died fighting in the Revolutionary War. To me, theres really no difference. Just a weird xenophobic sentiment shared among locals, it definitely stems from pride. Sure its annoying when massholes etc come up and drive like absolute maniacs but pretty much every state has that.

Something interesting I did hear from some coworkers at an old job, A LOT of native Vermonters leave but a decent amount of those end up coming back. I'm in my early 20s and planning to leave within the next few years, so we'll see what happens

I'll never forget taking lovers lane to bypass the construction

I know the exact spot you're talking about, I had no idea they were actually trying to get one put in that's awesome

This is awesome, VT is surprisingly well suited for train commuting. Would be funny to see people in Brandon reactions to trains station being built 😂

The issue isnt whether we encourage people to make uninformed decisions when voting, its about understanding HOW people vote. If you take party affiliations off the ballot, a lot of people won't vote/won't know who to vote for. We want MORE people voting, which RCV encourages

Which mcdonalds we talking here?

Getting rid of the party designation on ballots would be a bit of a mess, mainly cuz people don't always know the names of the candidates they support, party indicators are a helpful shortcut for that. Ive also thought about how it might phase republicans out (rcv would prevent the left from splitting the vote,) but all it does is ensure the candidate actually has majority support. Having it state wide would be interesting, I'm sure a lot more republicans would lose but that only means they never really had the majority support of their constituents. (Sorry, i work advocating for this stuff, hope this helps)

Ive always been bothered by white headlights, its just unnecessarily bright unless you're actually driving places where its impossible to see. I also drive an older accord so pretty much every modern cars headlights point directly at my face. Even cars behind me make it hard to see sometimes with the reflection from the side mirrors absolutely blasting me