CNBC's Ten Best States to Live

Since 2007 CNBC has been ranking all 50 states in the US by how good they are to do business in. As you can imagine, the Northeast doesn't always rank that highly. We have high taxes, lots of regulations, the region has a shrinking workforce, the high cost of living means needing to pay larger salaries, etc. However, as part of compiling this list CNBC checks a bunch of different attributes and in some of those the Northeast really does shine. Things like educated workforce, access to capital, tech innovation and so on.

One of those criteria where the Northeast also does great is apparently quality of life. With the data they've compiled CNBC puts together a side list covering their 10 Best States to Live In 2022 and no shock to me, Vermont (my home) and Maine (my second favorite state) are right in the #1 and #2 spots! Low crime, protections for all people, access to voting rights, great healthcare and childcare, an unspoiled envrironment, all come together put us at the top.

So glad to call Vermont, and New England more generally, home. 🏡

Chin Up

I'm hearing a lot of pessimism coming from friends, family and neighbors lately about the future. And I'm talking about people with a variety of political positions here. They don't agree on what the problems are, let alone how to fix them, but they all seem to agree that something is wrong.

I tend to see things a little differently. I don't deny there are things happening in this country that I don't agree with, but on balance I tend to think the world is becoming a better place, and for every thing we can quibble about with our country's direction there's a couple other metrics we can point to where things are improving.

Good to get some validation then in The Interpreter column in The New York Times this morning. In it, Max Fisher writes pretty persuasively that while democratic erosion in the States and elsewhere is a big concern, there are so many other trends worth celebrating right now. Cheers to that. 🍻

Brave Little State

My wife Katie and I are big fans of the Brave Little State podcast from Vermont Public (formerly Vermont Public Radio). It's a great show where listeners get to vote on listener-submitted questions that they'd like answered by Vermont Public's reporters. Given our love for the show, you can imagine our delight when a question of Katie's got selected, albeit through the backdoor. Who needs votes? One of the show producers selected it as a wildcard pick! 😁

The episode just landed this week. Katie's question was: Whose job is it to come up with the punny messages on the highway traffic alert signs throughout Vermont? Hilarious!

Keep your Tabs to Yourself

Prettier is an amazing tool. I've used it for years and will continue to do so, but I find shit like this beyond eyeroll inducing. Because there's an accessibility angle now the vast majority of JS/TS devs might have tabs as the default? The point of a default is that it fits the default use case.

I've never bothered with a config file for Prettier before. Now I'll be dropping a .prettierrc like this at the root of all my projects:

{
  "useTabs": false
}

I'm Listening

I've no love for either big party in federal US politics. I have points of agreement with both, I've voted for candidates from both, but I have little respect for both. I suspect one reason I don't see many candidates I can quickly support from either is a need for them to go to the extremes in order to secure their base.

I don't necessarily see what NJ Congressman Tom Malinowski presents in this piece as offering a silver bullet for our national polarlization. (I have other ideas as to what might mitigate that.) I do, however, think he's on to something with regard to how we can mitigate political animosity and vote in folks who could get things done in DC. And I suspect I'd be at least open to supporting a politician of either big party (grudgingly, no doubt) who also had the endorsement of some Moderate Party.