I mean, you're not going down there for one ant. You probably want to fill your carry on with them and digging up dozens of ant mounds on strangers land doesn't sound all that great

just thinking that, as a buyer of a rarity who is presumably showing it off to others eventually, i'd probably get more mileage out of a photo of me sticking a twig into a dune, and then a tale of 'smuggling a single ant', than 'i got this myself, from one whole trip to the store'

Oh man 10-day long airplane ride. No thanks.

Feels like the kind of grift DOGE should not allow

The black pill about that story isn't that a (crappy) preprint exists, it's that it got coverage in the press and was viral on social sites.

Telling people lies that they want to believe has always been profitable.

Recipe for endless sprawl

You were a kid before Detroit automakers? Before NYC was the center of finance?

When I was a kid the Detroit automakers bought air filters manufactured at a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin and brake pads manufactured in Peoria, Illinois and lubricants from Fort Wayne, Indiana.

And the people working in those places provided the customer base for local and regional financial services, along with the rest of the commercial base that made small towns and provincial cities good places to live and raise a family throughout the 20th century.

And of course, a household only needed one person employed, so there was less pressure to move to a bigger city that could provide opportunities for two different careers.

Point taken, but the trend has only increased since then.

Related: I asked AI to find me a house to buy and went with the first recommendation. It did a better job searching than I did.

Curious on this - what was the prompt like? How did you give it access to listings?

Marketplace is pretty good. I never use Craigslist anymore.

Otherwise yeah.

We're all Frank Grimes

Same. Ouch my back.