# Are cities obsolete?



## Sexy Senior Citizen (Jun 9, 2020)

Partly due to the fact Corona-Chan spread like wildfire in the cities, and now the urban dwellers are setting their own neighborhoods on fire- but also partly because some reasons for forming cities have largely disappeared. Cities tend to form where water is abundant (both for sustaining life and transportation), but advances in transportation have rendered this unnecessary. They provide a place where major political and corporate entities gather, but again, advances in communications technology have rendered that obsolete. They once provided safety in numbers, but again, this isn't necessary due to the evolution of warfare- cities nowadays are little more than glass-and-steel bulls-eyes for the hostile military power. Packing people like sardines in a can may seem like a great idea to save space, but since cities are incapable of producing food or the raw materials necessary for expansion on their own, they need to leech enormous amounts of resources from the surrounding land; besides, behavioral sinks are a very real threat (and one we may be seeing play out right now in the riots around America.)
So, do cities still have their advantages, and if so, what are they? Do they need to be retired, and if so, what do we do with the now-empty skyscrapers?


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## Angry Shoes (Jun 9, 2020)

Just because there are protests and an overhyped virus doesn't mean that people are suddenly going to stop wanting to live near other people.


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## Sexy Senior Citizen (Jun 9, 2020)

Angry Shoes said:


> Just because there are protests and an overhyped virus doesn't mean that people are suddenly going to stop wanting to live near other people.


I don't mean everyone needs to live the Daniel Boone lifestyle. Just that, with the march of progress being as it is, do we need to have massive, overcrowded concrete jungles? Are they still necessary?


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## Biden's Chosen (Jun 9, 2020)

Cities are containment threads for autists IRL.


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## Marco Fucko (Jun 9, 2020)

I like cities because I prefer walking over driving. Also, there's always "somewhere else to go" in the ecosystem if things don't work out. You can get lost in a crowd, suits me just fine. And if you're persona non grata in one metro, just catch a flight to another one.

I understand why suburbanites like their environments, less crime on paper, cheaper housing for the middle class, et cetera. But at the end of the day those suburbs at least partially rely on neighboring townships or major cities for employment, and disbanding cities would merely spread that over to other suburbs, making them consequently bigger and somewhere in between the suburbs and the metro.

Don't ask me about the country. I was born into a rural area before I moved to a city with my mom when I was like 9 or 10, and it was an economically depressed shithole with embedded cartel operations. A lot of rural shills will yammer on about simplicity and purity but my area was the other side of the coin: lack of economic opportunity and either bought out or otherwise ineffective officials. Also the county was a target for greyhound hobos from cities, so a lot of hobos in addition to regularly unemployed or underemployed citizens.


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## Cast Iron Pan (Jun 9, 2020)

Skyscrapers should be emptied of humans, and filled with chickens and other large fowl. Forget free-range chicken, we're all about business chicken from here on out. Why settle for an uncredentialed fly-over chicken when you can have a professional chicken with a master's in Grievance Studies or Gender and Racial Justice Interrogation (GARJI)?


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## Pickle Dick (Jun 9, 2020)

moviebob would beg to differ


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## Y2K Baby (Jun 9, 2020)

I can't believe something bad happened. Obviously, this is a new paradigm.


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## keyboredsm4shthe2nd (Jun 9, 2020)

Sexy Senior Citizen said:


> I don't mean everyone needs to live the Daniel Boone lifestyle. Just that, with the march of progress being as it is, do we need to have massive, overcrowded concrete jungles? Are they still necessary?


yes. those cocksuckers need to be contained to stop the spread to rural areas


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## dreamworks face (Jun 9, 2020)

I like cities because it concentrates all the assholes in one place.  In the US, every ten miles and two years, a shopping center containing a new whole foods, bed bath and beyond, target, buffalo wild wings, movie theater, sushi place, and asian fusion restaurant + a bunch of shitty over-priced apartments emerges from the ether, and this shit is spreading to every unpopulated area of the country as  if it's being clone-stamped by a bed bath and beyond executive in his master plan to populate the entire US with crappy shopping centers.


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## Robert James (Jun 9, 2020)

Cities are good for containing yuppies and hipsters and are kind of a necessary evil unless you want a hour+ commute. Also they are necessary for larger museums, zoos, aquariums to exist.



Y2K Baby said:


> I can't believe something bad happened. Obviously, this is a new paradigm.



Holy shit, the riots really did change everything, that is the most logical response I've seen from you. I don't like this new world we need to go back.


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## Merried Senior Comic (Jun 11, 2020)

Cities contain autism. I'd very much not like to have a bunch of drooling former city dwelling retards shit up my small town.


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## ZeCommissar (Jun 11, 2020)

Over 50% of humanity lives in a city, with it being over 60% in the coming decades. 

Tell me something; where the fuck are all those people going to go? 3.75 billion people isn't a small number

And yes cities are still important in a modern industrial society. Unless you want to revert back to pre-industrial agargian society cities will always be around....well there goes your "advances in transportation" argument.


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## The best and greatest (Jun 11, 2020)

Cities exist because it is mutually beneficial for people to congregate, live, and work in a shared space. They'll stop existing when this ceases to be the case, which will be when human society is rendered obsolete  by the automated end-of-history and every man becomes his own nation.

The cities are fine. The people are fucked.


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## jorgoth (Jun 12, 2020)

ZeCommissar said:


> Over 50% of humanity lives in a city, with it being over 60% in the coming decades.
> 
> Tell me something; where the fuck are all those people going to go? 3.75 billion people isn't a small number



Obviously they're all going to die, which is the real goal of people who say things like this. I know that because I'm one of them.


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## Kosher Dill (Jun 12, 2020)

The best and greatest said:


> Cities exist because it is mutually beneficial for people to congregate, live, and work in a shared space. They'll stop existing when this ceases to be the case


I would point out that this is already much less the case than it used to be. If you go back to the turn of the 20th century, the case for cities was _ironclad_ - there simply was no other place that the interchange of goods, ideas, and people from around the world could take place and build any sort of culture that extends beyond what a peasant farmer would have had 1000 years ago. The transportation and communication technology of the time just made that impossible.

An interesting book touching on this is The Discovery of France, which discusses various attempts to survey, unify, and modernize France in the 19th century. Long after the golden age of the Enlightenment in Paris, people living in the French countryside were often still practically medieval pagans who didn't even share a common language with the city dwellers.

Today of course you can buy anything you want and have it delivered anywhere, get at least a mediocre college education locally, and communicate with anyone on the planet without ever needing to go to a city. City living is now more of a lifestyle choice (or a business strategy if you're a business owner) than an absolute necessity, unless you depend specifically on something exclusive to cities, like proximity to a major international seaport.


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## LazarusOwenhart (Jun 12, 2020)

I think city design is obsolete. A lot of inner city areas get designed to be storage boxes for as many humans as possible. I honestly think that private cars are a massive issue for cities, if I moved into my nearby city I'd ditch all 3 of mine, no questions asked. Modern cities need proper, integrated public transport and a design that allows a free and easy flow of pedestrians that are separated from necessary traffic by more than a few inches of curb.


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## HumanHive (Jun 12, 2020)

Cities aren't obsolete. I have a roundabout reason for saying so:

Logically, cities shouldn't exist in the first place. The average human is only about to really know about 30-100 people. 30 is max for close relationship, 100 is max for fragile but tangible relationship. Anything above 100 is "oh yeah that guy" at best. At worst, total anonymity and total apathy towards anything that happens to them. So a city of 1000 and above is basically a powderkeg waiting to happen. Collapse seems inevitable, after all why stick around when shit really hits the fan, and if you look at history that's exactly what happened. Throughout the Middle East and Mesoamerica, there are signs of a cycle of urban collapse that occurred through the vast majority of mankind's history. No signs of war or disaster, people just suddenly decided to leave and left a perfectly good city behind to rot and eventually be buried by the elements. Why did this happen? Probably famine, but also probably famine caused by bad governance. It ain't easy to develop a political system above "like the mafia, but without a government to stop them".

But eventually it happened, and that's the era we are in. That's what makes a city last. They're a concentration of manpower, capital, and culture; and that makes them worth all the bullshit like being constantly surrounded by strangers who wouldn't care if you lived or died. If another cycle of urban collapse started, it'd make the fall of Rome look like a gentrification project.


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## Watermelanin (Jun 12, 2020)

HumanHive said:


> The average human is only about to really know about 30-100 people. 30 is max for close relationship, 100 is max for fragile but tangible relationship. Anything above 100 is "oh yeah that guy" at best. At worst, total anonymity and total apathy towards anything that happens to them. So a city of 1000 and above is basically a powderkeg waiting to happen.


I don't think that logic really follows. A functioning "close-knit" community doesn't necessarily mean "literally everybody knows literally everybody on a personal level." You can build a model in your head assuming everyone reaches that 100 person cap and the overlap is anything less than 100% and still find well over 1000 people with only a few degrees of separation from one another. 
Let's say the rate of overlap is 80%, for the sake of argument. So any one of the 100 people I know will know about 20 people that I don't and vice versa. Those 20 people that I don't know but my friend does will also have 20 people they know that my friend doesn't (though I might). Following law of averages, it's reasonable to say each of these people would know about 4 people unknown to either me or my friend. If you expand on this trend to include ALL people in my social circle, then all people in theirs and so on: you can get a pretty sizeable, yet still reasonably close-knit community.


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## HumanHive (Jun 12, 2020)

Watermelanin said:


> I don't think that logic really follows. A functioning "close-knit" community doesn't necessarily mean "literally everybody knows literally everybody on a personal level." You can build a model in your head assuming everyone reaches that 100 person cap and the overlap is anything less than 100% and still find well over 1000 people with only a few degrees of separation from one another.
> Let's say the rate of overlap is 80%, for the sake of argument. So any one of the 100 people I know will know about 20 people that I don't and vice versa. Those 20 people that I don't know but my friend does will also have 20 people they know that my friend doesn't (though I might). Following law of averages, it's reasonable to say each of these people would know about 4 people unknown to either me or my friend. If you expand on this trend to include ALL people in my social circle, then all people in theirs and so on: you can get a pretty sizeable, yet still reasonably close-knit community.


We're not talking about six degrees of separation, we're talking about how cities are cold anonymous places where nobody bothers to get to know their neighbor. Can you have a close knit urban neighborhood? Sure, but it requires some degree of tribalism and a lack of mobility. But in modern times that's practically unheard of. It's why urban dwellers are considered so rude, because they don't bother making social investments in a city of ten million.

My overall point is that cities should collapse under stress, which they did historically, but not anymore.


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## Watermelanin (Jun 12, 2020)

HumanHive said:


> My overall point is that cities should collapse under stress, which they did historically


Even that isn't _entirely _true. There's a fair number of examples of cities that have been inhabited continuously for thousands of years. It's honestly dubious to say these are the exception rather than the rule given how few and far between city building was in that time.


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## Lemmingwise (Jun 12, 2020)

HumanHive said:


> Cities aren't obsolete.


Still trying to build those hive cities, eh?


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## HumanHive (Jun 12, 2020)

Lemmingwise said:


> Still trying to build those hive cities, eh?


M-maybe...


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## Xarpho (Jun 12, 2020)

Cities aren't obsolete, but "downtowns" are (which functionally only are about 100 years old). The weird obsession of how we must abandon the suburbs in favor of overpriced inner-city housing is confusing, especially as how even the "best" downtowns have just storefront convenience stores and restaurants, as well as a version of a chain grocery store that's a third the size of the suburban ones. That's not even counting the inherent problems (homeless everywhere, expensive parking, echoing of sirens, closing streets and transit for downtown events, tiny parks, etc.). I get the appeal of downtown areas and why people flock to them, but rather accept that people have different tastes in living, downtown/urban apologists will often use mental gymnastics to convince people why anything else is inferior.


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## Lemmingwise (Jun 13, 2020)

Watermelanin said:


> Even that isn't _entirely _true. There's a fair number of examples of cities that have been inhabited continuously for thousands of years.


Mostly true is still true enough. I don't know the history of every city, but constantinople/ istanbul is in that list and it was depopulated numerous times. At least once to such a degree that they were starting large scale farms inside the city walls. Was it really still a city at that point?


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## Watermelanin (Jun 13, 2020)

Lemmingwise said:


> Mostly true is still true enough. I don't know the history of every city, but constantinople/ istanbul is in that list and it was depopulated numerous times. At least once to such a degree that they were starting large scale farms inside the city walls. Was it really still a city at that point?


What I'm questioning here is if it's "mostly true" at all, especially given the fact that the only way for this distinction to make any sense is if it held true _in relation to_ smaller townships. Obviously, if rural communities depopulated at the same (or greater) rate as cities, the whole idea that cities were ever inherently unstable by virtue of them being cities goes out the widow. Whether that is the case, I honestly don't know.


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## Samson Pumpkin Jr. (Jun 13, 2020)

ZeCommissar said:


> Over 50% of humanity lives in a city, with it being over 60% in the coming decades.
> 
> Tell me something; where the fuck are all those people going to go? 3.75 billion people isn't a small number
> 
> And yes cities are still important in a modern industrial society. Unless you want to revert back to pre-industrial agargian society cities will always be around....well there goes your "advances in transportation" argument.



The Netherlands is a great example of a highly dispersed country with only one big city centre, that being Amsterdam. And the Netherlands has one of the highest, if not the highest, agricultural capacity in the world. I'm pretty sure the Netherlands could feed itself 2 or 3 times over. If we really want a sustainable world I think the Dutch model of a highly dispersed population is the way to go. 
And to add to this it also makes for stronger communities. People are always whining about the modern world being so isolating, well if we had just a bunch of small cities instead of one mega city I'm sure this would improve the situation.


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## jje100010001 (Jun 14, 2020)

Leon Krier is a bit spergy, but always has the best graphics for this:
































Of note:


			https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/27/this-is-the-end-of-the-suburban-experiment


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## Slap47 (Jun 14, 2020)

HumanHive said:


> We're not talking about six degrees of separation, we're talking about how cities are cold anonymous places where nobody bothers to get to know their neighbor. Can you have a close knit urban neighborhood? Sure, but it requires some degree of tribalism and a lack of mobility. But in modern times that's practically unheard of. It's why urban dwellers are considered so rude, because they don't bother making social investments in a city of ten million.
> 
> My overall point is that cities should collapse under stress, which they did historically, but not anymore.



Cities only fall apart when they're at the core of an empire that dies. Most cities are sustained by the fact they supply the countryside with manufactured necessities. Kindof why you have cities that are 4000 years old. 

Cities tended to have local pubs and marketplaces so I doubt they're the cause of our current social alienation.

Heck, rural America is where the drug epidemic is.


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## Ted_Breakfast (Jun 14, 2020)

I get nervous when people start questioning the greatness of urban life, like I'm at the top of a pyramid scheme whose base is rumbling.

No seriously, cities are the best way to live. Diversity and culture and science and whatnot.


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## Unassuming Local Guy (Jun 14, 2020)

Ted_Breakfast said:


> I get nervous when people start questioning the greatness of urban life, like I'm at the top of a pyramid scheme whose base is rumbling.
> 
> No seriously, cities are the best way to live. Diversity and culture and science and whatnot.


I haven't been here long enough to know how many layers of irony we're on, but you're making fun of narcissistic yuppie fucks, right?


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## Orion Balls (Jun 14, 2020)

People who live in the country do so for a reason. Same goes for city dwellers. Suburbanites, well, no idea about those folk. Never lived in a burb. There will always be people going from one to the other, but in general, no. Major metropolitan areas aren't going anywhere.


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## CrippleThreat (Sep 2, 2020)

Given the current and frequent news pertaining to mass exoduses around the US, I was pondering on whether big cities (Brooklyn, Seattle, Los Angeles, etc.) were still worth living in, in contrast to the small and more rural areas, which seem to prime locales for the fleeing.

For other city-slickers like myself, what are the happenings in your cities? Are people dipping out quick? And for those who live in the suburbs or closer to small towns, how's it going?


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## UselessIdiot (Sep 2, 2020)

I guess it really depends on the city, but most city propers are a no-go for me. There's cities like Phoenix which have low-population density, sprawl, and more suburban feels in many areas. I still like the suburbs best, and many people are now living in the exurbs. 

Expect the suburbs to keep getting more diverse, and the exurbs to be mostly white. That's how it is in my metro area.


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## break these cuffs (Sep 2, 2020)

Cities are great. Everyone should stay in theirs. The boondocks are full of inbred hillbillies who smoke meth who will shoot at you in your car if they hear you listening to anything but Johnny Rebel. Plus, there are no jobs. You can't even get Cambodian takeout at 1am. No reason to leave y our city.


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## wtfNeedSignUp (Sep 2, 2020)

Depends how much of the population there lives from social welfare.


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## Ndnd (Sep 2, 2020)

We left our city a few years ago because houses are completely unaffordable thanks to Air Bnb and dirty Chinese money driving up the price of real estate to insane levels.  For instance my parents paid about $300K for their house back in the early 90s.  Today it’s worth about $1.5 million.  It doesn’t have a huge lot, nor is it particularly nice, nor is it located in a super nice neighbourhood.   If you were to look for something closer to downtown proper, you’d easily be looking at $2-$3 million for any sort of house.

If you’re an average middle class person, and you want to live in the city, your only option is to buy a tiny overpriced condo, which sucks because you essentially have less rights than a renter, with the added responsibility and expense of being an owner.  Condo fees are retarded too.  It’s calculated based on the square footage of your unit, so if you had a 1000 square foot unit and your building charges $0.70 per square foot, you’re looking at $700 a month on top of your mortgage and property taxes.       And that’s _if _you’re lucky enough to find a place with more than 1 bedroom.

Moreover, hubs and I want to have kiddos and couldn’t imagine trying to raise them in the city.  Shit has gone downhill in the past 5 years and violent crime is on the uptick.  I also don’t want to have to explain to my future children why some homeless guy is taking a shit in the middle of the street. 

Our options were to buy an overpriced condo or move out of the city to a more rural area. We chose the latter and it’s the best goddamn decision we made. We have an honest to god detached house and a half acre of land.  Our neighbours are awesome and there’s more of a sense of community here.  At this point, you couldn’t pay me enough to move back to the city.


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## Marissa Moira (Sep 2, 2020)

The Hey Arnold remake is just going to be Mad Max with kids.


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## Red Hood (Sep 2, 2020)

Large cities tend to be cesspools of crime and degeneracy. Suburbs and rural areas can be too, but it's less close together so I can deal with it.


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## Y2K Baby (Sep 2, 2020)

The case for Big Chungus.


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## OctopodaEnjoyer (Sep 2, 2020)

More rural than small town, but to any city person let me just tell you that the cities are great, the country is shit, and you should keep paying 80k a year for your super nice apartment.

The nice thing about being rural is that the insane shit that goes on doesn't really matter. If I didn't want to I could go for weeks without seeing/hearing another person most months, and that's being outside and not holing up in one room like a neet. I WISH the cities didn't suck as hard as they do, just because that meme about city people running away but being literally retarded and voting for the same policies is absolutely true.


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## TFT-A9 (Sep 2, 2020)

STAY IN YOUR CONTAINMENT ZONE.


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## NOT Sword Fighter Super (Sep 2, 2020)

If I could choose to I’d live somewhere that I’d never have to see my neighbors unless I wanted to.


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## Un Platano (Sep 2, 2020)

Thanks to all the suckers crammed into their cities so I don't have to be


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## Unassuming Local Guy (Sep 2, 2020)

Cons:
More crime
More pollution
Lower standard of living
Less cost-adjusted personal wealth
Little to no community cohesiveness
Nothing but concrete as far as the eye can see
Constant noise
Rats everywhere
Nearly impossible to build equity, trapping you in a cycle of poverty forever

Pros:
Yummy street tacos that only sometimes give you food poisoning mmmm num num (please ignore the fact that tacos are so easy to make a literal chimpanzee could do it)


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## Sped Xing (Sep 2, 2020)

The case for big cities-- the more concentrated they are, the less ecological damage caused by a nuclear cleanse.


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## TiggerNits (Sep 2, 2020)

Major (((Blue))) Cities: Because the nukes have to be aimed at somethin'


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## Never Scored (Sep 3, 2020)

I was born and spent my entire life up to this point in a province with a lower population density than Wyoming. I've literally never known anything any different. Granted, I do live near the one actual city here where the density is higher, but like, that city would still be in the bottom three on this list when you sort it by density. I've been to New York City, Toronto, Miami, Edmonton and Calgary and personally I think you people are all animals and I don't understand what you have to live for. Please kill yourselves.


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