Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

The Last Grocery Store It’s not that Maria hadn’t noticed the changes. The clinic down the road had quietly shut its doors a year ago after Medicaid funding was slashed, but no one made much of it then. People just drove farther, or they didn’t. When the county’s only pediatrician left, when vaccines ran dry, when the shelves at the pharmacy started emptying out — that’s when the quiet started to settle in. Now, the last grocery store in her town was gone, too. The property was owned by a trust, which was owned by another trust, which was ultimately linked to one of those billionaire farmland acquisitions that had slowly carved up the region. No one lived here anymore. Fewer births, more deaths, families deported, clinics and schools shuttered, until all that was left were skeletal towns dotting billionaire-owned fields — automated combines rolling past abandoned homes. Maria knew she should leave. But where? And for what? Her phone still worked, of course. Service was flawless. D...

This article came about when I asked ChatGPT to assess if I were being unreasonable about a hypothesis. Maybe it's programmed to do this as a product, but ChatGPT encouraged me to turn it into an article. So I asked ChatGPT to make it an article, to see what it looks like. The article is presented first, then the initial discussions with ChatGPT that resulted in the article. Here's the TLDR: Perhaps men, historically, fooled themselves into believing that a woman’s affection was purely personal, when it was entangled with survival. Perhaps women, too, embraced the story because it was the most dignified and emotionally satisfying version of a limited choice. What happens when that layer is peeled back?