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Very little property sovereignty: The UK planning system is draconian. Conservation areas (common in Greenwich) prevent minor alterations (windows, doors).

Homeschooling is currently legal, but the "Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill" (2025) introduces a mandatory register for home-educated children, signaling a shift from a "notification" system to a "permission" system.

Temperature: Not extremely cold, but "damp chill”. Summers are mostly mild.

Air Quality: While Greenwich is "leafier" than central London and benefits from the park, it is still within the London orbital pollution belt. PM2.5 levels frequently exceed WHO pristine standards, though the ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) has mitigated diesel fumes.

London tap water is recycled repeatedly (waste-to-tap loop) and is very "hard." While currently not artificially fluoridated in Greenwich (unlike other UK regions), the high density of population upstream creates risks of trace pharmaceutical contaminants that standard filters miss.

Note: This comment was added at the wrong level in the chain.

At sea level, so fails altitude criterion in #2294.

At sea level, so fails altitude criterion in #2294.

Very little sunlight except for a fairly brief period in summer. About 1,600 hours per year.

Social Trust / Safety: Urban awareness required. While historically very safe, recent trends in property crime and "ram raids" indicate a degrading security environment. It is no longer a "doors unlocked" culture.

Freedom of expression is generally upheld by common law, but recent legislative trends and the Harmful Digital Communications Act introduce mechanisms for state censorship regarding "hate speech."

No right to self-defense: Self-defense laws rely on "reasonable force" proportionality which often favours the aggressor in court. Pepper spray is classified as a restricted weapon and is illegal for civilians to carry for self-defense.

Taxation: No comprehensive capital gains tax and no inheritance tax suggest a favorable environment. However, the Foreign Investment Fund (FIF) rules tax unrealized gains on foreign assets, and trust tax rates are high (39%), creating friction for global capital allocators.

People are not fully free to do what they want with the land. The Resource Management Act (RMA) and local council unitary plans create extreme friction. Modifications to land, heritage overlays, and tree protection laws severely restrict the "Right to Build."

If children are not sent to school, there is a lot of bureaucratic work that the parents need to go through. It requires an exemption application and the Ministry of Education retains the right to review the educational philosophy and curriculum.

Reduced sun exposure: Auckland experiences a lot of cloud cover and rainfall, particularly during the winter months. Summer months are quite good though. Auckland gets about 2,000 - 2,120 hours of sunshine per year according to Google.

Auckland is at sea level, so the health benefits of being at altitude are not available here.

I would like to have kids one day. I should find places that allow kids to pursue their interests with minimal or no legally required education standards infringing on that.

I hadn't thought of this angle. Very interesting.

I should aim to create a life where it isn't a problem if people who have physical access to me also know what I say online.

I'm not sure what that looks like in practice. I suppose it is highly situational.

Some quotes relating to your idea:

Rationality is man’s basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues... [It] means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action.
— Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, ch. 1

and

Since these virtues are expressions of rationality, they are logically interconnected... None can be validated in isolation... nor can a man practice any one of them consistently while defaulting on the others.
— Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, ch. 8

@dennis-hackethal* see the revision chain on #3164. Revision 5 improved the content but I accidentally removed valuable comments. Revision 6 (a revision of revision 4) brought back the comments but I failed to include the content improvement in revision 5. I then made revision 7 to have both the comments and the improved content.

Maybe it should be possible to amend which comments apply to an idea without needing to make a whole new revision. This could behave weirdly in some edge cases, but it’s food for thought. If you think the way it currently works is going to be best, that seems fine to me.

Core Moral Virtues (influenced by Ayn Rand and CR)

• Rationality: The commitment to the ongoing deliberate use of conjecture and criticism, and to only adopting ideas that have no pending criticisms.

• Honesty: A refusal to evade one's thoughts, a commitment to searching for one's own errors, and a refusal to fake reality to others.

• Integrity: The refusal to permit a breach between one's convictions and one's actions.

• Independence: The acceptance of one's own mind as the first and final executor of rationality in one’s life.

• Justice: The application of rationality in judging ideas, people, and actions, and acting on those evaluations proportionately.

• Productiveness: The application of rationality to sustaining and improving one's life and circumstances.

• Pride: An insatiable drive to find and fix errors in one's character, knowledge, and creations. “[M]oral ambitiousness”, as Ayn Rand puts it.

Core Moral Virtues (influenced by Ayn Rand and CR)

• Rationality: The commitment to the ongoing deliberate use of conjecture and criticism, and to only adopting ideas that have no pending criticisms.

• Honesty: A refusal to evade one's thoughts, a commitment to searching for one's own errors, and a refusal to fake reality to others.

• Integrity: The refusal to permit a breach between one's convictions and one's actions.

• Independence: The acceptance of one's own mind as the first and final executor of rationality in one’s life.

• Justice: The application of rationality in judging ideas, people, and actions and acting on those evaluations proportionately.

• Productiveness: The application of rationality to sustaining and improving one's life and circumstances.

• Pride: An insatiable drive to find and fix errors in one's character, knowledge, and creations. “Moral ambitiousness” as Ayn Rand puts it.

It occurs to me that self-discipline can literally be interpreted to mean disciplining the self in the way a parent might discipline a child. That framing makes it easier to see problems with self-discipline.

Applied Virtues

• Curiosity: The drive to find new problems and generate conjectures.

• Self-Criticism: The primary tool of intellectual honesty.

• Clarity: The virtue of refining thoughts to be less ambiguous and easier to criticise.

• Epistemic Humility: The consistent recognition of one's own fallibility.

• Thoroughness: The commitment to accounting for all known uncontroverted ideas and pending criticisms that may pertain to the problem at hand. {This seems weak}

• Good Faith: The commitment to "steel-manning" ideas and criticisms.

• Resilience / Fortitude: The ability to recover from failure and re-apply the process.

• Decisiveness: The will to act once a conjecture is provisionally accepted and criticism is exhausted.

• Courage: The will to face the potential pains of the epistemic process (facing uncomfortable truths, acting on counter-intuitive conclusions, thinking alone).

• Accountability: A social manifestation of integrity; the willingness to "own" the consequences of one's actions.

• Reliability: The practice of meeting one's voluntary commitments.

• Proportionality: The skill of acting proportionately to a given situation, criticism or event.

• Intellectual Impartiality: The skill of separating the content of an idea from its source, allowing criticism to be applied fairly.

• Fairness: The consistent application of the same critical standards to all ideas.

• Intellectual Patience: The willingness to give a problem the time it needs, rather than using a problematic solution (a solution with pending criticisms). {Okay but what if it is an emergency?}

• Foresight & Planning: The application of conjecture and criticism to problems pertaining to future circumstances.

• Diligence / Industriousness: The sustained application of effort to the problem-solving process, usually to a particular problem.

• Creativity / Ingenuity: The skill of generating novel conjectures and criticisms.

• Efficiency: The drive to reduce the work, resources or steps it takes to solve problems.

• Resourcefulness: The skill of solving problems within constraints.

• Purposefulness: The skill of defining a hierarchy of problems to solve, ensuring one's productive effort is directed at goals worth pursuing.

• Focus: The ability to sustain mental effort.

• Sharpness: Raw mental processing power.

• Energy / Vitality: The capacity to be highly productive, especially over long durations.

• Athleticism / Physicality: The capacity of the body to execute actions.

• Memory: The ability to store and retrieve important conjectures and criticisms.

• Conscientiousness: The opposite of negligence. A commitment to making genuine efforts; not cutting corners.

• Excellence: The opposite of mediocrity. Man can go “as high as his ability will carry him” (The Virtue of Selfishness, ch. 12).

Good question. It is not something I have thought about much myself, but I wanted to allow for the possibility that people may want to discuss keeping their digital devices tidy, not just physical spaces.

I suppose digital tidiness would consist of organising your computer, phone, or tablet in such a way that it is straightforward to find things when you need them.