It’s interesting you bring up pascal’s wager, because the first time was introduced to me it was basically a clear-cut example of a logical fallacy.

Probably because it is a clear cut example of a logical fallacy. The whole thing was an exercise in question begging via it’s unstated assumptions.

“The only only thing better than a poison swamp is two poison swamps.”

-Hidetaka Miyazaki, probably

The real nightmare fuel is the Laundry Files villain inspired by these things.

Ironically, in some ways it’s actually a lot better place to live now than it was back then purely because of ecommerce, but the jobs issue is even worse now that it was back then, because all the farm work is now controlled by megacorps instead of individual families.

How large is large? How are people getting goods at all living hundreds of miles away from a population center?

Usually you consolidate all your errands into one trip every week or two where you buy everything you need at the larger town of a few tens of thousands of people.

My grandmother lived in rural Kansas, and her town had a grocery store and a gas station. Anything else was a 3 hour drive to buy.

The larger city area will often be hundreds of miles away with not enough population in between to have more than one or two people at most in any given bus even stopping at multiple small towns. Mass transit it great in cities, but it desperately needs population density to be efficient.