hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Processed food(here used broadly to include things like bread as well as sodas and lean cuisine) and beef are a majority of most Americans' grocery bills, and those things are much more expensive regardless of the cost of staples like potatoes and milk.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Everyone hates health insurance companies because their premiums keep going up and the system is a pain to deal with. It's not complicated.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
These guys are both edgelords with generally libertarian sympathies. The edgelord thing means they say a lot of stuff that doesn't play well in the media; that's not a surprise.
Polis is serving his last term as governor but he almost certainly has at least dimly entertained national ambitions, because he's a governor with a national profile. So why did he point to thinkers he sometimes disagrees with? Probably to try to create an impression of himself as being willing to listen to people he doesn't agree with. In Colorado, non-progressives are generally more libertarian than conservative, Lauren Boebert is more 'guns' than 'God'. It's no wonder he'd reach towards libertarians who write in sophisticated ways. I'm not sure why he didn't predict that their open defense of dating/having sex with older teens as an adult, AI child porn, and occasional defense of racism would dominate a media discussion of this idea, but libertarian public intellectuals are generally very spicy and even very spicy libertarians are likely more palatable to Jared Polis, as a gay man, than very thoughtful and nuanced classical conservatives like Ross Douthat.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
No, they're still pacifists. They just bow and accept cartel rule; it makes no difference to them to whom they pay taxes.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
They do fine in ultraviolent northern Mexico right now.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
The Amish do not have late medieval tech, their tech level depends on community size but something like ‘victorian’ is probably fair as a rule of thumb, with quite a few exceptions. The Amish are not luddites, they have limitations on relying on non-community members that force them to live off grid. Some communities have electricity and tractors.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Or put rocks in the backpack with all the stuff in it and dump it in a random pond.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Murder probation
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Houston and Austin are sprawling at the edges and densifying in the middle simultaneously because that is what Texans (including Austin liberals) vote for.
Ok, minor correction- while Austin liberals are decently pro-growth, the suburban sprawl in Texas is approved by... republicans. Including in metros where the core city votes very reliably blue. The suburbs outside the city which due the sprawling are invariably republican run and republican voting, although these republicans are often moderate. In general Texas republicans want to build out and Texas democrats want to build up, and except for Fort Worth(which is run by republicans) all the major cities are run by democrats so they build apartments, and all the suburbs are run by republicans so they build vast tracts of single family homes.
The 'smaller' cities(and this means not big 6- Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso. Some of them are major cities population wise) in Texas are ruby red and mostly build out, but often build lower quality(more duplexes and stuff). If you're wondering why Texas is still red, it's mostly due to the overwhelming republican advantage in the smaller cities and their ability to keep pace in growth terms due to endless cheap suburbia.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I mean SpaceX built it's launch facility near a populated area.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Uh, is Mangione even claiming he didn't do it? It's like the lefty American version of the Siri thesis.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I don’t know about Appalachians specifically but whites and Hispanics intermarry regularly- especially white man/hispanic woman. I can’t say anyone would care if it was white/black instead but it’s considerably less common.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Uh, blue collar Americans dislike Indians more than they dislike other middleman minorities(Lebanese, Koreans, Albanians, etc) for being rude to their workers. This is not a highly visible complaint, but it primes the ground for other complaints.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I mean it definitely doesn't seem to have been true of Mexicans. Even in the early 2000's when 'immigration' was a euphemism for 'Mexicans' people mostly didn't seem to have big problems with Mexican culture- maybe some griping they didn't learn English fast enough, but people thought they were mostly normal blue collar guys who worked hard and liked beer and sports.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Working class Americans don't like Indians because snooty brahmins treat them like shit, and Americans are used to more... nice class relations. It's not 100% of them but it's enough to develop a reputation. Add the paganism(which the average American probably doesn't see as an ultimate sin that invites vengeance on the community but does see as savagery we moved past thousands of years ago) and cultural oddities and the highly visible middleman minority status and it doesn't really help. The stories out of Canada(which many people might not realize are from Canada) probably make it worse. Tech workers complaining about H1B's are more a thing in higher social classes.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
People the world over copy suburbia when they get the chance- that's part of the impetus behind Israeli settlement, for example. Obviously someone likes them.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
HSR isn't profitable but neither are American freeways.
The difference is that freeways are reasonably versatile. You can have passenger cars, busses, and eighteen wheelers on them. HSR is stuck in its particular niche.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Well then he should fix that.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Those joys are unfortunately not very describable.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
I mean at the end of the day, the US is going to lose slower than China. The population is declining slower, it has far more fossil wealth to live on, there's more natural resources making purchasing power/GDP disconnects easier to weather, and if you think US foreign policy is disastrous- wait until you see China's. The US native white population has a pretty decent fertility rate by first world standards and the core red tribe is actually replacing itself.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Then get married and become a normie.
Like it or not, society doesn't revolve around men having fun. You're not a kid anymore. I'm not sure why eccentrics should have a veto over societal development. The suburbs are great for most people; your disinterest in growing up into a normie probably says more about you than it does about society.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
I mean to be fair Europe has both first world militaries(France) and first world economies(Netherlands, Denmark). Not in the same places, mind you. But still.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Wasn’t the 1979 bomb South African?
I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Nature is already going to do that for us - not only are the fossil fuels going to eventually run out, rational human beings prioritised the easiest-to-access and most efficient stores of fossil fuels. The energy return on energy invested of conventional fossil fuels is going down, and the EROEI of shale and fracking is even worse.
Isn’t there quite a bit of easy to access fossil fuels that are off limits for political reasons, eg Venezuela’s dictator not trusting anybody capable of drilling?
In the current American market, yes, but fattened meat has often been more expensive in history.
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