As I said in another comment, that’s why I put illegal in quotation marks. I honestly couldn’t come up with the right term, so I just went for the sarcastic air quotes instead.
As for the flag burning, you and I are on the exact same wavelength there. I commented on that in my other comment, too!
Sure, but Dallas ain’t the east or west coasts, and even in the Midwest, it’s probably pretty spotty from one locale to the next on whether or not you’ll see them being worn. I think big straw/woven sun hats are probably more uniformly worn across the country than cowboy hats.
Now, if we were talking about baseball caps with a sports logo on it, then I’d say it’s as endemic to every corner of the country as oxygen is.
Fun fact, there’s an industry term called TTP: Time To Penis. It’s the estimated amount of time before a player draws a dick in your game, whether through bullet holes in a wall or something else. It’s often measured in seconds.
That’s why I put illegal in quotation marks. It’s not actually illegal, and few people even know what a flag code is, let alone care about what’s considered disrespectful (except when it comes to protesters burning the flag, then it’s horrible and offensive).
Besides, consumerism trumps everything, so companies will happily slap a flag on anything and everything because American jingoism will eat it up.
Honestly. The only thing they got wrong is the cowboy hat, and that’s just because it’s uncommon in most areas of the states. We’ll slap the flag on anything - even things that it’s “illegal” to put the flag on according to the same rules that say that you have to burn the flag if it touches the ground, like paper napkins.
Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.
Then you’ve never interacted with the locals in these other places. Having grown up in a vacation town, I can tell you right now that the only difference here is that the people with water guns have hit their breaking points.
Have you ever seen the movie Jaws? There’s a small throwaway bit in there where the wife of the chief of police is asking a friend of hers when she gets to be an islander (because the family had recently moved to the island from New York), and her friend responds, “Never. If you weren’t born here, then you’re not an islander.” Having grown up near where that movie was made, that’s 100% accurate to the local sentiment. On that island, they call people who move there “wash ashores” because they feel that they washed up like the flotsam and jetsam on the beach. In my town, we called the rich people who would come up to vacation in their lavish summer homes “snowbirds” because they migrated at the same time as the birds and couldn’t handle the winter weather.
The most consistent thing I’ve found about tourist areas is the negative impact the industry has on the area for locals and the hatred locals feel towards the tourists.
Whether these people are acting rightly or wrongly, they’re trying to hit the government and businesses where it hurts most - their profits - because it’s the only way they’ll ever care about the local problems.
They didn’t say that it doesn’t create jobs. They said that it creates poor paying jobs. Which it does. All those restaurants and shops and guides are low wage jobs, and often, only seasonal jobs as well.
In the vacation town I grew up in, up to 50% of businesses were closed 8 months out of the year. In these kinds of areas, tourism isn’t a boost to the economy. It is the economy. It eats it up until there’s almost nothing left. Any industry that doesn’t serve the tourism is pushed out by the high profit margins of only being open long enough to service the seasonal tourism. I used to work at a fish market in that town that stayed open all year, and outside the tourist season, the boss reduced the hours to half of what they were during the tourist season. Because he couldn’t afford to keep the business running full-time. The store ran at a loss 8 months out of the year, and the busiest day of the tourist season largely kept the place open the rest of the year. It would’ve been more profitable for him to close down, but he stayed open because he didn’t want his local customers and employees to go somewhere else.
Most of the towns in that county are tourist towns, and that county has the highest rates of drug addiction in the state and huge homelessness problems. Because there’s very little to do most of the year since everything is closed, and combine the seasonal labor/low wage tourism industry with the housing stock being bought up by wealthy people for their vacation homes or Air BnBs while apartments prioritize short-term seasonal rentals because of how much more they can charge, and locals can’t afford to live in town anymore. There’s one town there that has a year-round population of 2,000 and can see up to 60,000 people there in the summer. And anybody I’ve ever talked to who has lived in a vacation town has cited the exact same issues consistently - high rates of poverty, homelessness, and drug use/addiction.
It’s still practically the same now as it was then, just without the porn. Still no algorithm, and the majority of the userbase is people who have decade old accounts.
It’s leagues better than Twitter, at least.
Interesting way of saying “my human rights aren’t up for debate every 4 years.”
But the fear isn’t so rational. It’s like a fear that the cocktail in your example will replace the original vodka whether they want the cocktail or not, or that the vodka will be so diluted by seltzer that it will functionally cease to exist.
It’s like a fear of gentrification of the country as a whole.
It’s also important to remember that the US is a huge exception in this regard as well. Most other countries are like 90%+ native population, and immigrant populations tend to be sort of isolated from the wider national culture due to things like language barriers, and they often set up little “bastions” of their native culture locally wherever they live. We even see plenty of that in the US as well. While there are many distinctly US cultures across the country that are derived from a variety of backgrounds, there are tons of “enclaves” of European culture that make it blatantly clear where immigrants from certain countries settled. In Boston, the culture of Chinatown is distinctly unique and separate from the wider culture of the city, which largely has ties back to Ireland (and is very proud of it). And both of those are distinctly different from where the Italian immigrants settled, who effectively have their own districts of cultures descended from Italy regardless of where they immigrated to.
Because of the American Puritannical values, which dictate what the credit companies and advertisers are willing to do business with and the cultural zeitgeist along with it.
The Puritans were some of the earliest British colonists in the US, and were either thrown out of England for attempting a coup to replace the king with a puppet to force their more extremist form of Christianity on the country, or left by their own choice because they felt that the Church of England was too liberal. They were basically a bunch of prudes who believed that the human body and sex were shameful and disgusting.
This has led to the dichotomy where advertisers want nothing to do with sex/nudity, except when it comes to implied sex in advertisements. Because sex is bad, but it also sells, which is good.
PG-13 and rated T for teen, respectively
Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.
More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn’t take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They’re used so heavily that it’s just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.
All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.
One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Of course, we’ve also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.
But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn’t so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.
I didn’t know they added swords to CS2
We call these people “snowbirds” where I’m from.
You also missed the part where they vote to prevent any additional funding for education and other services in the communities where their summer houses are because it would increase their taxes.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed Machine.
Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.
But I am already saved. For the Machine is immortal.
I think they should name an airline company after him instead. Or maybe a steak company.
Those definitely won’t go bankrupt, surely. No way a businessman of his caliber would let that happen.
But would it even make a difference? The Republicans haven’t won the vote in about 2 decades, and in 2016, the Supreme Court said that the Electoral College doesn’t have to vote the way that the voters that they represent voted when multiple representatives said that they were going to cast their votes for Trump despite Hillary winning the state.
In this context, young men with mental health issues are the exact kinds of people to fall down the alt-right propaganda pipeline that the social media grifters are spewing, most commonly.
In my opinion though, his political affiliation is more important in the sense that it gives the copycat shooters and cultists less justification for the uptick we’ll see in the coming weeks of attempted assassinations, death threats, and mass shootings (especially against democrats and minorities), though that’s never stopped them before.