Hellhole country. Whole nation who's only purpose is to enrich oil companies at the cost of the entire planet. An entire people soaked in blood.
and created by people who illegally brought slaves to Mexican territory, expressly to keep owning them
oh country, thought you meant Texas (although massage it a little and it applies to the USA as a whole)
Prolly the most succinct description of Texas you can get
The coolest thing Ozzy Osborne did was get super drunk and piss on the wall of the Alamo
Yes but that's not the whole story of course. Texas was "independent" before being annexed into the USA (this was a big political issue because it would be a slave state and would imbalance the anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions by adding another slave state) and then the continued disputes about the border between Texas and Mexico led to the war. Edit: But yeah, it was pretty much all about the right to own black people as slaves. Edit 2: fun (depressing) fact about the war was that a lot of the confederate generals got their start during the Mexico-USA war. Lee is a notable example.
Yes Texas has the distinction beyond the USA as being founded just for slavery
I think so, but I might be wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Texas
The air feels wrong here, somehow. That might just be the global warming humidity...
Tinfoil hat time: the lack of a decent high-speed rail system in the US (the slow, expensive shitheap that is Amtrak doesn't count) isn't just a result of negligence or political domination by the auto and energy industries. It's a deliberate tactic to keep low-wage workers in one spot and ensure they have no feasible way to move someplace that would be objectively better for them to live in.
No, they want people to move, as they keep telling the business managers when they cause these recessions. They just don't know where they want them to move to. They basically throw their hands up in the air and say 'we'll let the market decide' and then when that doesn't work they say, oh woops, and restart the economy again, because you know, this is the most efficient conceivable system.
Not anymore, at least. You used to be able to get a junker on the road for under $500. Now the subprime car loans are so rampant that even a shitty sedan is like $6k
Yeah cars very expensive at the moment. Actually makes me curious as to what is even available under 2000 right now
Cars a couple years ago were the cheapest they have ever been in history. There was a point in like 2018 where a brand new base level sedan only cost like $12,000 after rebates. Cars and consumer electronics are the 2 items that have consistently dropped in inflation-adjusted price over the past decades (likely due to Chinese and other offshore manufacturing). Compare that to education, housing or healthcare - all of which have increased exponentially.
they are extremely cheap compared to what they cost abroad. buying a car in the US is cheaper than buying a car in Brazil, accounting for the exchange rate and all. if you make a comparison based on monthly earnings it's much, much cheaper.
Neither of those things are true for most people making under $40k in the US. Even a shitbox $500 used car is still like a full week-and-half pay for a lot of people, and that's not counting insurance, upkeep, etc.
Where I grew up, most families shared a car, or at most two, for that very reason
Kjj, where I grew up a lot of families don't have a car, or don't have a car with less than 10-15 years cuz those shits are a money sink.
I don't think this is intended, it's probably just a convenient side effect.
Once all the laws hit in the south it'll be like a 13 hour drive from Miami for an abortion.
I dont get how you can understand how cities work and not be inmediately radicalized
What the fuck
Genuinely one of my first steps from completely unaware vaguely liberal teenager to where I’m at now was joining the “New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens” Facebook group. Once you understand how capitalism has destroyed urban development idk how you don’t start becoming a communist
last time I was in NUMTOT it was lib central filled with car apologists
Interesting, I remember it basically being “fuck cars” pretty consistently, but they definitely had a problem of thinking that if you just let developers build more housing everything will be fine without addressing any other part of the problem
Last time I checked it they were still shitting and moaning about the mods supporting Bernie in the Dem primaries.
Insanity.
All of the urbanists around here talk about "smart density" and "better zoning laws" to solve housing problems, but this is in explicit exclusion to rent control or public housing or removing streets and highways/replacing with transit. It's the people who just want to talk about how we should all ride bikes. High/medium income homeowners that think of transportation as "choices" they can select from, not a core element of equity. They love the idea of minor policy changes making their own stuff cheaper but balk at raising property taxes.
Tbh I used Facebook longer than a lot of people I know. For some reason the way Facebook’s interface works (or at least how it did by like 2019) is fucking crack to my brain, even more so than Reddit or this site. I had to delete mine because it was genuinely bad for my mental health.
I had a pretty awesome professor in college and he was talking about France and the different regions and even languages that used to be part of it. A student raised their hand and said "But I thought France was a small country" (Mercator projection problems) and he just flatly stated "France is the size of Texas." That quieted the room pretty good.
Why was that their reaction though, do americans think of Texas as being big? I feel like saying "France is as big as one of the 50 US states" shouldn't have worked as well as it did at explaining to a bunch of american kids that it's not a small country lol.
It is, but I'm from Europe so almost every US state seems big to me. Florida is the size of the UK, and you could fit all of Hungary inside Wyoming.
I guess what I'm saying is if you showed Texas and France superimposed on a map to some kids I would expect an european kid to think Texas is big and an american kid to think France is small.
