That sucks.
I don’t know if this is a thing anymore but “back in my day” your friends/family/coworkers/roommates would try to hook you up with other people that they know are single and might be a good match. Especially the older ladies in your life, that was like their mission in life. Aside from that, you might ask someone who runs in overlapping circles that you’ve seen a few times if they want to get coffee or lunch.

The closest thing to Tinder-type dating would have been “cruising” on a Friday and Saturday night, driving up and down the Main Street of your town, hanging out in parking lots to talk and make plans for the night. Even then, you would ask “where do/did you go to school” and “do you know ____” “are you related to” type questions to establish your “degrees of Kevin Bacon” relationship in the social network.

So there was no need to date total strangers. That would be considered kinda weird and suspicious, which is why online dating was heavily stigmatized in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. I went on a few match.com and eharmony dates but kept it secret, telling only my closest friends, out of shame. They thought I was crazy, meeting up with strangers like that.

A few horny guys would try to chat up every random stranger and it occasionally paid off for them, but that wasn’t really normal behavior.

I think we’re all more mobile now, moving from city to city for work, so those networks are probably shattered for most people.

I feel so incredibly lucky that I dodged the dating app bullet, it seems awful for guys to try and compete in that space. And for women, having creepy dudes be creepy with no repercussions, with no way to tell their mother/aunt/sister to smack some sense into them… not great.

1. There are plenty of tiny coffee places (and other small businesses) near me where the owner is there all day, every day with just one or two employees. You’ll get to know them if you want to. You might also bump into them around town. If they suck, patronize a different place.

2. Theoretically, most of the money that I spend there stays in town, helping to keep other businesses and families going. They probably sponsor the local animal shelter or little league team. I like that.

3. I’ve worked in small businesses and corporate America. In my experience corporate America always sucks, small business only sometimes suck. I don’t like supporting large corporations and especially not their admin and C-suite. Those vampires are why the wealth gap is growing so quickly.

4. Corporate food is boring.

5. Some people argue that all of the transportation involved in moving around product and people for multi-national corporations is worse for the environment. I don’t care about that personally but it seems like a reasonable conclusion.

I agree with everything you said but I’d also like to point out that it wasn’t just a form of comedy, it was an entire entertainment industry all on its own, like movie theaters or concerts today. It was called the Minstrel Show

It eventually got replaced by/morphed into Vaudeville which was then replaced by cinema.

For a good 50-100 years, a major form of entertainment (not just in the South btw) was pretty much just: “haha black people are such stupid clowns! Look, that one thinks he’s fancy! That one’s a no-good drunk! Oh look, that one’s trying to give a speech!” It was pretty formulaic with standard props, just like you’d expect to see at a clown show. So fried chicken and watermelon were standard props like “tiny car full of clowns”, oversized shoes, a flower pot for a hat, a flower that squirts water, etc. For that reason they carry a very unpleasant legacy that reminds people of an insult to injury that still hasn’t been made right, in my opinion.

The format was pretty similar to the show Hee-Haw actually, kind of a fun variety show, just wildly racist and it’s obviously pretty fucked up to pick on literal slaves. Real bitch move there.

So people who know something about history are pretty salty about that and forms of the Minstrel Show were still happening here and there recently enough that people alive today remember seeing them.

Irish people caught some shit, but not like that. I’m not sure if Irish-American racism like that happened recently enough that living people remember it, or that it was ever to the extent that it formed an entire entertainment industry.

I’ve noticed that using a teleport spell will take you to, or very near, an unexplored area. If I feel like I’ve looked everywhere that shows signs of being a false wall then I’ll use a teleport spell and that solves it for me. Same goes for finding secret rooms in fully explored levels if I have a lot of unused teleportation spells.

They have a really nice office, must be legit.

Great, now I’m gonna be looking even more like a crazy person when walking in the woods, as I crawl around sticking my face up to every Turkey Tail (Trametes Versicolor) that I pass looking for these. Jk, thanks for sharing!

Texas isn’t some dystopian hellscape like your examples, nor will it become one in our lifetime.
It’s just another example of a gerrymandered state with loud-mouthed shitheads riling their base up and clinging to power despite their declining poll numbers.
47% of Texan voters chose Biden in 2020, 52% voted Trump. Meanwhile in California it went 64% Biden, 34% Trump. Not that different. Also interesting to note, 6 million people voted for Trump in California, while only 5.9 million people voted for Trump in Texas. Seems like California has a bigger problem than Texas, maybe we should give them to Mexico or have them secede or whatever as well?

Texas has a good chance of being blue in our lifetime as cities grow in population and the demographic continues to skew… younger and less “white.”
Source

Edit to add: let’s say for fun that your Gaza/Hmong/Rhohingya comparison is true and a liberal holocaust is coming. One stereotype about Texans that actually is true is that most of us (left and right, urban and rural) own guns and generally like guns for sport, hunting, defense, etc. Attempting a liberal holocaust in a densely populated, urban environment full of gun fanciers that don’t like authority would not go well for the invaders.

I agree with most of what you said but that 44% number is wildly wrong. Article about it
Also, anecdotally, I’ve gone through a couple of houses in hot markets the last 5 years (had to move for work) as both buyer and seller. The vast majority of people looking weren’t corporate or institutions. Most were couples looking for a place to live. Cash buyers above asking are a real thing though and they suuuuuuuck for the poors like myself.

For a few hours? Sure, why not. They’re not actually useful labor. The store is doing you a favor. Your average 8 year old peeled away from Minecraft and told to do a task is going to fuck up more than they help. I know, because I was that kid and I fucked up a lot. Sometimes in very expensive ways. My only worry would be that they would leave the job thinking every day will be fresh and new like that day, and that people are gracious and polite.

For a few weeks? Oh hell yes, now we’re talking. Then they’ll see the monotony and how much corporate sucks. Even more, how much customers suck. At that point, the value of learning a skill that keeps you out of the fast food/retail mines will be obvious.

Selling chocolates is so much worse though. That always creeped me out because it’s either A) kids learning how to hawk wares on the street outside of stores, B) kids learning how to be door-to-door cold call solicitors or C) run a MLM pyramid scheme by convincing their parents to push their product at work.

Maybe even D) a combination of all of those for the ultimate street hustler training.

This is just kids “playing house” for a few hours. Most probably love that shit. I would have killed to see what the buttons on the register do and how the fries are made.

Is this also true for headless servers? I’ve been using Ubuntu via SSH for 15 years now and it’s always been fine for me but I’ve also never run the desktop version (for more than a few days anyway.)

I just installed it on a scavenged workstation last month to use as a media server and I didn’t notice anything unusual.

Edit:

While we’re at it, what does the hive mind think I should be using instead for turning old trash PCs into shitty servers? The only thing Lemmy has taught me so far is that Ubuntu sucks and the only truly honorable choice is to quit my job and stop speaking to my family so that I can devote my life to installing drivers on unstable Arch. Also, I’m supposed to buy some thigh-high stockings and learn to tuck apparently?