Ask Lemmy

This one bugs me so much. It may feel that way but you know why? Because they're literally being exposed to new people and ideas - you know - what being in a community does naturally. College isn't doing anything, it's because they're breaking out of their small town/suburban bubble

Ok one of my professors did guide me towards communism on accident. He explained how we'd need to put human suffering in dollars to get safety investments and how that's vital as an engineer. He wasn't wrong, but Jesus fuck that shoved me into the arms of ths labor left.

Just last year I was laid off while my job was shipped overseas. But hey, my CSuite got richer, so congrats to them.

Yeah, if we can sanction a country and seize their assets, we can do the same to the billionaires. Plus there are very few countries where it would be as cheap or cheaper than the US for them.

They say the same shit in the UK. Where are all these billionaires going?!

Conservatives use the word "urban" as a dog whistle for "minorities," probably most often black people.

But anyways, as to your point, even if an urban area has a higher crime rate, it's inevitable because of the density. If you take the same number of people and cram them more closely together, there will always be more crime because the people interact with each other more often. More chances for crime usually results in more crime.

But the conservative mindset is also completely wrong about what to do about it. People usually commit crimes for a reason. Like you steal something because you cannot afford to buy it. Conservatives want to stop crime not by looking at the reasons people commit crimes and looking for ways to solve those issues, but by trying to scare people into not committing crimes. But that doesn't work.

A couple of years ago, we were coming home from visiting my in-laws in Florida and I sat next to a woman on the plane who found out we were “going home” to SF and wanted to talk my ear off about everything that’s scary there. First of all, I didn’t want to talk to you anyway, lady, I just want to read my book. But since you asked, no, I don’t know what you mean when you are talking about how dangerous it is. I played it as simply confused about what she was talking about, and eventually she got confused at my response and left me alone. I wasn’t going to be successful convincing her; I knew that. But playing it that way was non-confrontational and still seemed to have the desired effect, which was to put a chink in the armor of her misinformed opinions.

It was night and day what they showed on the news vs social media. Conservative news might as well had shown half of LA on fire with mothers clutching their babies because of scary rioters. Liberal news showed nothing. Social Media showed a lot of very angry citizens peacefully protesting in LA who wanted their families and friends returned from being disappeared.

I think they must have a fundamental misunderstanding about how big Los Angeles is. Like, truly, it is monstrous. And even when the city ends, it keeps going.

I've been seeing the same thing with New York on yt. Single channel posting straight up "Immigrants Looting New York", "New York Destroyed By Gangs" type of bullshit using what looks exactly like AI imagery for the thumbnails.

Hell, I don't even need to see the video title or channel responsible to know it has to be bullshit if they're willing to use AI generated images in the thumbnail.

they say after driving 1 hour round trip every day on government-paid roads with their thin-blue-line sticker

We have an amazing bar near me that has an "all gendered restroom" that would make my rural family members cry out in fear. A sink in the middle big enough for 15 people to wash their hands. On one side is urinals, the other stalls, and all are fully enclosed and lockable individually. The horror

Remember when the entire west coast was burned to the ground during the George Floyd protests. Whole thing, every city, gone.

I mean I lived in the Bay Area and San Francisco seemed completely unaffected. But the news told me daily about how every city had been turned into a mad max style thunder dome where the only medical care that remained was gender affirming transition surgeries.

It’s fun being governed now by the candidates that appealed to the voters who saw that and went, “yep, that’s gotta be true”

Exact same impact as having a church in your neighborhood I assume? I say I assume because I don't even know if there is one near me - I bet there is now that I think of it, but that's how little it affects me.

I grew up in a small suburb just outside of a major city, overall a pretty liberal and urbanized place.

The town had it's own garbage trucks, all the years I lived there I never remember them missing a trash pickup. The neighboring towns didn't have their own trucks but still provided municipal pickup just contracted through some company and they were similarly pretty good.

I now live towards the more rural end of that same county. I'd still consider it to be in the suburbs, but it's a much less densely populated area, with some woods and a handful of small farms around, and while still fairly liberal, it definitely skews more conservative than the town I grew up in.

So this town does not provide trash service for its residents. It's pretty much up to everyone to make their own arrangements with any of a half dozen or so trash companies in the area.

And it's an absolute shit-show. They're all constantly missing trash pickups, constantly raising their prices, one time the company I was with got bought out by another company and they decided they were going to stop providing residential pickup service in my area so I had to find another company to take my money, and because we have all of these different companies with different pickup schedules it seems like anywhere you go there's constantly a trash truck slowing down traffic.

Because the libertarian dipshits in my area would rather pay more for worse service than abide by a smaller bump in their taxes to get reliable municipal services.

Similarly a lot of roads in my area are bullshit tar & chips instead of proper paving, it doesn't last long, loose stones are always getting kicked up, the motorcycle riders in my area complain that they're dangerous, etc.

A lot of my town is on wells and septic tanks instead of city water and sewer. There are allegedly plans to expand the parts of the town that can get hooked up to the municipal water and sewer lines, but they've been saying that at least since I moved here about 5 years ago and I haven't seen any real progress on that. I am hooked up to the municipal lines, but I have some friends who aren't and are hoping to get hooked up to it, and every time they ask they get told that their street is on the list to get hooked up but no one seems to know when, so they're constantly juggling whether they want to do some overdue maintenance on their aging septic system or if it's worth toughing it out until they eventually can get hooked up.

And probably the worst is the police department (InB4 ACAB) it's a part time department so they're not actually on duty overnight or most weekends and our area gets covered by state police when they're not on duty (which I believe the town actually pays for)

Now if there's any town that could probably get away with just not having its own police department, it's probably mine. I work in the county dispatch center, I know what their workload is like, if they handle a dozen incidents a week, including traffic stops for speeding tickets and such, they've had a busy week.

But of course most of what does happen in town is overnight and over the weekend, because that's when people are home. We don't exactly have a lot of businesses in town, so most people are just straight-up not around during the day.

The state police coverage is terrible. They cover a pretty large area of other semi rural departments without their own police or part time departments like mine, so often when they're needed the only available troopers are a couple towns away.

They also will only enforce state laws, and won't bother themselves with any local ordinances, so if you have, for example, a noise complaint, you're SOL, because odds are your neighbors are having loud parties and shooting off fireworks after the local police are off-duty for the night. They might be able to cite them for it later, but no one's gonna be going out to shut them up right now while you're trying to sleep.

No one likes the state police coverage, but they also don't want to pay the taxes it would take to have an actual full-time police department. A couple years ago there was talk of joining up with a couple neighboring towns that are currently covered full-time by state police, to form a full-time regional department that would cover all 3 towns, but those other towns also didn't want to increase taxes to pay for it.

The irony is just hilarious. The magas who screamed the loudest are now silent...when their turnip is doing exactly that.

And now they've decided to build their own.

The same people condemning BLM and Antifa are the ones that would have called the Civil Rights Protests "riots/looting"

What's crazy about it is literally nobody's pressured to become trans, like, at all. Nobody wishes anyone to be trans because gender disphoria sucks.

It's literally just "feel free to express your gender however the fuck you want, you do you, and we'll still respect you as-is".

Despite that, I never once thought about transitioning or being trans or fantasizing about growing a pair of boobs. As a cis man, looking like a women would just make me feel disphoric and want to be a man again ASAP. I never once felt pressured to transition either, and I hang out with a lot of very fruity people.

This idea that it's contagious and gives bad thoughts to people is just plain wrong, nobody becomes trans that weren't trans already.

Maybe they should see if that weird Jesus guy had it