FriendOfDeSoto

They don’t wake up one morning and yell small government. The more liberal social frog inside of you will also get boiled eventually by imperceptible temperature changes in the water over a long time. Conservative thinking isn’t generally synonymous with xenophobia. It’s more about low taxes, no handouts to anyone, tough on crime, that sort of thing. The xenophobia aspect is a perversion of that, which sadly isn’t uncommon but not a forgone conclusion generally speaking. The fact that the MAGAs have made this synonymous with conservative thinking in the US speaks to the success of their movement built on fear, lies, hate, and generations worth of people failed by their education system.

Many reasons. The older one gets, the more stuff if not wealth one has acquired, the more one stands to lose. That has most people make a turn for conservative viewpoints if they weren’t there already.

Also, as the Peter Principle in the workplace (I paraphrase: everybody gets eventually promoted to a position they are not qualified to do well) old people get to an age where they overestimate their worldly knowledge.

Getting old is shit. Your joints hurt, hair grows out of weird spots, people around you move to farms upstate. Things you loved from when you were crisp and shiny get swept by the wayside by progress. You have a lot more to complain about now because you also have more time for it. And you wait an awful lot at doctor’s clinics.

Not all people do all of these things all the time but there average person will tick at least two of these broad boxes. There is nothing you can do really. Listen but don’t take to heart the crap. I draw a line at right-wing politics and hurtful -isms. If my parents didn’t cross into that territory I turned my head into an extractor fan.

When you were little, they wiped shit out of your ass crack and worried about you when you were sick. As a bonus they now get you annoy you. The circle of life.

I get it, you’re okay with it. And I would allow then to continue funding it if their environmental conscience demanded it. And if they sailed there or even flew economy I’d still allow them to pull a trigger themselves. But I think overall this idea that rich and most likely Caucasian asshole money is required to keep conservation projects in Africa going smacks of a school of post colonial thinking that I don’t subscribe to. Africans are not solely motivated by asshole money to preserve their ecosystems.

Hunting is part of conservation efforts. Hunting tourism is not necessary. Rich assholes flying around the world in private jets just at that they can shoot at a different type of animal than at home is questionable.

And I know they weren’t hunting elephants. It’s just if I were charged by a herd of elephants and I happened to hold a rifle in my hand, I’d probably be tempted to make use of it in self defense. And the animals could have hurt themselves while acting in self defense from their POV as well.

The fact that this hunting tourism exists is more than infuriating. When people die it cannot be mildly infuriating; even when a-holes kick the bucket. So why is this story here? Which bit is only mildly infuriating?

I hope the elephants are alright.

If you have noticed a political bias then you are a political person.

Any place with low taxes, low or rich people favorable oversight over the financial sector, or chance to park money anonymously is a place rich people gravitate to.

Would that mean I’ll be getting more in dollars due to that having high value?

You posted the answer yourself.

Every central bank designs its own bills. The US chose to be boring, bland, and hostile to people with visual impairments. The reason why they won’t change that in a hurry is because it would necessitate an expensive switch in vending machines to handle different size bills. They could change the color but greenback is their brand. European currencies have pretty much always had bills of different sizes.

The exchange rate of currencies depend on many things. Prices depend on many things. Comparing Swiss ones with American ones is almost pointless. Switzerland has high VAT rates (high taxes in general) and thus salary levels will be higher as well. Swiss tourist will go nuts spending stateside because everything will just be cheap to them. Because they won’t finance social security, universal health care, or a bunker place for every citizen in case of thermonuclear war in the US. But they do in Switzerland.

Fans. Keep a paper/manual one on you are all times, as backup if you have a battery powered one. On those do your research to find one with a good battery.

If you’re running your A/C you can set it at a higher temperature if you run a ceiling fan or upright fan at the same time.

Don’t wear black or dark colors.

Cooling packs in the freezer, wrap a towel around it, put it on your head, hold it on your hands.

Just a wet cloth around your neck is great when you’re out and about.

Not yet.

Have another go at reading the post. The question wasn’t what’s stopping the US from building both, the question was whether OP’s explanation does justice to the status quo. My first sentence includes the word “also,” indicating that this is additional information that I found wasn’t sufficiently weighed in the single paragraph.

This is a thread and I read other people pointing out other things. So I didn’t.

I think you need to read more of the article you neglected to link to. I also think your irony gauge needs adjusting. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

The pace at replacing books at libraries is so painfully slow you stand a good chance to find an environment that’s nearly free of LLM influence at your local one.

It’s faster than a transaction via QR code. Also, the chip isn’t just restricted to handling payments. It can be used as key fob for your car or on your smart lock at home or at the hotel you’re staying at.

That tends to be the case though. Even in Europe that’s true in many cases. I think so far only France has legislation on the books that makes it illegal for airfare to beat trainfare under a certain distance.

The geographical distances also favor air traffic over anything on the ground. If the jet engine hadn’t come around, North America would have a great high speed rail network today.

Ignoring recent events in the middle east and their effect on pricing, even in Japan a flight from Tokyo to Osaka will beat the bullet train fare if you book it a month or more ahead of time. And that’s not on a budget airline. Japan gets a lot of praise for its bullet train network. But it’s really just one cash cow line (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto) and the rest is more often than not half empty. They run it because there is pork barrel politicking and because they can sell the flexibility and immediacy of hopping on a train in a downtown location in this network, on a whim (outside the holiday congestion). Japan is also a centrally organized country where the administrative sub sections (prefectures, cities, etc.) have less say in things.

And no local in their right mind would take the shinkansen to go from Kyoto to Osaka. That’s a 40min ride or so on the normal trains. The cost to time saving ratio is not good enough.

You can help stop your elected dickheads. Protest, general strike, a constant barrage of your elected officials with dissent. They were bombing schools in your name.

Iran has been under the longest internet blackout in history (if you don’t count North Korea). The things that trickle out from there are scarce and that little bandwidth may be better used to collect evidence of atrocities, ironically committed either by the regime or the US/Israel coalition. The current top 40 may be less important at this point in time. So there is a pretty high chance that you won’t get a good answer to your question.

If nothing else helps, imagine how you tickle them on the tip of their dumb nose with an imaginary, invisible feather. Imagine the surprised look when they don’t know what’s happening. It’s so annoying and they don’t have a clue where it’s coming from. They have fucked with the wrong person with an overactive imagination! By now, you’ve zoned out far enough to ignore any jabs coming your way. You wear the self-satisfied smile that only imaginary feather ticklers know.

Are they possibly romantically interested in you? Just drop a casual “you’re just in love with me, aren’t you!” when they’re annoying and see how flabbergasted they get.

I definitely cannot.

I have never heard of him. In general, I don’t find YouTube a reliable source for anything controversial. I think the CIA falls under that umbrella. So I would be very skeptical.