Khotetsu

There's also the fact that Americans have record low confidence in the government as a direct result of the actions of the people who give their billionaire friends tax cuts year after year and make it up by raising taxes for everybody else.

In a way, though, the culture and environment of the area I grew up in is exactly why we had so many addicts in our ranks and why we did heroin instead of drinking.

The county my hometown is in has had the highest rates of drug and alcohol addiction in the entire state for at least 50 years, probably going back to the 1910s (I wanna say its in the top 3 areas countrywide, but I dont remember), and a lot of it revolves around the tourism economy. A tourism economy means that money is made there during the brief time between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and the rest of the year the jobs dry up and something like 60% of businesses close up until the next year. So not only do many people make the majority of their annual wages during a 3 month period and hope it lasts the rest of the year, but there's also very little to do in the area because everything's closed and it's not like you're gonna hang out on a beach with 4 inches of snow on it. I used to work with a fisherman who would have his son drive the boat while he leaned over the front and used a chainsaw to break up the ice so they could get the boat out to fish in especially cold winters where the ocean would freeze over. The only thing that comes close to the frequency of drug and alcohol addiction there is homelessness. And it's the same story no matter what tourist town/vacation spot you're talking about. A veneer of glitzy vacation beauty and plentiful party drugs hiding the addiction and homelessness beneath.

But my generation turned to heroin because, as you said, it's illegal and therefore unregulated, which makes it cool to do, but also because alcohol is legal and so our parents were the ones day drinking in bars or at home while we were kids, making it not cool to drink, and heroin was easy to get and plentiful. Post 9/11, as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan grew, heroin from the Middle East began to flood into New England ports, and the guys who sold the tourists and rich people in their summer homes party drugs in the summer, were selling heroin right alongside weed and Adderall to us high schoolers in the winter.

And I just wanna make it clear that my comment wasn't some kinda dig at you or something, but rather that the greentext of "why would you want to leave the idyllic country life" and your response reminds me of the countless conversations I've had with tourists and wealthy summer folk who say "why would you ever want to leave, it's such a beautiful place," and how every other person I've ever met who came from a tourist town has said the exact same thing as me about where they grew up.

"What you want isn't that, it's this ideal where everything is simple and paid for and you're distant from the things you don't like about actually living in a community with people but all the amenities of that life are still immediately to hand" exactly sums it up.

On Reddit, it actually got to the point where it was weird how often I would describe living in a tourist town without naming anything specific beyond what I've said here, and have people either say "that sounds like (the exact area I grew up in)," or, "I grew up in (the area I grew up in), and it was exactly like that." I guess I kept bumping into them because Reddit was our addiction of choice. What else was I gonna do sitting in the fish market I worked at waiting for the 10 customers we'd have in the 4 hours we would be open on a winter day.

This is something I have a real love/hate relationship with in Overlord. In the books, we get to see a lot more of what's going on in Momonga's head and how his experience as an average salary worker affects his decisions in his new role as an all powerful lich and the dichotomy of how he perceives himself vs how the people of the world perceive him, which is really cool and fleshes out him as a character and the world a lot more. But then people in the new world will casually throw video game terms into their speech like "putting levels into x class," and it really throws me out of the world.

Everything about OP's comment and your response reminds me of every conversation I've ever had with anybody else who grew up in a vacation town.

3 months of tourists clogging up every service you can think of and talking about how wonderful it must be to live there as they leave after their 3 day weekend of partying on the beach, and 9 months of the local kids doing heroin because alcoholism is more popular with their parents and you need some kind of addiction to cope with the lack of work and things to do outside the tourist season.

I spent 10 years training kids on how to cut fish, and every single one of them shared the same sentiment. Regardless of whether they wanted to move to the city or farther out into the woods, they all wanted to get as far away from that town as they possibly could.

There are two kinds of dog people. They are both in this thread.

You'd be surprised by the number of ads you see that were created by a dude who grabbed a bottle of whiskey, did some cocaine, and locked himself in his office for the night.

Actually, based on the quality of the ads out there, maybe you wouldn't be surprised at how they come up with them...

It's not about the global or countrywide scale. It's about the local scale. If you take a cup of salt and eat it, it's going to end back up in the ocean eventually, but it'll make you sick before it gets there. Dumping salt into an area is going to screw with the ecosystem in that area, in a major way. We actually have similar problems in many areas due to stuff like fertilizer runoff from people's lawns during rainstorms, causing toxic algae blooms in ponds and around beaches.

You're correct, but so are they. In the long term and at a large scale, it balances out, but in the short term, there is a very real concern about local salinity levels wherever you're reintroducing that salt to the ocean. Keeping up with the desalination plants will be a tricky business of logistics to avoid destroying the ecosystem around where you're dumping that salt.

Adding the salt into water leaving sewage systems before it returns to the ocean might be a good idea, as you could basically kill two birds with one stone: put the salt back in the ocean while also avoiding damaging the local ecosystem with the fresh water of the sewage system reducing local salinity levels. But I'm no engineer or water treatment specialist, so I dunno if that's at all a real solution.

Ender3 Estradiol .4mm any% speedrun

I think the real issue is with schooling before college, and this article seems to be looking at college as the same sort of environment as the previous 12 years of school, which it isn't. So much of everything through high school has become about putting pressure on teachers to hit good grades and graduating student percentages that actually teaching kids how to learn and how to collaborate with others has become a tertiary goal to simply having them regurgitate information on the tests to hit those 2 metrics.

I have taught myself a number of things on a wide range of subjects (from art to 3d printing to car maintenance and more. City planning and architecture are my current subjects of interest) and I've always said when people ask about learning all this stuff that I love to learn new things, despite the school system trying to beat it out of me. I dropped out of college despite loving my teachers and the college itself both because I didn't like my major (the school was more like a trade school, we chose our majors before we even got to the college) and because I had never learned how to learn in the previous 12 years of school. I learned how to hold information just long enough to spit it out on the test and then forget it for the next set for the next test. Actually learning how to find information and internalize it through experience came after I left school.

They're calling it "financially paired" now? Republicans really will do anything to avoid calling it gay marriage...

It's also a very clever and awful propaganda strategy. They misuse words with important meanings until they become useless reactionary buzzwords. Like how woke, and politically correct before it, originally meant "to be aware of the unequal treatment of minorities in society" and "politicians should be aware of how the language they use affects people," and now they both just mean "anything that I, as a conservative, don't like."