I’m pretty sure waffle house is Dennys for perverts

That makes sense, and I’m glad they filled that role

It is absolutely a thing. My pagan household has one somewhere in the book shelf because we used to be catholics. A friend was never Christian and still has one

My problems with hooters are predominantly with the working conditions. A cooperatively owned breastraunt may not necessarily be my thing, but as a leftist and as a feminist sure whatever

Most of them, it excludes the American west coast while including the poorest regions in the country (Appalachia and the deep south, neither of which can really be considered developed)

I highly doubt west Virginia and Alabama are pulling their weights here

Yeah the CalArt style did get a bit overdone, but I see little qualitative difference with any other decade’s popular cartoon style. Ultimately I like it, it’s heavily stylized and evocative of a time.

Yeah a 3.5m cube is 3.5^3 cubic meters. You gotta change the number the same as the unit. Honestly KL might be better than m^3 for intuitiveness

Aww as the daughter of a different kind of sweet crazy lady that’s sweet.

That’s a weird mixture of sweet and insane

The Massachusetts special

Yeah I’ve been seeing a lot of folks act like all Americans are absolute barbarians who revel in our nation’s cruelty, but prison abolitionists still operate here and plenty of communities here are actually putting rubber to road for rehabilitative justice.

And as you say, it’s fucking hard. You want to give people chances but you need to prioritize victims safety and rights, and the fact is there are bad actors in every group. And that’s not even getting into situations where life is a hell of a lot easier when you keep giving one person more and more chances.

I’ve been fortunate enough to know some folks in the prison ab scene and they’re good folks trying to do right by the sorts of folks nobody else is gonna. And I’ve come to the conclusion that you can judge a society by how it treats its criminals. Who will defend the unsympathetic? Someone’s gotta, otherwise you’re a hop skip and a jump away from having a role where the worst people can get official sanction to be their worst selves. Round here the prison guards are often just as bad of people as the prisoner.

Yeah if I shared a border with Ukraine I wouldn’t be the least bit scared of them. If I shared a border with Russia I’d have a nuclear program.

I think it also helps to imagine the irresponsible, aggressive, jackass. A common enough fellow amongst many cultures in their own variety. In most of europe this individual is restricted to bar fights and other less lethal means of conflict. In Switzerland, most folks have a gun but also have military training with it and are less likely to have the issues that cause American veterans to be more likely to be violent.

Meanwhile here in America this jackass can buy a gun after jumping through a few hoops depending on what state. Not only can they own a gun, they may be culturally encouraged to whether it’s because of macho posturing, rural lifestyle, or because of any other number of reasons such as being a minority in the Midwest. Once armed the jackass has the means to engage in high emotional violence. Every “I’ll fucking kill you” that is normally accompanied with a fist may come with lead instead.

Eh our burglaries sometimes turn into sexual violence too even without guns involved. And it should be unferstoo that “home invasion” means everything from a quick burglary while you’re out of town to an armed robbery with rape. But yeah it’s important to understand that we do overly focus on the latter and ignore that the former is far more likely even here, but thieves in America often have guns. Crime is disproportionately violent here, but we also are really focused on the most violent crime because it’s sensational and serves as common excuses for bigotry and for gun ownership.

Like when I suffered a home invasion I became acutely aware of how few people I knew had experienced such a thing (and were willing to volunteer that information). So many people own a gun to deal with a violent robbery with rape, yet few know anyone who’s experienced that, a gun kept safely is unlikely to help, and they’re significantly more likely to be harmed by their own gun than someone else’s.

Ok but the US points in the pickpocket column are pretty low compared to Europe’s. Other forms of stealing are plenty common in America, it’s just that we’re a lot more likely to get shown a gun and asked to empty our pockets ourselves than have the thief covertly do it for us.

Also Vegas doesnt surprise me in the least. It’s utterly unwalkable except in the hospitality areas where a lot of people are drunk and headed to or from casinos.

I’ve never been pickpocketed here. It really is in my experience such an elsewhere and old timey crime that I’d be shocked to see it here outside of somewhere like times square.

It’s a skilled crime with high risk of physical violence that thrives when people with enough money to rob are walking with enough frequency as to make it worth robbing folks. Car culture probably plays more of a role than risk of being beaten up, but the potential violence of victims may contribute to would be pickpockets just being muggers.

Thievery here is more con artists, threatening crime, and burglary. It’s a smash and grab on your car, a mugging (though that’s also not super common since the cities were cleaned up), or a armed robbery of a store rather than a pickpocket

What I find worse is how many Americans refuse to accept that our society can and should treat prisoners better. Like I’m not advocating for luxury hotels or unrestricted freedoms for them, just humane conditions, reasonable sentence lengths, and a focus on rehabilitation. What we’re doing isn’t working and is a stain on our collective soul.

Though I will say most Americans have odd understandings of quality of life. Owning a car is seen as so fundamental that people feel attacked at the idea of building cities where it’s not a necessity, while the idea that we should provide free meals to schoolchildren or providing medicine to prisoners is seen by many as government waste. Even our fundamental and foundational rights such as state appointed lawyers for the indigent accused of crimes are nickel and dimed to uselessness, and the idea of providing these lawyers for all accused who want them is seen as radical.

Yeah you gotta do that one yourself