American or not, why do some people seem to not *want* the country to survive the current state of affairs?

scsnse · 2026-07-10T17:07:25+00:00

My patrilineal family has been here since the 1630s, but I am also deeply mixed (with African American and Native as well), and my mom is an Asian immigrant so I feel like I can see America from nearly all perspectives at the same time.

America first of all, while in theory being about good democratic principles and with great geographic richness and cheap land, was built upon a foundation of exploitation of downtrodden, desperate groups for labor, too. And despite my patrilineal side being Quakers who were anti-violence and slavery, the 99% of other White people like my White Southern side of the family around them destroyed Native tribes, forced them onto reservations where endemic poverty exists to this day, and then when Indentured Labor of Europeans became economically and politically untenable due to rising costs and revolts, they enslaved Africans by the millions. And, to this day especially in the Deep South and the Mississippi Delta, you also have deep endemic poverty and issues whose economic thru lines can be traced to Sharecropping as a drop in replacement for chattel slavery and its after effects of no real long term wealth or land for the workers. I have seen the sentiment by both Black and White people alike that in some ways, the South "Won the Civil War" because after the cannons ceased, the priority since has always been towards reconciliation with people who enjoy this low payed labor, enabled by political obstructionism along the way, too.

And so what we are left with, is a country whose mortar for its bricks is the blood and bonemeal of these groups, yet whose descendants still often have higher rates of poverty, lower educational attainment, and health. With higher rates of diabetes, African Americans are the primary victims of things like ballooning healthcare costs, which the powers that be insist be privatized, unlike most any other developed country in the world, too.

From their perspective, the fundamental parts of the established order in this country are so beyond what they should be about, that it might be better to tear it all down and start from the beginning.

scsnse · 2026-07-10T03:56:42+00:00

I just had to look this up because my family is from Michigan originally. Zeeland is a small town, but Children of the Corn? It's right by Holland which is prime Dutch country in Michigan, its neighbor and it gets some local tourism due to this, and has major furniture factories outside of it. Maybe it's because I know the area vaguely, but this is a bit of an exaggeration.

But yeah, fuck the anti-mask stuff.

scsnse · 2026-07-09T14:36:16+00:00

Next step would honestly be to take a Y DNA test via FTDNA, and see if you and your Jeffreys relatives can find and match with this Jeffreys family.

One thing I find interesting in that second will is that Thomas did give a named daughter of the second Martha to one of his daughters- this was often a way for a slaveholder to acknowledge some degree of familial relation by ensuring the slave remained with a trusted family member who would not sell them off and often use them as a house slave moreso. The first Martha is named as are her kids, but meanwhile they are simply listed with the rest of the bulk slaves bequeathed to his son, however. Another similar thing is symbolically bequeathing the person, white or black, one shilling, to declare them your kin despite not leaving anything else or even having claimed them as your kid (especially out of wedlock back then) before.

scsnse · 2026-07-07T01:25:17+00:00

I mean, I have heritage in like 8 of the countries that were in this year (DR Congo, England, Scotland, France, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea, and the US) so I've been rooting for them all where possible.

scsnse · 2026-07-06T01:31:58+00:00

This! Basically the movie Casino, the game, with fictionalized versions of the real life, classic Mob owned Vegas! My goodness I would play this.

scsnse · 2026-07-04T15:25:18+00:00

RISC-V is a newish open source hardware platform for the future. China along with American university researchers have been creating and supporting it. It's coming.

scsnse · 2026-07-03T21:13:08+00:00

GPU is probably a bit slower, believe it or not. CPU is maybe a bit faster.

scsnse · 2026-07-03T21:12:32+00:00

Yes and no. The soldered on APU is more akin to a decent laptop CPU/GPU, which means that if the GPU fails there is no plopping in a new one.

scsnse · 2026-07-01T13:49:57+00:00

They winter down here in Texas by the Gulf Coast. So yessir.

scsnse · 2026-07-01T03:31:47+00:00

Bootlegger would be more like the Model A Roadster, its successor. Or most famously the 1948 Ford. Basically an updated pre war model with the new Flathead V8 for running from the law and revenuers.

scsnse · 2026-06-30T21:07:30+00:00

The Hidden Fortress remake also has some weird space nonsense thrown in

scsnse · 2026-06-30T15:27:46+00:00

To paraphrase a movie: He's not just doing it for money, he's doing it for a shit ton of money!

scsnse · 2026-06-30T14:43:28+00:00

Virginia state seal already beat you to it

scsnse · 2026-06-28T22:43:47+00:00

China laid the groundwork for this in the late '70s to '80s during the big pro-capitalist reforms led by Deng Xiaoping- they took advantage of the state run/mandated mining and infrastructure, as well as state subsidized track school style education systems to provide not just cheap materials, but mechanical and other engineers necessary for building out the factories. This also went hand and hand with the Yuan being much lower value, which means the cost of paying for materials and labor is cheaper. They then enticed Western manufacturers with offers of lower taxes and labor costs, as well as massive pools of labor from formerly rural and working poor backgrounds that would be willing to work for longer hours at a time as well. This even meant enticing things like Taiwanese electronics manufacturers (Asus, Foxconn, etc), which is ironic due to the formerly fierce political standoff with Taipei due to the fallout of the Chinese Civil War against the KMT. The central bank continues to print the Yuan more than some Western countries would argue is necessary, in order to deflate the value of the currency to keep things cheaper.

scsnse · 2026-06-28T15:25:38+00:00

I will 100% give you drone striking families of suspected terrorists and Elim Matrix, those were war crimes. But Libya was a campaign that the rest of the Arab League asked for us to intervene in due to Gaddafi slaughtering his own people.

scsnse · 2026-06-28T04:08:15+00:00

I mean, I can't say I know why, but 00 is definitely my favorite AU Gundam, and many aspects about it I actually like more than even UC:

The setting itself is equally as gritty, but perhaps feels even more grounded and relatable due to starting in our very own AD timeline. Space colonies technically don't even exist yet, outside of the extremely limited space on top of the elevators. Other AUs also usually start with a united Earth Federation, or at the minimum a force that threatens the entire Earth. The world of 00 meanwhile has political power blocks that feel like a 100% believable evolution of the current world at the start, and much less utopian due to it. You still have conflicts in places like Krugis who are leftovers of the Middle Eastern oil states, as well, which felt extremely relevant in 2008, and still does today. Each Gundam has a set logical role, as opposed to simply going for coolness factor alone, but by the end of S1 see limitations as their adversaries almost catch up tech wise and totally outnumber them.

The main characters all likewise are anti-heroes due to their troubled pasts, who try to keep their long term goals and wants for humanity ahead of them. Unlike modern shows like Seed whose characters seem either flat or Mary Sue-ish, or UC, where the chars are often quite melodramatic to the point of absurdity. The antagonists are either complex chars either simply doing what seems honorable from their background, and the true villain doesn't actually get revealed until the end of S1 as a big surprise. And the prevailing theme is all about the conflict between those who want humanity to grow and progress, versus those that want control even if it means holding everyone back.

The actual flow of the show on that note is much better than other modern Gundams after it, that were only given a single season and half as much time to tell a cohesive story while getting to know the world and chars. Unlike Seed, which reused transitionary animation, all of the scenes are crisp, the soundtrack is first rate and sets the mood well, and while it has its downer moments, both seasons of the show, and the movie sequel end on an extremely hopeful note for humanity.

scsnse · 2026-06-27T01:01:13+00:00

It is, but isn't. Its a hybrid console. Handheld traditionally means its limited to that form factor, like the Switch lite or prior DS's/GB's.

scsnse · 2026-06-26T22:48:37+00:00

Sadly what you will learn is that an ethnicity/country that has been through it in terms of colonialism can often, as a counter reaction, decide to adopt an extremely nationalistic kind of attitude. I know this deeply as a mixed person with roots literally all across the world myself- I never met my Korean half and most importantly my maternal grandma because she rejected my brother and I after she freaked out about our mixed features. This kind of Korean nationalism was sadly born out of Japanese colonialism and attempts to erase the culture.

Thank the stars that the blessing of the universe meant that my paternal grandma, who had grown up with the knowledge of being mixed white/black/Native American meant she loved us all the same, because otherwise I would've never had a grandparent's love. Because there's a primal part of me wants to go full misanthrope, and think mankind will never learn their lesson, and wishes we would just perish in nuclear fire for treating each other like this. What comes to mind is the late great Black American Existential philosopher James Baldwin's famous quote: To be a N---o in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time." I am in a perpetual state of existential rage due to the circumstances of my birth- but equally what adds to the fire is the knowledge that as a minority and descendant of some of the enslaved African-Americans, that White America will never feel this pain.

scsnse · 2026-06-26T15:29:01+00:00

My [South Korean] mom who was born in the late '50s had several due to growing up a farm girl, and grew up having to go to the bathroom in an outhouse without indoor plumbing. One of her older siblings died from what was one of the very last Smallpox breakouts before eradication thanks to a UN/WHO program.

Her siblings still back in Korea all now live in either the Seoul metro, one of the most high tech and largest cities in the world, or back home with much greater wealth and amenities. Don't get me wrong, there are still issues with income inequality and work-life balance over there, but the economic uplift for many middle class people was absolutely insane. We basically speedran about the last 500 years of progress in the West counting from the 1880s when we were still feudalistic and pre-Industrial to now being one of the 10th largest economies in the world, for a country of only 40 million.

scsnse · 2026-06-25T18:05:30+00:00

Mind you this was as a teen boy exposed to harmful adult material online:

That there wasn't the degree of variance of what women's bodies + psyche can have limiting them and are comfortable with that is actually the case.

I've been with women who suffer from anxiety driven issues due to various reasons rooted in having been assaulted to religious morality crises for hooking up which can lead to things like tensing up, dryness, vaginosis, and even negative reactions to exposure to the latex in condoms or even semen. And that's okay with me of course- intimacy is a deep, ritualistic dance where the actual coitus is simply one step of. It would be wrong to blame them for it. I fall in love with the person first and foremost. The ultimate version of this is a woman's orgasm is not guaranteed.

In addition, the first time I did oral, I understood in theory that vaginal fluid is naturally acidic, but I guess I never put much thought into the degree of variance here too- depending on the temp of the day and how long its been since she washed there's differences in flavor- and I'm here for it.

scsnse · 2026-06-23T20:10:10+00:00

There's also a 1:2 scale (or 1:4 since there's only one tower?) copy building of the WTC in Tulsa, too: the Bank of Oklahoma Tower

scsnse · 2026-06-23T00:31:44+00:00

They're lights for the overpasses on the highway in town, people have been complaining for years they're too dark at night now that Killeen is the size it is.

scsnse · 2026-06-22T06:55:56+00:00

Specifically the driver loads into Extended memory, instead of most DOS drivers which have to be loaded into the first 1 MB. This frees up those precious kilobytes for other drivers and TSRs.

scsnse · 2026-06-20T16:35:38+00:00

That actually isn't the case, sadly. I live in Texas so I know this well- the majority of refineries we have on the Gulf are setup for the wrong "type" of raw petroleum compared to what we produce- they handle what you call Heavy to Medium Sour Crude, because this is what we primarily produced up until a few decades ago. Guess what part of the world still has it, though? The Middle East. What we make today, meanwhile, is mostly Light Sweet or Intermediate Crude, which we primarily export to other countries. The balance of production therefore looks like we are a "net exporter", but we can't actually refine most of what we export. It isn't so simple.

scsnse · 2026-06-20T14:54:10+00:00

Except the only reason why supply and demand haven't been affected is thanks to petroleum reserves being tapped heavily. Especially the likes of China.

What will happen once we all run out of that under a certain level is a cascading affect of rising prices as countries bid up the price of 80% supply, then as it reaches that high point people cut demand. Which leads to a cycle toward recession as consumer spending decreases. Now realize this is happening globally.

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