4 posts tagged “america”

yeah, yeah, we won on tuesday. i do sincerely hope that the democrats realize this wasn't so much a vote for them aas a vote against our current leadership. there is a difference there.

anyway, i get very frustrated with red state-blue state stuff - i feel it creates a false split. here's a better take on regional identities and differences.

The regions were based on election results, demographic data and certain geographic features. Each one represents about 10% of the electorate (i.e. approximately 10,5 million votes in the 2000 presidential election).

• Northeast Corridor: the richest, best-educated and most densely populated region of the US. A traditionally Democrat-leaning area, it delivered 62% of the vote to Al Gore in 2000. That’s better than any Democrat in any region since LBJ.
• Upper Coasts: anchored by Boston (on the east coast) and San Francisco (on the west coast), this region is relatively affluent and well-educated. Arguably more liberal than the Northeast Corridor, it is less reliably Democratic: third-party candidates do well.
• Farm Belt: has the smallest non-white population, with lower than average population growth. Ranks first in percentage of people who finish high school, but don’t get a higher education. Solidly Republican.
• Big River: has been the most closely contested area in presidential elections for over 30 years. And the region isn’t easily wooed, never giving either candidate more than 55% during this period.
• Appalachia: the poorest and most rural region, but catching up economically. Showed a dramatic swing towards the Republicans in 1980 and stayed that way ever since.
• Sagebrush: named after the anti-bureaucratic Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, this region occupies almost 50% of the US land area. The fastest growing region, it was also Al Gore’s worst region in 2000.
• Great Lakes: centered around Chicago, and suffering from population loss in smaller cities, it has Democrats chasing votes in more rural areas – the suburban counties have been tilting their way, anyway.
• Southern Comfort: fast-growing and average as to income and education, this was part of the ‘Solid South’ that squarely supported the Democratic party around 50 years ago. It has since turned into the most Republican region of the US.
• Southern Lowlands: the largest percentage of African-American voters, who reliably vote Democratic. This voting bloc is matched by some of the most Republican areas in the US, making it a swing area.
• El Norte: the youngest and most Hispanic region, it was carried by Gore in 2000. It is however not solidly Democratic, having recently sent conservative Republicans to Congress (from Florida and Texas).

so busy as of late that i haven't kept up with posting or reading. i am swamped, officially, although it is paying off.

New York Magazine presents: What if 9/11 never happened? Not in the conspiracy sense, but in the history can go a million different ways sense. [via]

The US ranks among the lowest in the world in acceptance of evolution. Next you'll tell me that dinosaurs were real.

Fifteen of the most important websites of ALL TIME! I could quibble with some of this (like the implication that napster's current 500,000 paying subscribers have anything to do with its all-time relevance, or friendsreunited, which can't be that important since i've never heard of it), but it's a pretty solid list of the pretty solidly obvious. But man oh man, they're missing a huge one. If they only knew. [via]

Having worked in customer service (over email and a one-time phone call that ended with the other guy saying, "this game is the only fun i have in my life. please fix it"), I can sympathize with these guys. But I've also been the caller, haven't we all. [a different via]

no chance i can effectively comment on things like this right now, but i think about them.  I need jobs that revolve around thinking through things like this. I've got one this summer but it's over in a week. [via]

i've always trusted the us news & world report college rankings, but i've read a couple of arguments against it lately - mostly here. similar to the above article about gaming digg, you can game the usn&wp as well. the washington monthly rankings take a different approach to college rankings.  personal anecdote: i didn't take a friday class my junior or senior year of college. i later learned that the school had only in the last ten to fifteen years begun to have friday classes, as their existence - wait for it - factored into the algorithm.

this is sorta funny; i'm only linking to it cause a lot of people are ending up in new york these days.

a wifi router that includes 160 gig drive, itunes, bittorrent & ftp. i very rarely use bittorrents, but it strikes me as a huge leap forward. i see down the path to totally on-demand cable, where content comes from all over instead of through huge traffic, and you'll buy youtube videos for a penny (or a cool grand, following hyperinflation), sopranos episodes for 1 to watch or 3 to save, movies on similar prices, and you can manage what you want to pull down from the web from your pocket or laptop. hell, price could go up or down depending on how often you watch something. the point is, now that anyone can get or contribute content so, so easily, (insert your local cable provider/isp/cell phone service here) has less and less control over the market. my hope with net neutrality is that there now that we can bypass the "lay cable all the way around the world" phase with satellites, can't you see the harvards and stanfords, as well as the gates and bransons and buffetts of the world, fronting for a satellite to provide information to the people? i definitely can. hell of a tangent but something i've been wanting to write out for a while. carry on.

ben casnocha's observations on travelling and such. pretty amazing guy who's taking a year off between high school and college to travel. and he started his own company, about four years ago.

from get rich slowly, ten secrets of success by john paul getty.

ibid, how to raise a family on one income. unsuprisingly, many of the techniques for saving money are techniques for living sustainably.

and finally, how to protect your search information - i'm not sure there's an organization i like more than the electronic frontier foundation. [via]
 

This is a really, really pretty long essay about the experience of traveling abroad and reflecting on America, but it's really fucking good. Here's an excerpt, but you really should read it in context.

Only once have I let loose with this theory, because it's generally not my business. In Livingston, in a bar, one of my cobackpackers started up with the whole "I'm so glad to be away from all that shit, all that wholesale corporate shit, all that unthinking consumption, all that overly aggressive American culture, all that Bible thumping and fast food and 9-5" routine, and I was drunk and talky.

I set down my beer, and gestured for the guy to lean over.

"I've got a hunch about America, dude..."

"What's that?"

"...You're doing it wrong."

Divebars. Jukeboxes. Allen Iverson. Beerball. Super Mario Kart. NetFlix. LiveFuckingJournal. The way my girl looks in that skirt.

An aversion to whitehats and fast food might be a reason to leave the country, but it's no reason to bash it. To fail to find a place for yourself in the USA might be a failure of fucking imagination, but it ain't a failure of the culture to provide. I dunno... I've given up on thinking that I can really tell anyone else what should be going on in their head - but when I go from America to Guatemala to America to Guatemala, the virtues of our ways of doing things are pretty self-evident. Guatemala is a sucky place to be born. Without qualifiers. A lot of people come down here and backpack around and go back to the U.S. or Europe talking about what a great place Guatemala is, how nice the people are, whatever. They're wrong. I think they're even objectively wrong.