Honestly was shocked when I first visited. On TV the streets are wide there and everyone has enough to eat.

Visit (and at this point I have spent time in about half their states) and it is a different story. Broken roads in disrepair. Beggars everywhere, fighting for the chance to ask you for food, water, anything. We stopped at traffic lights and a teenage boy shaking with palsy knocked on our windows begging for food. People mobbed me in one city because I was carrying a bag of apples and they hoped for one as my bag split. I was careful never to give, but was still followed everywhere as an obvious tourist. The only place I did not get food begging on every single streetcorner was Manhattan. I am told this is because they deported beggars to the mainland there. Heartless sods in a capital that gets snow told me "there's less beggars in winter, the cold gets them".

I think you're right about the jobs, too. There were roadworkers on those broken roads, using jackhammers without ear protection, or even foot protection. I was told it was because they are "free" to bring their own PPE. They looked injured and sick but determined.

Shops were similar. Waitstaff looked half starved, serving the rich in an obsequious yet hateful way unnervingly like a roleplaying slave. It was disgusting, and ruined many a meal by constant disingenious artificial attention.

You won't regret visiting, but it is a ridiculously heartless broken place. The most expensive travel insurance too, for reasons most obvious in their medical stories.

Yanks are no doubt going to downvote this to oblivion, but it is how I have so far experienced their miserable cities.

To be fair, deserves a treat. Dragons are more a pest than even rats.

Poor sodding woman, having to go through all that just to be allowed to try to live. Good for her, looks like she might get that chance soon. So much stuff though!

It's odd, Americans all make a big fuss about freedom, and about Texas being the place with the most freedom, yet they seem to have a lot of freedom prevention....

Student names that really exist in my local area: "L-A" (pronounced "Elldashah") and Hazmat (shortened to Mat). Not had a Bobby Tables yet, but getting that dash into Eldashahs name was a difficult task, I am told.

Reddit was at the extreme end of emoji rejection as far as I ever saw. Odd that you experienced differently. I often saw well-upvoted comments such as "downvote due to emoji use" next to heavily downvoted emojis on Reddit.

Not an emoji fan myself, but each to their own.

A lot of solar panels are now semitransparent too, now, meaning as you said people can grow plants below them. I love the shading cars in parking lots idea, but no one seems to have impemented that in Australia just yet.

What about Forest?

Also, this appears to be a lemmy of a tumblr of a tweet. How meta.

It's not because you're 50. It's because it is celebrity news.

A few Prime Ministers have been peculiar plotholes. Harold Holt just disappeared. Whitlam got taken out by a madman influenced by the yanks and nominally working for the Queen. Sometimes it seems the writers just get bored of the storyline and drop stuff.

An American comedian, following a long set here in Australia, told the audience to stand up and stretch. He then tried to direct us to "bend over and pat your neighbour on the fanny". Stone cold silence did not indicate to him his mistake, and he tried several times before eventually realising he had lost his audience goodwill entirely with this starting skit.

Turned out later that he had no clue what "fanny" means here, and had to have it explained to him.

I love that no one has a clue if there is in fact anything for sale, or what it might be.

Suppressing the local language. Happened in Australia, the Americas, and so many other places. It's a symptom of the overall racism.