The only way for there never to be long trips in a country that spans the width of an entire continent would be to condense every one into a much smaller area. So you either abandon land in 2/3rds of the country, or you figure out how to magically drop away the land in between large metro areas.

China has high speed rail in its eastern most populated section, with a single line running to the entire western half of the country, and similarly sparse lines to the north. The dense population centers in the US are not all in one area, they are spread across the continent interspersed with large swaths of rural land. That being said the US is working on high speed rail, and we’ve had passenger trains that cross the entire country for nearly two centuries - see Amtrak, as well as bus services like Greyhound.

As much as I hate to break up a circle jerk, the US is about as good at this as any other western country, and it’s doing it across an entire sparsely populated continent, not small, highly dense European countries.

The odds for lots of sports betting literally change based on the bets made. Bookies, legitimate or not, shift the line and odds to account for the money on the line - they’re never going to lose money if they can help it. The house always wins.

Sure, we’ll just delete some of the land in North America so everyone can live closer together.

You seem to have neglected the most important one: privilege.

Millions of Americans are stuck in a cycle of generational poverty. Really difficult to manage even the first one when you’re grinding to just put food on the table daily, and that’s the reality for 46 million Americans right now.

This ultra-priviliged, ignorant “you just gotta grind for it” attitude is literally what this meme is making fun of. Congrats on being the butt of the joke and doubling down on it.

Somehow I highly doubt your mom spent 1/3 of her pre-tax income to send you to private school. And based on how much she paid for it, I assume you went to private school in the 80s. The median family wage these days can’t afford rent, much less $15-20,000 a year private schools, which by the way is what they cost this century. And if my assumption is correct about you growing up in the 80s, that $15,000 a year is the equivalent of nearly $59,000 a year today - higher than the median family wage, so not quite dirt poor.

I don't see any evidence supporting this, but I also don't recall ever seeing reruns in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraggle_Rock

No, Apple can begin supporting RCS and play nice with other phones (not just Android) using a modern, encrypted, and open messaging platform. But they choose to fall back to SMS intentionally in order to market their devices as superior.

Eh? RCS is an open standard. Yes, you're basically required to use Google's RCS endpoints at this point unless you want to host your own, but it's far superior to SMS. Apple made their own proprietary version in iMessage instead, so you have iPhones on iMessage and every other phone in the world on RCS.

What a fucking nostalgia bomb. Haven’t been a part of the scene for a very long time, so seeing RAZOR 1911 in the hex triggered a flashback. They were huge back when I was running a “warez” BBS as a kid in the 90s.

Central Florida has AT&T fiber now. I pay $108 a month for 2.5gbit up and down. 1gbit is $80 IIRC.