TheSanSabaSongbird

Right? It's still the Jews? Really? WTF? East Indian Americans are rapidly outpacing "the Jews" in terms of elite professionalism, but it's still all somehow about the Jews?

What planet do these people live on?

True, but it still amounts to a vote for Trump, due to the electoral college.

Newspapers were a very different beast in Jefferson's day.

Yes it is. I guarantee you that someone who regularly reads a reputable major daily is going to be better-informed than 90 percent of the public. Your attitude is part of the problem too. The vast majority of Americans are functionally illiterate when it comes to news media and don't have any idea of how to evaluate credibility and accuracy.

I mostly blame the Internet for trashing the signal-to-noise ratio, but I also blame our education system and the profession of journalism itself for not giving people better epistemic toolkits.

The Biden administration is quite possibly the worst administration I've ever seen when it comes to messaging, and I am in my 50s. Someday in the future someone will write a PhD dissertation on why they are so dysfunctional in this respect, but for now I just don't get it. They are singularly inept when it comes to publicizing and taking credit for their wins.

As a longtime SAR guy --I'm in my 50s-- I always tell people to carry a gun in the backcountry if that's what makes them feel safe, but just know that you're far far far more likely to get in trouble from things like weather, terrain, rivers, meltwater, falling, exposure, hypothermia and just the elements in general than you are from any animal. The risk profiles aren't even remotely close. This is true even in places like Alaska where almost everyone is armed. As far as I'm concerned, a gun is dead weight. Lose it and concentrate instead on carrying the ten essentials and knowing how to use them

Among the world's economically developed democracies, it absolutely only happens in one nation. This is not up for debate; it's an objective fact.

How we choose to address this fact is up to us, but being in denial about it is not a sane option.

Several things can be true at once. We don't have to be all-in on one side or the other of the Snowden affair. I've never understood why people seem so eager to pick a team on this issue.

Also some of them are paid very well. Any of your unionized specialty trades can easily make $150k+ a year, especially if they're willing to travel or work a lot of OT. If you're single or married with no kids, you can pretty easily afford a big fancy truck like that.

If you're willing to travel that can be more than $50k a year in per diem pay, so in two years you can easily pay off a new trailer to live in and a nice truck to haul it with. I personally know people who have done exactly this. The catch is that you need to get into a good union and do your apprenticeship and generally have your shit together. It always surprises me that more people don't know this.

This is a strictly American thing

If by "American" you mean North American, then yeah, you are correct, because pickups are also super popular in Canada and Mexico. But I don't think that's what you mean. I think you mean to specify the US which again, is incorrect. The fact that pickups are so popular in Canada and Mexico as well tells us that contrary to what I suspect you're trying to imply, there isn't some kind of special innate idiotic pickup truck gene that's unique to Americans and that instead, it's all about marketing.

After all, if marketing and advertising didn't work, it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry. What the big American car companies have done with amazing effectiveness is to make owning a pickup truck an intimate part of a lot of people's self-image. That's what you are arguing against and that's why it's nearly impossible to change anyone's mind about it.

How do they even do it? I know for a fact that a lot of them are not especially wealthy.

Well the other team is SF, which if I had to guess is probably the right's most hated city in America. It must be galling to them that the 49ers are easily one of the winningest teams in NFL history.