i can't click my fingers. can't do it.

some other things i can't do are drive or administer any kind of first aid.

Saw a Hawkwind gig lastnight, support act was Wilko Johnson. Hawkwind were fucking unbelievable with their 15ft dancing aliens on stilts, constant powerful psychedelic beats and otherworldlyness, and cool light show. I was right up front against the barrier, so like right up close when Tim Blake (also in Gong) was doing his trippy keytar solos.
Highlight is either singing along to Spirit of the age (fave song) or the acid house section of Assassins of Allah (originally titled Space is their palestine) with whirling canibis patterns being projected onto the back wall.
Loved it, wanna go again! Hawkwind are a true unique experience.

i can't click my fingers. can't do it.

some other things i can't do are drive or administer any kind of first aid.

got one of these over you *clicks fingers maniacally*

do a lot of people not drive over there? sound's nice. america is transportation hell.

actually yeah i guess that is a difference. i can get pretty much everywhere i need to go without driving  - although no, i think most people do still get a license. most of my old friends and my little brother drive.

are there no trains in america or something? and i guess people don't really use the bus unless they are desperate or is that just a snob perception i get from the media.

yeah, buses have a bad reputation for some reason. people vastly prefer light rail/trolleys even though they're a lot slower and even less reliable. my city's bus system is pretty terrible, though.

and yeah, a lot of public transportation outside the cities is usually either super tedious and not at all convenient, or entirely nonexistent. and idk how it is in other cities, but in Philly it's barely even cost-effective to use public transportation--if you can find a good parking space, you might actually save money depending on your gas mileage.

it's all because several awful money-grubbers essentially made sure Americans would require individual cars to get from place to place and take care of simple daily errands and everyday needs, by configuring development and zoning in favor of automobile traffic. and because of this the income disparity is exacerbated even more than in other countries, you really NEED to earn a good amount of money to have any shot of happiness/be able to take care of your family

From what I've heard there are trains but they don't run often, don't go to all major places and are basically 50s infrastructure. I would guess this is partly because the GOP is against it and blocks the government from making investments (I know of at least one GOP-controlled state that rejected a giant check from the federal government to build a high speed rail network on the ground that trains are communism). But I've never actually been there so I don't know what I'm talking about and earlchip should correct me on this, but yeah the US is very much a car-based society.

it's actually way more disgusting than this and I'd love to get into it but my family is doing doing memorial day dinner right now and I'm gonna be busy for a while!! but I really want to make a topic about this sometime, because it ties in with a lot of ideas that guys like dietcoke push for and I think a lot of people here would enjoy the discussion

are there no trains in america or something? and i guess people don't really use the bus unless they are desperate or is that just a snob perception i get from the media.

there aren't always buses depending on where you are and we have trains but they're more of a novelty (like dada said, 50s) than a serious form of transportation.  the biggest problem is that only big enough cities have bus systems whereas the bulk of america is small towns


if i lived somewhere with good public transportation i probably wouldn't drive much at all.  my car would probably just be for like...if i had to buy something too big to lug around or if i had to take quincy somewhere (i assume pets aren't allowed on your trains dada???)

Oh wow really?  That's pretty neat!  Quincy could fit in my lap but he'd probably be very busy trying to escape to lick/smell everyone else nearby.

yes i would also read and post in a topic about this kind of thing. i like learning more about the differences in different countries in how big/useful the public sector is. my general stance is that i am for public spending and taxes on the right people to pay for comprehensive quality of life stuff like health care, education, transport and benefits, etc, but that i don't really understand in depth what is a good use of money and what isn't. and i also don't know how much confidence i have that things wouldn't sink into shit if profiteering was just removed as a possibility from certain services and industries - basically i don't understand well enough how things are paid for, and why. i know the way it seems things should be, but not how possible that is and what needs to change exactly for it to become that way.

i've always had the vague knowledge that the US is crappy for things i take for granted like healthcare, education and public transport - at least in terms of how much people need to break their backs just to keep their grasp on these things i get for almost nothing in comparison - and the more i think about it the more it all slots in and just makes an intuitive kind of sense. america seems to make sense in the exact ways it is terrible and the ways it is good.

i don't really think i grasp it totally though, because the way i see it is that for the majority of people who need to work for a living would be better off in places like europe, canada and, i think to a lesser extent, australia, where they would get the same kind of life for less money and worry less about basic essentials like healthcare and more about how to improve their situation from a position of relative comfort. and i don't see a lot of people disagreeing with that, but then i look at certain rankings (and maybe these don't mean much, like i said i am kind of ignorant) but the US is up there at #4 on the HDI and i think, why? it doesn't really sound like an amazing place to live in a lot of ways, for your average person. but i guess i have a different measure of what makes a place attractive to live in that whatever the HDI is measuring by? i don't know.

edit: actually i'm looking at some of those previous hdi rankings and it looks like they are pretty capricious and possibly based on bullshit economic data which allows iceland to be at number 1 before the financial meltdown a few years ago and to start crashing down the rankings once it hit them. i'm feeling like it's naive of me to give any weight to a chart like this at all.

I can get one game.
Stuck choosing between Portal 2 or the new Mortal Kombat.
hmm...

Have you seen Yahtzee's review of the new Mortal Kombat yet?

That's a nobrainer. Portal all the way.

I'm glad you guys are interested in this, because this is what I'm all about! mainly because clearly identifying the problem is part of finding the solution (sustainable urbanism). I kinda see it as a way of implementing a lot of the goals people talk about when discussing things like communism and socialism, but without all the theoretical ivory tower and political bullshit getting in the way. and the political climate is never gonna be conducive for something like this in america, so the best you can do is carve out a niche on your own

this is the bipolar rap guy I was talkin' about, its his memorial day facebook post:

Proud to be an American? Watch Loose Change 911... Hate America for all its worth? Watch Loose Change 911... Want to know the truth? Watch Loose Change 911. The truth is out there if anyone gives a shit anymore.

I just got done shittin all over it after readin a couple o' these:

I understand. I've already heard most of the "otherside" of the story straight from the media, but i have watched a number of buildings collapse via explosives placed inside them prior and they all look exactly like the way the towers went ...down. I didn't watch documentaries and then believe that something was fishy... I knew something was fishy and then watched documenteries. Even if I never had, I would still wonder how the 757's that supposedly crashed into the Pentagon and Pennsylvania disintigrated into nothing leaving only a hole and no sign of the huge aircrafts.

I always thought that a cohesive fast rail trasportation system in the US would not be a good idea because of the sheer size and distance between cities and towns in the united states. Like, you'd pretty much have to run railways all over the place fucking railway spider webs in order for it to be worth a shit. I rode around on trains in the DC area and they were kind of like railways further east but not so hi-tech as japan closer to the london area I think. So I think that in the more developed big cities they've got them but the US is too sprawling to have something like that. Where I'm from they have a trolley system which is free but it only goes on the island I used to live on all around the beach, its a tourist thing.

From what I've seen the only countries that have a good railway system are usually more compact like london and japan. Poorer third worldish countries can't afford that stuff and instead they depend on cheap asian cars or mopeds (puerto rico and vietnam). Well puerto rico isn't like poor third world or anything they're just not that developed in the way of roads and transportation and the US pretty much ignores them.

I'm glad you guys are interested in this, because this is what I'm all about! mainly because clearly identifying the problem is part of finding the solution (sustainable urbanism). I kinda see it as a way of implementing a lot of the goals people talk about when discussing things like communism and socialism, but without all the theoretical ivory tower and political bullshit getting in the way. and the political climate is never gonna be conducive for something like this in america, so the best you can do is carve out a niche on your own

things change very rapidly. aside from leftover teenage nihilism, what makes you think that things'll never change?
i bet if you were to tell an egyptian person in early 2010 that Mubarak would step down the next year in the face of a massive popular uprising they'd probably laugh at you and tell you to get your head out of the clouds. & I'm sure on the eve of great depression the same businessmen who flung themselves out the windows of their highrise offices were juuuust peachy thinking pretty highly of themselves and the work that they do.

buildings and infrastructure last a really long time and contain a lot of discourse about how people [should] live. if roads are narrow and everythings in walking distance, that'll have a lot more impact than idk the popularity of walking as a concept when driving is much easier.

also i really like this stuff feel free to talk lots about it earl!!