This isn't the greatest ever, but here's mine:

Why does the Mississippi flow south?

Because Iowa sucks!

I saw an Andrew Yang post promoting his Foward Party (trash btw) aiming at gathering right wingers to a populist option instead of the GOP since Trump is corrupt.

And the comments are full of people saying MAGA is the third party option OR that he’s a democratic shill.

Yang posted a similar post promoting his party aimed at liberals to diverge from the Democratic Party and the comments were supportive and saying how the Democratic Party should die.

I was reading a bit about different phones, and one point that comes up a lot from USA commenters is that people cannot just use any phone they want, it needs to be a specific model supporting their network carrier, especially the network bands.

I live in Europe, this is pretty unknown here, and from what I gather, Asian buyers are also free to use any phone they want.

How come that nothing has ever been made to improve that situation?

Background:

• Trump’s second term could mean the downfall of the FDIC, CFPB: Here’s what that means for consumers | CNBC
• Senator warns of national security risks after Elon Musk's DOGE granted 'full access' to sensitive Treasury systems | TechCrunch

What prompted this is I logged into my bank this morning to send some bill payments, and the FDIC banner at the top caught my attention. At first it made me laugh because of recent events, but that laugh turned into kind of a nervous chuckle:

I was like "Surely this administration won't fuck with the FDIC" but then read through the articles above, and now I'm not so confident.

Currently, I use a small, local bank. I've never really worried about it because of FDIC protections, but should I move my money out of it to a larger bank? Withdraw it all and stuff it in my mattress?

I'm not freaking out, but I am concerned about this for the first time in my life.

The rational part of me says that if it gets to that point, my money would probably be worthless anyway except for burning it to keep warm.

It's kinda damn cool no matter what! 😎

Setting aside the obvious one of Florida, I would guess Ohio bc (gestures wildly around) it exists.

(I don't mean to suggest that these are necessarily true)

I saw a cool Taiko drumming performance, so I've got that going for me, which is nice

I am currently visiting the USA, and before I leave I want to try some food that is "uniquely" american - IE, you can't really find it outside of the country.

UK stores do tend to have a "USA section" which has a small amount of sweets and other products. But I am wondering what americans specifically missed / couldn't find in other countries.

As an example - Wendy's as far as I've seen, isn't local to the UK or at least where I live. So trying that was a "unique american food", to me.

I'm also in Chicago at the moment, so I made sure to try a proper (real?) Chicago deep dish pizza (loved it, by the way).

Alternatively, any other suggestions of food to try?

Immediate edit - turns out Wendy's is in some locations in the UK. I just assumed incorrectly!

Thanks for all the suggestions!!

I generally drink zero or one cups in the morning. Sometimes one in the afternoon, but not later than 14:00

Rather than put my answers, I will leave space for you to jump in directly with yours:-).

I'm not talking like 10 of them, just one. Even for historical reasons.

Edit: I suppose you could answer any way you like it, but fwiw I meant like an American flag. 🇺🇲

And if you'd decide to leave, where would you go?

Context for why I'm asking: I'm trans and currently live in Minnesota, I moved here from Florida so I have some idea of how miserable big moves can be. I can get EU citizenship which makes me very lucky, but... Do I sit here and hope Minnesota can protect me from 🥭 or do I try to build a life somewhere else, again?

Mine's been cold 🥶

Just gonna keep this short and to the point.

We all know FDR only went so far with including black people in new deal programs to appease the southern coalition of Dems. He also denied entry for Jewish Refugees and deported many Mexicans during the Great Depression.

Once LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act, Dems essentially lost the South forever.

Nixon pulled federal funding from affordable public housing in black neighborhoods and it strengthened his base.

Reagan blamed the aids epidemic on gay people and was embraced by the country.

Obama had to run on being anti-gay marriage in 08, but ran on being pro-gay marriage in 2012 and lost some support.

Trump spent millions in anti-trans ads. And leaned into the trans panic.

I know social issues aren’t everything, but it seems like that’s the direction America has gone post Civil Rights.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1i611hm/americas_digital_dialects_how_reddit_reveals_the/

From the author:

"Hi, everyone—This map is based on my 2024 Linguistics PhD dissertation, A geographic analysis of lexical variation in North American English using Reddit corpora. (You can read it here.)

For this project, I extracted huge amounts of text data from top-ranked posts for subreddits dedicated to cities in the US, Canada, and Britain (although my project focused on North America). From each subreddit, I counted the usages of particular synonymous word pairs, like cute and adorable, or forest and woodland. I then calculated the ratio between the two words in each pair for each city subreddit. With each city subreddit corresponding to a real-world geographic location, I was able to run statistics to identify regional clustering in the usage of each word pair, and aggregate the overall patterns. This map shows the groupings of cities in the US that emerged from that analysis.

During my time as a grad student, I taught a course on the history of the English language for several years, and one of my favorite topics to cover was variation in American English. So when I did a dissertation project that combined linguistics, social media, and geography, I knew that I wanted to share my findings with others in order to promote engagement with linguistics and maybe help spark someone’s interest in language.

I have a Twitter thread up where I talk a bit more about the project, and I also have some slides on my personal website where I go into more detail about the methods and findings. You can also find maps of results for some of the individual variables on this page of my website."

Genuinely can't figure out how other people develop active social lives. The most common advice I get is to look on Meetup, but I found pretty much one group and while I had fun, halfway through the event they started making fun of liberals for not having friends. I'm genderqueer so that ain't gonna work out. Everything else on Meetup is scientology garbage.

I go out and do things on my own and try to be open to people who approach me, but on the rare occasion someone wants to talk to me it's because they're horny and they've mistaken me for a straight woman. I can be out in the mud picking up litter and someone will strike up a conversation about the environment, something I'm interested in, and it turns out it's because they think I'm doing this to get the D.

I'm getting crazy bored. Does everyone just work a 9-5 and then go home alone? Except for when they have sex with the occasional random straight man??

I’m a 21-year-old guy and since they unfortunately didn’t teach us about American history in school I wanna learn it all on my own from the beginning to the present.

I’m really looking forward to a deep dive to not only understand American history better but also to get a better grasp of the culture, people, economics, politics and social aspects that influenced America to become what it is now.

I was wondering what the best ways and resources are to do this. Maybe someone can recommend some good media resources. It doesn’t matter what it is, it could be books, videos, podcasts, documentaries, documents, articles, movies and so on.

I’m open for everything :)

I was just watching "American Primeval", when it occurred to me (again) that the US was a place where oddball religions could prosper. Two recent successful examples of very weird ones being Mormons and Scientology (although the latter is a bit less successful lately).

Why is it that weird things catch on so readily in the US?

Of course, the "founders" were people that were kicked out of everywhere else because they were trying to convert them to their extremist religious views (and yet US people are fond of trying to find family ties to them... "hey, my great, great, great grand father was a religious lunatic! But yours wasn't")

So now, Mormons (Jews totally rowed to the US, for some reason, and then Jesus came there, and there were horses, and cities, and there's absolutely no archaeological trace, probably because god) have an astounding foothold despite their creed (I'm saying this because I have read the book of Mormon).

Then there's Scientology, and I don't even know where to begin with that one, given how fucked up it is... If you don't know about it, start with Wikipedia.

Also (probably not finally, there's certainly more) there's the innumerable bizarre Christianity stuff in the US. It's such a mess. I don't even think that most of the evangelical groups are technically Christians.

So apparently,, in the US, anything goes. The holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, blessed be it's meat balls, showed us that. But then what?

The problem with the typical US "let anyone do whatever" is that vulnerable get fleeced at best.