but it never spilled over into politics quite to this degree.

Sure. But, look at the media environment. From the founding of the US to the invention of radio, there were newspapers. Sure, there was a strong element of yellow journalism, but to print a newspaper you still needed a printing press so it wasn’t a free-for-all. Then with radio, and then TV in the 50s there were only a handful of sources of information for everybody to follow. It’s only really since the 2010s that the media environment has been a free-for-all with anybody able to put up their own podcast, or put up videos on YouTube, or have their own blog, or post on Twitter, or whatever.

Politicians used to be able to do backroom deals. Those used to get a bad name, but to a certain extent it was a good thing, because at least they were dealing, instead of causing things to come to a deadlock. Now, if anybody dares to talk to someone on “the other team”, they get raked over the coals.

Russia was found to be sponsoring the NRA

Sure, they spent some money, and had some success. But, they hardly needed to push. The NRA’s goals were already aligned with Russia’s. The NRA has over 5 million members, and they were hardly upset with the direction Russia was pushing.

the rise of evangelicals as a voting group seems to be a co-ordinated world-wide phenomenon.

Not to me. There doesn’t seem to be much coordination there. There are just grifters seeing an opportunity.

I’d argue that those same elites thrived more under stable economic growth than an unstable one

It’s hardly the first time that an elite and powerful group tried to use a movement or a politician to further their interests and then found out that they couldn’t control what they’d unleashed.

I think you’re overestimating the influence of Russia and China and underestimating the dysfunction in the US.

Civilization is doing pretty well outside the US. If the US disappeared tomorrow, the rest of the world would do significantly better. I don’t know how the world will deal with climate change, but without the US it would be easier to make progress. The tech firms blowing up the AI bubble, and invading our privacy are nearly all American. A lot of the private equity firms destroying the world are also American. If the US could hurry up and finish collapsing, the rest of the world’s civilization could just move on.

Comparing the coming crash to the dot com crash is like comparing a rough landing to the various crashes on Sept 11th, 2001.

The dot com crash was mostly isolated in high tech. Because it was lead by the Japanese economy starting to fail, and followed by the Sept 11th attacks, the various combined crashes resulted in the S&P 500 falling by about 50% from its peak to the bottom, but it was already back up to the peak value in 2007, then the global financial crisis hit.

This bubble is much bigger. Some analysts say the AI bubble is 17x the size of the Dot Com bubble, and 4x the size of the 2007/08 real estate bubble. AI stocks were 40% of all US GDP growth in 2025, and 80% of all growth in US stocks.

Nvidia’s stock price has gone up 1700% in just 2 years. OpenAI is planning to go public on a valuation of $1 trillion despite losing vast amounts of money. Just 7 US tech companies make up 36% of the entire US stock market, and they’re all heavily betting on AI.

At least when the dot com bubble popped, it left some useful things behind, like huge amounts of dark fibre. But, the AI processors are so specialized they can’t be used for much of anything else. They also wear out, sometimes within months. The datacenter buildings themselves can maybe be repurposed to being general purpose datacenters, but, a lot of the contents will have to be thrown out.

Drink their blood. Got it.

Wow. My local library mostly has books. No board games. No media stations – there are some (old) computers you can use to browse the web, so I suppose you could watch media there, but it’s set up as a desk, not a couch or something. You can borrow some games, but not game consoles, and there’s definitely not a spot to play the games on-site. Definitely no VR rooms. There’s one branch of the library in the city that has 3d printers. One branch that has a “music editing station” with a music keyboard attached to a computer. One branch has a high quality, large format scanner for scanning historic docs. Definitely no kitchen or playground.

The idea still seems to be that libraries are supposed to be quiet places where you can read books or study. Any media is meant to be consumed with headphones on, so obviously no shared listening of any kind. They do loan music, video games and movies, but they’re meant to be brought home. You can borrow a lot of musical instruments, but again, there’s no place to play them on-site because the library is a quiet place for reading or studying.

I think it would take a major mental shift for people here to consider libraries as places where you might do something non-quiet, and/or non-serious. And something like cooking on-site would be seen as completely non-librarylike.

I’ve been to the Y, and at the moment it doesn’t seem overtly christian. But, as long as that “C” is part of the name, and especially as long as “Christian” is part of the mission statement, it can potentially become a lot more unfriendly to non-Christians.

That document you linked to says that some YMCAs are overtly christian, and talk about the problems that causes:

Ys that have a strong Christian identity may find that non-Christians are uncomfortable with explicitly Christian language, imagery, and activities. Proselytism is an especially sensitive issue.

For example, several survey respondents express discomfort with colleagues offering Christian prayers or reading Bible verses during the “mission moments” that begin Y staff meetings

I do think there’s a special thing about church that is this bigger than yourself experience

I’m pretty sure that’s only the case if you’re a believer. And, in general, people who aren’t believers don’t go to church, so you’re selecting for a group of people who want to believe in something bigger than themselves.

The Y is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to put Christian principles into practice

https://www.ymca.org/who-we-are

New Brunswick?

Well, definitely not a Christian association.

In the show Clarkson’s Farm, Jeremy Clarkson is looking around, trying to buy a pub. At one point they talk about wanting to have a pub with a little grocery store attached. Clarkson’s girlfriend explained why that was common at one point in Ireland. It was because in the past men would get paid, go immediately to the pub, and drink until their paycheck was gone. If there was a shop attached to the pub, they could hand in an order at the shop before they started drinking. And then, even if they drank away the rest of their paycheck, they’d still be handed a bag of groceries before they were kicked out and had to stumble home.

I like that in the US, New England (NE) is in the North East (NE).

Also, in places with significant winters (including Northern Europe) parks aren’t an option in winter.

Northern Europe seems like the kind of place that would realize this is a problem and invent some kind of community building which was open in the winter and had a shared kitchen, a stock of board games, a court for indoor sports, etc. That’s certainly not going to happen in the US.

The only way to learn what something sounds like as a non-native speaker is to look it up or listen to someone pronounce it. There are no rules – or at least no useful rules, because any rule will have many exceptions. Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it.

For example, in many British English dialects, the “a” in “can” and the one in “can’t” are pronounced completely differently, despite “can’t” being a contraction of “can not”. It’s literally the same word, just with a different word afterwords, and yet the two get different pronunciations. There’s no way to guess at that being the case, or come up with a logical reason why. You just have to accept it.

How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a ‘g’ but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.

And then there are the cases where two consonants combine to form another sound entirely: ph, ch, sh, th.

Ooooh, la dee dah. A morning dressing gown and an evening dressing gown? Does your butler hang it up for you?

I also use hooks. It’s better than using a chair. But, I recently saw an upgrade to the simple set of hooks in Ikea: a pegboard. A pegboard lets you customize it so you can have hooks for small things (like a hat) and other hooks for longer things (pants, etc.) I haven’t tried it yet, so I might be missing something, but it seems like an upgrade to hooks to me. In the past, I also just went with a coatrack. It’s pretty compact and lets you keep the back of your door for a towel or something like that.

its