The thing about the middle of Illinois is they consider Chicago to be a separate state and East St Louis to be Missouri’s problem. “Oh you’re from Chicago” is a common reply any time you found out you’re from an exurb. Often said with just a hint of dismissal. That’s not the real Illinois. Nobody talks about Rock Island and Moline (the Illinois half of the Quad Cities) this way, for instance.
Carbondale is slightly better, but I think it’s a notorious party school for very good reasons. Small town Midwest has a saying that “there’s nothing to do here except drink, fuck, and knock over mailboxes”. Most Iowa this is especially true, but Carbondale also gave me that vibe. Also that’s a fucking long drive. St Louis too. Nobody appreciates that Illinois is half as tall as California (not that anyone appreciates how long a trip up and down CA is either).
Indiana is seriously considering annexing much of central/southern Illinois. It’s amazing just how aggressively divisive politics have become in the last 20 years.
I had one of those, dunno what happened to it...fun story, I was living in Boston at the time, and there was too much line noise on the phone system for 300 baud, but 110 baud worked like a charm.
Citizenship in certain forms today in many cases is just like slavery.
You are taxed on anything you make and do regardless of where you go. Giving up your citizenship too costs something like $10,000 now, where they may just take the money and not complete the process.
If you don't report earnings to Fincen they'll go after you as they did with that one person, who was technically a US citizen but had no living memory of the US and was only born there, but was raised in France. He found out when he turned 15 or 18 or some such.
Its quite the racket.
Update: its actually $2350 which is non-refundable, and if you have assets above a certain amount there are additional compliance taxes, and if they can demonstrate non-compliance in some detail you have to start over.
There isn't much of a future for the young or even middle aged at this point.
Most of the benefits the old received when they were young were systemically taken away or withheld to enrich the old.
Debts were piled onto the young without appropriate representation (i.e. social security, and many other taxes).
In many respects the older generation as a whole chose to willingly make their children sacrifices to the spendthrift debts of their generation; which is what happens when your leaders have no real funding plan and the population doesn't hold their leaders to account.
The old through aggregate choice (inaction is a choice) of their cohort made the world they intended for their children. All the leaders needed was your willing complicit consent to do nothing.
As a result, many of those children aren't having children themselves because there is no future, no economic means to support children, or even meet someone.
Just like the native peoples who became slaves following the Spanish Conquistadors, where they would kill themselves, not have children, and even kill their children. These things about slavery repeat when people blind themselves.
The systems which were handed off to the last generation are former shadows of what they once were. The protections have been removed to favor one party at the expense of many.
One bad generation is all it takes, and from there you have a generation of suffering and violence when that suffering becomes untenable by the majority. A hellscape, and that is the legacy of the boomer generation.
To make matters worse, the weapons the older generation developed to maintain control may even allow government to retain a system of enslavement thereafter, where everything collapses (i.e. Malthus/Catton).
I was about to watch Francis Ford Coppola’s little-seen You’re a Big Boy Now on Criterion, but you’ve convinced me—I’m forking over the rental and watching True Romance.
Very curious to hear feedback from someone watching it for their first time ~30 years after its release. I watched it incessantly around the time it came out but haven't watched it much since - queued it up for the coming weeks.
“I’d love some pie.”
“-I think what you did was…
-What?
-I think what you did was…
-What?
-Was so romantic.
-Oh, baby, you’re bleeding.”
“Son of a bitch was right. She tastes like a peach.”
“You got me in a vendetta kind of mood. You can tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you.”
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