Anneal

Southwest for arguably one of the better "economy" airlines. United and Delta are alright though. Alaskan is pretty great, but they really only service flights towards Alaska and the Northwest.

Well, used to be. Its popularity peaked around 2016 or so along with survival games until the new hot genre became hero shooters and then battle royale. It's clearly not dead though, considering great games like Killing Floor 2 are still being actively updated and The Last of Us 2 is still generating quite a bit of hype. Personally, I think it's a good thing that the zombie apocalypse trend has largely passed so we can get fewer but higher quality games. One of my favorite "post-apocalyptic" genre games is The Long Dark, which is a pretty underrated indie game – admittedly, while the setting is post-apocalyptic (a geo-magnetic disaster has essentially wrecked the entire planet's power grid and set humanity back into the dark ages), it focuses a lot more on survival against the freezing elements, and it does a great job on portraying survivalism realistically. Sleep, food, water, and warmth are essential, and injuries and diseases require extensive treatment to survive.

That's really just Southern California and parts of the Central Valley. The air here in the Bay Area is fine. A lot of it has to do with how both regions developed; San Francisco rejected most of the highway projects while Los Angeles was absolutely gutted with a web of highways which now contribute to its extreme congestion. Urban highway construction is a rather dark chapter of American history, as many neighborhoods and historical districts were demolished due to it under the excuse of "urban renewal". Thankfully, LA has realized that car dependency is going to be totally unsustainable for the future of the city (where hundreds of millions of hours are literally spent stuck in traffic yearly) and have made strides to improve its Metro.

We have the four elements all covered. Water (flash floods), earth (earthquakes), fire (wildfires), and air (drought...sort of). Maybe those New Age spiritualists have a point?

They do have the Indy 500 though. Indiana helped make American car racing a thing, and it's part of the "Triple Crown" (Le Mans, Indianapolis, and Monaco). They also have New Harmony, which was a weird planned town that some people did back in the 19th century as an utopian experiment. Washington is just as much of a hiker's paradise as California is. The Issaquah Alps and Mount Si are only a stone throw away from Seattle, and it's just as easy to get there by bus as it is by car. If you drive further east, the Yakima and Tri-Cities region are well known for their wine, thanks to the volcanic soil those cities lie on.

California would like to have a word with Hawaii.

California is incredibly huge and diverse in climate and demographics that it’s rather difficult to focus on simply one cool thing about it. We have sequoias, redwood forests, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Death Valley (the hottest place in North America), and Mount Shasta. Like the rest of the West Coast, it’s a hiker’s paradise. Also, California has plenty of vineyards, historical landmarks, cuisine, tech companies, movie star drama, and weed-smoking hipsters.

Right now, three, though I have opened as much as three dozen before thanks to surfing on TVTropes.

Plus, the benefits of manual transmission are slowly starting to fade out as automatic cars are becoming more and more developed. Older manual cars do tend to be lighter than older automatic cars, but in recent years, eight or nine-speed automatics and CVTs have proven to be on par with the fuel efficiency of manuals, if not better. Not to mention there are many other methods if you want to save fuel, such as carpooling, using cruise control, and driving light. Or if your destination is only a few miles away, just don't drive at all and get a bike.

There's also Vancouver, Washington, which is actually older than the Vancouver most people know about. The Vancouver in Washington was a fur trading outpost called Fort Vancouver, which then became a frontier town as people began to settle it in the late 1840s, and was later incorporated in 1857. The other Vancouver in BC was not settled until 1858, when a gold rush brought a ton of prospecting miners there, and was not incorporated until 1886. If you also look at the history of Ontario, California, the now largely suburban city was originally purchased by two Canadian brothers who named it "Ontario" after the region from where they were born. Many cities on the East Coast similarly share names with their British counterparts, due to its history of being formerly colonial towns.

I actually want to point out that there isn't actually an epidemic of school districts hating recess, it's just been happening in the last few decades and people are becoming aware of it and its negative effects. In fact, seven states have actually gone ahead and forced school districts to require daily recess time (Massachusetts and Arizona are currently voting on it), while nine states recommend it. And some states are rather vague about it and only require "general activity", which only mandates that school districts have a certain amount of time dedicated physical activity per week. However, many states have no regulation regarding recess or physical activity time like Illinois or Georgia, meaning it is largely down to the decision-making of school districts. The reason why schools are cutting recess is related to academic performance – people already know that the American school system overall is falling behind, so schools districts are cutting recess time or even removing it entirely to spend more time learning and prepare for standardized tests (sounds a bit like Asian schools to me). However, pediatricians have pointed out that this has the opposite effect and actually causes a ton of developmental and psychological problems, and can also contribute to obesity.

He lives in Indiana. If you don't have a car you're out of luck because most of Indiana lacks public transit. Even Indianapolis only has buses and ranks as one of the worst cities in terms of walkability.

It’s not just the skies. Urban sprawl also contributes to increased commute times, as you not only have to drive farther from work, you have to experience miles-long congestion, which dominoes into increased air and noise pollution and wasted time. Suburbs are also much harder to serve by public transit and increase car dependency. Thankfully, younger people are moving back into the city, and sprawl has been slowing down in some cities. Some cities have even taken into creating “green belts”, a layer of undeveloped land around a city, to stop sprawl outright, or build upward instead of outward. For me, it’s economic instability and being unable to find a decent job. I’m busy learning in university, but I’m still not too sure if I’ll be ready in the real world. Less personally, it would be uncontrolled, rampant automation. It might make parts of our lives easier, but if we let it go out of hand, millions of people may go jobless when they’re replaced by automatons and we have an economic crisis on our hands.

It's not that cheesy. Red Hot Chili Peppers were great at mixing in the lyrical complexity of hip hop into their music."Give It Away" is an early example, and songs like "Can't Stop" and "Dani California", while being largely alt rock, clearly show influence from hip-hop and funk. Also Limp Bizkit leans a bit more into rap metal / nu metal, though nu metal nowadays doesn't exactly have the best reputation, especially among some metalheads who don't regard it as real metal. I can at the very least agree that Soundcloud mumble rap is one of the worst things to come out of this decade. Hip-hop is all about lyrical complexity and dexterity and some off these emerging rappers don't show much of that. Some of the rappers that have become prominent in this decade that I do like though are Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper.

Lyrics isn't something that's native to pop. Any genre can potentially have lyrics in them.

Also I don't think it's fair to lump all contemporary pop as "bad". It's just that because pop is...well, popular by default, they are more vulnerable to certain trends – the more recent ones that come to mind are auto-tune and "millennial whooping" (and these trends aren't always bad if they are used creatively). It's also rather unfortunate that the majority of pop music is actually written by a select few. Now there is nothing wrong with having someone else write a song that you are going to play, because not everyone can play an instrument + sing + compose lyrics and melodies for that song. But it has contributed to the lack of complexity and variety in recent pop. However, there are still plenty of contemporary pop songs that I think are pretty good, and if you want to find good pop songs you just have to spend a little more time searching for it. I find myself admittedly liking "Somebody That I Used To Know", "Still Feel Like Your Man", and even songs like "Radioactive" and "Counting Stars". I also listened to a lot of Coldplay when I was younger, and I still do.

Personally I feel there's a difference between an overplayed song and a song that is actually bad, and I try not to be a hippie and give more popular genres a chance. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is not a bad song, it's simply overplayed, though I do think it's not the best song to represent progressive or hard rock. "Stairway to Heaven" is kind of eh for a Led Zeppelin song though. Not an awful rock song, but for its length it's not particularly progressive, has way too much fluff, and too much repetitive chords. "Creep" by Radiohead is a kind of mediocre grunge song and does not represent most of their work at all...yet it's the song they are remembered by, unfortunately. Also "Smells like Teen Spirit", though that could be because I don't like Nirvana that much and I prefer Soundgarden's music more.

This is the first time I have heard this insult, and honestly it sounds more non-sensical than offensive.

Oh, I think I ended up voting yes on that then. I don't remember keeping it lol, probably just misremembered.