It’s older than that.

Also some of them are paid very well. Any of your unionized specialty trades can easily make $150k+ a year, especially if they’re willing to travel or work a lot of OT. If you’re single or married with no kids, you can pretty easily afford a big fancy truck like that.

If you’re willing to travel that can be more than $50k a year in per diem pay, so in two years you can easily pay off a new trailer to live in and a nice truck to haul it with. I personally know people who have done exactly this. The catch is that you need to get into a good union and do your apprenticeship and generally have your shit together. It always surprises me that more people don’t know this.

This is a strictly American thing

If by “American” you mean North American, then yeah, you are correct, because pickups are also super popular in Canada and Mexico. But I don’t think that’s what you mean. I think you mean to specify the US which again, is incorrect. The fact that pickups are so popular in Canada and Mexico as well tells us that contrary to what I suspect you’re trying to imply, there isn’t some kind of special innate idiotic pickup truck gene that’s unique to Americans and that instead, it’s all about marketing.

After all, if marketing and advertising didn’t work, it wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry. What the big American car companies have done with amazing effectiveness is to make owning a pickup truck an intimate part of a lot of people’s self-image. That’s what you are arguing against and that’s why it’s nearly impossible to change anyone’s mind about it.

How do they even do it? I know for a fact that a lot of them are not especially wealthy.

Even so, it’s just an objective fact that blocking traffic hurts the working poor far more than it hurts the wealthy and powerful high-status people who wield real power in society. It also, at least in the US, just further alienates blue collar people from the Democratic party and the political left, a demographic that they should own, but are losing and continuing to lose precisely because they are so tone deaf. The right does not block traffic, at least not as a tactic in itself, because they are smart enough to know that it just pisses people off. This difference is diagnostic of why the Democrats are steadily losing support from non-college-educated working people of all races.

Blocking traffic is pretty shitty though because you’re hurting working people as opposed to the people who have real power and status in society. These are people who depend on hourly wages and often have multiple jobs together with childcare scheduling commitments and the like.

That must be nice. My company does a lot of work for one of the world’s largest chip manufacturers and getting access to some of their facilities is like pulling teeth. Somebody forgot to submit the right paperwork, it didn’t go to the correct department or project manager, this facility is always locked down on the third Tuesday of every month, for reasons, you name it I’ve encountered it.

It’s going to be an issue anywhere rural.

You have to wonder if they’ve ever actually met any Taiwanese people.

Yeah that’s bullshit.

The Intercept? Are you kidding me?! They are openly committed to advocacy journalism. They don’t even make a pretense of trying to be fair-minded, objective or operating in good-faith. Greenwald is an attorney who’s openly said that he approaches journalism the same way he approaches a case as a litigator.

I am a journalist by formal academic training --though I don’t really work in the business anymore-- and I can tell you for a fact that The Intercept is basically a case study in how many different ways a publication can violate SPJ’s code of ethics. They are a fucking disgrace to the profession and it’s galling that people like you take them seriously.

Bad risk assessment. Most Americans are deeply confused about the things that are likely to kill them vs the things they actively worry about. Maybe that’s not you, but statistically it almost certainly is.

Unless you are a young man in a concentrated poverty neighborhood, your chances of encountering deadly interpersonal violence are vanishingly small. You’re far more likely to be killed by heart disease due to an unhealthy lifestyle, yet the vast majority (not all) of gun-owners pay little or no attention to that aspect of their personal well-being.

The need some people feel to carry a gun isn’t rooted in accurate risk assessment and instead is about a desire to feel empowered or because like my old man --a Vietnam combat vet-- they have a blown-out fight or flight response so that everything looks like a threat even when it’s not. (This is why so many Vietnam vets --again, like my old man-- ended up living off in the woods by themselves; that way they could be in control of their environment at all times which is also why they always carried firearms.)

But ultimately the real problem is that many people aren’t honest with themselves about why they are so wedded to carrying.

The thing is that the experiment you imagine --implementing common-sense gun-reform-- has been run hundreds of times in other countries and the result was not, as you hypothesize, that suddenly they were overrun by bad guys with guns who don’t care about gun laws, but rather was that they saw precipitous declines in gun violence and gun-related deaths.

Basically, your hypothesis, which you and others take for granted as evidently true, is objectively incorrect, and has been shown to be so many times. What does a rational actor do when their hypothesis is shown to be incorrect? Do they continue to defend it? Help me make sense of your thinking, because what it looks like to me is a complete refusal to confront and accept reality.

Wilderness Area is an entirely different designation from a national park. They aren’t administered by the park service but instead by the Forest Service and they don’t typically come with amenities/facilities apart from trailhead parking lots, usually a trail system and sometimes designated campsites and the like. Just FYI. Not that it really matters in this context.

We all do that. Whether we’re aware of it or not. Some of us are more aware of it than others.

Otter Box makes pretty bullet-proof cases. They’re expensive, but worth it. I dropped a phone 10 stories off of a swing stage once and it was fine due to being in an Otter Box. It did break a window on the way down though, so that probably slowed it.

Because it would be a good way to ensure a Trump victory. I hate that it’s come to this, but unfortunately it’s the reality.

Lemmy is largely populated by children who lack the intellectual maturity to appreciate that democracy is about compromise and that winning elections doesn’t mean that you get to do everything you want.

There’s this myth that somehow Biden can just wave a magic wand and get everything he wants, but he’s not doing it because in spite of being arguably the most powerful man on the planet, he’s secretly in the pocket of corporate America. It’s a very childish view of the world and is entirely disconnected from reality.

That’s just bullshit. Many North American publications have called him far worse than a demagogue. You’re saying something that “feels” right but that isn’t actually true. It’s part and parcel with how disconnected from reality so many of us have become.

Nope. You aren’t looking at the bigger picture. The unions that were holding out were doing so to the detriment of the rest of organized labor. Had they continued to be allowed to do so, the economic consequences would have been a devastating PR blow to organized labor, as would the political consequences.

I have to wonder how many of you naysayers are actually involved in organized labor activism, given how out of touch you appear to be with how unions are actually thinking about the railroad strike. We, meaning organized labor, aren’t on the same page as you at all, and while we don’t doubt that you have the best intentions, at this point you’re basically making yourself the enemy by elevating the odds that Trump wins reelection, which would be devastating to organized labor.

I fully expect to be downvoted by Lemmy’s purist zealots, as frequently happens when I don’t toe their extremist line or pretend to be who they think I should be as a union organizer and activist. But I’m the one down here on the front lines, not you fucking privileged cry-babies who are going to flip the table over if you don’t have everything your way.

It’s bullshit. With friends like you, working people don’t even need enemies.