That sucks.
I don’t know if this is a thing anymore but “back in my day” your friends/family/coworkers/roommates would try to hook you up with other people that they know are single and might be a good match. Especially the older ladies in your life, that was like their mission in life. Aside from that, you might ask someone who runs in overlapping circles that you’ve seen a few times if they want to get coffee or lunch.

The closest thing to Tinder-type dating would have been “cruising” on a Friday and Saturday night, driving up and down the Main Street of your town, hanging out in parking lots to talk and make plans for the night. Even then, you would ask “where do/did you go to school” and “do you know ____” “are you related to” type questions to establish your “degrees of Kevin Bacon” relationship in the social network.

So there was no need to date total strangers. That would be considered kinda weird and suspicious, which is why online dating was heavily stigmatized in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. I went on a few match.com and eharmony dates but kept it secret, telling only my closest friends, out of shame. They thought I was crazy, meeting up with strangers like that.

A few horny guys would try to chat up every random stranger and it occasionally paid off for them, but that wasn’t really normal behavior.

I think we’re all more mobile now, moving from city to city for work, so those networks are probably shattered for most people.

I feel so incredibly lucky that I dodged the dating app bullet, it seems awful for guys to try and compete in that space. And for women, having creepy dudes be creepy with no repercussions, with no way to tell their mother/aunt/sister to smack some sense into them… not great.

1. There are plenty of tiny coffee places (and other small businesses) near me where the owner is there all day, every day with just one or two employees. You’ll get to know them if you want to. You might also bump into them around town. If they suck, patronize a different place.

2. Theoretically, most of the money that I spend there stays in town, helping to keep other businesses and families going. They probably sponsor the local animal shelter or little league team. I like that.

3. I’ve worked in small businesses and corporate America. In my experience corporate America always sucks, small business only sometimes suck. I don’t like supporting large corporations and especially not their admin and C-suite. Those vampires are why the wealth gap is growing so quickly.

4. Corporate food is boring.

5. Some people argue that all of the transportation involved in moving around product and people for multi-national corporations is worse for the environment. I don’t care about that personally but it seems like a reasonable conclusion.

I stand corrected!

Ruby is just one guy, Vermin Supreme

You’ll be fine. The average Texan isn’t even aware of this stupid shit and the cities you listed are way more left-leaning than a small town in whatever state you’re from.

This is a few hundred idiots in a state with a population of 30 million people. I saw more people at Costco yesterday.

Some articles have misrepresented it as 1,000 people, but that was a concert in Dripping Springs, a small town outside of Austin (not the border) with Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin. 1,000 people turning out for a musician with Top 40 hits is actually a very poor turnout for being near a city with 1,000,000 people.

This is all just media hype. Edit to add: And politician hype. I’m not sure which one I’m angrier at. They both suck for trying to “make fetch happen.”

Haha yeah, bacon always wins. Potato chips on a sandwich are nice for that same kinda fluffy crunch layer.

Cooked onions, I suppose I’d agree. They’re just kinda mushy. Raw onions on the other hand have a great crunchy texture to me.

Thick sliced raw onion rings on burgers fluffs the whole thing up a bit and adds some airy crunch.

They add a nice crunchy texture to Greek salad as well.

Cut into lengthwise strips, they’re similarly fun in stir-fry if you don’t cook them too long.

Diced on top of a tostada or taco or bagel with cream cheese and lox, they add a little crunchy something but admittedly this could be also be achieved with pretty much anything not-squishy.

Texas isn’t some dystopian hellscape like your examples, nor will it become one in our lifetime.
It’s just another example of a gerrymandered state with loud-mouthed shitheads riling their base up and clinging to power despite their declining poll numbers.
47% of Texan voters chose Biden in 2020, 52% voted Trump. Meanwhile in California it went 64% Biden, 34% Trump. Not that different. Also interesting to note, 6 million people voted for Trump in California, while only 5.9 million people voted for Trump in Texas. Seems like California has a bigger problem than Texas, maybe we should give them to Mexico or have them secede or whatever as well?

Texas has a good chance of being blue in our lifetime as cities grow in population and the demographic continues to skew… younger and less “white.”
Source

Edit to add: let’s say for fun that your Gaza/Hmong/Rhohingya comparison is true and a liberal holocaust is coming. One stereotype about Texans that actually is true is that most of us (left and right, urban and rural) own guns and generally like guns for sport, hunting, defense, etc. Attempting a liberal holocaust in a densely populated, urban environment full of gun fanciers that don’t like authority would not go well for the invaders.

What do you think is happening in Texas?!?!
You sound like my in-laws talking about Portland as if it’s constantly on fire with ANTIFA checkpoints throughout the city.
Cities in Texas (where most people live) are the same as every other city in America, overpriced housing, tech bros, craft breweries, overpriced coffee, tapas bars, suburbs filled with church-going pearl-clutchers. It’s literally the same exact shit with slightly different food and ethnic background of blue collar workers.
The rural areas are significantly more fucked up, economically (and I would argue socially) but that’s true of absolutely every blue state. Go to rural California, Oregon, Washington and you have the EXACT same people as rural Texas.
Go to LA, NYC, SF, Portland and you have literally the same people as Austin, Dallas, Houston, because a lot of people you meet are from those cities.

If people had to move states every time a relatively tiny group of idiots advocated for something stupid that’s never going to happen, there would be nowhere on earth to live.

To add to your excellent point (that there are more democrats in Texas than the entire population of many states), very, very few people are actually a part of this “movement.”
This isn’t a real thing that normal people actually endorse, it’s a bumper sticker you see on an old beat up truck in the wal-mart parking lot.
It’s like the Texas version of flat earthers or ghost/alien hunters or Bigfoot researchers. They do exist but they are massively over-represented in the press because it’s so stupid that people can’t help but “tune in.”

“Just 63 people made it to the South in 2021, more than 90% down from 2019, when 1,047 arrived. The number stayed low in 2022, at just 67.”

So no rental properties at all? You either buy or you’re homeless? That doesn’t sound great to me. Owning is a lot of work, risk and commitment. If anything goes wrong, you better have thousands of dollars ready to dump into getting your roof fixed or your plumbing fixed or whatever. If you decide you want to go to a different school or accept a better job offer in another city, you’re probably gonna lose tens of thousands of dollars to the real estate agents when you sell. It’s not the right choice for a lot of people.

I’ve lived mostly in houses owned by landlords with less than ten properties and they were all pretty cool for the most part. Way better landlords than apartment complexes or property management companies. The biggest annoyance was surprise visits by them early on the weekend to plant flowers/bushes in the front yard, water the tree, replace edging, typical homeowner crap like that. I guess worse than that, a couple of times their situation changed and they decided to move back into the house, so they didn’t renew our lease and we had to move out. That kinda sucked but it’s their house, if they want to live in it and your lease is up, that’s the way contracts go.

All that said, property management companies and large landlords can get fucked. Regardless of housing cost, they’ve always been scumbags to deal with.

“ When combining closings between both larger, private equity and smaller, independent operations, investors accounted for 44% of the purchases of flips during the third quarter”

That figure is talking about only flipped (i.e. remodeled) houses bought in a specific quarter, October 2022. Most people (myself included) can’t afford freshly remodeled homes and brand new cars.
That figure also lumps small landlords together with big investors which really isn’t the same thing in my opinion but some people around here think that all landlords are evil so that’s somewhat subjective I guess.

Institutional investors “purchased 25% of the homes flipped” “as soaring mortgage rates push traditional buyers to the sidelines,”

That still sucks but it’s not 44% of all homes being bought by big corporations throughout 2023.

Here’s a recent Business Insider article that goes in depth on who’s been buying houses over time

I agree with most of what you said but that 44% number is wildly wrong. Article about it
Also, anecdotally, I’ve gone through a couple of houses in hot markets the last 5 years (had to move for work) as both buyer and seller. The vast majority of people looking weren’t corporate or institutions. Most were couples looking for a place to live. Cash buyers above asking are a real thing though and they suuuuuuuck for the poors like myself.

It’s not even close to true. Here’s an article about it

I just wanted to mention that I got a chuckle out of the word “pallettable” because it’s not quite right but I totally see how you got there. I thought you might like to know that the word is “palatable.”
A palette is the board that a painter uses to hold paint, a pallet is something you pick up with a forklift and a palate is the roof of your mouth/your tasting skill. So something that’s pallettable sounds like something tasty that you’d smear all over a giant board and forklift onto a truck.
Fucking English, lol