• JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Your individualism. Of course I’m aware of the huge downsides, but my understanding is that personal freedom has been a vanishing rare thing in human history. As I see it, some very odd circumstances (puritans and the frontier) generated the USA, which morphed into something even weirder still: a libertarian superpower. Which then, in extremis, saved the rest of us from authoritarianism of both right and left. Probably temporarily. I predict that after it all collapses, and with better hindsight, we’ll appreciate the USA more than we do today.

  • zaphodb2002
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    12 hours ago

    As many have said, our National Parks are incredible, and even outside of them most of the western US is pretty awe-inspiring. I live in a place where, within an hour or two, I can go to desert badlands, alpine forests, coastal tide pools, and even skiing resorts for decent chunks of the year. I was recently up at 11k ft altitude in the Sierras and at -250 ft in Death Valley a few hours apart. The US is HUGE and big parts of it are still very wild. It’s something worth fighting to preserve.

    Edit: Also we can’t read, I am American. Look, I didn’t say the education system was good.

    • Donebrach@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Don’t worry; as a person born and raised in New Mexico most people would consider me an immigrant so I can say that I agree with your sentiment that the land is truly glorious. We got a freakin northern coast and a temperate massive grassland for farming all the food anyone could ever need (barring tornado or big agriculture ruining it). Not to mention a great trench in which to cast dissidents or non-virginal women who dared to miscarry their pregnancies. We also got The Big River and then built the bigger car-river! Truly, a wondrous land.

  • jxk
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    15 hours ago

    Using the period as a decimal separator rather than the comma

  • CRUMBGRABBER@lemm.ee
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    11 hours ago

    Without the American innovation of deep frying a wrapped dough something within another wrapped dough something and serving it in a bucket, I don’t think civilization would be on the positive path it is on right now.

    • pirating@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Don’t forget about the National Monuments! They’re not sculptures etc, but cool stuff like walls of dinosaur bones and canyons!

    • themadcodger@kbin.earth
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      14 hours ago

      Totally worth it. The ones you’ve actually heard of though are too popular and generally require a reservation and waiting to visit. But there are a LOT of National Parks that are “less popular” that are just as amazing that don’t require reservations or possibly even entrance fees.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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        12 hours ago

        Sure. Oftentimes it’s the not so popular places that have their own charm. And I mean the USA is kind of a big place 😆 There are lots of very different experiences to choose from.

    • 0x4E4F
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      15 hours ago

      Had a good chuckle 🤣🤣🤣.

  • ma1w4re@lemm.ee
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    16 hours ago

    Content. Without it there wouldn’t be an abundance of free learning material. I’m already feeling the pain of trying to find any decent lesson about my interests after Russian government blocked YouTube.

  • Ving Thor@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    The national parks. I visited Yosemite Valley two years ago and it was amazing. We don’t have acces to nature in this scale in central europe.

    • jubilationtcornpone
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      14 hours ago

      I’m an American but I remember talking to a gentleman from Belgium years ago while visiting Muir Woods. He said something along the lines of, “You all have some of the best national parks in the world. You should be very proud of them.”

      That conversation gave me a new appreciation for our national parks. We are fortunate to have some pretty amazing scenery in the US.

  • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    12 hours ago

    Whatever we did during the campaign to get kids to stop smoking cigarettes managed to work wonders. Even counting vape, the nicotine users numbers are way down. There are other countries with legal weed who still have more tobacco smokers than us too so I think its more than just the availability of weed, although that clearly helped a lot.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOP
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      8 hours ago

      I managed to quit smoking via vaping!

      Aaaaaand then we banned all the flavored vapes, including those without nicotine. So I fell back into cigarettes. So stupid.

    • Tar_Alcaran
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      12 hours ago

      The answer is a whole-society approach, AND heavy regulation. You provide information from a whole host of sources, government and private, and you basically ban disinformation (read: advertising) from contradicting or subverting it.