Community for asking and answering any question related to the life, the people or anything related to the USA. Non-US people are welcome to provide their perspective! Please keep in mind:
!politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world - politics in our daily lives is inescapable, but please post overtly political things there rather than here
!flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com - similarly things with the goal of overt agitation have their place, which is there rather than here
Rules
Be nice or gtfo
Discussions of overt political or agitation nature belong elsewhere
I am currently visiting the USA, and before I leave I want to try some food that is "uniquely" american - IE, you can't really find it outside of the country.
UK stores do tend to have a "USA section" which has a small amount of sweets and other products. But I am wondering what americans specifically missed / couldn't find in other countries.
As an example - Wendy's as far as I've seen, isn't local to the UK or at least where I live. So trying that was a "unique american food", to me.
I'm also in Chicago at the moment, so I made sure to try a proper (real?) Chicago deep dish pizza (loved it, by the way).
Alternatively, any other suggestions of food to try?
Immediate edit - turns out Wendy's is in some locations in the UK. I just assumed incorrectly!
Context for why I'm asking: I'm trans and currently live in Minnesota, I moved here from Florida so I have some idea of how miserable big moves can be. I can get EU citizenship which makes me very lucky, but...
Do I sit here and hope Minnesota can protect me from 🥭 or do I try to build a life somewhere else, again?
We all know FDR only went so far with including black people in new deal programs to appease the southern coalition of Dems. He also denied entry for Jewish Refugees and deported many Mexicans during the Great Depression.
Once LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act, Dems essentially lost the South forever.
Nixon pulled federal funding from affordable public housing in black neighborhoods and it strengthened his base.
Reagan blamed the aids epidemic on gay people and was embraced by the country.
Obama had to run on being anti-gay marriage in 08, but ran on being pro-gay marriage in 2012 and lost some support.
Trump spent millions in anti-trans ads. And leaned into the trans panic.
I know social issues aren’t everything, but it seems like that’s the direction America has gone post Civil Rights.
"Hi, everyone—This map is based on my 2024 Linguistics PhD dissertation, A geographic analysis of lexical variation in North American English using Reddit corpora. (You can read it here.)
For this project, I extracted huge amounts of text data from top-ranked posts for subreddits dedicated to cities in the US, Canada, and Britain (although my project focused on North America). From each subreddit, I counted the usages of particular synonymous word pairs, like cute and adorable, or forest and woodland. I then calculated the ratio between the two words in each pair for each city subreddit. With each city subreddit corresponding to a real-world geographic location, I was able to run statistics to identify regional clustering in the usage of each word pa
Genuinely can't figure out how other people develop active social lives. The most common advice I get is to look on Meetup, but I found pretty much one group and while I had fun, halfway through the event they started making fun of liberals for not having friends. I'm genderqueer so that ain't gonna work out. Everything else on Meetup is scientology garbage.
I go out and do things on my own and try to be open to people who approach me, but on the rare occasion someone wants to talk to me it's because they're horny and they've mistaken me for a straight woman. I can be out in the mud picking up litter and someone will strike up a conversation about the environment, something I'm interested in, and it turns out it's because they think I'm doing this to get the D.
I'm getting crazy bored. Does everyone just work a 9-5 and then go home alone? Except for when they have sex with the occasional random straight man??
I’m a 21-year-old guy and since they unfortunately didn’t teach us about American history in school I wanna learn it all on my own from the beginning to the present.
I’m really looking forward to a deep dive to not only understand American history better but also to get a better grasp of the culture, people, economics, politics and social aspects that influenced America to become what it is now.
I was wondering what the best ways and resources are to do this. Maybe someone can recommend some good media resources. It doesn’t matter what it is, it could be books, videos, podcasts, documentaries, documents, articles, movies and so on.
I was just watching "American Primeval", when it occurred to me (again) that the US was a place where oddball religions could prosper. Two recent successful examples of very weird ones being Mormons and Scientology (although the latter is a bit less successful lately).
Why is it that weird things catch on so readily in the US?
Of course, the "founders" were people that were kicked out of everywhere else because they were trying to convert them to their extremist religious views (and yet US people are fond of trying to find family ties to them... "hey, my great, great, great grand father was a religious lunatic! But yours wasn't")
So now, Mormons (Jews totally rowed to the US, for some reason, and then Jesus came there, and there were horses, and cities, and there's absolutely no archaeological trace, probably because god) have an astounding foothold despite their creed (I'm saying this because I have read the book of Mormon).
Then there's Scientology, and I don't even know where t
There are many reasons you might have unclaimed funds (abandoned accounts, uncashed checks, misspelled names, incorrect addresses, misplaced inheritance and trusts, etc), and your state is required to hold your property until you claim it.
They will not seek you out, and most people are completely unaware they may have lost funds or property being held by the state.
Every state has an official (.gov) website where you can check whether you have unclaimed property and submit a claim. Just search ‘[my state] unclaimed property’.
e: make sure you go to the official state website; I just noticed some state search top results aren’t the official (.gov) website.
e2: also, check every state you’ve lived in. Moving state is one of the major reasons this happens, and your unclaimed funds will not move to a new state with you.
e3: if you find unclaimed funds, please comment! I’m fascinated to know, no ma