Most cities have a bus service, but they only rarely connect to smaller towns (“smaller” being relative here, like 30,000 people).

To put it in perspective, I live in a suburban apartment outside of a medium-sized city in Ohio. There is a single busline that goes through my neighborhood (which thankfully has a stop right outside my complex). A bus comes by once an hour between 7 AM and 7 PM.

This can get you to work if you’re lucky enough to work a 9-5 next to a bus stop. My work has a bus stop, but I work a 4-12, so no luck.

My favorite bar is in the next town over, a college town about 15 minutes down the road. If I wanted to get there by public transit, I would need to wait for the hourly bus outside of my apartment, get off at a grocery store, wait about a half an hour for a connecting bus from the college town’s bus service, and that’s not even counting the drive time.

And if I don’t leave the bar by 6 PM, of course, I’m stranded without an Uber or something, because even on weekends (not that I have weekends off work) the busses only run till 7 PM.

And there’s other towns nearby that I literally cannot take public transport to. I had to work an event in a smaller city (but still probably within the top 20 in the state for population) about half an hour drive away. There is no bus service that connects me to them. The only options are driving or Uber.

I was going to answer “in the Internet Hole”, which was also my college nickname

🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵

Fuck French Toast, marry Waffles, kill pancakes

There are plenty of governments that do that. Cuba, China, Vietnam, Korea, the late Soviet Union.

While Stalinist ultraleft economic policies were not so generous to small businesses, the new Chinese model (which has been adopted by most Socialist states, bar Korea, which hews still to the failed Stalinist model) focuses on nationalization of heavy industry (steel, aggregate, resource extraction, refinery) while allowing consumer goods and small-scale retail to remain in the hands of business owners.

The reason this doesn’t happen in the West or its neocolonies is that it hampers the wealth and resource extraction of the international finance capital class.

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

The disappointing answer is that it’s going to be very similar to how things are now, just with fewer rights and more repression around the edges. Almost all of Project 2025’s policies are things that this nation has used in the past or is using today to a lesser degree - voter suppression, rollback of labor rights and civil liberties. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, but that was happening long before Trump.

Proteins don’t necessarily just mean meats etc. Most vegetables and grains have protein in them that is contributing towards your daily requirements.

No offense intended to OP, but anyone who thinks the world works this way is hopelessly naive about the system we live in.

When it comes down to it, the reason all of these issues exist comes down to Capitalism (Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Fascism, NIMBYism, w/e flavor you want).

Good public transit is a great example because there are so many reasons we don’t have it and all of them come down to Capitalism.

• the failure of our Healthcare system for the poor, unhoused, and uninsured means that severely mentally ill people make public transit feel unsafe. Ditto for criminalization of addiction and high poverty in general.

• The American government’s reliance on the Petrodollar to control world trade promotes oil-based transportation options, especially inefficient ones that take more oil (since the goal is increased consumption, not efficiency).

• A general lack of tenant’s rights and a tendency for local governments to favor landholders and and business owners over working-class renters (who tend to be more transient and are less likely to buy out local politicians) means that more attention is given to individualized transport (car infrastructure) and less to transport methods more suited to higher density. Not to mention the fear the petite bourgeoisie have towards poor people, who might potentially use public transport to invade their walled gardens.

There are so many reasons even on top of these. They all come down to Capitalism; and, no, to the Liberals of Lemmy, I don’t mean markets. Markets can do a lot of good when it comes to making efficient public transport, when managed correctly. The issue is the power that those with money (and not just the billionaires; the petty millionaires who own a couple strip malls is just as bad when it comes to opposition towards public transport) exert over our lives and governments.

Those probably aren’t hairs you’ve eaten; long hairs tend to just fall into your shirt/pants and are worked up into your butt as you walk around for the day.

Well, one other thing is that instances will only fetch content from communities that at least one instance member is subscribed to. Every instance will have a slightly different selection of content because of what communities the existing members have subscribed to (and larger instances will typically have a broader selection of content, because they have more users).

The only important thing, really, is that the instance you choose doesn’t defederate with other instances for political reasons (except being literal Nazi instances). I find that lemm.ee users have a good mix of political expression ranging from Marxists to Moderate Conservatives. An account there, on lemmy.zip, or lemmy.ml is probably your best bet.

I think it’s because most of those personal stories were attention-grabbing fakes and there’s fewer incentives to do that on Lemmy