Oh I’ve been to New York and the Wash DC Smithsonian, likely the two best public transit systems in the USA. BART in San Fran also is fine but could be better.
But I’ve also gone to Madrid, Tokyo and some other cities around the world. There’s no comparison. Best in the USA is closer to average of Europe, while average of USA is pretty bad public transit wise.
Ex: I’ve also gone to big cities like Nashville, Manilla Philippines, Los Angeles where things are closer to bus-only and the local traffic suffers greatly as a result. The general expectation in the USA is that ‘public transit is for the underclass’. In contrast, you do see rich people take Wash DC metro, NYC, and especially Tokyo’s subway. And it makes a difference when both rich and poor take the same system.
But all USA cities are car-first designed. As opposed to European model where cars are actively being de-prioritized on a city level.
Except like, New York City. One place in USA where walking works extremely well across the whole of Manhattan. But further out is less good transit, but the central island is well made.
Millennials are ignorant of Rodney King Riots, Desert Storm, Waco / Oklahoma City Bomber (far right domestic terrorism), Newt Gingrich’s rise of the ‘Party of No’, and other such political events of their era. Pop quiz, what is the Cranberries’s Zombie song about?
Gen Z however is keenly aware of the problems occurring around them.
I remember the politics of the 90s. It wasn’t as happy as others point out here. We really didn’t start the fire.
Columbine happened under our childhood yo. And the 1980s going Postal craze was a different brand of public mass shootings. 9/11 was the SECOND attack on the Twin towers after all.
Letty just wants to find a house where he can live and be safe in. But that Demon Lord of Real Estate keeps finding him trap-filled dungeons, or ghost-filled hallways and overemphasizing the security features…
EDIT:
Tohru, despite having a cute and adorable human-form, is actually a badass. So Letty probably is the dragon you were looking for this meme.
Go look at this “90s was full of hope” crap that the rest of this thread is full of.
There were the Troubles in Ireland/Britain, there was Osama Bin Laden (1993 Bombing, 1998 Embassy Bombings). The was far-right nationalism. There was Columbine. There was Rodney King race riots. There was Desert Storm 1.0. There was Ruby Ridge and Waco. Etc. etc.
I dare say that today is possibly more peaceful than back then. We just are more informed about various disasters today than we used to be. All this “Era of Peace” crap the rest of this thread is talking about is pissing me off. It wasn’t like that in the 90s at all.
I’m bringing up the Troubles because 90s-era Troubles got pretty bad, up to the Good Friday Agreement in the very late 90s. The world was always on fire, and any 90s kid talking about “The Peaceful 90s” has extremely selective memory.
Mate we were literal children during these events.
My literal 7 year old niece knows about both the Israel-Hamas War and the Ukrainian War.
I duno how old you were, but lets say 3 years after the Rodney King riots of 92? So lemme pick a random 1995 event. Were you aware that Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated when you were 7? Something I do remember was the USS Cole bombing. Do you remember that? That happened a bit later, Wikipedia says 12 October 2000.
The issue isn’t “we were children”. The issue is that research and information was far more difficult back then. Newspapers cost money and required manual reading. (Though I was able to pickup a few Newspapers when I was waiting for a haircut or other such events). We didn’t have online forums (well, ignoring BBS and USENET)… or at least online forums weren’t popular. And internet was very expensive and slow back then. So we didn’t get information anywhere as quickly as children today get information.
Secondly, it wasn’t “cool” to be politically informed before 9/11. That was just nerd shit back then. 9/11 changed our collective mindsets and everyone became more aware of world events.
Good. Now look at the rest of this thread downstream. Plenty of people talking about how “peaceful” the 90s were as if they didn’t live in that era.
I stand by what I said. Millennials largely were ignorant of world events before 9/11 and the overall explosion of information the internet afforded us. Meanwhile, GenZ always lived in post 9/11 world AND always had information at their fingertips.
Nerds weren’t celebrated back in the 90s. If you knew too much back then (or showed that you knew too much), people would look at you funny and bully you. Today, knowledge is more generally appreciated.
Yup. Its nothing about “better” or “worse”. Its about the technological differences of today’s children vs myself as a child.
Here’s a memory for yall who are too young to remember how dumb we were in the 90s. On 9/11, bullies were blaming China (and me, being a slanty-eye Asian) for bringing down the Twin Towers. I think people don’t grasp how unfathomably ignorant pre-Internet and pre-9/11 people were. Such a mistake wouldn’t happen today.
Nothing against those bullies. Everyone was that dumb back then.
9/11 was a big wakeup moment. Society collectively decided that paying attention to world events was important, and we got smarter. Technology improved as well, so it became easier to look up news events after that. But deep down within our collective psyche was a turning point in foreign-policy mindset. I’m seeing that Gen Z today is far more anxious and worried about world events (both good, and bad, associated with that). The 90s “peaceful” era of my youth was an illusion, it was created by my (and my peer’s) collective ignorance about the world.
I look at my ignorant Youth vs what GenZ grows up with today, I see pros/cons with both. I think knowing more about the world is a better thing overall though.
Ummm… no. I loaded it through a floppy found in the mail through a system called shareware. (Where people would leave floppy disks in people’s mailboxes, and we didn’t know what viruses were so we just plugged them into our computers).
Did you actually exist in the 90s? That was floppy era of shareware, you’d spread games like Doom by mail and/or by copying the floppy and giving it to a friend. That’s why it was called SHAREware, you shared it with friends. In some cases, computer stores would combine a bunch of shareware games into CD-ROMs (650MBs!!! So much space!!) and you’d get a lot of shareware all at once.
And with 25-million subscribers, that’s only some ~25% of American-households with AOL back then, at its absolute peak. Internet in general was never a common thing for Americans to get until the Broadband era.
If you want to talk about the internet in the 90s, be my guest. But any Millennial who lived through that era remembers that the internet was relatively rare. Most people’s exposure was through libraries and maybe schools/university systems.
The best we had in the 90s was Encarta, ya know, that CD-ROM Microsoft sent with some computers?
My library was on Dewey Decimal / Card Catalog for a good chunk of my childhood. If I was looking up information, it was like that. The computers were some weird old DOS-like prompt screen that almost no one knew how to use. No fucking internet. My Dad happened to be able to get Microsoft Encarta and that was the first time I ever was able to look up information in any manner similar to today, but as a CD-ROM it was only about historical / cultural old stuff, not about recent events.
No, I’m a millennial I used the Internet.
And secondly, bullshit. Wikipedia wasn’t invented yet… and if it had been invented, it wasn’t respected until the 2010s+ (unable to be used to write our school reports off of). So what website were you even using back then if you happened to magically have access to the Internet?
We were playing Neopets, maybe using GameFAQs or spreading memes on SomethingAwful. But looking up information? What is this, 2010s+ ?? No one trusted the internet yet for information.
Wikipedia started in '01. I was absolutely using it before '02/'03 for schoolwork. Just because you didn’t know about it or how to cite things doesn’t mean that applies to everyone.
100% bullshit. You’re forgetting that I’ve actually lived in this era. No teacher was accepting of Wikipedia citations until the later 00s. There was no trust on Wikipedia’s articles until much later. You didn’t cite Wikipedia because your Teachers would penalize you for doing so. (and this culture was true well throughout all the 00s). Citations on the other hand, were just a Microsoft Word / .doc plugin so it wasn’t that big a deal.
Furthermore: there were competing online wikis and webpages. I don’t even think Wikipedia was the breakout wiki at that age, but instead the C2 Wiki.