Do people make friends at Applebee's?

This is why we have to rethink policy situations. Mandatory friend-making at Applebee's every Thursday.

I meet lots of people of different social classes at the Squirrel Cage. Or did years ago. Mostly I still talk to the same people.

I do all my networking at the Applebees salad bar

I guess you can get drunk really cheap if you go to Applebee's at the right time. But you mostly have to drive to get to one. They aren't usually near transit or walkable.

Just have one of your new friends give you a lift home.

They're drunk too.

I had lots of cross-class Facebook friends, but I hid them for Trump-related reasons. Growing up, I was the only one in my peer group with two college educated parents.

I thought they were squirrels.

No. Just people I went to high school with.

I thought they were drunk.

Some of them.

I'm surprised by the implication that chain restaurants have larger catchment areas and as much/more uniformity of distribution than pharmacies.

Maybe Food Fight Fridays would help with the cross-class interactions at Local Chain Franchise.

US pharmacies that.is. In the UK/Europe they're usually bodega sized.

I don't really go to chain restaurants if I'm not traveling.

Except fast food. Chipotle and Five Guys mostly.

Five Guys near us closed down, presumably for being too expensive for this area.

I helped a neighbor who's living on disability payments across the street from me for a while while she had extensive spinal surgery-- first walked her dog, then helped her out by changing her antibiotic tube daily after she got into an argument with staff at the hospital and discharged herself before she was really ready. Then buried the dog (blind, deaf, and mobility impaired before I got there, not my fault). She's renting, will be relocated by the end of next year. Met a bunch of other neighbors who chipped in as well, including an ex of hers who is responsible for her kind-of extravagant christmas decorations. So on my block, it turns out that the guy who would put santa and the reindeer on the roof is an ex-felon.

Being in the same store with someone is not much contact. Maybe bowling leagues or something?

They closed our bowling alley.

Yeah, ultimately I think some NIMBYs are somewhat motivated by personal greed but by far predominant is their sense of the desirable neighborhood, which (whatever their race) tends to include strict class segregation. (Plenty of other places for those people to live! -or- Why does everyone feel entitled to live in an expensive metro area anyway?)

One way to think about density is that it allows large combinations of people, mediated by developers of any or no profit motive, to outbid the rich for scarce land.

I have a number of acquaintances/neighbors who range from annoyed to fearful that "city" people use that large grocery store closest to us (which though a bit of a quirk is actually within the city limits despite not being directly connected to the city--it is on the land originally dedicated to the city waterworks).

Some of the more fearful drive extra miles to more pure suburban places.

Not sure what my point is. Fuck everything.

At least that is a good Five Guy's down the street.

"Rent nihilism" (or its allied "parking nihilism") - any improvement to public spaces or any new likable business opening is bad because it will increase rents and/or make it harder to park.

The best place to meet economically diverse people is art openings. Lots of people from all over the city (and sometimes farther afield), ranging from very poor to ultra-wealthy, many of them interested in talking to strangers and connecting with new people.

Sometimes the art comes with cheese. That always draws more people.

25: I would have thought the same... and, I guess that the article says museums and historical sites aren't as cross-class, but doesn't say anything about art in specific. In our City, they have a monthly Art-Hop that does have a relatively broad cross-class attendance, sometimes facilitated by free cheese as Moby mentions. I bet that movie theaters would look good in their data too, if they're mostly measuring people who share a space.

I only go to art if people I know what to go to art. Same with movies.

They closed our bowling alley.

Just doing their civic duty to prevent bowling alone.

Art-Hop

I would go to an art house pancake place. Especially on Food Fight Friday.

What s/b want in 28.

How about an avant garde Olive Garden? We could call it the Ovant Garde-n.

My socialist fish restaurant was going to be called Red Lobster, but apparently that's already been taken.

Growing up it was kids (boys) non-school sports teams that were the great class mixers. That was less true for my kids era given the rise of "premier" or AAA teams and leagues where it cost thousands for your kid to play not just ice hockey (always expensive) but soccer and basketball too. The other significant class mixer when I was a kid (1950s-1960s), again much more the case for boys than for girls, was summer jobs. It was common for MC and UMC boys to work as bus boys or dish washers in local restaurants, also doing physical labor for parks department (the latter went to politically connected people where I grew up). It wasn't that you'd meet other low income kids your age doing these jobs -- that was all other MC and UMC kids. The cross class mixing came from all the other, older people working in those establishments and definitely wasn't the type of thing to promote any engagement outside of the workplace.

Times Square Red Times Square Blue seems pertinent, but you can't really mandate hooking up in porn theaters any more than you can going to IHOP.

There's a constitutional right to avoid sticky places.

I think about this a LOT. I have actually made lists a couple of times about the daily encounters I have vs. those that are common in my sisters' lives.

An ordinary day for me includes things like:
- chat with apartment building security guard (working or middle-class Black people)
- brief interactions with apartment neighbors (one or more of: elder Black ladies, elder disabled white ladies, working-class Black families, Asian university students or faculty, Asian medical students)
- visit to grocery store (one has an entire kosher aisle; the other caters to Black clientele)
- visit to pharmacy (fully 1/5 of items in store are locked up, including not just razors, baby milk, and condoms but basic foods and other toiletries).
- ride on public transportation (waiting at station/riding on trains with diverse mix of riders)
- consult with home health aide (almost exclusively working-class immigrant women of color)

In contrast, my sisters:
- drive exclusively in their own cars
- shop only in stores in affluent white neighborhoods with zero items locked up (except tobacco, of course) and minimal "ethnic foods" sections
- never ever have "out of stock" issues of common prescription medications at the pharmacy (I've had chronic issues at three different pharmacies near me)
- take their kids to sports, dance, and other events that are equally filled with other white, affluent parents and kids. There is ONE child of color on my 13 yo niece's soccer team, for example.

We live 5-20 miles apart, but our daily lives are dramatically different in terms of the interactions we tend to have.

(I should add, it's especially notable to me because I've been doing a fair bit of aunt duties, so am spending the night at their places and driving to the places that they generally shop/take their kids. I'm seeing this stuff firsthand; it's not guesswork on my part).

I'm reminded of the incident I heard of second-hand, of one of my aunts (the more upwardly mobile one), told by another aunt I'm closer to. My aunt was apparently at a salon or nail place - a very white place - and a Black woman came in with some personal care emergency needing a pair of scissors, and the shop's response was apparently to deride her for her tacky nails, and not help her. And she related this to my other aunt like it was a funny story!

I have only one aunt now. She told me that the United States government created AIDS and also that white students weren't allowed to go to medical school in the United States. Those conversations were in different centuries.

Thin line between heaven and here.

I think this is a third-space problem, isn't it? I don't know if there's ever a *lot* of mixing between classes, but a life where some people are hanging out with people not at the office is one where they will encounter a wider set of beliefs and practices.

I don't know if it's progressive-making but it's echo chamber reducing. It's noticeable for me because of the university bubble (pretty typical) and the LDS bubble (fairly atypical.)

I don't know if it's a 3rd space problem. Country clubs count as 3rd spaces.

NMM to stacking the proles in windowless towers.

The TV series "Upload" was fun for two seasons, but the third season is dragging and I'm probably going to give up on it. There was at least one good gag in it, though, when the main characters visited Charlie Munger Reduced Circumstance Housing.

I have no idea what Upload is, but that's a good joke.

I feel like there's a distinction to be made between the third spaces that require some amount of money to use, and those that don't.

Local avant-garde art house pancake place that sponsors cross-class Food Fight Fridays has a hand-lettered sign above the entrance to the restrooms that reads: "the turd place"

"Bowling alone" is a euphemism.

On the OP, I remember learning about the "dissolution of the social fabric" back in my US History class in high school, where the main culprit was streetcar suburbs. The rich used to have to interact with the poor, since the city was where everyone lived and worked, but streetcars allowed the wealthy to live comfortably and cross through the poor, instead of having to interact in a more substantial way. While it wasn't the first time people moved apart, it seemed like a reasonable explanation for one wave of rich and poor (from the 1890s to 1920s) to interact less.

I live in what used to be a streetcar suburb. Or neighborhood. I don't know whether the street car or the city border arrived first.

50: Streetcars go a fair way further than that - even before electric or cable cars there were horse-drawn omnibuses and then horse-drawn streetcars on rails. Before that things were so different as to be unrecognizable: the vast majority of people's daily lives was limited to walking radius.

51: The city. Liberty township annexed in 1868.

Before that things were so different as to be unrecognizable: the vast majority of people's daily lives was limited to walking radius.

I've been reading about the Revolutionary War lately and it's fascinating how much of the early fighting took place in areas that are now part of New York City but were then extremely rural.

53: Thanks. All I know is that Boundary Street used to be a the boundary, but that has been a while.

And most of your national security estab;ishment is lives among Civil War battlefields. Though I wonder how common that is, globally.

Is the place where Lincoln almost got shot during a battle within the city limits of DC? I've been there but I can't remember. Also don't remember the name of the battle.

I don't think there were any battles actually within the city limits, though a few were pretty close.

It's apparently in NW.

Huh, I stand corrected.

54: Yeah, Howe landed his troops at the relatively remote locale of Kip's Bay--about 33rd St.

That's a long way from a Metro stop if you need reinforcements.

61: Then later at Throg's Neck, a peninsula that was sometimes an island at high tide.

But until 1871 the city and the district were not coterminous - and it looks like the site of Fort Stevens would have been unincorporated Washington County.

Its kinda bullshit that VA got to keep their portion of DC after the war.

Your establishment doesn't stop at the district limits, it sprawls all over NoVa.

Oh yeah, your 56 is definitely correct.

There was a brief Civil War skirmish in my former front yard, about 100 or 150 feet from the DC line. Between Mass and River -- just a little closer to the former -- and I guess I wouldn't be surprised if some Confederate soldiers along the line, north or south of us, stepped over into DC. My little development was at the time a farm owned by a Quaker family. Their house wasn't too far away from mine, and there's an old family graveyard kind of hidden behind some of the houses a couple of blocks away.

MC, of course the area around DC was hotly contested. First, the enemy's national capital is a pretty important target in any war. Second, the boundary is right there, so post-war, you'd expect a lot of government development on both sides of the river.

Right now, there a big foo-faw about whether the new FBI HQ should be in Virginia or Maryland. People have strong opinions! The Maryland cite is in PG county which, despite considerable Confederate sympathy, didn't see much of the Confederate Army, I don't think. [I'm sure someone will correct me!] The geography was maybe a lot more favorable for places like Monocacy and Frederick, west of DC. Certainly it'd be easier to move an army across the River in western Montgomery than to Charles or St. Mary Counties. The latter had a prison for captured Confederate soldiers, right on the water, which I suppose shows how little fear there was of the Confederate Navy.

PG county was more escaping Confederate assassin territory.

DC was also memorably burned back in 1814. PG county saw battle at that time.

Memorable burns are nice to have, but even ephemeral burns are enough to keep most stand-ups in business.

It's interesting once noticed. The capital, once established, becomes powerful, hence a prize, hence the site of battles; it accumulates about itself mythic events which make it yet more powerful. Like a pearl adding nacre tumor growing blood vessels.

||

Hyder's U.S. and Canadian customs houses have been shot at, burned down, and generally harassed by Natives and Anglos alike. At one point, the Canadian border post was subject to a psyops campaign consisting of a PA system blasting a continuous loop of "North to Alaska."

Working together even though they didn't have an Olive Garden.

Hyder is weird. It's technically part of the US but functionally part of Canada. (I've never been there myself.)

I'm still unclear why Hyder is of interest to any tourists as Wikipedia claims: "It is popular with motorists wishing to visit Alaska without driving the length of the Alaska Highway, and is otherwise landlocked." They want to say they've set foot in Alaska by going to a town of 48 you can't get anywhere else from without getting on a seaplane? Is it a visa thing?

I think you can drive there just fine from the regular Canadian highway.

People want to visit all 50 states and so forth. If you're driving it's hundreds of miles closer than the next entrance to Alaska, and not too far off one of the main highways through BC. There's nothing all that interesting in the town itself AFAIK.

People also do daytrips on the ferry from Prince Rupert to Ketchikan for the same reason. There's a lot of actually cool stuff to see in Ketchikan though.

I guess when you've laboriously driven through 49 other states a technical achievement can be more attractive.

Driving to Hawaii would be more impressive, it's true.

I heard the cybertruck works as a boat.

I should say in fairness to Hyder that it doesn't have any unusual attractions compared to similar sorts of towns elsewhere in Alaska, but they may be different from what you can see on the Canadian side. There's a glacier and a bear-viewing area. That sort of stuff isn't hard to find in Alaska but maybe it is further inland.

82: Ship of the desert--that's different.

Anything is a boat if your time frame is short enough.

I visited Moose Factory for no particular reason other than the novelty of visiting an island with that name- there wasn't much there. They weren't making any moose at that time.

I think you need to be there during rut.

86: That is really far to go, from pretty much anywhere at all, just to say you've been!

I've been to all fifty states except Alaska. And Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

86: so did you go by FREIGHTER-CANOE or CHARTERED HELICOPTER? either sound like top tier ways to arrive somewhere.

Also you can probably leave bawling "I don't want no part...of your Moose Factory" along with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPoRRk7cLJI&pp=ygUYZWxvaXNlIGxhd3MgbG92ZSBmYWN0b3J5

90: There's also the Polar Bear Express! Just 5 hours from Cochrane.

My 50th was Kentucky. Not a long visit, but I had dinner in Owensboro. From the map, I see that changes in the Ohio River have left some Hyder style bits of Kentucky north of the River, but I wasn't alert enough at the time to tag one.

I think there's a shopping tourism trade in Point Roberts where Canadians visit even though there apparently isn't much to do there and it's not far from a US border where you can, like, get to the rest of the US. At a glance, Hyder's landscape looks more interesting.

91 is correct. I went to Moosonee for a reason* and Moose Factory was there so popped over on the ferry to see it.

*I had canoed half of the Missinaibi River from Lake Missinaibi to James Bay; I wasn't going to get to do the northern half so I took the train to see what the end was like.

What are now Arlington and Alexandria, VA, "retroceded" to Virginia from the District of Columbia in 1847. Apparently the DC businesses west of the Potomac saw Virginia as more pro-business, including more pro-slave trade. FA few row houses in Old Town Alexandria still have cast iron drainpipes that are marked as having been manufactured in "Alexandria, DC" - that is, pre-retrocession.