From the photo, they look pretty easy to swim under. Just a waste of money, plastic and rusting metal for posturing more culture wars.

This looks like an illustration or AI, did you put a filter on it?

I wasn’t directly attacked but my friend and I had the same experience in our 60% Trump area.

We weren’t together when each incident happened, but they’re so similar I’ll describe them together.

We were just at the checkout: me at a convenience store; my friend at a major grocery store chain.

So, we couldn’t reasonably move away. We had to stand there to pay for our purchases.

An old man encroached my space; an old woman encroached my friend’s space. We both politely asked them to step back for social distancing, and they refused.

I wish I had my friend’s ability to think and speak on his feet. After he checked out, he told the old lady “I asked for you to do something, that cost you nothing. All you had to do was take a few steps back. I hope in the future, if you ask someone the same, they treat you like you did to me.”

As for me? Even though I just said my request and didn’t respond further, the guy was a huge jerk who tailgated me for several miles in his huge pickup truck. Like headlights in my mirror tailgating… during the day.

Who tf cares that much? Honestly… just take a few steps back. Doesn’t cost you anything, like my friend said.

I bet it looked amazing on you! I hope you’ll find a worthy replacement.

Uh… it’s ok sir, you can just keep the money.

Glad you asked.

Short answer: gambling

Long answer: us kids were starting high school and he knew college was after that, so he needed to figure out how to come up with some money to help us. He was good at math, so someone suggested he play the stock market.

He started off investing “fake” money (just his own personal ledger) and did pretty good. So he invested small amounts and continued to do well. He finally decided to borrow money from the bank, which is how the story came about.

He actually did REALLY well; paid off the loan, got a bigger one, paid that off, etc, until he had enough of his own money to keep investing. He beat the S&P every year, he had a talent for it.

But he really didn’t enjoy it, he said it was a lot of work to keep up with the markets and how they interacted with each other. He kept it up for a few years after we finished college until he had a comfortable nest egg and quit.

He only paid for half our college, as a matter of principle he wanted us to come up with the other half. I still have loans to pay off but it was a huge help.

Now he hates capitalism and doesn’t do any investing at all. He used to have some safe mutual funds but he’s jaded about the state of the world, he doesn’t want any part of the system.