When they start doing captchas along the lines of "check all pictures of potential terrorists" we'll know they're training data sets for military drone manufacturers.
Austin has grown a lot since I lived there are a lot of people from outside Texas have moved there so I'm sure the culture has changed - but when I was there going from north Austin to south Austin seemed to be this epic trip the locals would only do on a weekend -- and probably pack water and sandwiches for the drive across town. A really exotic senior trip "abroad" for students might be to Houston or Galveston. You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.
> they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars
Weird. This is sort of unbelievable. I think I know many Hispanics who lived in ATX during 2001, but they’ve never mentioned their car being firebombed.
>>You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.
The meeting spouse in grade school/not worldly typically implies not leaving the area they grew up in at any point. I grew up in a smallish town where this happens frequently. So many people never leave the state let alone the country. Some people never even left the county. Their biggest travel is for school sporting events.
In otherwords, it's not really a term of endearment as much as another "bless your heart"
Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world? Would it be so bad to be invested in a single community for a lifetime, and to have a deep connection to the people there? I feel like I lack that, deep connections where the pull of cultural influence goes both ways. I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.
For many people, the answer is a pretty definitive yes. I grew up in apartheid South Africa and left mainly to escape two years of compulsory military service helping enforce apartheid rule.
But if you speak to immigrants in any first world country, you'll find lots of similar stories. People having migrated because of severe political or economic issues.
> I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.
What stops you going back, in that case?
So, you're extrapolating your personal experiences and applying them to everyone on the planet.
Many of my family members met their spouses in their home town. They hardly ever leave that town. They might fly to another country for vacation once a decade, but otherwise find complete fulfillment in the place where they live. Several have never even bothered to get a drivers' license, because they never found the need to have one.
By your standard, that makes them unsophisticated. But they're probably not. They live in New York City.
> "Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since" I suspect your experience wasn't very representative. After all, Texas has a 40% Hispanic population. Assholes won't be calling them terrorists, they're much more likely to be working them like slaves and paying them scraps off the books.
I suspect the biggest reason for a cross-Austin trip being an event has stayed the same: terrible traffic.
Indians or Middle Easterners I knew were not infrequently misidentified as Mexican (as was anyone of Hispanic but not Mexican background), but the idea that anyone would be so unfamiliar with the sizable Hispanic population to do a "black/white/terrorist" identification and firebomb "all the Hispanic people's cars" is hard to believe without some news articles discussing this as a big trend in 2001 Austin.