What's the deal with Minnesota and Wisconsin? I tend to group them together or associate them with each other but one clearly does things differently. Why the contrast?
From my limited experience, Minnesota is tremendously more progressive than their neighbors who make a really big deal about (poor quality) cheese. I met some younger folks in the Twin Cities who had escaped an otherwise bleak trajectory after growing up in Wisconsin.
If you haven't been, Minneapolis and St. Paul are beautiful cities filled with some lovely people. (They also had some terrorist cells some years back. People need something to do in the cold months, I suppose.) But there's culture and history and decent food and people are really kind and welcoming. And although the winters are cold, getting around in the skyway is a neat idea, despite making the downtown feel like a big indoor mall.
I haven't been to Wisconsin but I know people who have. It sounds like they're trying in some places (Milwaukee) but sometimes trying just isn't enough.
I lived in a suburb of St Paul for a year over 30 years ago. It was progressive, but it was the most inbred place I've ever been. If your family hadn't been there for five or six generations you were an outsider.
Madisonian here. Wisconsin is a purple state with a major gerrymandering issue. There are deep blue cities of Milwaukee and Madison, and also some smaller cities like La Crosse and Green Bay. Travel just slightly outside those cities, and shit gets MAGA fast. The result is a purple state where it's easy to section off blue and red voting districts.
The Democratic governor has stopped the worst crap coming out of the state legislature, but doesn't have much influence to enact his own agenda.
The state supreme court recently got a liberal majority and promptly shot down the gerrymander maps. The new maps don't guarantee a progressive majority (and in a real democracy, they wouldn't in a purple state), but what should happen is making districts competitive. Legislature candidates will actually need to listen to voters, not just assume they've won as long as they pass the party primary.
Minnesota has the advantage that it has a blue metropolitan area of around 3M people, which is over half the state. Hard to gerrymander that for team MAGA. Madison + Milwaukee metro is around 2M, or around 40% of the state.
Lastly, Minnesota public radio absolutely owns. That may or may not have anything to do with anything else, but I'm super jealous whenever I stream The Current.
Edit: forgot this part. Fuck you, our cheese is internationally award winning.
You know, genuinely I have no idea. Especially because due south my GOD is Iowa completely NOT progressive in any way, shape, or form. If you ever drive through Iowa and start flicking through the radio stations it's terrifying. One radio station saying that "so and so democrat is the antichrist" is one too many but there were several.
Because my first thought would be urbanization, but really Wisconsin and Minnesota population distribution is not that different. It's also not bleed over from Canada because we're both about as connected as the other. Large forests and lakes between us. Prince was genuinely propping up the local music scene a TON before he died but... I don't think a single industry could be responsible for it. (it's a difference though) Then we even elected Jessie Ventura Governor, which... maybe scared other politicians to get in line? I genuinely don't know. I grew up in an incredibly conservative town in Minnesota but at the same time I had enough info to go "some of this sounds like utter bullshit". I remember listening to Joe Soucheray as a kid (even showed up on his radio broadcast at the fair once) it's not like conservatives aren't there, but not in the numbers.
It feels like a Springfield/Shelbyville rivalry: both areas were colonized by the same sorts of people, but Wisconsinites wanted to marry their cousins.
I'm confused, WA has no income tax, OR has high income tax... As someone who moved from WA to OR, got a raise, and ended up with smaller paychecks I can attest that this doesn't represent everyone accurately
For anyone not reading between the lines, taxes like sales taxes and property taxes are designed to disproportionately target those with lower income (i.e., regressive), while income tax is mostly supposed to target higher incomes (i.e. progressive).
Uh, the thing about percentages, as in "the top 1%", is that they are proportional. It doesn't matter if one state has fewer billionaires than another state, that's not what the chart is displaying.
If the average income tax of the top 1% isn't 20 times higher than the average tax of any of the 20% groups, then they'll be paying less overall tax. Because there's 20 times more people in the bigger group.
Or it could be showing that those states have unfair tax rules, which is undoubtedly the case for some of them.
This chart is honestly completely meaningless, because there's no way to know which of those two conditions exist.
It's lies, damn lies, and statistics, poured into a rage-bait map.
Edit: However, I would be intrigued to know how the middle 20% managed to pay the least tax in Oregon.
WA has no income tax, but it does have a state level sales tax. Low income people spend a larger portion of their income on purchases which results in a much higher tax rate.
I’m not used to seeing my state (NJ) on a discussion about tax where it’s painted in a positive light. I know my taxes are high but I can thankfully afford it
How do you even look long enough to damage your eyes? I used a projector box and did like a 1/10th second glance with by bare eyes just to get a sense of it and even that was very uncomfortable, and left an afterimage for about 5 minutes.
I don't doubt that people can be very dumb, but I'm surprised at the dedication people put into ruining their eyes.
I dunno man, I've got a coworker that swears looking at the sun is healthy "because that's how you get vitamin D"... Says he looks directly at the sun every day. I have no idea how he doesn't have vision problems, I just mostly assume he's lying.
He’s probably just blind in the very center of his vision and doesn’t realize it, because he sees the brightness around the blind spot, and the brain is pretty good at ‘filling in’ missing information.
I saw a video a while ago about a helicopter EMT pilot who got hit with a laser while flying, and he’s blind right in the center of his vision. He doesn’t notice it most days, but he’ll catch himself looking ‘around’ things he’s focusing on to actually see them.
Your colleague probably doesn’t look long enough that he feels the ache/burn of the UV rays, or if he does, he assumes it’s something mystical, like the eyes producing vitamin D.
Boy is he gonna be surprised when he no longer can see the sun.
Unless he was pulling your leg. That’s always an option.
I believe that's one of those "doctors say it's bad for you, so it must actually be good for you" conspiracy theories. Kinda like antivax, but opposite "logic", I guess.
It takes a second to ruin your eyes in some way, but some people apparently don't feel pain and can somehow do it for several seconds. There's actually a report of a woman back in 2016 who looked at the sun for 6 seconds and later had blurry vision and a black spot in her vision.
Little visible light dilates pupil. But there's still plenty of UV that burns the receptors. The back of your eye doesn't have melanin like your skin to absorb it or relevant pain recptors to notice the damage.
The more north you go in Florida, the more Southern is becomes. Right there, where Alabama can't go more south and Florida can't go more north? That's prime sister-wife country.
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