I brought my churchwarden pipe with me to Italy, thinking I could find a tobacco shop that sold some interesting Mediterranean tobaccos. I had a vision of a store a lot like Liberty Tobacco in San Diego where they have 30 or so jars of different tobacco blends. Nope. Nothing like that at all.
In San Diego terms, Florence has a population equal to that of Chula Vista plus El Cajon. It's roughly 380,000 people. San Diego as a whole has a population of about 2,200,000. Liberty Tobacco is unusual. Searching for a comparable store here has made me realize how large a population you need to support a niche establishment like that.
There have been some promising places turning up in my Internet searches, but none of them have been close enough to visit. The ones I have visited have all been massive duds, so going an hour out of our way to visit one more roll of the dice doesn't seem to be worth it.
Oh well. Next time, I'll bring my own in my luggage.
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| The tobacco shops have all been like this - little hole-in-the-wall places that sell lottery tickets and other odds and ends along with cigarettes and a few cigars. |
Bigger Issues
I'm finding it harder and harder to blog about the bigger issues of the day. The situation at the border is panic-inducing when you combine it with the fact that we're running a $2T deficit per year now to go with our $32T debt. Team Faculty Lounge capturing the culture makes it hard to face reality. If you do, you're called a racist and no one can handle that. Because Europeans were better imperialists than Africans and American Indians, we all have to pretend that we're evil and deserve to have our countries invaded and ruined.
The world is changing right before our eyes, but no one is allowed to notice it. You see it on social media and Fox News, but if you're not following the right accounts, you can easily avoid it. I did a search of the AP News website recently and found zero references to the American border crisis, but plenty of hits on the word "border" for other countries. Ukraine, for example.
The AP is about as middle-of-the-road American culture as you can get so it's a good bell weather for the effects of Team Faculty Lounge on our perception of reality.
It's A Good Thing Mathematics Is Racist
... because if it weren't, we'd do some back-of-the-envelope flow calculations and note that our largest city, NYC is past capacity for illegals, but the rate of intake at the border is hitting new records all the time.
The world is changing right before our eyes, but no one is allowed to notice it.
I don't know if the first and last parts of your post were intended to go together, but they do. Your note about how a big city can support a wider variety of businesses at a larger scale than smaller cities and towns, is a huge part of why people are trying to get across the border. They want the variety of opportunities that they can get in a big city like San Diego. Which is why they are going to the cities, and not to the little towns all across the US. The little towns that are dwindling away because their population wants to move at least close to, if not into, the big cities where they perceive everything interesting to be happening.
ReplyDeleteThe US has always had a lot of land and a lot of space for more people than we have. The problem is what it always has been: because of the way economics works, everyone wants to cram themselves into a tiny fraction of the land and then wail and moan about how crowded everything is.
Actually, live my wife and I, we are seeing many people moving out of the Twin Cities. We, possibly unwisely, chose to stay in Minnesota. Minnesota is loosing population at a significant rate. Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas are all gaining population. The main difference is that Minnesota has higher taxes and much higher stupidity in public office. But with the results of the pandemnic, work from home means that home can be anywhere. Which will only speed the leftist's goal of destroying the country.
ReplyDeleteThe Mayor of St Paul and the Emperor, er Governor are begging for businesses to make people come back to the office downtown St Paul. While at the same time not requiring the government employees to do so. And are consolidating government buildings. The Mayor rarely goes into City Hall. It's easier to hide that way. This helps contribute
On another subject. The Federal reserve is losing $723 million a day supporting Biden's failed economic policies. As awful as Trump was, the Fed turned a profit, sending that money to the Treasury.