I look around my living room now, and there's almost no books. This is the first time in my life I've not been surrounded by books. I don't have a pile of books on the coffee table, I don't have 3 bookshelves overflowing with books, I don't have piles of books in the back room waiting to be put into storage.
I love it. I have 89 books, or samples of books, on my kindle, and I'm reading four of them. And they take up no space at all.
There's actually a lot of truth to this. It had got to the point that a middle class person in the west would have stuff like computers and entertainment systems that even the top communist officials couldn't get.
Not just Reagan. Some Russians have said that the Soviet Union was just as economically bad off in the 70's, but the Soviet government kept things together by convincing the Russians that America was just about ready to invade.
It's worse than that. The local kids can burgle your house and when the cops come buy to investigate they'll blame you for having too fancy stuff and tempting the local kids with it.
I have relatives that moved into a fundie area in the south. The stories they have are incredible. And no one talks about anything but the coming rapture.
Like I said, the problem isn't towns where everyone goes to church. The problem is towns where everyone tries to work in being born again and the rapture in any casual conversation.
For 30 grand you can buy 10 acres in the country with a house and a lake. I remember one place that was like 10 miles from a state road. Turn left and you were 10 minutes from a fairly good small town of 30,000 people, turn right and you were 45 minutes from a big city of about 750,000.
If you do want to move to a small town tho, make sure you visit first and talk to some local people. If they tend to mention the rapture or being born again, stay far, far away. In these towns the young men are expected to be criminals, sort of sowing their oats before they get saved. And if they beat you up or steal every thing you own the cops will just laugh and blame you.
There aren't really any apartments in small towns. Sometimes they'll be an apartment above a store or something. But there'll be nothing like the two bedroom two baths you're used to.
Housing in small towns is cheap but crappy. The only time a new house is built is if someone strikes it rich somehow, like getting a 30 grand a year job. And likely as not it'll be build by local unemployed men who don't have a lot of experience in construction.
You can live pretty well on little income. You can buy a house for 5 grand. There'll be little taxes. Meals and drinks will be very cheap.
On the other hand the restaurant meals will be awful, and probably close at 5. No one respectable drinks at bars, so they'll be filled with hopeless alcoholics or unbelievably violent young men who'll see you as someone they can beat up without getting into a feud with another family.
No one in town will talk to you as they won't even understand the concept of meeting someone new and making friends. They will all have grown up knowing every one in town, from families that have lived there for generations. When you meet someone they'll first ask what family you're from, and when they find out it's no family they know they won't even know how to relate to you.
And they'll be all sorts of rules and customs you won't know about, but will enrage people if you break them. Saying "Goddamn" might be interpreted as a direct insult to the divine being. "Motherfucker" might be interpreted as a direct insult to someone's mother. Saying "hell" around an unmarried girl might get the shit beat out of you by her brothers.
And when you're flirting with a woman you have no way to know whether she's the town whore, or the wife of "Bubba", the meanest asshole in town. She, of course, will be used to living in a town where everyone knows each other, so she'll act available until you go to far, at which point everyone will go after you to protect her honor.
You don't want to buy a kindle if your plan is to read free ebooks from the internet. The sonys probably are better there, although I don't know how well they render PDFs and html.
The big advantage of the kindle, and the deciding factor for me, is it's seamless integration with amazon.com, and all the books available for the kindle there. You spend a few minutes on amazon looking for books you might like, click on a button to download samples. Then if you like the sample you click on a link on the kindle and it's downloaded for you.
You can't convince people because of the way automatics work. People will honestly put on the brakes while it is in gear, trying to fucking slow down a 400hp engine with the fucking brakes. Or they'll goddamn ride the brakes and clutch, like they were fucking flying a plane.
I'll be like, "Put it in neutral dude. ", but they'll tell me it must be bad because automatic transmissions don't go into neutral.
That's why people are always burning out clutches.
But in an automatic all you can use are brakes, and it doesn't hurt anything.
Downshifting and playing with the RPM does give you a bit more control, but putting it in neutral and braking is the safest, and no worse than what you have to do in an automatic.
Isn't there a vin on the engine somewhere? If you buy a used
car everyone should always check the vins. Lots of people buy a used car, get pulled over by the cops for some traffic violation, then the cop checks the vin, finds out they don't match, and he then takes the car. And your out what you paid for the car.
