> Plenty of people go through cancer

At this point in time the public has a worse than 50/50 shot at cancer at some point in their lifetimes.

Literally worse than a coin flip.

If cancer caused people to be bad people, there'd be a lot more bad people.

> I wonder why we haven’t classified racism as a personality disorder, much like sociopathy or BPD. Viewing other human beings as lesser and having no sympathy for them seems to fit the bill.

Cynical answer: Because humans naturally like to punch down. Look at the comments that come up every time raising the min wage is discussed. "Ho-hum, I don't make $15/hr so these cashiers [who the commenters think are inferior] should live in cardboard shack if they don't like it" type comments.

Its hard for something to be labeled a disorder when most of the population seems to have it.

Not all of the rules. IDK about EBT but there is a lot more variety for medicaid at least than you'd assume once you look at how jurisdiction to jurisdiction differs in terms of dental coverage, or whether medicaid was expanded at all (some states still haven't).

In some states you can't even get dentures under medicaid until you have a mere 4 teeth left.

Also some states allow for medicaid buy-in and some don't.

> and they do it anonymously

They just as commonly don't do it anonymously. This is a common trope from low class racists who have worked as cashiers & are pissed off at the world for being "better" than them. Facebook is full of people who love to come out of the woodwork whenever EBT is mentioned to tell about some time they worked in a grocery store or gas station and saw people "abusing it." Because obviously only low class whites deserve EBT or something like that.

Someone should turn it around and call them colonizers for speaking English in Pennsylvania instead of German (on a county by county level German was more common than English until WW1 throughout the state & some of those families were here before William Penn was).

> yet Democrats run the whole state

That's ridiculous. The GOP has had a deathgrip on most of Pennsylvania for ages. Look at this chart under "historical party control."

https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_Pennsylvania_state_government

That's a lot of red.

The state senate has been republican forever. The state house is usually republican and just recently turned blue (for the first time in over a decade), by a tiny majority that doesn't mean anything if just a handful of those democrats are right-leaning (which you can almost count on).

Nonetheless: Medicaid and EBT is state/county managed but the feds set most of the rules & funding.

> So many cars in my apartment complex have MD plates

If they're students going to school here, their license & registration can still be under their "official" residence at (usually their parents') out of state address.

I moved to PA while a college student, had a non PA car & DL for years. Was perfectly fine.

Officially living in PA was a bit tricky because 1- I was poor and had an older vehicle, 2- I came from a state where older vehicles are not issued titles when purchased used, 3- PA requires all registered cars no matter how old to have titles, so 4- I had to scrap my fucking car for $80 in cash because no one would buy it, it couldn't be registered, and my landlord & the township was about to impound it as derelict :(

> More farmland could be put in preservation, but that requires us to pay more taxes.

A lot of these farms were profitable and don't have to be converted into something else (including more heavily regulated "preserved farms").

I'll give you an example. There was a very controversial warehouse proposal near Kutztown around when COVID started. Whether or not it gets built is an off topic tangent and its not exactly clear what's going to happen there.

But rather than talk about that part I want to talk about why the farmer wants to sell to a warehouse builder in the first place:

It comes down to zoning. The farm has been profitable and stable for hundreds of years at that location, but in recent times it became rezoned as industrial use (against the owner's wishes). Which means a significant property tax hike. Now throw in the farmer wanting to retire, the lack of younger people wanting to be farmers (for various reasons), and its "screw it I'll sell to someone who will actually use it as what its zoned for and cash out/retire."

Now why & how did a multiple-centuries old farm become zoned as industrial in the first place? Harrisburg. Its politics plain and simple. Harrisburg's vision for the future of Pennsylvania's economy in places like Berks, the Lehigh valley, and elsewhere is to attract warehouse jobs. Harrisburg went to the local municipal governments and said hey we're demanding you zone X amount of your territory as industrial to attract these sweet, sweet warehouse jobs [that pay crap, treat their employees like crap, and congest the shit out of our roads]. We don't care if your residents hate it, this is the future we want.

The 81, 78, 33 corridors were heavily pushed towards rezoning with the explicit goal of building these warehouses. Rt-222 isn't by any stretch of the imagination part of this original "vision" but it was collateral damage from shit-policies.

PennDot envisions building a 5 lane highway circle on the east end of Kutztown on Rt222 to accommodate a 300-acre, 4-warehouse mega-facility with no plans to expand the road infrastructure of Rt-222 between there & Allentown due to the delusion that the trucks will never want to travel east (lol). They expect them to go west, hook up with 81, go down to 78, just to cross east towards Allentown & etc.

> we could have made modest changes back in the 70’s and even 80’s and it could have been no big deal

Unlikely. Even by the 1960s petroleum had become our way of life, globally (with rare exceptions if we want to account for Amazon rainforest tribes & so on). Jevon's paradox holds that any attempt to decrease our consumption of oil or coal, say by producing more nuclear power generation, would simply make it more affordable for under developed countries to use instead.

And in any case; nuclear power does not give us the fertilizer our crops depend on, and electric transportation -still- is not advanced enough to obsolete our big rigs & seafaring container ships.

And those oil guzzling container ships are one of the planet's biggest sources of greenhouse gases. They are dirty in emissions and inefficient in oil/fuel consumption. The top 10 worst container ships in use -right now- nevermind 40 years ago, EACH emit as much greenhouse gas as all of the cars in North America.

Now I suppose in theory we could have banned petroleum based products (coal, gas, diesel, etc) after WW2 and tried to use the UN to invade & stop any country globally from using them, but I am skeptical that this wouldn't have caused WW3 and nuclear war in short order...

> That said, rust on the front fenders ect., should not be reason to fail.

In my county the state police will pull the fresh inspection sticker clear off your windshield and threaten to take away the tech who put it there's license to inspect cars if they see "rough edges" due to rust holes along your tire wells (on the fender lip). They will similarly do the same if you have broken or missing cosmetic body parts (like the plastic that covers bumpers but serves no actual purpose besides looks & aerodynamics) leaving gaps or sharp edges, which they call "catch points" because in some absurd situations someone might, in theory but not in reality, get their clothes snagged on it and be pulled into the car if you hit a pedestrian.

PA really has two, no make that 3 different tiers on how hard or easy it is to pass vehicle inspections depending on where you live. If you're in an urban environment the safety tends to be lax but the emissions part is harder. If you're in a rural, especially if its poor county where emissions isn't even done the safety will be tough as nails. Some places are between the two extremes.

> People like to shit on the inspection in general, but I think that mostly comes from shops that embellish problems and try to coerce people into fixing things that they might not need to

It depends on where you are in PA. In some counties the techs are hard asses and nitpick fail you over the stupidest shit not because they want to, but because they're being put under heavy handed pressure by the state police & other gov officials to fail a certain amount of cars per year. They will come into the shop and look at your books periodically and if they think you pass too many cars (even if its because there was nothing wrong with those cars) they'll accuse you of being a lick & stick place and threaten to take away your license to inspect cars.

If the tech is failing you for stupid shit but isn't giving you a quote to fix it, especially if they don't even want you to hire them to fix it, they're not the problem.

I've lived in a few different counties in PA and its like a night & day difference on how hard it is to pass because of this. Also, the counties that are hard asses about inspections also tend to be the counties where state police are the most aggressive at ticketing for expired inspection stickers.