Geology shapes culture in many places.

Simple example: the Netherlands and bikes or dried up lakes and the way Dutch people hold meetings

Okay i get the flat is good for bikes.. but meetings, curious about that one?

I suspect he was referring to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model#Historical_backgr...

Interesting read. Quote:

> Ever since the Middle Ages, when the process of land reclamation began, different societies living in the same polder have been forced to cooperate because without unanimous agreement on shared responsibility for maintenance of the dykes and pumping stations, the polders would have flooded and everyone would have suffered. Crucially, even when different cities in the same polder were at war, they still had to cooperate in this respect. This is thought to have taught the Dutch to set aside differences for a greater purpose.

Yep, that one

That link lacks the article text, as do archive.is’ other snapshots of it.

I could not read the article either, but one example is the Alabama Black Belt. Geologically that part of the deep South and its neighboring states is chalk, which over time has become covered in incredibly rich black soil. Perfect for growing things like cotton. Which, back in the not very recent past, was brutally made the responsibility of slaves. When the slaves were emancipated after the Civil War, many freedmen stayed on and ended up as sharecroppers, ultimately maintaining a deep well of Black American culture that persists to this day.

Edit: unpaywalled article on the human history[1], wikipedia[2], and geology[3]

[1] https://southernspaces.org/2004/black-belt/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_in_the_American_Sou...

[3] https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/black-belt-region-...

That's just the intro. This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is mostly about university administration issues. Anyone read the whole thing? I'll bet that's a lead-in to something about how universities differ depending on location.

off topic, but i'm just not sure what american culture is anymore

the american dream apparently depended upon a willingness to shit on others for personal gain; i just don't think most engineers think like that?

law and order, checks and balances: lol (sad lol...)

send us your tired and weary... sigh, the one job that's been insourced it seems

a few times in the last month i've heard some tv/movie character pop out some line about americas greatness in the context of decency, or russia, etc, and boy, is that gonna date quick...

fucking hell my nerds, are we all sleepwalking through this shit or what?

Are you American, in America?

I feel like American culture has anyways been elusive and dynamic

The "American Dream" has always been a mixture of a thought-terminating cliché and mass delusion. No matter how much ink is spilled over it or how many hands are wrung about the death of it, you'll never actually get two Americans to agree on what it is, past a nebulous something about "freedom".

It was just easy to not worry too much about that it when sitting pretty on 10 million square km of super-defensible natural resources while the rest of the world burned itself down twice over entrenched legacy bullshit. But now there's been time to brew up just as much domestic legacy bullshit and geopolitics and the media environment doesn't yet support a unifying us-vs-them narrative (by God they're trying) to cut through it.

> 10 million square km of super-defensible

With a 2000 mile southern border that is extraordinarily hard to defend, and a somewhat longer northern border that we've never actually had to think about defending.

No, they're borders that would be extraordinarily hard to defend, but conveniently it's not been relevant for about 200 years. Defense is about more than having enough machine guns on the border.

In the case of the southern neighbor and their neighbors, one might wonder if it's a complete coincidence that the collective Latin American shit hasn't been together enough to be a credible threat since that time they actually were and were eventually repulsed.

Diplomatic and, let us say, "special" methods of making neighbors safe to be nearby is one of the key advantages that made American soil defensible in a way that, say, early 1900s French soil wasn't.

The only credible way that border has been for the American century, or will be for the foreseeable future, a military danger would be if another superpower cut a deal to stage there, and that would be both incredibly obvious and would represent the world's longest and most vulnerable supply lines in the history of armed conflict.

The closest anyone ever got was missiles in Cuba, and it was so utterly disconcerting that there even was a threat in the same hemisphere that the world nearly ended.

You could also say that this only applies to conventional military threats, and there are other problems now. That is perhaps why things are beginning to feel different and sitting between two oceans and two pacified buffer zones isn't proving enough to engender national feeling, rightly or wrongly, of being large and in charge.

> a somewhat longer northern border that we've never actually had to think about defending.

Well, not since they (as lackeys of the Brits) burned down Buffalo.

The US War Plan Red from the 1920s covers a war between the US and the British Empire and includes quite a lot about Canada!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red