I find it wildly amazing how here in the US we have what we try to represent as a melting pot that is so diverse that we end up, on average, having a similar culture with similar goals. If we didn’t represent our country this way we wouldn’t be federated and elect a president, a congress, and have a legal arm. Yet despite this representation when we start to look closer at the states themselves we end up with an interesting divergence of ideas, rules, and regulations for the same set of things.
Take Chicago’s food truck law changes. This is an industry that I see sprouting up and flourishing around Seattle and Portland, yet it appears that over in Chicago the government is bending to pressure to let the food ingredients diversify in exchange for severely restricting where they can operate. This is obviously different then the goals in Seattle and Portland where food trucks are becoming the norm for weekday lunches and are starting to be the norm for weekend dining as well.
What about the other unique properties of the states? The number of stay at Home Moms seem to decrease as you go northeast and increase as you go southwest.
An interesting phenomenon is that this pattern seems to correlate well with where people are tweeting about Beer and Church. Perhaps the stay at home Moms are at home drinking beer? Or the men married to them find a desire to drink more? Maybe it is the other way around and the families going to church are motivated to have two working adults for some reason.
Interestingly enough,the church vs beer tweets correlate with the same-sex marriage laws… Less legal in the Southeast more church tweets in the Southeast. More legal in the Northeast and West, more beer tweets in the Northeast and West.
Last, but not least is the correlation to legalized Marijuana – it has growing state support and the interesting thing I think is that out of all these measures – California seems to have all of them jumbled up in their society (perhaps that is why their economy is so jumbled up) and the Northeast seems to have everyone working hard, drinking beer, smoking pot, and marrying whomever they please (perhaps that is why their economies are less problematic).
