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Complex Numbers #1032516 added May 17, 2022 at 12:05am
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Industrious
The industry is/was your town/area noted for?
Brains.
Also, tourism.
Those two industries are incompatible.
As I noted a couple of weeks ago in "Charlottesville"  , this town probably started as a rest area. Not a destination, but a place to spend the night and drink while on the way from an actual place to another actual place. Tourists still come and go.
As for "brains," I'm making a pun. A lame pun, but still a pun.
These days, people only care about college for two things: 1) job preparation and 2) sportsball. But in the good old days, a college -- or, in this case, a university, the distinction between which is still a bit hazy to me -- was a place to expand one's mind. After UVA was founded in the early 1800s, Charlottesville became more of a destination. Now, instead of tourists coming and going, students came for four or more years (or in the case of Poe, one semester) before leaving.
Me, I came and stayed. I just like it here.
Now, I'm not saying university makes a person smarter. More knowledgeable isn't the same thing as smarter. It's the difference between being able to win a trivia contest, and developing a Grand Unified Field Theory or whatever. But one of the original purposes of a university was to expose a person to a wider range of culture, knowledge and experience than they'd have gotten in one farm or town.
Times change, and thanks to faster transportation and the internet, you can get that bit anywhere. Not that either invention is without its downsides. Now, like I said, people seem to only do higher education for vocational training (I'm guilty of that myself) and sportsball. And maybe partying, which we were known for in the days before they foolishly raised the drinking age to 21.
In any case, as I noted before, UVA is the largest employer in town, so it's the "industry" that drives our economy. But it's not only the college; there's a hospital affiliated with it. As with any hospital, opinions vary on it, but I consider them world-class. (They certainly do charge world-class fees. Or, rather, America-class, because we have to pay for that shit ourselves). In particular, there are only three places I'd want to go for neurological problems: Mayo, Johns Hopkins, and UVA. One of these is two miles from my house.
It's where they flew Superman to when he broke his neck.
Hence, "brains."
As with most college towns, there are certainly other big businesses here as well, though we don't have much of the hot, sexy tech industry. Which suits me just fine; the last thing we need is a SpaceX launch facility or an Amazon whorehouse. There used to be a clothing factory here, and there are some defense-related employers as well, making us a target. And the usual assortment of retail outlets, including at least one that's unique to us. But it wouldn't be Charlottesville without UVA.
And purveyors of fine fermented and distilled beverages. |
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