Stuff White People Like is a satirical blog cataloguing tastes and habits of liberal, upper-middle-class white Americans.
HN commenters use it as shorthand for a bland, politically correct liberal culture, and argue over what it says about racial identity.
I can't properly describe the cultural phenomenon but there is a sort of intelligent/privileged/rich get-out-there demographic that has been on a steady incline for some time causing gentrification of many rural areas.
Sort of a cross between totally-stoked-Mountain-Dew-guys + farm-to-table-vegan-tatooed-hipster + do-not-really-have-to-worry-about-money + love-ridiculously-over-hoppy-ipas + own-four-bikes + sustainable-forever + into-outdoor-shaming-others [1].
I'm not that knowledgeable on demographic groupings but I think you know the type. Yes stereotypes are dangerous and I hope I don't offend anyone.
EDIT: btw to be clear I don't have any problem with above mentioned traits (as I'm not far from it myself). IMO I prefer it to the rural stereotypes I grew up with which is toting guns and killing animals for sport (which again sadly I don't actually have strong feeling against either). However I do hate IPA beers. The over hoppy beers have to stop (I'm stout, porter guy).
Also if you are looking for a similar city to Billings I just recently visited Flagstaff Arizona. Flagstaff is pretty darn cool.
[1]: https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/20/9-making-you-feel-bad-about-not-going-outside/
It's hard for me to pin down just what it is about this article that sticks in my caw, because a lot of his points are spot on, either with regard to me or with regard to people I've worked with in the past.
If this guy were a programmer, talking about what sort of management structure works for him, it would probably seem thought-provoking, if flawed. We've all met pseudo-intellectual types in our business, or those that are always following the latest fad, or those who have decided that they're too old to learn anything new. In fact most of us (I know I am) are guilty of these sorts of things ourselves.
But because he's an outsider we're put on the defensive, and the whole thing comes across as condescending and insulting. It's especially biting because there's an element of truth to it. We're being judged not as individuals, but as part of the biased sample of bad apples from dysfunctional organizations that this guy has dealt with.
This must be what being a victim of prejudice feels like.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, this is how I felt the first time I stumbled upon http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/, until I realized that a) it's a joke and b) the author is very, very white.
The suburbs are isolated because of the decline of the school system. Parents are unwilling to put their kids in schools will they will get harassed and bullied by lower class kids. "Public schooling" results in private communities. It used to be that the richest people in a city would live blocks away from the poor and the working class. That rarely happens anymore because of the association of location with schools.
As for universities - the top universities have a rainbow of skin colors, but the culture is overwhelmingly "Whiter Person" - http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/
Please don't take it literally. I meant SWPL as in this:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/
and thought it would be understood.
What I mean is stuff that is too "liberal", too bland, too politically correct for my taste. A bit hypocritical at times. It's just my opinion; perhaps I should have phrased it differently.
This is only tangentially related to race, by the way. People all over the world (including me) love classical music etc, but by using a derogatory term I'm implying only the stuff I dislike. ;-)
Yet I can't help but laugh at stuff like this.
"As with many white people activities, being vegan/vegetarian enables them to feel as though they are helping the environment AND it gives them a sweet way to feel superior to others. For further evidence, note how the vegetarian world has increasing levels of extemism (no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish, nothing that has been cooked, etc)."
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/27/32-veganvegetarianism/
You're not supposed to speak unkind of Apple products [0] or its peripherals North Face, Patagonia.
How is any operating system supposed to log everything an application does and then remove it? If it's allowed to add data beyond its birth directory, would not an "uninstaller" only remove whatever the devs chose to and not 100% of its effect on the OS?
[0] https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/30/39-apple-products/
Sent from my MacBook Pro