That’s unfortunate but not terribly surprising.
Humans will build a bar as soon as there are more than two people that want to drink but you typically need much larger populations before you get a sober community at all. You usually only get dedicated sober spaces when those communities get big enough.
Fortunately, as many others on this thread have pointed out, there are many sober options beyond dedicated sober spaces.
Light intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. A light that’s only a few microns away from your cornea would look incredibly bright even with minimal power.
I’d start by narrowing the scope of this question to conservative Christians in the US and Europe. India has a larger population that the US and the EU combined, is quite religiously conservative and leans socialist. Even though the Catholic Church issued a “Decree Against Communism” in 1949, that has since been amended and many Catholics around the world embrace socialism. While modern Muslims do participate in market economies, Islam has some fairly strict laws against capitalism; Sukuk is the complex workaround they use in order to get against their prohibition against charging interest.
For Christians in the US and Europe I think there are a few major components.
Christianity has had strong capitalist elements for a long time. In particular, John Calvin argued, among other things, that God rewards good Christians in this life as well as the next. These rewards can take the form of material wealth and therefore material wealth is evidence of God’s favor. This philosophy was obviously extremely popular among the wealthy.
After WWII the US government wanted a way to convince people that our erstwhile allies, the USSR and China should now be considered enemies. One obvious element to emphasize was that they were both Communists. An element of Communism was godlessness, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” So the US took the contrary stance and presented itself as a Christian nation. Two of the more obvious results were that “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance and Congress replaced the unofficial “E Pluribus unum” (out of many, one) with, “In God we trust.” Since it was primarily intended to be anti-communist it was, effectively, pro-capitalist.
In the US there was also a deliberate shift when George HW Bush realized that evangelical Christians made up a large part of the Republican base. At the time churches had a fairly strong aversion to politics. They generally considered politics and economics to be part of the profane world and thought it was beneath them. He managed to convince them that the profane wasn’t just irrelevant to spiritual health, it was an active threat. By this view, good Christians couldn’t ignore politics they had to take an active role to help fight Satan. Since the Republicans were the ones actively recruiting Evangelicals into politics they made sure the message stayed supportive of their policies (including economic policies).
tl;dr I was wrong.
I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.
Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn’t think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.
The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.
But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn’t think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I’d go once a week and if I ever found a date I’d impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn’t like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).
Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.
We decided there’s no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.
Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn’t recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren’t a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(
The FCC has a lot of regulations on it. From what I remember active jamming within the home is still wildly illegal. Depending on the size of your house/room, a far as at cage wouldn’t be too difficult, especially if you did it during construction. If you’re on a budget and don’t mind looking crazy you can line a closet with tinfoil and connect it to ground.