"Mr. President, sir, if we plan to bomb this new country, we're going to need to 10x the Pentagon budget asap! Otherwise, we'll run out of death machines."
"I can't get that through Congress."
"How about 5x? 2x? 50%?"
"I think we can add another $100B to the Pentagon's budget for this holocaust."
turning to line of lobbyists behind him "Warm up the hot tub at Little Saint James, boys! The President just greenlit Lockhead's next round of bonuses!"
The hours are brutal. Working 12+ hour shifts with the bulk of the labor happening at the tail end.
Then you're dealing with other people's droll and piss and blood. Managing angry drunks, happy drunks, and piss drunks. Tracking orders, periodically against people who want to cheat or rob you. Scouting for underaged drinkers, dealing with sex pests, and still politely catering to the whims of the bulk of your clientele.
I don't envy bar work even slightly. Crazy to think it's "easy", unless you're already four drinks in. At which point, you're one of the people making the job more difficult.
The typical class size in US public schools is 16-23 students. In the academic year 2020-2021, the mean class size was 18.3 students, a slight decrease from the 2017-2018 average of 19.6 students. These figures represent the mean across both primary and secondary education.
In the United States, average class sizes vary widely, with national averages indicating 21.2 students in elementary schools and up to 26.8 in secondary schools.
COVID exacerbated the situation over the last five years.
We're already seeing them pop up wherever real estate prices go vertical.
But dense housing builders are constantly at war with suburban city planners. Getting permits is an increasingly Kafka-esque endeavor, unless you can buy yourself an exemption through municipal corruption.
I think I would have felt resentful if I were forced into a particular living situation rather than being able to choose it.
I mean, we're all forced into a living situation that our budgets and our work-life demands. The illusion of choice is going to a real estate agent and seeing twenty different near-identical overpriced units, then making a dubiously informed decision that'll lock you into 30 years of debt.
I'd love to live in a crystal palace on a tropical island next to a rail station that's thirty minutes east of midtown Manhattan and an hour west of the Vail chairlifts which runs me $99.50/mo for the note. No amount of resentfulness will give it to me.
We played this game back in the 70s, during White Flight. I lived through it.
White professionals got very paranoid about living in THE CITY. Built giant gated communities just at the edge of town. Stuffed their neighborhoods with cops and private guards and security cameras and retractable road spikes and giant fuck-off electric gates and stone walls. Then nothing happened for a few years, and people inside realized this shit was boring af and obnoxiously expensive.
So they brought in a bunch of developers to add parks and malls and theaters and clubs. And then these places needed labor, so they built a bunch of low-rent housing just outside the spots just outside THE CITY. And these places filed up with the same working class folks who lived in THE CITY. But now the white professionals weren't living in the exurbs anymore, they were living in THE CITY again. So they all panicked and sold out and fled to the new edge of town.
And we've been repeating this pattern for 50 years, such that now it's a two fucking hour drive to get from Katy or Clear Lake or The Woodlands into downtown Houston where all the fucking professional jobs are. But, of course, this is Texas so nobody is allowed to build commuter rail. Instead we have several hundred miles of twelve lane highways gobbling up a bunch of historically prime real estate. And we spend $1.1B/year on cops who mostly do dick-all jerking themselves off in their squad cars earning 2.5x overtime pay on six figure salaries.
Everyone under 30 wants to GTFO of these horrible boring overpriced suburbs. While everyone over 60 is still too terrified to walk out their front doors when they live 30 miles outside of town, because the news said someone in a suburb on the opposite side of the city was center stage on the nightly news for getting their purse snatched.
But hey, don't worry, because Palantir Presents THE PANOPTICON is coming soon. And they'll definitely finally permanently for real this time solve the problem of crime forever. Just give them access to your retirement account so you can pay for it.
I was hoping for some kind of like-for-like trade. US gets Alberta. Canada gets Minnesota.