Mainstream economics reads like a flat earth Facebook group when you see how many times it's failed to predict booms and busts despite being considered acceptable as such.
1,130 karma · joined November 15, 2011
Suburban lawn care has been going on for decades, using largely the same approach it always has. Mainly fertilizers applied once or twice a year if you bother to care. Broadleaf weed killers, maybe grub killer. The primary way to getting a nice lawn, though, is to overseed so often you choke out weeds. On the other side of the coin, agriculture is engaging in a broad spectrum application of herbacides, pesticides, etc with new formulas coming all the time. At an insane scale.
There is no comparison to yards. It's agriculture.
The West Coast, in my experience, has very little on the Midwest when it comes to spiders and bugs. In Oregon I was blown away by the lack of bugs. I could leave my doors and windows open at night and nothing seemed to come in. Unreal! The only major thing Portland seemed to have on the middle states is slugs. Waking up in the morning to find slug trails in my kitchen and in the dog bowl was a weird experience. Live and learn!
A lot of folks in the Valley who are the hardest hit by these economic changes grew up in California. It's ironic to me that somebody from the Midwest move there and then criticize the residents for not moving to where they moved away from.
It's right to bring up the military and the trades as viable options, but let's not oversell that stuff. The trades aren't just a shoo-in easy crack at six figures like folks spout off. You gotta work for that master-tradesman slot. It'd probably take you 10+ years to get there if you're good enough. The trades are designed to limit the number of people entering them...it's part of why they make so much money. It's also incredibly hard work and tears up your body as you age.
I think the drawbacks to joining the military are pretty obvious and go without saying.
Amen.
Should also add that the R1 school I did my graduate work at put funded research in front of didactics every time (thanks to state funding cuts, primarily). The students (and their paying families) really had no idea that these priorities even existed. Everybody gunning for tenure (and with tenure) put teaching in the backseat because, like you said, you have to if you want to succeed in research these days. Where I was at, graduate students ended up carrying most of the teaching load...to the detriment of just about everybody else.
You're going to see more homeless people in a library that is located in an area with a lot of homeless people. They can congregate in the library where it's climate controlled and there are bathrooms as well as something to do (books to read). That's pretty common in larger cities.
Some libraries I've frequented also have spaces for hosting public events and also maker spaces for folks who can't afford access to such things on their own. It's really a great thing to see.
One wonders if the system is worth keeping around in its current form if so many people get screwed by it. What do we have an economic system for, anyway?
Also, you can have a STEM-based undergraduate education as your pre-med, even math and computer science can count if you take the right additional electives. The two aren't mutually exclusive. It's a good fallback if you bomb out of getting into med school (or decide 3 years into ugrad that you don't want to apply).