It’s worse than us simply becoming poorer. It’s that these places - sprawling low density suburbs - where never financially sustainable to begin with. They never brought in enough tax revenue to remotely cover the expense of maintaining all their infrastructure. There’s just too few people per square mile to pay for it all at the property tax rates people can afford. We’ve only kept things going this long through a few mechanisms:

1. Letting older suburban infrastructure decay to well past its replacement state.

2. Relying on growth to prop things up. (Build new neighborhoods and require developers to repave streets and replace/upgrade utility infrastructure in an area.)

3. Relying on ever higher levels of debt.

It isn’t financially sustainable. It was never financially sustainable. As long as a town can keep growing, they can keep the Ponzi scheme going for a time. But eventually you hit a wall on that and the whole house of cards collapses.

The meme is just that it’s a book with a funny-sounding title. Like, “yup, it’s wood!”

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/identifying-wood

If you want to take a look at the book itself, you can probably find it at a local library, or a digital copy can be found here:

https://annas-archive.org/md5/cda044e9fa42876a51bb245e8b3ac251

But it’s really what’s right on the tin. When just given a peace of lumber, it can often be very difficult to identify a specific species. You’re not going to pay for DNA testing for most scenarios where you need to identify lumber. So you have to learn in detail about wood anatomy, using features that can be identified with nothing more elaborate than a hand magnifier. And if you know enough about wood anatomy, you can determine the species with high degree of accuracy. That’s what this book is meant to help you do. Ideally you would be able to be handed a board, a light, and a magnifying lens, and be able to estimate the species. I actually had to do this on some assignments and exams.

My favorite photoshop of this.

I have actually had this as a course textbook. I have a copy literally just three feet from where I’m typing this. It’s legitimately a great book!

Oh, so you’re just a bigot. Figured.

I want this except it’s a 30 year old incel literally living in his mother’s basement…somehow working as a life coach.

What am I making up? This woman almost certainly has athletic advantages far greater than the vast majority of the trans athletes people get so apoplectic about.

Stop making shit up to fit your narrative. It detracta (sic) from the actual issue.

There is a reason white supremacists like Steven Miller love this definition of antisemitism. There’s a reason most white nationalists are also Zionists. They fully support the idea of a Jewish homeland…so they can have somewhere to export all of America’s Jews to. They dream of a white ethnostate, and Jewish people do not fit anywhere into their vision.

I don’t think the current White House is going to go this far, but it’s absolutely part of their long term plan.

Unfortunately for your genes, attitudes like these will mean they don’t have much chance of spreading.

But it’s paramount that we ban the 5’5" trans girl who has testosterone lower than cis girls from playing volleyball because…reasons.

The beliefs of the poorest 90% of the population have zero impact on the outcome of public policy debates. We do not live in a democracy.

Jesus. Imagine if we could make gold cheap enough to make into soda cans. They wouldn’t even need that plastic liner. A truly infinitely recycleable solution to packaging of all sorts. Imagine if the bag on the inside of cereal boxes was made from gold foil. What’s so great about gold is it’s incredibly chemically stable. That means it won’t interact chemically with any food you package in it. And it’s an element, not some forever chemical that will pollute our bodies and environment.

I want to see a world where all cheap disposable packaging is made out of gold.

This is the true killer feature of prestidigitation. Lets you instantly clean a soiled object.

The test will ask how old the Earth is. Any answer over 6000 years or so will be marked false.

Columbia has decided to adopt the Hitlerian definition of antisemitism, one that embraces despicable ancient tropes of Jews being forever foreigners in whatever land they occupy.

Think about the actual philosophy behind this. The only way that criticism of Israel can be considered identical to antisemitism is if you believe that all Jews, regardless of nationality, beliefs, and personal character, have some innate tie to Israel. You can be a Jewish person, only a citizen of the US, with no interest whatsoever in the Israeli state, but it doesn’t matter. Simply due to your ethnicity and religion, you are forever tied to the state of Israel.

Columbia has fully embraced the antisemitic belief of the perpetual foreigner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_foreigner

Columbia admins believe that no Jewish person can ever be a true full American. From birth, every Jewish person has innate ties to Israel. They cannot escape this tie. Thus any criticism of Israel is innately an antisemitic attack on Jewish Americans. To be a Jew is to be an Israeli, and to be an Israeli is to be a Jew. They are one and the same to the antisemites running Columbia University.

Notably, this was the belief also shared by the Nazis during WW2. Jews were considered perpetual foreigners in Nazi Germany. It mattered not how they lived their lives. They could never truly be fully German. They could have lived in Germany down ten generation and personally served Germany in WW1. It didn’t matter. Jews were always foreigners, and thus it was justified treating them differently from other Germans.

This was the logic of the American Japanese internment camps. Japanese were considered forever foreigners. They were interned regardless of their actual personal beliefs and loyalties. Their own character mattered for naught. If you were ethnically Japanese, you had innate loyalty to the Japanese emperor, and thus even Japanese American citizens were treated as suspect foreigners.

There is a reason the white nationalists currently running the White House have embraced this definition of antisemitism. If it is normalized that being Jewish and being Israeli are truly interchangeable, then why can’t American Jews be forcibly deported to Israel? If all Jewish people are essentially Israeli from birth, then an antisemitic administration can justify deporting any and all Jewish citizens “back to their homeland.” After all, they can be treated as suspect foreigners with dubious loyalty to the US. And this is ultimately why the right wing is so fond of this Hitlerian definition of antisemitism. Currently it’s being used as a cudgel to attack Palestinian rights protesters, but it can just as easily be wielded against Jewish Americans to justify their involuntary deportation to the state of Israel.

When this is over, we are going to have to try, convict, and hang thousands of ICE agents for crimes against humanity.

How are those related? It is possible for some conservatives to want to purge LGBT voices from the internet at the same time other conservatives want to advance crypto. These are not mutually exclusive goals.

“Flight risk criminals and terrorists had their accounts frozen!!!”

Yes, those criminals, for example, LGBT people who conservatives believe are pornographic simply for existing. God forbid LGBT artists want to have a way of earning a living. Crypto is relied on by a lot of marginalized groups. It’s used by artists who make perfectly legal art, but whose content conservatives object to. Crypto is used by many queer content creators as they face being cut off from payment processing systems, as again, conservatives consider queer people pornographic simply for existing. Crypto is used by sex workers, often people with few other employment options. Oh, and crypto is used by trans people to get access to healthcare that is quickly being criminalized.

How insane do you have to be, in 2025 Trump’s America, to fall back on the idea that anything criminal is bad. Republicans are trying to criminalize the existence of entire swathes of the population. And those people face being cut off from the banking system entirely, if folks like you, who blindly consider legality=morality, have their way.

Get the audiobooks. Listen to it in the car. But yeah, one of the plot points is basically exactly this, where people can effectively have a “save point” in life. I won’t spoil it, but it’s great.

Read Peter F Hamilton’s Void saga.