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QuarterReptile

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In fact, the current administration, not headed by someone from the military (and VP has military credibility but not leadership) is not at all aligned to the military except in that their base appreciates the imprimatur of honorable military service. In fact, Trump 1 was in many ways a huge refutation to Trump of the idea that the military guys were leaders he could count on. Their brain-trust positions had more left-alignment than he maybe imagined. His administration, in 2025, fired high-ranking officers in a way that suggested he entered with the reverse conclusion: not military leaders as high-competence straight-shooters, but as all being suspect for having risen unstoppably in a system pervaded by partisan platitudes and shibboleths. Fortunately, the administration didn't take the Soviet approach of purging all those under suspicion.

They just finally had to fire their SecNav because reality butted heads with their ideological conclusion was that business experience was more conducive to military success. Unfortunately for their very-much-not-military-led plan, SecNav probably needs a bit more user experience from time in Navy leadership to successfully work within that labrythine bureaucracy.

The school system is going to crash out in the US. The public school teachers will readily share symptoms ("enrollment going down", "2X the IEPs of 3 years ago", "non-verbal ipad kids", "kids only sleeping 4 hours a night because of ipads", etc.). As everyone with means or time escapes, the system increasingly distills problems and legitimate special-needs cases while no longer spreading them out among cooperative kids, and teachers will continue to burn out in such a thankless environment.

At varying times in various places, public school is or will become just like riding the bus: technically a viable option for a needed service, if you have no other choice and are ready to suffer in a place that tolerates all manner of dysfunction.

I think Maryland deserves a special shoutout. It's illegal, and not just in a CPS-steamrolls-your-rights-and-family sort of way, for an 8 year old to be left with children <13.

Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.

dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost

If the abstraction works better for you this way, call them interchangeable units of American and Chinese insolvency. Or incremental forfeiture of domestic ownership.

I think OP needed "emergency service is cash up front".

In a different domain, this is the painful lesson of almost anyone who tries to help people in a bind -- you can try to help, but yours is unlikely to be the advice that sets them straight, so you shouldn't get too invested with unproven or, especially, proven unreliable actors.

North Korea was able to get nuclear weapons because we didn't want the carnage of artillery bombardment to Seoul that would have been the retaliation, had we stopped them.

Iran was close to achieving that same thing with ballistic missile bombardment of Europe.

The problem is that Iran, unlike NK, is run by a fanatical death cult with stated goal of attacking United States and history of running proxy militias in every nearby failed state, in a neighborhood that has no shortage of failed states.

If you're in the US, it's likely that you either don't drive by schools when they're letting out, or you live in a place that has the right combination of density and poor kids to limit the driver pick-ups. None of the 5 places across 4 states where I've lived in the last 10 years have avoided the pickup line phenomenon.

Or, at least, most of the people who thought their advertising strategies were worth mentioning spent almost nothing, relying rather on word of mouth.

Those may be quite different things.