Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 72: Schools & Childcare in the New River Valley

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

just give the kids some goddamned enrichment jesus follow Childcare4All: https://twitter.com/VAC4A https://www.nrvdsa.org/childcare-for-all slides: https://youtu.be/mkRhKNipOS0 Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod​ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 YOU ALREADY SENT US ANTHRAX so please don't bother in the future thanks

And I can draw all over this, right? And people can see this. OK, you can deface the map of where is this? This this is the New River Valley. I'm going to say big. Nerds. Hokey, hokey, hokey. Hi, that was teach VMI. Listen, I we we get this shit on Virginia Tech in this podcast.

Garbage school for garbage people. The one guy in high school, I went to high school with who went to the tech is possibly one of the most egregious examples of trash I've ever met. OK, you just cut out for a second. So I did. Do we have Liam? Do we not have Liam? Are you fucking kidding me? What? No, I can hear Liam.

So can I. I. OK, well, it's my fault, then. I cannot hear Liam. All right, it's going to be fun, baby. You said Liam. That's the most insulting thing I've ever done. If you have a piece of shit, I literally have me. I have served a muted Liam.

Wow, go fuck yourself. Sorry. Fuck you. Fuck you. I'm so sorry. Are you? Why are you after all the nice things I've ever done for you? Are you fucking kidding me? It must have been the last time we used discord.

It must have been like Zenka. Yeah, yeah. Well, someone in the comments. I'm going to make the rude comment is I wish I could mute Liam. And to that I say fuck you. Yeah, all you have to do is be on the show and then you can mute Liam anytime you want. Or you could just go watch a do not eat video.

You fucking puzzles. All right. Listen to what? Welcome to well, there's your problem. Fuck you. It's a podcast with many technical difficulties. Where we all hate the listeners. We all hate each other. We all hate you personally who is listening to this.

It's just generally bad vibes all around. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice Kodakali, the person who is talking now. My pronouns, she and her. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson.

Hopefully not muted this time, Alice. My pronouns are he and him and we have a guest. We have a guest today. Guest. Hello. My name is Sarah Roop. My pronouns, my voice talking and my pronouns are she, her. All right, we've done it.

We've started the podcast at long last. Only 26 minutes late, baby. So it's 29 minutes late by my clock. Are you sure you're not four minutes behind? Oh my God. We started talking like three minutes. I'm going to fucking have a nice time. No, you got to edit that out.

You can't have that. Yeah, that's true. It's suicidal ideation. You got to edit me out. You got to edit her out. Just dub me over with this. I'm going to have a nice time. Yes, like that.

Well, I'm so agree. Right. Just any time, any time we make an actionable threat, just dub over a thing that you've clicked out of me saying, have a nice time. Yeah, please do actually. Yes. Okay. So what you see on the screen in front of you

is a satellite image of the new River Valley, which Sarah is has come on to talk about today. We're going to talk about a lot of aspects of it and sort of inequalities there and dysfunctional funding of schools is a big part of it. And what what what Sarah is experienced in working in one of the schools in this region, right? That's what we're here for, right? Yeah.

Yes. Okay. Okay. I adequately described that. Good. Guests successfully introduced. Yes, us. Yes, we've made it over the second hurdle of many.

Yes. Where will we crash the bird? We don't know what you don't either, baby. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So anyway, but first we have to do the goddamn news. Okay. Explain how what's going on all these fuck chuckle fucks.

Pennsylvania Senate has decided to immediately strike down Governor Wolf's emergency declaration order on account of that stupid fucking ballot initiative passed. Good job, idiots. Yeah, good job, idiots. And so now the now it's illegal for restaurants in Pennsylvania to serve to go cocktails or to serve alcohol outdoors. Oh, don't all restaurants have to be outdoors now?

Yes. So but it's also a little bit of a dry state once again. Yeah, basically. Cool. You're like a you're like a more boring Utah now. This shit sucks. Ass. They'll make us install like the big what's the thing they put

on the side of curtain. The side of curtain. Yeah. It's an incredible snub if you're by the Republicans to small business owners, which I think is very funny in a way, but also it's annoying because, you know, alcohol is now illegal in Pennsylvania. Um, what you've got to do is you've got to go for the kind of

legislative competence that the Republic of Ireland has where they accidentally made all drugs legal for about a day until they could fix it by poorly drafting a law that was going to like legalize. I think it was like they're going to legalize MDMA. They're going to legalize ecstasy and then like they inadvertently made all drugs legal. I would have just kept it like that.

Didn't they also accidentally fund public housing? Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of that going around. I think by this point, I'm starting to believe that if you want like a public body to do something, your only hope is to like wait for them to fuck up and do it by accident. Yep. Yeah.

Give them like 12 guinesses, you know, every single legislator and then they come out of the chamber the next day and they've accidentally brought through full communism. I mean, this is this was Lenin's one move in the Palace of the Soviets. Yes. Works every time you get that vodka flowing. Well, you know, I mean, the Duma was probably not full of tea

toddlers. I can say that. No. But now that now that alcohol is illegal in Pennsylvania, I guess that's not going to happen here. Thanks for nothing, dickheads. Yeah. Very sad.

Well, very sad. You're going back to your like Puritan Quaker roots though, which is Wait, Quakers, Quakers Puritans? No, no, I was mixing the two together as part of the sort of like general disdain for a nonconformist religion that like led people to move to the East and the United States and then like cheat people on their tree season stuff.

I'm a shquaker, Mennonite Mormons. Yeah, exactly. That must be stopped. All right. I only put in one one goddamn news. That's probably for the best considering we are 26 minutes late. Okay.

Let's go. Let's fucking go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Beautiful. What's this? The new River Valley.

Yes. It's beautiful. Yes, you're beautiful. Oh, I think it's like the oldest river in the world or the second oldest and it runs north instead of south, which is unusual for a river. Huh.

And it's it's it's funny because it's the oldest river in the world and they call it the New River. It's not even close according to Wikipedia. Really? It's there according to Wikipedia. How wrong am I? Oh, it's 75 million years off the Fink. Finky River in Australia is the oldest.

The New River and the Susquehanna are basically tied. Hmm. They're older than the Atlantic Ocean people. Yeah, that's that's always a possible. Well, Hanjia, Shanshia, Sarah,

dog. That's always that's always the fun one is, you know, what what is Appalachia? You know, how far does it go? The international Appalachian Trail. They have that now. You know, it goes all the way to Spain. It also goes through Glasgow.

So that means Alice Caldwell Kelly is a person of Appalachia. A PLA. That's right. I always say listen, Scotland is Appalachia. Glasgow is Philadelphia. All of this stuff like it has been linked irrespective of continental drift both spiritually and geographically. Yes.

Also, that's why yeah, that's why we do the podcast. Does this mean we can through hike to get MDMA? If you're feeling brave enough, sure. Yeah. Yeah. I have a trail name as I'm hiking the Atlantic Ocean. What is it? I'd rate it.

I love to I love doing this podcast because I can just hit you with a dad joke. Yes. Well, I think I think I think once you get because there's no specified route for getting off a Newfoundland. So what a policy. Yeah, I guess I guess you do. We had to get a kayak.

Yeah. A kayak and just go straight to Iceland. Yeah. It's a good idea. Yeah. Do the reverse life Ericsson. But anyway, so yeah, New River Valley, it's an old river. It flows into the Ohio River and into the Mississippi as

opposed to flowing to tidewater in Virginia. Sort of, I guess maybe at the end of the Shenandoah Valley, you might call it or that's sort of where it starts ish. Right. You know, it's one of the earliest areas where it's sort of Appalachia was developed, you know, after sort of, you know, initially there was this thing in the Shenandoah Valley and the Great Appalachian Valley in general called the Great

Indian Warpath, which is the English name, right? Algonquin speaking tribes called it the Mishimaiget, which means the Great Trail or Ethel Wundemi, one or not. Nailed it. Yeah, nailed it. Yeah, the path where they go armed, right? Now you're not just using this thing for wars. It's for like trade and stuff.

You know, it's sort of a combination of trails carved by wildlife going to Salt Licks, you know, and, you know, paths carved by, you know, people trading unimproved basic trail. A lot of it later became sort of US Route 11 long after settlement. A massive downgrade. Yeah, exactly. It's a fascinating drive. I will say that.

Yeah, you can go to Smiley's. Yes, you can. For which you're welcome. Yeah, you can get the best dang barbecue in Virginia. No, the best dang BBQ and VA, sir. This is true. Yes. And they have beer flights.

In case you don't know what we're talking about. Smiley's is a truck stop with a barbecue restaurant in it for some reason and a full service bar in it for some reason. Yes. And I ordered a Mr. Pimp and they gave it to me in a foam like gas station cup. I don't know why I was expecting felt like, like, you know, like a soda gun, but I did not get that.

And I was just like, I bet if I asked real nice, she would pour three shots into this for me. Hell, yes. And of course, we don't know, but it's entirely possible that an indigenous people have their own Smiley's along this this piece of infrastructure. Good point. Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know anything about Native American cooking. Um, a lot of fry breads, which is like good as hell. Um, three sisters. So like, uh, corn, beans. Um, I forget what the third one is. Someone's going to be yelling at me in the comments for not remembering squash. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Squash. Um, I don't know. It's probably like too far north or stuff like, uh, tomatoes. Right. But like, yeah. Um, you say tomato.

Yeah. Tomato. You said tomato and it bothered me when we saw you. Alice, that's it. She, she gets an exemption. Yeah. Because I have, I have, I have the normal accent. That's cause we never, we never talked about tomatoes on the

show before. Yeah. Well, there's your problem of the tomato. And now there's, now there's an, uh, irresolvable divide between the hosts. You know, we can't fire you. I know. You know, so eventually, you know, settlers come in, uh, Daniel

Boone, Daniel Boone finds, uh, goes through the Cumberland gap and proves the roads. People start settling. Then they find cold. To go with the hat, the raccoon hat. The guy with the raccoon hat. Yes. Raccoon.

Jesus. Fuck. What kind of sociopath makes a raccoon into a hat? Daniel Boone. What are you listening? Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone.

Daniel Boone. Yes. And Davey Crockett came through too. Yeah. Yeah. So you got coal. That means you can have railroads. Um,

like wildly swinging. Yeah. 100 years of history. Yeah. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna skip over this cause we want to get to the meat of it. Uh, that's right. Yeah.

So, you know, you have a, you wind up with a very rapidly start building up an infrastructure based around extraction of resources. Um, you know, and, and this is, this is sort of, uh, you know, it's the whole purpose of these railroads is to bring coal. That proposed railroads for Africa map. Holy shit. Well, I think this is a good, a good parallel, I guess.

Um, you know, so if, if you're listening on audio, you don't have the slide up in front of you. I have a map of the Norfolk and Western railroad and then a map of existing railroads in Africa versus proposed railroads in Africa, sort of like, and also a map of railroads in India, sort of talk about like what's sort of like extractive infrastructure versus something that's a little more productive. Right.

Cause there's like, you can build a railroad, which, you know, gets people and goods from place to place, or you can build a railroad that does one thing, which is to bring coal to a port or bring timber to a port, do something like that. Yeah. Bring tea to a port. Yeah. Any number of things.

You know, and the, the, the stuff that was built in Appalachia is kind of a, a combination of both. Um, just because all the railroads are private companies, they didn't always play nice with each other. You didn't have a great integrated system, but you could get coal to Norfolk. Um, thank God for that. Yes.

So, you know, you have different patterns of development in like, you know, based on resource extraction versus based on something productive. I mean, you can sort of look at, um, I don't want to say it's like a one-to-one comparison, but I always think of like Africa versus India in like how they develop the brand, the railroads or didn't, you know, cause India is, um, you know, has a highly integrated network and, um, yeah.

And I've cut to like 5,000 British people going, you're welcome and waggling our eyebrows until we're all fucking struck by lightning, having like pushed God too far. Yeah. One can hope. Yeah, you wind up better off, I think overall when you, when you build infrastructure, which is, you know, uh, geared towards moving people and goods from place to place versus

moving everything to one place and then exporting it. This sort of results in, you know, a lot of, a lot of wealth is generated in Appalachia from, you know, coal, lots of these towns spring up before the advent of the automobile. You know, they're very confined by the topology, right? Which means they're very dense. Um, there's like, you know, lots of tall buildings. Um, it's weird to see an American town with hills.

Normally you guys just sort of bulldoze those. Wow. Pittsburgh, I see. And they started doing that later. This is Bluefield, Virginia. Population is currently 10,000 or Bluefield, West Virginia. Yeah. You know, the Twin Cities.

The 12 story building in the background there. This is six story building. Um, or no, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Um, this is a very lazily named bakery. The bread man. Yes. That's what it says though. Wow.

Yeah. He's the bread man. He brings you bread. What if you just like named bread man, but it was like unrelated. No, his father was a baker and his father was a baker. So, so like, you know, this is a sort of an example of the town, you know, which is built around a the railroad. Um, well, Bluefield, West Virginia was also built around Union

busting, um, because Baldwin felts was there. Um, but you know, this is, um, this is sort of a place. There was a big railroad yard. Um, and because, you know, everything was based around like either walking or, you know, horse carts and stuff. And the topology was so difficult. All the development was concentrated in a very small area. Right.

I'm so glad the Baldwin felts detective agency no longer exists because we still have to deal with, we still have to deal with Pinkerton. Pinkerton is on Twitter and they have a rainbow flag, uh, profile picture for Pride month. Wait, did they actually do that? Yeah, they actually did. They actually did that.

I was going to do that as a joke. No, it's a real thing. Pinkerton catch it before the end of the month. Pinkerton has a Pride logo. I'm going to put that on the screen somewhere in post. That's right. Well, didn't Denver like Pinkerton security guard get shot at a BLM protest in October?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, well, he shot a guy. I think he did like, um, he killed a guy. I think it might actually be fake cause I'm trying to hang on. I will get to the bottom of this. Well, if it's fake, we've got to like put up a fake one.

Yeah. Yeah. I think he like killed a guy allegedly in self-defense because the guy pepper sprays him and I don't know. Like if some Mac a guy pepper sprays you and you shoot them. No, it's real. On the other hand, it's a Pinkerton and it's real. I think it'd be, I think it'd be funny if like, uh, Pinkerton detective

agency was like, you know, really, really pro BLM in one of those weird moral gambits they have. Like Pinkerton was really, really anti-slavery. There was a bunch of Pinkerton's and John Brown's raid on Harper's ferry. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's another they do have the black and the brown stripe in

their pride flag. Wow. Who's who's to say? They're straight. Don't go do that place. You know, so you got these, these small tight towns, you know, you got these, uh, you know, lots of towns claiming like they had the most millionaires per capita in like through the early 20th century in

sort of this area. Not, not great to completely romanticize this stuff because, you know, they're also full of horse poop and disease and bad labor conditions. You know, people are being poisoned by chemicals. There's no indoor plumbing until late. You know, yeah, there's like millionaires all over the place. Yeah, that's another issue. Yeah, that's good because you can go door to door with the guillotine or

strong guillotine. Labor activism must have been so much easier when the rich guy who was fucking with you lived in a place called like surname castle on top of a hill. You can just walk out. Let's go to his house. Right. Yeah, he's got his house.

Yeah, that's true. He's walked there because the boss has to walk places. Here I go. Striking again. Yeah. What are you going to do that now? You try and like even set foot on one of these guys private islands and like a Pinkerton pride flag adorned like Sniper Nest.

It's going to take you out before you get within like two miles of them. Love is love. Just scratch into your bloody courts. You had towns that had, you know, they had a lot of money, right? And, you know, they were clearly capable of spending it on public works and like public services. You know, you got big, big old bozar city halls and courthouses. You got your big academic gothic kind of high schools and middle

schools and stuff like that. You know, you know, those are apartments now. Yeah. Yeah, they did that in my neighborhood too. And they're sort of through, through like the mid 20th century, there's sort of a general collapse in the ability of towns to sort of finance anything, right?

And I think it's, it's not restricted to Appalachia, the New River Valley or anything, but, you know, okay, what, what happened, right? All right. So I'm back, back out here. We're back. We're back in space. We're back in space. Space.

Wait, it's all industrialization. It's all industrialization. I mean, we talked a bit and a lot of people like to talk about the decline of coal. It, coal's never been the only industry in any part of Appalachia. There's still lots of timber. There's still, there's still lots of coal, honestly, but a lot of the coal moved to the Powder River Basin.

We talked about that in our Vulcan episode, but you know, in an area like the New River Valley, you see Blacksburg, you see Christiansburg, you got Radford, you know, there's, there's still like major employers like the, the Radford Army ammunition plant, which they built here in 1941 because they thought if they built it far inland, it would be immune to Zeppelin attack. Has it ever been attacked by Zeppelins? No.

Then unimpeachable. Yes. You have, you have employers like Virginia Tech, you have Radford University, right? It's sort of a solid economy, but yet there's still like definitely a discrepancy between which, which towns are providing services and which are not, right? Of course, another fun one is all these employers are exempt from taxes

for various reasons. Of course. All right. Yeah, I feel like these like universities create bubbles around them too, because they only cover like one county in the New River Valley. Like, uh, Radford was like a women's college and it's kind of a party school. Um, and it doesn't have as much of an endowment as Virginia Tech,

which is like a really large agricultural school. Um, but Virginia Tech is like where all the money is in the New River Valley and like they have different zoning laws than the rest of the New River Valley. So they've basically forestalled their commercial businesses outside their town lines into Christiansburg and into Radford. Um, so you see different types of development that pop up too. Like, oh, there's a lot more like mobile home parks in Montgomery

County, um, like outside of Blacksburg, um, just because there's more workers that need low income housing. That's like dense because you have like the targets, the Walmart's, the Lowe's, all these like super chain stores. They're outside of, outside of the limits of Blacksburg where Virginia Tech is. Um, and that was done on purpose by like the academic class because they, uh, they want their kids to have like a beautiful serenic like,

uh, but they want like the Blue Ridge Mountains to look pristine where they live, but they're willing to outsource it to like the surrounding neighborhoods. I love the, the dictatorship of academia. It's so cool to me that we everywhere becomes South Bend. You know, I move this slide up. Uh, cause it is fun to talk about the arsenal. Um, this was taken from a Zeppelin.

No, there are no Zeppelins. Well, you can see it didn't make it all the way there. That's why we've got this like plan view. Right. Sarah, this is all you, you made this slide. So the Radford arsenal is responsible for like 90% of US bullets and rockets. Um, and they also, it's the only place that in the US military

that makes a specific type of propellant. Um, what is it called? I think it's like nitrous. Oh, nitrocellulose, which is also called gun cotton because basically you put these chemicals on cotton and it makes it explosive. Um, and, uh, the arsenal was built like around World War II and a lot of it hasn't been updated since then. So you can find a lot of like really like, uh, impassioned military

people being like, we need a new arsenal because it's falling apart, which is scary to hear because it's, uh, it's making propellant. It does explode every once in a while. Like I think there was like a fire like a couple years ago that killed someone. Um, yeah, it, it, it apparently like the US military when the war in Iraq began again, they started making close to like 250,000 bullets for every Iraqi insurgent that they were killing.

So, and all of that was being made in the Radford arsenal. So when we have things like coal disappearing in the New River Valley, we didn't see like the end of like, um, like industrial forces. Instead, the economy started developing towards like US militarism. And, um, yeah. So the space at the arsenal, even though it's like the US military, it's leased out to base systems, which is a defense contractor that also supplies Saudi Arabia.

Um, and previous, previous entrant on this, on the show, VAE systems. Really? I have to listen to that one. I, sorry. Yeah. The plant also like they burn off all their waste like into the air, which is a, which is one of the only things that like upset people because you have a lot of like, because of Virginia attack, you have a lot of

like eco type activists and they're upset about the plant burning off waste material, but they're not as upset about the fact that the plant is making munitions to kill Palestinian children or anything like that. Um, and yeah, it's a pretty shitty situation. Like my boyfriend's dad worked at the arsenal for 30 years and I think he was only making like five figures. And at the end of it, he developed this condition, uh, called PSP, which is like a chemically caused, uh, like disease.

It's caused specifically by chemicals, but it's kind of like Parkinson's. Um, and there's other people in town who've gotten like cancer from working underground, the arsenal, and it's kind of scary too because the arsenal used to have like these soccer matches for all the workers, kids, and they would have it on like the wet field in front of the arsenal. And, uh, now you're not even allowed to walk over that field, uh, because it's too close to where the chemical burn offs occurred. So I mean, fantastic fun way to spend the Saturday.

Yeah, just go out and like, hey kids, you know, it's a fun activity licking unknown chemical patches. What, what if the love canal except that they were actively dumping toxic waste in there while the kids were watching? Um, hey guys, you want to see something crazy? This just sounds like the principled, muscular, internationalist liberalism that the Biden administration is so proud of. You know, exactly.

Only democracy in the Middle East. That's right. What America? Huh? Oh, I was, I was making a joke that, that America was the only democracy in the Middle East. Yeah. Which is more or less as a 51st state and just get it over with more or less.

Yeah. If the French could administer Algeria like the deteriorate province, we could do it with Israel. Oh my God. And nothing bad happened. That's right. Israel gets statehood before Puerto Rico. My God.

Probably. Yeah. Israel becomes like a US territory, but I have to put like passive aggressive taxation without representation shared on all the license flights. They're a federal district. They knew what they were getting into when they signed up for it. The warfighter depends on Radford Nitrocellulose.

Oh, wow. This came out from this, um, military think tank that was like advocating for the arsenal to be rebuilt. And at the graphic is like this triangle and it points to the bottom. It says like the Radford acid facility, which makes the Radford Nitrocellulose facility. And basically all of these things, they're what power like the Apache helicopters, all the weapons that we use, um, Bradley fighting vehicle,

Abrams tank. I don't even know what these things refer to really. I'm just like reading off what I read. That's crazy. Sounds like a lot of US military power is insanely vulnerable at this one specific point. Oh, no. Yeah.

And think about it. Like those workers can be organized. Like I think that they're represented some of them by SCIU, but like imagine if you had like a picket or something where you're like, you know, advocating for it to be closed. Like that would be an interesting thing to do because you could effectively stop the production of all munitions in United States and stop like all the wars that we're engaging in.

Yeah. You could lower the ambient temperature of the zone that we're in several degrees. Exactly. Yeah. And all those, all the workers, like they send their kids to the Montgomery County public schools. Um, you'd think that the military would have like special daycare programs or schools set up.

Um, but that's not the case. They're using the public school system and it's still critically underfunded even though like this is the industry. Like you'd think that there would be like some sort of resources coming in from the US government. If they have like the military, like a huge production aspect of the military is here in the New River Valley, but instead it's still left to the property taxes.

I mean, they can't even take care of people who are in the military. This is true. And having that much extra free market ideology on on top of it where it's just like, yeah, you're not like, you can just quit your job, right? You're not even like a troop. Why should they, you know, go to, you know, local public school, which is I assume extremely good.

If you don't, if you don't, if you don't like the conditions at this nitrocellulose facility, then you can just go work at another nitrocellulose. That's right. Be a rational consumer. Yeah. Um, yeah. So basically my boyfriend, he's, he went to the school that I work

for, I'm not going to say the name of the public school, but it's in Montgomery County. Um, and that's, that's, I got interested in doing childcare because we organize a tenants union together. And while we were door knocking in a trailer park that had lost, um, water during the summer, there was also like potholes and safety issues. There were all these signs put up everywhere that were like hiring caregiver for $12 an hour for the public schools.

And this was during COVID. So I was really curious about like what's going on because the schools were closed and I went to a job fair and like I sat in front of four different elementary school principals while they're on their cell phones and I was like, uh, like, hello, I'm here to like work. Um, and I got hired as like a childcare worker for the public school system and they had us inside the high school cafeteria with a mixed age group of kids, um, ages five to 11.

And these kids were, uh, given like a state mandated bag of Legos and like one thing of Play-Doh to play with. And they're, they're in adult sized desks at the high school, face six feet apart, all facing forward. Um, and there was no, there was no like instructions telling me what to do. There was no, it was like 12 hours a day, no breaks. And there was no lesson plans. Um, and eventually when schools opened, I went to, I would, they had me

working back in the elementary school as a recess aide. So I would like watch the kids at recess. And I don't even know which aspect of the job was more depressing, like working in the cafeteria or working in the playground because I showed, um, Justin and Liam the playground and it's pretty, it's pretty awful looking. Yeah, it looks like a FEMA evac site. It's a FEMA evac site.

Yes, but there was a FEMA tent and it collapsed under the rain. Yeah. We got a picture of that coming up in two slides. Oh, should I move, should I move to the next, next slide? I'm just going to do it. Oh yeah. So yeah, if we, if we're driving from where I live in Craig County to the school I was working in, I would pass a bunch of element, two

different elementary schools in Blacksburg on my way to work. And these elementary schools had literal, like multiple playgrounds for different age groups. There were huge buildings, big windows, and they had race tracks for kids to like race little mini cars around with their feet, like Flintstones. And this is like compared to my elementary school, which had three swings and a fenced in black top and the monkey bars that

like were dangerous. Um, and so I started getting like really angry. I was like, why the heck, why is there so much difference between Blacksburg kids? So you could swear on the show. Yeah, I'm still used to being around little kids. Yeah, I was like, yeah, I still can't, I can't even make myself cause. Why are the schools so different?

And yeah, these questions about inequalities really came up to me. Um, cause like also like there's no sidewalks around the elementary school where I was working. So all the kids like, um, it's the school I was working in is a title one school, which means that 40% of the children or more like live below the poverty line. And you can see directly where they live. There's like a trailer park that's less than a mile away and then

like, uh, dense apartment building. And even though those buildings are walkable, you can't walk. There's no pedestrian access because there's no sidewalks on the side of the road and there's no crosswalks. So it's literally right across the street. Yeah. And you gotta, you get to send a bus across the street. And they do.

Yeah. And like there's no bus aids either. So the kids get in fights on the bus, which is like, a whole thing. Um, yeah. Getting, getting in fights on the bus that goes across a one street and then like background. It's a real quick fight.

Yeah. Could this be a metaphor for anything? Yeah. I, for capitalism, right? Yeah, probably. I just work here. The, uh, one of the things which I always thought was kind of interesting is just the lack of pedestrian infrastructure and

areas which are, you know, sort of rural impoverished areas. Um, one of the big ones is actually on, uh, reservations. Lots and lots of people don't have cars, but there's no sidewalks anywhere. You know, it seems like where they're most necessary. Cave the res. Yeah. I can't believe I even had to say shit like that.

I mean, I literally can. Let's just genocide in slow motion, but Jesus Christ. And so one of the big differences too is like the, it's not just like that the kids can't walk there. It's like there's nowhere for them to play. And I found it incredible that when I started working as a recess aid, that the kids were only given 20 minute recesses. And that's basically the same as like when you're having a

smoke break as an adult in your, in your adult job, or like if you're having a, a, in prison and you're taking laps around the prison break field or whatever. Like it felt like that's basically what the school was preparing kids for. Um, and it looks like it's got a union eyes. Yeah.

Got a union eyes. You like blow the recess whistle or like hit the bell or something. The kids just like, listen, buddy, I'm union. Yeah. You don't, you don't tell me when recess ends. I tell you, I'm gonna call a tiny little union rapid adult desk.

He's just like, we don't talk to him. Throwing crowds at you. All the new students are called scabs or something. Yeah. Um, and so also when I was on the playground, the playground was also not meant for kids with disabilities. Like I had this one student who was in first grade who had a developmental disorder and like he had a,

he had a, he had a, he had a, he had a, he had a, he had a, he had a, he had a developmental disorder and like he went up on the

monkey bars and he fell off. And in front of me, he literally broke his arm and I'd never seen anyone cry that hard in my whole life. Um, and afterwards I was like trying to tell the first graders like, don't go on the monkey bars, but it's like, there's no other options.

There's literally three swings for 60 kids and like a black top. There's not anything else for them to do. So I'd have to play games with them, like catch the flag, things like that, but it was like playing with kids. Well, the good news is that there's nothing to link disabilities or like developmental disorders with living next to an arsenal

that like pumps a shit ton of chemicals out into like, Yes. Exactly. As we know, as we know, I, I do love the idea, Sarah, of you being a ringer in like red rover.

Just like absolutely clothes lining some poor nine year old. I mean, it happened a few times on accident because it's just like, they're so small and like you're playing tag. I mean, okay, we got like, that we got like noodles so that they could hit each other with noodles instead of their hands.

Um, and they would end up like hitting me a lot of times and, you know, you just got to take it. Such as life. It's just instituting a sort of like noodle based underdome. Exactly. Yeah.

And the, so the one other thing about the program that I wanted to tell you, I was like that the, when I got hired during the pandemic to work in this full day day care, I had not worked in the school before and all the students in my program were white. Um, and so I had assumed like,

okay, I guess like the school is probably going to be predominantly white. Um, but then when the school opened and I was working as a recess aide, I noticed that the school was like way more diverse. Uh, and that's because the program that daycare I was working for wasn't free.

So by, because it had FB for it, like a couple hundred dollars a month, it like excluded all of like the children of color who were like from the low income neighborhoods, like none of them were in the program because it had a cost. So I was also wondering like why are after school programs for elementary school kids? What was the cost at all?

And I don't really have a good answer. Well, all of the money that towns could be using to, to pay school districts for that is going into, uh, uh, question mark. Nine figure,

nine figure, uh, administrative costs. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. We had to, we had to buy the local police department, like a new M rap.

Cause they like weren't happy with having just the one. Yeah. It's sort of a bear cat. It's a bear cub. It's child sized. Yeah. Our town has like a Susan G. Coleman,

like souped out pink, like cancer cop car. Oh my God. The worst, the worst variation of that I've ever seen was an upstate New York, a tiny, tiny, like essentially one of those like New York towns that's like a golf course incorporated had an autism awareness Humvee.

Wow. I mean, I know why, but it was bright blue and it had the like puzzle piece logo on one of the doors. Yeah. For, for when they're SWAT team or whatever needed to raise awareness of autism. Right before they shot somebody with autism in the leg for not obeying orders.

Yes. That's also raising awareness. That is raising awareness. You're right. You will be very aware that you got shot. Yeah. People with autism. Yeah.

Our heroes in blue, ladies and gentlemen, causing a national incident. Yes. That will raise awareness of autism because very few people are aware of the concept of autism. Yeah. So if you go to the, well,

if you go to the next slide, Alice can see the picture of the playground. Yes. It looks like it's an exit. Sarah, I love dash con. Yes. So if you're the people who are listening,

this is inside the FEMA tent that kids were supposed to be able to eat in for, if their parents requested, like have them eat outside during the pandemic. And as far as I know, all the kids who requested that ate inside the cafeteria anyway, but like this, yeah, it has an exit sign inside the FEMA tent inside. No one mowed the grass.

It was like up to our waist. And then if you look out from the FEMA tent to the right, you'll see the fenced in black top where I spent four hours in the morning with kids playing dodgeball, kickball, whatever. And then next to it is like this, like badly fenced off like plastic fence around all this like playground equipment that they've just thrown in a pile because it can't use it anymore. And then out out of the frame, there's three swings and the monkey bars.

And that's all the kids had to play for all day all year. It seems pretty like a pretty lame experience. If you're a kid, you know, especially if you're like, you don't like you don't like playing with balls, you know, which I certainly didn't enjoy doing when I was a kid. No, what about the poor fucking nuts? What are you supposed to do? I like us as the most athletic third of this podcast.

God help me. Well, I was I rode in high school. I kicked. I just took the train even in high school. I got CTE. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm more athletic because I didn't get injuries. Listen, I thought you said you rode.

He did. No, he did say road. Yeah. I was talking about the CTE microphone high school. I was micro. Yes, I was lecturing all the other the all the other students about how safety regulations are bullshit and also unions suck. So this is what I did for the nerdy kids because like I had the same concern. I got like, and this sucks because I had to use my own money for everything like the pool noodles.

I said, I told you about I had to buy the pool noodles. I had to buy jerseys so I could put the kids into teams because if they didn't have even teams, I had this one student like when he lost, he would just be like, I give up and like walk home and there's no fence around the playground. And like I said, there's just a highway with no sidewalks. So what he would do is walk up to the highway. Like he was going to walk home to like one of the like dense places where you can leave you to the trailer park or the apartments. And I would have to like, stop him get in between him and the road and be like, please don't leave, please don't leave. So what I did was like, I got like a bunch of bird and bug identification books and binoculars and microscope.

Well, they're not microscopes. What do they call where they're in your hands? Magnifying glasses and like bug catching things so that the kids who didn't want to like socialize with the ball sports, they could like look for birds or bugs. And that was a success, especially with the younger kids. But with the older, it's so weird that fifth graders are even in elementary school. They're like 11. They're fully sentient.

Like they have. Yeah, there's one girl called another girl pick me in front of me. And I was like, what the like they have like their whole like internet lingo is already like in their brains. Yeah. So that was the one thing I could think of was like doing like nature stuff. But even then, if you like, like Liam and Justin saw like there isn't a lot of like nature to look at. There's literally three trees. Yeah, the like the asphalt Beatles West Virginia.

There was the man mowing his lawn next door. Wild, wonderful. Oh, it's normal Virginia, not West Virginia. Yes. Yes. So if you go to the next. Call it normal Virginia. Normal Virginia.

So that was just more facts. But this like the thing about this that is most upsetting is that the Blacksburg is deliberately zoned. Like I said, to like allow the academic upper class to have like a higher quality education for their children. Like their kids have playgrounds, they have racetracks, all this stuff. And at the same time, it's because they have all the low paying businesses concentrated outside of Blacksburg in the town where I was working Christiansburg. And yeah, and all these trailer parks, like they don't even have like bus lines to get them to and from their jobs. So they rely on their own cars and things like that. And the kids like they have no freedom to explore because there's nowhere for them to go.

Hmm. Justin, you're going to need to like censor the fourth bullet points on this slide because it's got the name of the elementary school and whatever. I'll do that in post. Yeah, just just if you want to put the like the Pinkerton Pride logo over. And I think a lot of a lot of times kids these kids too, like they don't have like a good home life. So if they had public childcare or even like beautiful like playgrounds to play on where they could go after school or if after school programs are free, like it would really improve just like their dispositions because they're they go home and they play like they kill each other on fortnight if they have fortnight. But yeah, like a lot of times like these trailers that these kids are living in their parents have been caught into these things called like rent to own schemes, which is where like a trailer park landlord instead of like renting you the trailer.

He sells it to you, but you still have to pay a lot rent on the trailer. And this means that legally the trailer park owner he no longer has to do any maintenance on the trailer. So like if you if your pipes burst below the ground or your electricity in your trailer bus, like he has no responsibility to fix those things. So oftentimes people will like run out of electricity and water and have no way of fixing it. I really hope that landlords have a nice time. I think it'd be great if somebody gave their landlord a present. International Friends Day. Yes. Yeah, I think we need a cultural revolution for landlords.

Intercontinental ballistic gift. Yes. Just give them just, you know, give them give them what? Give them what they deserve for the friendship sauce. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Landlords. Landlords. Lords of land.

Moving swiftly on before we get canceled again. It was about to say before we get killed by the FBI or something. Alice. We survived that one. Yeah. How do you feel about landlords? Fucking suck. That's all I can say.

Our tenants union deals with landlords that are some of the shittiest people I've ever met. They threaten the women that live in their trailer parks. They like a lot of times in these. What's happening to you in Appalachia that's interesting is like these big conglomerates. Big conglomerate companies are buying up trailer parks while they're on the market and they don't now they don't even do repairs. So like they have one person managing like five different trailer parks that have hundreds and hundreds of tenants. And so a lot of these people are like when they say they have to pay rent, they're like, I don't even know where it goes to. And I'm like, yeah, because it's literally going to a corporation.

There's there's not even a black rock or somebody at this point. Yeah. And it's fucked up. I think even if you had like, even if you had the one rare unicorn mythical beast of like a property manager who wants to help you, like if they have fucking 500 people that they've got to do that with, then a thing with crumbling infrastructure, when are they going to find the time? Next slide. So did you put the sooner did Ross?

No, this was me. Looking looking good. Yeah, Steve Ballmer. Steve Ballmer. Yeah. We're going to have never blinked. We're going to talk about developers. Never will. Or development, which is, you know, one of the I mean, we talk about, I guess, solutions to like inadequate like infrastructure or inadequate development in Appalachia places like that. I am slamming an entire JD Vance book into my veins. And I am saying, why don't they just all learn to codes?

Right. Yeah. This will definitely help. Have you have you considered learning Emax? Yeah. It's even frightening that the school is trying to teach kids how to code. Cause like I walk into classrooms and these kids are sitting at desks in front of their Chromebooks all day. And they have these like plastic barriers around their desk because of COVID.

And so they're literally in office cubicles learning how to like interact, even though they're illiterate, like they don't know how to read or write. They're learning how to interact with the computer and like how to manipulate it to get information, which is frightening. Right. Like they don't, they're not having a proper childhood and I find it alarming. Oh, I had to fucking thought. Jesus, that's depressing. No childhood, only code. Learn to code. Fuck.

I know how to code and it was the biggest mistake I ever made. There's like this fundamentalist. There's like this fundamentalist Christian education system called like accelerated Christian education. Oh, yeah. Which involves like putting kids in cubes all day and filling out worksheets. It feels kind of like the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

I concur with that. Oh, fuck. Okay, I'm good. I'm back. You know, I think, you know, if we're coming here as, you know, socialists, right, you know, some of the stuff you'd want to do. I have a lib now. Please excuse me. This is the kind of shit, right, that makes me want to like adopt a fully like bullshit educational policy where we just do all of the like,

insane shit that rich kids get to try for fun. Like fucking Montessori shit where you just like, it's about your feelings and you like assign colors to things. That is what we need. Like for kids under the age of seven, we need to have play based childcare, like not whatever this is in the public school systems because think about it. We have fifth graders in elementary schools and the Biden administration wants to expand it so that we have three and four year olds in elementary schools too. And those kids are going to be expected like California Governor Newsom, he went ahead and he extended their kindergarten to cover four year olds. And they're mandating that four year olds have three hours of education every day. It's like, you can't teach a four year old three hours.

Are they going to fucking sit still? Yeah. Let them be fucking kids. Let them be kids. It's fine. They have the rest of their lives to be cynical dickheads like us. Yes. If you all get interested in this, there's a really cool pedagogical method called the Reggio Emilia method.

And it was based out of like this communist. It was like the committee was working to build a public childcare facility in the province of St. Louis, Maloguzi, and Italy. He made it in after World War II because their whole town was destroyed in some part of Northern Italy. And as the people in the town were rebuilding it, they were like, OK, we're going to use this rubble to build public childcare facilities. And so all the mothers in town were building it with their own hands. And he was just biking by and he was a member of the Italian Communist Party. And he got of his bike and he was like, what are you doing? And they're like, we're building a school.

And I'll be your teacher. And he came up with this standard that's like it's considered it's like Montessori and that it's like in America only the rich kids can access it because those programs are like $1,000 a month or so. But it's all play based. And it's also based on having the workers be unionized because in the public school system, the union that represents workers is the VA in Virginia, which is a business union. It doesn't do anything for like the lower tiered wage workers like janitors, childcare workers, special needs, AIDS, things like that. It basically only covers teachers and teachers interests. So like if schools were redesigned, like if we had public childcare in Virginia, I would say that it should be separate from the like elementary schools. Like we should have specific facilities that are for kids younger than the age five.

And it should be play based and it should be worker run instead of having this like tiered system or like I had like a coworker like eating kids lunches out of the trash. Like because like there's just no there's no food like we weren't we're not paid enough like $12 an hour is like nothing to live on and our union like when we wrote a petition to ask for higher wages and for breaks. Like my union didn't even respond to that. So like I think like the way I'm rethinking it all this is like not to trash unions. I think unions are really good, but not business unions, right? Those are different. Those are like a machine. So yeah, I think like the veggie a method is a good way to go forward.

It's like the Montessori, but communist or I'd consider you could be a freak. Like my mom would go to Quaker school. That's great though. This is the thing, right? Genuinely, right? This kind of like Fordist thing of like, fuck you, getting the cubicle makes me want to like. It's so fucking depressing, man. Literally any, literally any idea you could sell me on fucking anything at this point as an alternative to that kind of education.

You could tell me, yeah, we're going to teach the kids that like different foods have different vibrational energies or whatever. That's insane. Go right ahead. Here's several million dollars. I agree with you entirely because this shit's so fucking depressing. And like the like, I don't know. I personally believe like as somebody who really liked learning, but really hated school like school, even up and until you're a teenager, school should still be fucking fun. Like I should like the best project I ever had was shout out Mrs. Kendrick, 12th grade English, where we got to we read Dante's Inferno and then got to put people in hell.

That was amazing. I just I it's so fucking depressing to think about all these kids that are little cubicles learning to be good little wage slaves and it just takes away childhood entirely. In terms of into little cogs of the machine, it's like, we don't need to be this fucking cynical about eight year olds like let him do some weird shit. And that's why if like I cannot encourage our followers enough, don't fucking get a STEM education. This is true. I would highly recommend avoiding STEM fields entirely, speaking as as as STEM PMC scum. Just, yeah, pedagogically, just, you know, fuck around a bit, do something different. Do some weird shit.

Do some weird shit. Do some weird shit. Do some weird shit. Do some weird shit. Yes. What else on the slide? Okay. So we're talking about Steve Bulmer.

We're talking about Steve Bulmer. Well, I wanted to sort of drink while you code. What I'm hearing is give the six year olds alcohol. No, don't do that. That's probably a bad idea. You a bitch. What one of the solutions which has been put forward for like underfunded, you know, public schools in Appalachia, among other, among other, among other things, you know, social services in general is we need more develop. We need development, right?

What kind of development for who and what? Yes. Well, you need development. Okay. That doesn't really answer my question. Increases the tax base and provides jobs. So what I'm hearing is hang the rich. That's not.

No, no, that's, that's not. We need their money. We can't just build them. You have. No, wrong. Wrong. So wrong. I don't want to have this podcast anymore.

I will say if you just destroy wealth, it is equivalent to redistributing it, honestly, because the rest of the money becomes more valuable. Oh, yes. All right, fucking laser designate some Bitcoin minds. I don't like that's not really okay. Yeah. The economics degree in my head is just. Yeah. The Bravagan rage.

Yeah. We don't have time to talk about artificial scarce today. So I thought it'd be good to like talk about development. I think this is relevant to especially Christiansburg. What kind of development has been sort of prioritized, right? Which is why and what's been built and why it kind of hasn't. Provided the results. Yeah.

Which is why we have to talk about the Appalachian development highway system. Yeah, I made it about cars. Did you see that coming? Oh, look at this. Look at this beautiful cityscape. That is breezewood. That is breezewood. Yeah, that's true.

Well, Alice, we got to take it a breezewood. Hell yeah. I love. I love to like I'm so fucking aware of autism right now. I'm having so much autism awareness as I try to process 50 different signs of different. I fucking love breezewood, man. It's the only place I'll ever feel at home.

All right. So some of the three. Fuck do you pass any single thing in this like. What we do is you sort of come out of this exit from 70 and you go straight across into the sheets. Oh, Christ. Yeah. Yeah.

And then you can ignore everything else. Yeah, Ross, you claim to hate cars, but I have numerous photos of you and a Volkswagen GTI. Yes. Okay. Okay. Well, that didn't work as well as I thought. Yeah.

Well, I listen. So we built, you know, this sort of interstate highway system, you know, and that's sort of, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a big, it sucks. It's, you know, it's, it doesn't suck. I mean, it does what it does, you know, it does it well. Yeah. The Appalachian Regional Commission decided at some point it would be a good idea to be built a series of highways, you know, to move people around within Appalachia.

This is directly for purposes of development. You know, the idea being this is going to increase. There's going to be more, more businesses. This is going to help the economy. There's going to provide jobs, so on and so forth. You drive two towns over to go to your new job coding. Yes. And on the way you stop and you get like a coffee.

Yeah. But like in reality, it's, you drive two towns over to go to your new job at Walmart. Right. Exactly. Or the Amazon distribution warehouse or what have you. And then you work at the Walmart as well. You know, some people said we're building roads to get people out of Appalachia, you know, and roads.

I mean, in terms of economic stimulus, I mean, they're expensive to build but very cheap to operate. You don't have to pay anyone to run them. Right. Unlike say mass transit. Or trains. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there's a lot of, there's not a lot of direct stimulus.

There's lots of short term construction jobs, minimal personnel who like are out to repave and salt the roads. It's good for contractors, right? But it's not, it hasn't been good for like long term economic development that increases the tax base. No. And the jobs that it creates have no job security because you're going to have to go across three or four different states looking for work doing this shit.

So, but, you know, theoretically, this increases the tax base and increases, you know, opportunities, right? It increases city's ability to fund services like schools, right? But sort of the net result of this has been kind of the opposite, right? Because when you build better roads, instead of having nice compact development, you have stuff that really sprawls out the result of which it's very, it's much, much more, it's more expensive for a city to maintain infrastructure for a Walmart or a Target or a Lowe's than it is for them to maintain infrastructure for a smaller business in a smaller form factor,

right? You know. Yeah, because the business models of all of those chains are predicated on giving us a little of that money back to anyone, but especially the local area as possible. Yeah. It's also about the physical form factor. You have more street frontage. You need a wider road, you know, you may be trying to attract a business, you may be trying

to attract like a new development in the form of a Walmart. And then suddenly they build a big parking lot and that means you need to redesign your entire stormwater system in your town because that's just how bad a parking lot is, right? A lot of times the business is required to pay for the improvements, but that's, you know, sort of a one-time cost and then the maintenance is passed on to the city. So if you're like a town, like a small town and the Walmart opens, you might get double tapped by the Walmart, you know, so like they build a road around the town like a bypass and then a Walmart opens along the bypass and the Walmart says, well, you know, it's going

to be great for the town. We're going to, you know, you're going to amortize your losses over 20 years. You know, now the road is bypassing around, you know, the central business district, everyone's shopping at the Walmart. The Walmart is, you know, requiring all these services like the big road, you know, and the Walmart doesn't pay the same level of property taxes that most, you know, businesses in a small downtown would, you know, and this is... Yeah, it's a parasite.

It's a parasitic business. Yeah. And it's, you know, and it sort of results in local businesses closing, you know, because the Walmart is more convenient and now, you know, if you're trying to maintain a city budget, all of a sudden this is much, much more difficult. This Walmart that was supposed to be a boon for the city has actually just drained the tax base. Now you have no money for anything, right?

But this is all in the name of development, right? So... Yeah, because now you have a Walmart. Yeah, I don't have a Walmart. Now you have a Walmart, maybe you have a Sheets, you have, you know, a couple other things, right? Hey, don't talk bad about Sheets. Wow.

It's been there for you in some pretty dark hours. As is not. This is true, yes. Well, so is Walmart. I feel that, unfortunately. Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of this, a lot of the money that's gone into development has specifically been to encourage this kind of business and this kind of development pattern.

And it's a net negative for most towns and cities. These places are very expensive to maintain. They require a lot of infrastructure to keep on running. I think a good example here. I have downtown Christiansburg and just outside of Christiansburg at the same scale here, right? Oh, hell yeah. Yes.

All right. So this is... Looking great. Christiansburg itself is kind of, there's a lot of parking in here, but I think a good example is over here we have a Hardee's, right? And over here we have a place called Macadoo's. Macadoo's is a sandwich place and they also have a liquor license. Probably, I think for a southern, a Southwest Virginia chain, it has pretty good pastrami

surprisingly. That Hardee's parking lot is literally insane. Yes. So, like sort of as an example, if you're going for development, right? If you want development that's going to increase the tax base, you have this Macadoo's, right? It's on a little road, right? At most you're maintaining this amount of street infrastructure, right? There's a parking lot behind it, so I guess maybe this as well.

You have a sewer lateral, you have a water lateral, right? That's about it. You have the street. You don't have any parking. So when we build out all this road infrastructure to attract auto-oriented business, all of a sudden we have something which is probably not providing the same amount of tax revenue as Macadoo's, which is this Hardee's, right? And we have much, much more road infrastructure.

We have this whole sewer. We have probably stormwater drains, all sorts of other stuff, and this is a much wider road. And it's kind of like, well, all this infrastructure is now required to sustain the same kind of business. Save one Hardee's. Yes, and it's providing less tax revenue, and it's kind of, you know, the net result of this is you can't have lots of, you can't have schools, you can't have good social

services because you need to pay to maintain the road in front of the Hardee's, maybe because of the turn line. You don't talk to or meet any of your fucking neighbors because you're all in your cars. Whereas you get a sandwich and a beer at Macadoo's, you know, and then maybe you stop to get your wife a present or something. And you know the florist because her kid goes to school with your kid. It's that sort of thing. It's not about just like, because we hear them support small business all the time,

like you should support density and less auto-based infrastructure because the time is coming, folks, where I will have to put cannons on my GTI. I think it's very... You know, you're just sitting in traffic getting madder and madder at your fellow man. Well, it is very clever that, like, Blacksburg has managed to shovel the auto-oriented businesses into Christiansburg, you know, rather than try and deal with stuff on their own, you know, considering they have, you know, they have that world-class urban planning school there at Virginia Polytechnic and State Insta State University.

You will never beat Clemson. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. You love playing enters. Oh, well, we, we all play Enter Sandman and jump around when our football team comes out. Just get wiped off the fucking face of the planet by Miami 52 to 10. Oh, and I like hot dogs. Fuck.

All this stuff is really, really, really expensive to maintain. It just eats city budgets, you know, you can't, you can't have, and this is sort of a slow motion disaster that's happening everywhere in the United States. So why isn't there, like, a corporate tax for maintaining infrastructure in Virginia? I don't think anyone's ever reckoned with the cost of this infrastructure, especially since a lot of it's kind of abstracted and, you know, local officials are not, not like smart people. No, they're also very easy to bribe.

Yeah. It's, it's, you know, people, people don't think that, like, maybe development is going to actually be bad. No, because you have a Walmart now. And you, you've said you were going to get development in your day. Yeah. The tax revenue, you know, is supposed to be there. And sometimes it isn't.

If you're a mayor or whatever, you get to, like, open a thing, which mayors love doing. A lot of times, Walmart or come in and say, you know, we're going to, this is going to, here's the statistics. They say we're going to be, it'll be a net positive for the city in 20 years, right? And then, you know, after that, I think, I think I read today somewhere that the average lifespan of a Walmart is 12 years. Wow. We're bringing the jobs back for 12 years, for some of you.

And then you just have this liability for the city after that. Yeah, an empty Walmart. An empty Walmart. Yeah. Which I guess, you know, maybe you want some money, you can turn into an ICE detention camp or something. Failed state. Failed state.

Failed state. Yeah. And like, it's not like the McAdoo's employees or the Hardy's employees or the Walmart employees or Target employees are unionized, right? And like, if you, if you look at like my partner, he's trying to start, he's trying to organize a workers committee at the local Target in Christiansburg. He does this thing called Target Workers Unite and like, all of his efforts have been like thwarted by management, just because like, and like, he gets threatened with, like if

he takes a photo at work, like saying like he supports the UAW strike, which is happening at the Pulaski Volvo plant right now, like his managers will call and be like, yeah, you can't do that. Like you're going to, you can lose your job, things like that. Cause like even showing solidarity with your fellow workers or like making yourself recognizable so you could walk around town and be like, yeah, I'm trying to start a union. That's like a danger to you at your job. People will do anything to stop it.

Yeah. Cause I mean, just on a personal level, you might lose your, your gig as like assistant manager of this Walmart, which is going to close in 11 years, 11 months and counting. Yes. Yeah. I love, I love capitalism and I love the consciousness that it gives us and there are no problems. Yeah.

And it's, it's, it's kind of, it is depressing, you know, when you look at, I guess municipal budgets and it's like, well, you know, it becomes a question of, you know, we have to choose between police or schools or repaving the turn lane for the Hardys because the drive-thru was backing up onto the road. Yeah. And we can't say no to the cops because they terrify us and you can't say no to the Hardys. So yeah, they terrify us, but for different reasons, different reasons. There's the guy at the Hardys slowly rubbing a cheeseburger on your face.

The Hardys kills more people statistically, but it's like slower. The cap suddenly also got into the Hardys. Yeah. Yeah. That's like you're, you're like unholy alliance of cops and Hardys managers. Yes. Oh. The real Yellow King shit, fucking Carcosa, Virginia.

Well, we're back in space. We're back in space. I just wanted to kind of point out, you know, if this is an example of like just outsourcing all your problems because I think the Blacksburg line is about like right here and all the big things, but big box retail is down here. Yeah. Christiansburg, it just looks like a giant strip mall. It's one of the ugliest places I've ever seen for that reason.

And it's sad too, because I like came and lived here because of the Blue Ridge Mountains and like hiking the AT. I was like, wow, it's so gorgeous. But then like you go into town and it just, everything looks the same. Yeah. It's incredible how much you can do when you outsource all your problems to other people. And there are never, ever, ever consequences. That's right.

Yeah. Well, what did we learn? America is a failed state. Yes. The United States military industrial complex is exceptionally vulnerable at one place, which is like only protected from one thing, which is Zeplins. Yeah. Fucking explore alternative pedagogical methods.

Yes. Because fucking at fucking anything is better than the shit that we're doing now. Absolutely. Encourage. Join a union, start a union, get fired from your job for trying to organize a union. Kill some paper tents. Auto oriented development is harmful, even outside of large cities. Yeah.

Yeah. Learn to code. Don't learn to code. Don't learn to code. Do not learn to code. It sucks. Stupid. I feel like kids should have a right to not be online.

Like there should be like a children's bill of rights. That's like you have a right to refuse to like be online. You have a right to log off. You have a right to log off. Yes. You should be able to touch grass. There should be grass for you to touch in your playground that's not covered in ticks. Yes.

That's right. That is that that is that is a good one. All right. So we have a segment on this podcast called safety third. Okay. I had to split this one in two because it was long. This is already an array of images. We've been given.

Hello. Well, there's your problem podcast. Hello. Hi. Hello. I am a contractor. Oh, I know. Sorry.

Yeah. For one of the class one railroads, I work on a safety system called positive train control or PTC. PTC if you don't already know is a very involved and complicated system to keep trains from running into each other. It involves putting a GPS antenna on all your locomotives, hooking it up to the Commodore 64 version of Google Maps and then doing a bunch of very duct taped together feeds of telecommunications to track the trains, watch the speeds and do all of the train a leaves

from Los Angeles going north at 60 miles an hour and train B leaves San Francisco going south at 4045 miles an hour. Math problems, which seemed ridiculous at the time, but now are relevant so the trains don't crash into each other. Cool. Okay. Yes. I currently do office drone work that is very boring and very physically safe, if not

spiritually safe. But my last assignment was a slightly different story. I did something called verification and validation or V and V, which meant I got to test all the Commodore 64 Google Maps data before we put it on the trains. This involved mostly running around in the cornfields of Iowa with a $10,000 GPS system trying to read timetables and occasionally riding in a high rail vehicle. See figure one. Figure one.

Now figure one, you may notice he is in the pickup truck and there's a train right there. Oh Jesus. It's fine. You got right away Ghana. Yeah. Yeah. Figure one is actually a very safe and normal situation other than my flagrant violation of maintenance of way operating roles one dot 10 games, reading or electronic devices.

Here we are waiting for a train to move into a siding so we can get track and time to move past it. The dangerous shit we did was either on foot or in the lab. One of my first tasks after being freshly rushed through maintenance of way class, I was sent to BFE. I don't know what BFE is. I'm fucking Egypt middle of nowhere. Big fucking.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. To perform an audit of a subdivision that was about to have PTC turned on. Basically they just send me out into the world by myself, double check someone's work and see if I had enough brain cells to rub together to be trusted for actual work. Usually these audits would be done from the high rail as we have to sit on each critical asset.

That's signals, speed signs, switches, derails, crossings, clearances and mile post signs to verify our data was within the 7.2 foot FRA requirement. The high rail would simply roll down the tracks pausing in each asset. I would check my computer and only have to jump out to get assets on sidings and EMT tracks. That just sounds nice. That sounds relaxing. Sounds nice.

I'm going to drive the pickup truck on rail wheels down the line. Yeah, that'd be kind of fun. I could collect 10 to 50 miles of a 200 mile subdivision a day this way, but it requires either having one of our own high rails, see figure two. Yeah, it broke. F. Or bumming a ride with a track inspector. Since I was the FNG and a big old dummy, I had not organized track inspectors to help

me, thinking they would easily cooperate with me the week of. Eh. Eh. What a rube. With no local help, I decided to put on my GPS backpack, see figure three. Big honking $10,000 antenna. And collect the points by car and foot using loan worker protection. Oh no.

Huh? Of the critical asset. He's just going to walk down the railroad by himself. Of the critical assets, only two are typically easily accessible from the road. Those are crossings and signals because signal people are whiny and they don't like the high rail if they don't have to. Most subdivisions have public crossings every mile or two with absolute signals every 10 miles and intermediate signals every two miles.

So as you can imagine driving 200 miles with roughly 100 to 200 stops in Iowa where the roads do not follow the main line is daunting. But since I'd already fucked up with the track inspectors, I wanted to at least do something to show my boss back at home, which is dumb. Don't go above and beyond for your boss. Yeah. And especially don't fucking turn into Sam Porter Bridge's railroad version, you know. So I started hiking through the Iowa cornfields wearing steel towed boots and jeans in 100

degree 90 percent humidity. I was so sweaty and gross. My lookout slash lone worker form book melted in my back pocket. So look out slash lone worker protection is a way for rail crews to work on rail when they aren't permanently obstructing the track. Basically you have a guy read the timetable, determine the speed of train traffic and then using the form book determine how far away you are, how far away you have to be to see a train be able to safely clear the track.

That guy is your lookout. All he does is look for trains. Now, lone worker is the same idea, but you guessed it, you're all alone. Oh, no. Technically, you can't do anything that distracts you from looking out. Since I just had my laptop and GPS up and running, my reasoning was that I could step on the track when it was safe. And while continuing to look out, press the past slash fail button on my laptop.

I had done this for a couple of days and found myself in real middle of nowhere shit. You know, lots of bones and fancy designs on the track. Lots of coyotes howling in the distance. And I'm just walking the track. The track was elevated with drainage ditches, maybe four foot below the rail just with ballast or decent sized gravel making up the sides. It's a real bitch to walk on. That's when I heard the horn of M track.

That's when I shook hands with danger. Well, timetables tend to give at least two speeds, one for passenger, one for freight. In my part of the world, which is west of the Mississippi, freight trains have a maximum track speed of 70 miles an hour. But passenger trains are 79 miles per hour. This gave me slightly less time to slide into the drainage ditch than I had planned. And I got to experience an M track at full tilt, maybe 10 feet from my head race over me. Oh, fuck.

No, thank you. Yeah, thank you. To be continued. It gets number. It gets worse. Yeah, it gets worse. Oh, my God. All right.

Well, our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Did anyone have commercials before we go? I do a podcast called kill James Bond. Liam does a podcast called lion's lab by donkeys. Justin does a YouTube channel called do not eat. Sarah, Sarah, give us your commercials. Okay, so if you're in DSA, support my childcare for all resolution at convention this year. It would give organizers like me an opportunity to build out legislation for statewide universal childcare.

Also follow at VAC for a, which is my working group for DSA for childcare for all. That's our Twitter account and it's run by multiple people. So don't, it's don't DM anything. That's weird. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure. Yes, please be normal in Sarah's working groups DMs. Thank you, Alice.

All right. I think we did a podcast. Yeah. Podcast. You did it. Awesome. Against all odds.