The only thing from my trees that will fruit year round is coconuts, and that's really more of a flavoring than a food. We give it to the ducks though and they like it.
This makes me think as a father of middle class kids... Kids with middle class parents get one shot in life. If they blow it by getting hooked on drugs or getting a DUI, they will likely struggle to recover for a loooong time. Kids with lower class parents don't even really get that. Kids with upper-middle class parents get to fuck around a little bit. They'll get to party a little but need to be careful not to let it ruin their lives.
Then there's the rich kids. They will get to go to party's, wreck their car, spit on cops, do drugs, buy their homework, and still go to college until they succeed. They will get bailed out of jail, won't have to work, and will go on to write books about how "nobody wants to work" and "jobs chase capital" and "pick yourself up by the bootstraps." And they will get a free ride to the top in daddy's limo.
In case someone's wondering, that's a pretty accurate rendition of the parental wealth, but limited.
Rich kids
- hang out with rich kids and get jobs from other rich kids parents
- get every opportunity to improve themselves through better schools and access to extracurriculars
- can always risk failure at a business because they know their parents won't let them go hungry
That last benefit? Turns out rich kids are really in the top 25%, not the top 1% as you might have been thinking.
I used to use em-dashes all the time, same with semicolons, in my academic writing. I love obscure punctuation rules (yes I'm a loser). I've stopped using most of them as AI advanced. Whilst I have a back catalogue of work using them it just wasn't worth the risk of having my work questioned. I'm sad about this AI ruins all the good stuff!
Remarkably, I found a blog where I thought "This sounds like AI" but I wasn't sure, so I went to their back catalogue from decades ago, and the writing was similar so I gave them a pass.
Then I checked the internet archive.
They had replaced all their back catalogue with AI slop.
Compared to the US, everywhere has an entrepreneurial self esteem problem. A culture that promotes and encourages entrepreneurialism is the US’ special thing.
The Great American Dream is to start your own business and strike it rich. The Great Australian Dream is to own your house rather than rent it.