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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Low income is also better in uncertain budget times as Title 1 funds make sure they have both fed and state funds. Here in Cali our property taxes mean that the schools in poor areas are the most well funded and the schools in rich older areas are the least well funded. Just with variations on what “rich” means here too.

    If you have a state pension system too don’t forget to look into how that works for your district. There are some in my area that actually don’t pay the full percentage so teachers have a worse retirement than if they went to a different district with slightly less pay. So it’s all about the long game.


  • Then your union is negotiating it if they’re of any value. All the teachers unions around me negotiated 14-25% raises over 3 years over the last few years. If you’re a younger teacher you should look to job hop though. If you’re tenured you’re sorta stuck. In my area there’s three districts of the like 40~ I always push people that are new to end up in as once tenured in them you’ll earn well over 6 figures, even at the elementary level.

    Source: former education and still friends with my teacher colleagues.






  • If you’re talking about adjustable rear view mirrors then I think one of the last and only cars to do it was the 90s Mercedes Benz S class. They had it memory linked with steering and seating. It was weird and cool.

    Also, if you’re charging your car in a PG&E area you’re technically giving them more money since the gas they provide is natural gas and not petroleum gas. You’d be sticking it to BP or Cheveron (or standard oil if you want to go old school).



  • This is exactly a problem of negligence. SS isn’t a fucking tree. It doesn’t just grow naturally. We have to put money into it and maintain that system, and not drain the coffers when we want to go bomb brown people in far away lands. When that system has been in place for decades and then someone doesn’t maintain it before me (I’m only 30 so I’ve only contributed about 12 years of my life to SS) but boomers worked for 40-50 years and kept trying to stop paying into it or taking from it, then they caused the problems. It’s not short sighted to call them out since they have had the most amount of time and have been the largest group of both voting and working blocks.

    SS is going to fail or be dried up by the time I hit 60 since we keep running into issues with it. At best those of us under 45 will have to figure out a new solution and rework the system so that we can pay for the failure and misgivings of those before us. You can try and sit on a high horse about not wanting to blame the older generations, but they’re literally the ones with the voting power and money to make this all work smoothly and they didn’t do shit. If you’re younger like me then you too will be paying for their fuck up. You can’t live off the knowledge you gained from realizing too late that the older generations fucked us. We cant eat knowledge, we can’t live in learning from past mistakes, and we can’t drink the warm idea of knowing we sat around and problem solved as a team.


  • Forrest service roads and cleared lanes don’t really do anything to help us mitigate our fires. A recent fire by me in NorCal was growing at a rate of nearly 1000 acres per hour. At that speed it was moving faster than 60mph and created its own weather including dry lightening and fire tornadoes. We have tons of freeways with at least 75+ feet of width to them for miles and they just jump those containment lines all the time.

    Back burns/prescribed burns are about the only thing we have that does anything useful. In fact that earlier fire was talked about how it got out of control because a prescribed burn wasn’t done when it was scheduled and it was right in the starting path.

    I’d recommend you go watch videos on the Camp fire (paradise) but also the Carr fire. The old thinking in Cali before that fire season was that cities were safe because of defensive spacing, pavement, underground power and access to water. The Carr fire wiped out a huge swath of western Redding and the Camp fire effectively removed paradise from the map. Both were 40k + people cities. Our fires aren’t like everywhere else. Our mountains create channels for wind to speed through and the steep inclines mean that flames spread faster when traveling up hills. Our trees are massive and when they fully engulf they basically become giant matches spewing embers for miles in every direction. In some cases we’ve had fires creating spot fires up to 1-2 miles away. We just can’t account for everything. Look at Nevada though, they consistently get larger fires than even California (due to remote locations and those same dry, hot winds. No one ever asks Nevada to sweep a forest or bury power lines.

    We also resource share with Canada and Australia in California. So we have a few NSW water drop plane here for the summer helping us, and then in our winter we send a few of our DC-10s over and a 747. On top of that we’re also a state that sends its firefighters out even during our summer to go to Montana, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona and any other states that request our mutual aid.

    Lastly, look up at Canada and Montana. Their wildfires are growing out of control. Specifically because they have a lot of dead trees after the bark beetle basically kills them.

    There’s a great documentary on YouTube about the last watchman for the Forrest service. It’s just not needed much since our camera system uses multiple angles to geo-locate faster. With drones often sent and used to survey fires and help teams on the ground prepare to fight them.

    Oh, and our smoke jumpers. We pay crews of people here in Cali to jump out of planes and live in the Forrest for weeks on end possibly while they fight fires. It’s just incredibly difficult in some of these more remote areas like the mountains.


  • This is every dumbass right wing talking point. Cali has the largest fleet of firefighting aircraft in the world. We have been deploying night time attack helicopters, we recently finalized like 5 new C-130 conversion craft (on top of our 747s, DC-10s and other various attack craft) that drop 4000 gallons of retardant and we have propositioned personnel across the state in strategic locations so they can water drop on any fire within 20 minutes. We’re a massive state with a ton of federal lands so cutting in the woods isn’t really a California thing. We’re burying power lines, but a lot of these fires recently have been dry lightening. We don’t really use watch towers since we have a system of cameras positioned on peaks all across the state that monitor for us. We have more firefighters and keep them on payroll year round. These fires down in SoCal happen frequently due to Santa Ana winds which is a dry (like 10% humidity), hot and fast wind that whips over the mountains. People in flat states or humid ones act like we just twiddle are thumbs at this but the state is just an environment that constantly caught on fire, and the weather and topography make those fires grow faster and burn hotter. Not to mention the eucalyptus that colonizers brought over that spontaneously combusts.

    It’s a little ranty/ramble-y, but fire risk is something we’re use to here. It isn’t new to us.