Can I just say how wonderful it is to have people like you who are able to work within the system?:-D Everyone is different - brain chemistries and upbringing and the like - and if you can handle it, you are doing a good work.

I had to leave the profession for another one entirely - I am now an engineer - b/c I just could not handle being part of the outright predatory practices within academia.:-( (people are literally walking away from fully tenured positions, not tenure-track mind you, I mean they already received that, in top-ranked universities even)

Regardless of what future career paths await someone, after getting whatever degree (PhD, MS, BS/BA, AA, or even just someone interested who is watching a YouTube video), knowledge of STEM imho can only benefit them, and society as a whole. e.g. the practice of skeptical thought (testing everything new against what you know to be true based on evidential thinking) can help someone even if they work at an entirely unrelated minimum wage job - e.g. don't accept candy from strangers and then climb into their unmarked van no matter what amount of free drugs they promise you:-D (and then the political equivalent: vote for me and I will make everything "better"). So then whether your students stop at the community college level - or maybe they are adults taking classes for fun even - or go on to things like business degrees, you are playing an important role in advocating for scientific literacy in society at large, which is so crucial these days, hence I hope you feel proud, b/c you should be:-).

Thanks for the sympathy. I apologize if you thought I meant anything at all about you - I did get myself triggered, and in greatly shortening the text it lost clarity that I was attempting to humorously refer to the community's motto:

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Without the word "peacock" in my reply... yeah that just got totally lost didn't it?:-P Also, this little gem of a 10-year-old video worked its way into my language as well:-P.

You - and that Denethor quote - are totally right. We cannot manage to control the entire universe, so we should just focus on what we can do. e.g., we aren't all going to make it, I now think, therefore I help those who I can. Like literally, what more could possibly be done?

Also, I have lost hope that the short- or medium-term situation will improve, but I can still fight back by slowing the degradation.:-) Some possibly nice words to that effect: the concept of "hope", much like "good", does not exist in a vacuum: we need to hold out hope FOR something specific - so it helps to try to form a mental picture for what that is.

We cannot ever move back, so all that remains is to decide how best to move forward, choosing among the options that do exist.

She is very smart. I mean duh, literal PhD professor and all:-).

What I know about the situation is that way back in the day, having a family was something that the US government decided needed to be incentivized, hence tax breaks were offered to those who participated. While WAAAAY back in the day before that, like feudal England times, marriage - as in certificates, formalized ceremonies where people would travel to attend, divorce prohibited under the law and such - was only for royalty, whereas nobody gave a crap about peasants. The latter just said "let's do it" and shacked up together, and that was that. That doesn't negate the very real experiences they lived - just that the government did not get involved down to that level, b/c the peasants were basically the "property" of the landlord, so if e.g. an injustice was done, it would be up to them to right it (assuming they were not the cause of it in the first place, or too bored/scared/drunk/horny/whatever). Maybe that is all in the book - probably, or at least she surely knew the back-story as she wrote:-).

Anyway my point is that ever since radio and especially TV, politicians have gotten really good at pulling the wool over people's eyes - and surely they did quite a job of that before then too:-P - and I don't think the politicians even cared about family income vs. non-family income, so much as it likely seemed a great way to hide the real truth: that a massive transfer of wealth from the common man was being increasingly shifted into the hands of a few. Calling it "family" allowed them to basically double the amount someone could receive before wondering why they were not doing well off (except it's so complex b/c they WERE doing well-off, but that was b/c the USA wasn't bombed all to hell during the World Wars, and also technology especially medical care had improved tremendously; also, women do not earn equal to men so really it's not "double" and more like 1.7). And then after that there are so many other tricks too - e.g. people having to work longer hours to meet the same standard, or old people having to refinance their mortgages to pay off their kids college or house loans or whatever, and all the while they had people convinced that even though they were NOT okay, that somehow it was mysteriously just them in isolation, rather than a major societal upheaval affecting us all (though not equally).

I am not very smart, and not very well educated in these matters - really - but that much at least I see. What the forces of globalization and mechanization mean, essentially, are that most humans are now irrelevant (to the REAL "Humans", the powers behind this little ~~democracy~~ plutocracy of ours), so we can just fuck off and die - if not all then at least most of us. The pandemic made this crystally clear, to anyone who was listening.

So yeah, if we aren't one of THEM then we are merely peasants, and can only get by as best we can. The only thing I can add is that not all places in the USA are moving towards this end at equal rates - e.g. women in certain states cannot receive life-saving medical care if it involves the uterus in even the most tangential of ways (like an ectopic situation), but women in more liberal states still can. Not everyone can pick up and move, thus many will simply (and fully, I mean literally in every sense) die instead.

The USA is not a first-world nation anymore.