which famously can vary by 4 orders of magnitude
That's why "Hiroshima" is now a unit. We're lucky "Tsar Bomba" isn't.
Lol at the $35,000. My brother's cancer drug (which is luckily funded by his insurance at the moment -- the same insurance company that balked at paying for an MRI of his brain while he had a six-week long migraine and was unable to walk) costs $40,000 a month.
No, I literally drive a school bus. I like the gig, but as a manager he is making something like eight times what I make (and probably a lot more than that).
I had a boss who had a net worth around $10 million (I knew because he had hired me to trade S&P500 futures for him and he gave me access to his brokerage accounts as part of this). He owned a house, nice cars, and a temp agency that gave him an income around $25,000 per month, in a southern city where the cost of living was very low. By any normal standard he was living in the lap of luxury, but his best friends were all west coast vulture capitalists who were worth hundreds of millions and my boss' jealousy of them just absolutely ate him up inside (this was the whole reason he was getting into futures trading in the first place).
Also, a lot of them like to rape children, and that shit can get pretty expensive.
Lol we were all laid off. He's now a manager at Comcast and I drive a school bus.
I'm currently reviving a personal iOS project that I last worked on almost 10 years ago. At the time, I was working under a (much younger) tech lead who was a firm advocate of the "all comments are bad" philosophy and reported me to management as being technically incompetent because I commented my code. Thank god I'm technically incompetent because there's no fucking way I could be making any sense of my 10-year-old code without those comments.
Somebody here is probably going to reply that nobody literally thinks all comments are bad, but I assure that you such people do exist in this profession.
I read War and Peace a couple of years ago for the first time to see what all the fuss was about. There's a scene where one of the characters is hunting with his prize borzoi and mentions that he paid a family of serfs for the dog. He didn't give the family money for the dog -- he gave the family in exchange for the dog. Imagine being the serf family and having to move to a new shitty estate for that.
It's fun to pretend that Tsarist Russia was the last place that still had serfs (until 1861) but that is unfortunately not the case.
You can also rent fucking robot legs in China. And apparently silkworm pupae are delicious.
Metal use historically was more a function of fuel (wood) availability than of metallurgical knowledge. Copper (and tin) have low melting points so it's relatively easier to produce bronze than iron, which needs much higher temperatures to produce. For a long time it was just easier to sail to Wales (an ancient producer of tin) than to round up an enormous quantity of wood.
"If you're doing business with a religious son of a bitch, Get. It. In. Writing. His word isn't worth shit, not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal." -William S. Burroughs, Words of Advice for Young People.
FWIW trump isn't really religious, of course.
Visual Sauce Safe, for us oldheads.