As written the bureaucrat would be useful in preventing stalemate, which isn’t accurate since bureaucrats cause stalemates.

FOH with that bullshit.

The no child left behind policy was intended to ensure that kids got extra help when needed. In reality schools determined it was way easier to lower the bar than to get some kids to learn. Kids and shitty parents have figured this out and will game the system as much as possible. Clear on it being a baby bush policy. FWIW I think the intent was good, but making more demands of the education without providing additional resources and no way of enforcing quality has reached an inevitable point.

Grade school: teacher fired for passing failing students so he wouldn’t have to deal with them next year. This was before “no child left behind” existed. At the end of one of the school years a girl tripped and fell and somehow got a metal tent spike through her neck. She was ok, just had a wicked scar.

Middle school: someone did the old flush the fireworks thing and somehow revealed a major flaw in the plumbing that required demolishing a whole building. We didn’t have water on campus for the last month. This was in Phoenix and it was getting stupid hot, so that whole month was half days.

High school: At the end of the year before I started a bunch of students got arrested for using an empty science lab to make meth. In my junior year there was a party that got a couple kids killed in a drive by.

Want to expend energy and stay fit? Gymnastics and tumbling. Especially at 6. The martial arts are a good place to start a self defense track, but a 6 year old has a very hard time understanding the body kinetics they are trying to mimic.

Exoskeleton suits will never happen because they’d be worth more than a soldier’s life is to the people in charge. It’ll take rich people wanting to cosplay Iron Man to make anything like that happen.

By your content I’m going to discuss regional, not local service. For context I’m in one of the top 10 most populous cities in the country. There is no regional rail service. That’s how bad it is. In order to catch a train, it’s a 2 hour drive to a much smaller city.

But let’s look at a train trip I wanted to take. All west coast, Portland, OR to San Diego, CA. There is at least rail service that would do it. I think it took 48 ish hours with a middle of the night layover in Los Angeles. The drive is about 16 hours. The flight is about 2.

When it exists, it’s slow and super inconvenient.

If you don’t take AZ and NV with you, you will get your Colorado River water cut off and lose a lot of farming power. That might even require UT. Unless it’s only Northern California included, in which case you still lose that agriculture, and possible land based trade lines to Mexico. It’s not a clean and pretty separation.

I could have been that neighbor. For many years I was a WiFi communist and intentionally kept my AP open. I depended on free WiFi to get through college so I provided free WiFi. Then I got a cease and desist from my ISP for someone pirating a shit ton of porn. Like the list was about 10 full length pornos. Had to lock it down after that. I’ve considered making some deals with my neighbors to extend my mesh network into their house in exchange for space in their driveway, but haven’t gotten around to it.