Vote with your dollar

I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.

For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.

Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.

Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.

So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.

A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.

TL;DR

This is the control room, and if you look closely, you'll see a dark stripe in the carpet running the perimeter of the room. This was referred to as the "velvet rope," and absolutely NO ONE was allowed to cross it without authorization. It was under constant observation from an adjacent office, and I was told that if someone did set foot inside without permission, things got VERY serious VERY quickly.

This is one of the computer stations, and to me, it's such a gorgeous encapsulation of its period of technology, the sort of aesthetic that shows like Lost will bend over backwards to recreate.

As I was scouting, I noticed the day calendar had last been torn off about when the plant closed for good...

Then we went into the nuclear reactor, and the whole damn thing was just so spooky.

Looking back, I think it came from an overwhelming feeling of utter insignificance in the face of the sheer power this colossus was designed to produce.

The scale was just so out of proportion to every day reality, the sort of place where a weight of "46000 LBS" is just casually noted on the side of a part.

Peering into where the core would've been, all I could think is that I'd never want the job where you have to climb down that ladder on the left while this thing was in operation.

If you're interested in seeing more, you can find my full tour here!

https://nickcarr.com/scouting-a-decommissioned-nuclear-power-plant/

Thanks for this question!

I think you might have read the Greenbook too fast if that's your takeaway from it. Because it's a little more nuanced.

He never said women should only be wives and mothers. It was his opinion that the average mother with young kids would prefer to stay home with her children if money were no object, instead of putting them in daycare, and that pretty much any baby would rather stay home with its own mom instead of going to daycare - his complaint was that the unpaid labor women do in the home raising kids doesn't get the same respect as paid work outside the home does, and he thought that was really unfair. (at the time I first read the Green Book, I was a stay at home mom with three kids under 5 and getting treated like dirt by my husband and society for not having "a real job" so that really resonated with me)

And he said that expecting a woman to both work outside the home in a paid job AND be responsible for all the unpaid household labor on top of it was "tyranny."

Now I'll admit some of the things he thinks about women are a little old-fashioned and sexist, and he did say that biology gave men and women their own separate roles that complement each other and bla bla bla. For instance he thinks women aren't suited for manual labor because they're delicate little flowers whose beauty would get ruined if they worked too hard.

But he never said women shouldn't have jobs at all. He understood that most women want or need to work outside the home.

One of the very first laws he passed was equal pay for equal work, another was raise the minimum for marriage to either 16 or 20 (I'm not sure which is accurate) gave women equal right to divorce, equal rights for girls to go to school (I've seen statistics and graphs about all this, the jump in enrollment for females is drastic and took effect almost overnight after he came into power) own property, drive cars and so much more. He was light years ahead of most of his Arab neighbors and most western countries as well in the early 70s.