Nobody important

One of my business school friends comes from a wealthy Swiss banking family and lives in the ritzy part of Geneva where the average house is in the tens-of-millions range. When I visit, I stay in his guest room and sweat profusely at night because, for all their wealth, these bozos can’t understand the unmatched pleasure that is a nice, cool room to sleep in at night. Bunch of uncultured rubes.

You’re born onto a planet you never asked to exist on… and society immediately hits you with: “Okay, now go earn the right to eat, sleep, rest, and have shelter.” Like… zoom out for a second. We’re floating on a rock in infinite space and we created a game where you have to spend most of your life working just to not starve or freeze to death. The whole concept is actually insane when you think about it.

If you are hyper aware of social cues, you probably don't have the "constantly misses social cues disorder" you probably have something else

An alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply. This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes. The era of abusing our nation’s immigration system is over.

This is my EMS Week story. Back in 1981 I started working for Grady EMS is Atlanta, the city's quite gritty "knife and gun club" service, that mostly ran in the seedier parts of the city. One night, things were slow for once, and my partner, Phil, parked our unit in an empty lot on Peachtree Street, close to 10th Street. Right after we stopped, several scantily clad young ladies came up to the unit and started chatting with us, like this was the most normal thing in the world to do in a dark parking lot in the middle of the night. Phil casually asked them how business was, they said it was slow, started talking about how their feet were hurting from just standing around, etc. I grew up in a comfortable, quiet suburb on the north side of the city, and even after serving in the military and traveling around some of the less glamorous parts of the world, was still a somewhat naïve 22 year old at that point. I was sitting there listening to the conversation and wondering what business these women were in, when we got a call. We said goodbye to the ladies, Phil started to head towards the call, when it just hit me like a thunderbolt. "PHIL, STOP!! WAIT A MINUTE!" He stopped the ambulance, and looked at me quizzically. "THOSE WOMEN....WERE PROSTITUTES!!!" I had never seen one before, Phil had to stop the ambulance for a minute to get his breath back, because he was laughing so hard at me. "What was your first clue, rookie?" Yeah, it took a while for me to live that one down, but I seriously had never been around any before. While we were headed to the call, I asked him why they all came up to the ambulance and seemed so glad to see us. "Did you see those shady looking creeps hanging around on the other side of the street." Well, yeah. "They were their pimps, making sure they were working and earning them money, and the girls knew that they could take a break while we were there, that no-one would seek their services while we were watching, and the pimps wouldn't hurt them for doing that, either." Cops would arrest them, Fire didn't hang around out of station, and everyone else would either abuse them or ignore them. We were literally the only "safe" people around so far as they were concerned. I thought about that a lot afterwards. We stayed in that zone for a couple of months, and I got to know some of those women, at least by their street names. There was one, blond, pretty, nice figure, super perky and bubbly personality, very unusual for that crowd, and a couple of the other women mentioned she was really new to the streets. She was distinguished by all that, and a very large, full color Harley Davidson tattoo on one thigh. Back then, it was very unusual to see tatted women, even prostitutes. IIRC, her street name was Alice. I suspected that was her real name, too. She was always so happy to see Phil and me, and I have to say it was very pleasant just to talk with her. A few months later, after we were assigned to another zone, in SW Atlanta, we got a call to a "person down" on I-285 between MLK and I-20. I assumed it was a car accident of some sort, but when we got there, there was just a body in the roadway, lit up by a GSP troopers flashing lights. It was a naked female with multiple serious traumatic injuries, and her head had obviously hit the pavement so hard it had fractured her skull in multiple places; there was so much facial swelling that whe was unrecognizable and doing what we called "squirreling, " where the forehead is swollen so much it overhangs and almost covers the eyes, pushing them over to the sides. She was still alive, technically at least. As we were getting her packaged up for transport, the GSP trooper told us that multiple witnesses had seen a van traveling at high speed, the back doors opened, and she was tossed out onto the roadway. When we flipped her over to strap her to a backboard, I saw a large, full color Harley Davidson tattoo on her thigh. It was Alice. We loaded her up and went Code 3 back to Grady, I got her intubated and a line started on the way, and stopped all the major bleeding, but there was not much else I could do. She coded just as we pulled onto the ambulance ramp. There was not much else the teams at Grady's Surgical Emergency Clinic could do for her, either, and they pronounced her dead about an hour after we pulled in with her. I heard later that she had been picked up by a customer at that same parking lot in Midtown, and then gang raped by at least six other men before being tossed out of that speeding van like a piece of unwanted meat. I never did hear if they caught the perps or not. I doubt it was much of a priority for Atlanta Police. I also heard that they never did identify her, and kept her at the Medical Examiner's office for 9 months, hoping a missing persons report would match with her, but none ever did. She was buried in an anonymous grave in Fulton County's indigent graveyard. That was 45 years ago, almost exactly. I still think of Alice fairly often, and have always wondered if there was still a mom or dad, or brother or sister, or even a friend or two still around that wondered whatever happened to her. I still wonder what happened in her life to cause her to end up selling her body for money in a dirty, dark parking lot in Midtown Atlanta, and how she was still able to be so perky and upbeat, at least around us. And that, in a microcosm, is what EMS life is like.

The Lunch Discourse annoyed me enough to write up a small rant about how the an entire generation was beaten into high time preference as the only rational response to decline.