cr4ig_
At the same time I was going to college part-time nights as an engineering major, but from my perch as a draftsman I was not really seeing a lot to love about civil engineering. I ran across an ad for a tech support job at a startup CAD software vendor, applied, and got the gig. I quit that drafting job, put away my ink pens and electric eraser, and switched to a computer science major.
The rest is history, now a senior systems software engineer working on projects for NASA. So godspeed John Walker, thanks for pointing me in the direction of a 30+ year career that has been both lucrative and interesting.
Example: I live in Baltimore, a city that used to have an array of industries paying living wage blue-collar jobs that didn't require a lot in the way of education or other qualifications. All those industries -- shipping/stevedoring, shipbuilding, steel, auto manufacturing, general manufacturing -- were either globalized and went overseas or in the case of shipping underwent a technology shift (containerization) that eliminated most of the good-paying jobs.
The white collar jobs were hit more by technology/automation. The city used to be a regional banking/insurance center, but between consolidation of banks or insurance companies to compete in wider markets and technology automating most of the clerical-level stuff, those jobs disappeared too.
The only jobs left in the city now are at the bottom or the top of the wage scale, the middle is completely gone. And you can easily see the impact it has had on the city.
My co-worker neglected to do this one time and casually sent the document to the plotter to be drawn. When the plotter reached the entity way out in coordinate space, you heard the click-thunk of switching pens and then a high pitched whine as the plotter started rapidly spooling out paper to draw it. I've never seen anyone move so fast as he dove to reach the plotter power switch before all the paper scrolled off the spool and onto the floor.
Plotters were state of the art back then but they have pretty much disappeared without a trace. I think the technology has been somewhat repurposed to make vinyl sign cutters, they are basically a plotter with a cutting blade attached instead of a pen.
I saw a live feed from later in the evening after the blast and there was a ship in that approximate location that was on fire.
Subsequent to that, guess who got canned, and who has since been promoted TWICE to a very senior level and still doodles (during remote online meetings).
The last is an exercise left to the reader :)
It's probably a raven.
Nevermore.
And therein lies the solution to Baltimore's problems. If you were to somehow provide 30-50,000 low-skill living-wage jobs and maybe an additional 10-15,000 medium-skill white-collar jobs, you could start to "fix" Baltimore. Because the net effect of all those people having money to spend plus the halo effect adding another 10-15,000 jobs (providing new services for all those working people) would be so massive it would change the city. The problem is really just that simple -- total lack of economic opportunity for a large fraction of Baltimore's population who are lacking in skills or education.
Baltimore has "good bones" but intractable economic problems. And the root problem is, how would you provide those jobs? If I had that answer, I'd run for emperor of Baltimore.
But that last bit about lack of other attractive job options contributing to a higher quality workforce was something that I was told by someone looking for nursing/assisted living care options, and in my experience (aging parents and aging parents of friends) it is actually true. I can also confirm from personal experience that New Mexico has absolutely horrible nursing/elder care.
Lastly, re: I think I'd rather kill myself than ever go live in a nursing home? You and me both. I've seen enough that I'd rather take myself out at a time/place of my choosing rather than go into nursing care. I don't think most people give it a thought though, much less have seen it firsthand.
They scan cities for known sources of radiation (hospitals, certain types of industries, natural sources) and map it all out. They'll also go back and conduct drills using those maps to see if they can locate planted radiation sources.
A real-life thriller...
I've seen these sorts of overflights regularly in the Baltimore/DC area. Most of the time it is Cessnas over a specific area (usually the FBI, judging from the shell company associated with the aircraft no.), but recently there was an umarked/blocked info aircraft canvasing Baltimore for a couple hours -- just the city, a very specific grid flight pattern. It was flying out of a commercial facility in Delaware.
My money is on surveillance targeted at locating illegal immigrants, using ELINT and photographic evidence together.
Just do a data dump at the end of shift (saves on those pesky mobile data usage fees) for later processing and aggregation into a stored location history.