yup! i worked my ass off, and a very generous expected audience for my book is maybe 4000 to 5000, over the course of the next 20 years. not per year, total.

and i would not change a word of it.

I do try to explain that, but she just won't listen. It's like there's a mental block stopping the connection from happening.

The crazy thing is she's worked insanely hard in her career and until a couple years ago barely made any money from it. (Although some of that is the gender inequality of her being out of work to take care of us when we were young for a few years.) She doesn't understand how her being this hardworking professional who still only makes enough for half of a middle class income is different than someone who's never worked a day in their life siphoning money off of workers so they can buy their 3rd mansion, private jets, and elections and somehow still has MORE money after all of that.

Huh. This turned out to be a more complicated answer than I thought. My parents were born in the mid 60s. Lead paint was banned in 1978, so they would have been in their teens. Lead gasoline, on the other hand, was gradually phased out starting in 1973, so a little earlier, but shockingly wasn’t completely banned until literally the month I was born, Jan 1996.

Lead pipes are even more wild. NEW installations were banned in 1974, but it allowed existing ones to stay in.