It is incredibly sad that the US has come to this though. Yet another example of the country self-harming in ways that will leave permanent scarring.
A quote I've repeated before: "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment".
This is also about rich guys wanting to play rancher.
I see many other countries in LatAM, Asia etc having just as many beautiful places of nature. And then in Europe there’s the beauty of e.g Gothic architecture in cities that are kept (mostly) clean.
I do agree there's plenty of places in other countries that have natural beauty, but the US has a combination of very large natural spaces, kept in a mostly natural state (not over developed), and does a decent job maintaining it. This is relatively rare (although the US is not the only one).
The US Forest Service has nothing to do with the amount of ads and billboards in US cities.
Because it's important to put Americans in their place. They are not good, and must be reminded that others are better.
10B$ is equal to 100k people with 100k$ a year salaries
that's 2k such salaries per state, I guess half or more can be counted for buildings/traveling/equipment expenses
no idea what to do with "1k people per state" estimate tho
aka literally what I said in the next line :-)
35k is same Order-of-magnitude as the 50k I set. Still no idea what to do/compare with those numbers tho
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numbers in sister comment say FBI has same budget/headcount, so... 300m pop vs 35k agents is ~10k:1, and since area-wise ~1% is urban and ~10% is forests... each Forest Service employee gets to keep and eye on ~100k house lots worth of trees?
medium-sized city worth of forests per every man
Spending on social security is about $680B, medicare is $480B, defense is at $410B [1].
Microsoft's valuation is approx. $2.8T [2], Google $3.8T [3], Amazon $2.3T [4], Facebook $1.6T [5] (Linux supply side is valued at approx. $8.8T).
The FBI employs roughly 38k people with about $10B in funding [7]. The CIA employs roughly 22k people with about $15B (?) in funding [8].
So, from that perspective, $10B is roughly .5% of yearly tax revenue (and about how much the FBI/CIA are funded) and estimated 50k people is about the size of the FBI and CIA combined.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/key-statistics/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/key-statistics/
[4] https://companiesmarketcap.com/amazon/marketcap/
[5] https://companiesmarketcap.com/meta-platforms/marketcap/
[6] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigatio...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency
Thanks guys. Thanks for fucking nothing.
Wonder who will help for fires now? Conservatives do hate trees I guess.