Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed for February 12, 2021

I’ve used the term diddly-squat ever since this one first appeared.

Gallagher?

There’s more money in garbage than education? That explains a lot, doesn’t it.

He needs to go to the meetings about his tax-deferred district retirement plan. Most of them are excellent. The one here is independent of the state so the state can’t get to its funds.

A dozen mortgage payments was only 25% of his salary? Must’ve been the ’80s.

Of course, Breathed forgot taxes, which take out a nice quarter to a third of the salary.

They rebuilt the 2 high schools for $300,000,000+ dollars and the playing fields for $4,000,000. They say they have no money to raise the salaries of teachers! Translation: school board gets boocoo kickbacks from contractors, none from teachers.

Comic strip economics…

Nothing said about the biggest expense of all. . . TAXES!

To this day I still say diddly over squat.

One can tell that this takes place in the 80’s because he doesn’t mention medical insurance.

The happy face mug makes my day.

At one time this was true, city workers really did make very good money, now that a lot of cities are privatizing not so much, just one more reason the middle class is disappearing.

Flashing forward to Feb 2021 there is considerable irony to be found in this one.

all too true

While it is true that teachers may be underpaid in some regions or in some disciplines, it is not universally true: unionized public school teachers in some big cities are extremely generously paid, despite their crocodile tears of being underpaid. Be careful of generalizations, or become a city garbage collector….

Now this made me laugh out loud. It would be cool if somewhere in the Bloom County comics there was the date it originally appeared.

I’ve always loved this strip for a couple of reasons. The first being that the sum of the fractions actually add up to 0.99524 (rounded) so, in fact, there is 0.00476 left – which is as good a definition of diddly/squat as I can think of. The second is that the fraction doesn’t change regardless of size of fruit – but it certainly makes that tiny fraction feel different.

Any other math geeks notice that this adds up to 112.6% of his annual salary?

This is from March 3rd, 1985. It’s a Sunday strip. This is a Friday. What’s going on?

I could be wrong, but someone sounds a little bitter…

:)

Teachers are underpaid, but anyone who thinks their garbage collectors are overpaid should maybe change places with one of them for a few weeks.

This is SO true!

You either have really cheap rent or you are eating entirely too high on the ol’ hog if your food budget is the same as your rent/mortgage!

And today’s take home fractions lesson is that all those fractions adds up to quite a bit more than a whole 1.

1/4 + 1/4 + 1/7 + 1/12 + 1/10 + 3/10 = 1.126