This was from candles for electricity.
How many stories are we going to see about fires from space heaters, etc, this winter? A paper I used to work at would cover a few of these every November/December, when it began to get really cold, and this was during the Glorious Clinton Economic Boom of the late 90s when we were all rich and happy from the dot-com economy.
What’s annoyed the hell out of me during a lot of the discussion of the economy lately is that for large swaths of the population, there never was any real up to contrast with the down. A lot of hidden poverty is manifesting itself now as people’s safety nets disappear (and politicians cut holes in them, desperate to save their own jobs by making things worse for everybody else), but for lots and lots of people, things were never all that good. Now they’re just worse.
A.