More than you think. I believe the DOJ lost 70% of lawyers in 2025 alone:

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/19/g-s1-66906/trump-civil-rights-justice-exodus

I heard later stories report 75%.

Now, anyone they hired into the circus to try and replace them surely lacked integrity as a prerequisite.

No chance they do it now. They’ll do it when Trump is likely already dead, if (and only if) a proper democrat and congress comes into power, and when the sentiment tides signifigantly shift. To the point where that MAGA neighbor suddenly pretends he never voted for Trump (he voted for him 3 times. maybe 4).

Then they will probably get 1-2 lawyers on the hook, take their license, and give them a consultant role elsewhere in government as an olive branch. Justice. I sure hope to be proven wrong, but something tells me we won’t learn from Reconstruction.

Odd because these files are well before Trump’s presidency, let alone when that immunity clause was ruled.

Probably intentional

Yes, those things are true, but it’s kind of like an ACAB situation.

Cops are unionized and work as a team. Ultimately, most therapists work by themselves. Not to mention that systematic abuse of power gives cops that reputation. Which is a hard argument to make for therapists.

So I don’t really think the comparison applies here. If you feel you were wronged: since it’s a licensed profession, there is a board you can report to. It varies by state, though. If what they did was especially egrigious in terms of the rules in your state, you can get their license revoked.

Short of that, you can be as terrible a therapist as long as you can keep getting clients.

A license is to make sure they follow the laws and regulations of their state. Not to make sure they are “a good therapist”. The license is to meet a minimum bar of quality and from there make sure they stay in good standing with laws. Just like how a driver’s license can be given to people of varying skill levels.

The closest aspect to your scenario is a therapist’s rating and testimony. Most services (if not, a 3rd party website) will have a review board for such thigs to read and a scathing review can be a softer way to damage their reputation than the licensing board.

That tells me that professionalization of therapy isn’t being done to help and protect clients, but to help and protect therapists.

If you look at any job cynically enough, you can apply this to anything, and anyone. A firefighter doesn’t want to put out fires, they want to protect their job. An athlete doesn’t care about the game, they just want to be famous and get sponsors. [insert literally any job ever] is only doing it for the paycheck.

At the end of the day, it come down to trust. if you can’t trust your professional, you shouldn’t hire them. That’s for all of life. But your lack of trust alone isn’t enough to invalidate an entire field.

I’m heavily downvoted in this comment section because I dared ask a hypothetical philosophical question?

If you do it in a way that feels like you’re “just asking questions”, that’s a dishonest gesture often used in alt-right pipelines to astroturf discussions. sealioning is what it’s grown to be called.

If you were being genuine, I’m sorry you weren’t believed. But this is sadly an increasingly common internet tactic out there.

old school 80’s/90’s sci-fi humor. They’d often use some superpower or new tech with “x-ray vision” that can conveniently see through clothes but not skin…

I imagine the rest can be left to your imagination on how that humor was utilized.

I don’t hate tech. But we are definitely in time of techno robber barons who have long drained any benefit of the doubt. Meta especially deserves no grace.

There’s a clear disctinction these days bewteen “Tech” and “Big Tech™️”. This is firmly in the latter.

Are there alternatives outside of paging. I know the risk of texting sensitive information, but I figured there’d be a more modern system than paging.

I have much more in common with a working class boomer, than I do with a rich person who is my same age.

Probably. But what did that working class Boomer (who at best, is a few years from retirement) voting for? Probably closer in line to what the young rich person says.

We have more in common, but they still vote against their (and by extension, my) best interests. Unless it’s housing of course. Their best interests conflict with mine and align with the rich young guy.

So far, not a god damn thing.

It’s starting just now, like this year. Millenials had the numbers for at least 8 years, but not the turnout. Well, Cheeto man finally made them mad enough to get out there and vote and we’re seeing quite a few upsets even within the Dem establishment party itself.

Better late than never.

I will:

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I didn’t read this Steinbeck in school (I read Of Mice and Men), but I thought back then “I’m glad we moved past this. We wouldn’t allow such work today so blatantly”.

Well, education definitely isn’t wisdom. And it sure isn’t experience.

I know, it can be bad. I had a sudden hospial scare and was in there for a few days without insurance. If I had to pay everything out of pocket (and holy shit there is so many 3rd party bills) it would have been 11k.

But that’s the thing: 11k isn’t 100k. An accident bad enough to drain 100k is probably way more debilitating.

this post is talking about “your” problems. Not society’s problems. Societal fixes need to be more subtle than “give everyone a million dollars”. But giving one person 10k dollars can be life changing money.

We separate the two fields for a reason.

Don’t know why you’re talking about income when I’m talking about assets.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/09/acs-rent-burden.html

any gains in household income was completely cancelled out by the fact that everything got more expensive, and more people were impacted by layoffs. Homelessness also increased, and those without a home (or who move into their parents’ home) do not count for household income

There are ways in which therapy can disempower you: it can teach you to ignore your instincts, paper over your concerns

Any therapist telling you to “ignore your instincts” without diagnosing you with a relevant condition (e.g. PTSD, OCD) isn’t worth their salt. And not all therapists are licensed to diagnose you, so you’d need to be referred to a potentially different professional.

It’s like any other professional. You try stuff they suggest, and sometimes it doesn’t work out or you simply want 2nd opinion on a matter. It’s not perfect, but generally it helps.

so I’m really hesitant to recommend it to people blindly with no caveats.

Worst case, they waste a few hundred dollars and learn its not for them. I’ve wasted more money with worse things. I think the risk of getting “addicted to therapy” is much smaller than gambling or drugs.

If you can’t get a better job, maybe your money and time would be better spent with a job coach or resume services than a therapist?

I have considered it, yes. In a better market, if I was struggling it may in fact be worth it just to get a few weeks of guidance on how to redirect my career. It’s also less ambiguous because many people’s goals are met when they can get a job or get that promotion or whatever.

However, reality can set in very quickly when I go to a temp job service and even they (which can generally find an odd job for you in a few weeks ) just outright say “yeah, there’s not much out there right now”. That’s the judement between “you need professional help” and “this didn’t work. job coaches are a scam!”. Job coaches aren’t magicians that pull labor out of a hat.

Instead, a therapist can make some vague promise of some emotional or mental shift that will somehow make a difference when months or years of job searching have not? Doesn’t that seem kind of bogus to you?

Not a surprise to me. a job is pretty obvious. your mind isn’t. And it’s biased towards yourself as well. I’d hope we’d advanced enough to start to take aspects of the mind like stress seriously. But at the same time we still have a lot to learn and a lot of old prejudice to overcome.

The main goal of a mental health coach is to at least help you look outside yourself. Sometimes the job market is bad and it’s not your fault even if you blame yourself for some random decision years ago. Sometimes it is in fact all your fault and they help you realize you’ve been actively cock-blocking yourself out of success over several opportunities you had to get a job. Because you’re depressed.

The goal of a job coach doesn’t care how you feel as long as you got your goal done. The goal of a mental health coach is to remove those bigger blockers. And that doesn’t always feel good. Confronting your demons rarely does.

I also see it being a much more lucrative vector for absolute fraud.

That’s why therapists need to be licensed, while a job coach doesn’t. Licensed don’t guarantee competency, let alone compatibility. But it mitigates the risk of someone pretending to be a voice of authority and telling you to kill yourself for the greater good.

That’s all I’m saying, yea. Therapists aren’t any different from any other professional you seek for improvement. But generally, in the wide spectrum of 100s of millions of people, professional guidance improves you.

Biggest sin of social media is people further misunderstanding statistics and acting like an individual failure is a societal letdown. Sometimes you just have a shit teacher. doesn’t mean all teachers are shit.

relatively cheap money and growing incomes

where have you been the last 3 years? It’s because assets have been outpacing inflation to the point where it’s destablizing society. the American GDP is being carried by AI speculation. Not productivity: hype.

Meanwhile, compensation has only been outpacing inflation if you’re an executive.

a million would eliminate my need to worry about next month’s rent and let me sit down and properly create stuff without worry for a few years (more like a decade, but I’d want plenty of buffer room). Sure, it’s easy to waste a milion and it won’t fix all my demons. But it’d take most of my stressors away instantly.