see-bees

I went to a high school run by the Brotherhood of the Sacred Heart, so I'll give my take. Poverty might not count because while the brothers may not have had large personal bank accounts, they were still well provided for.

Their residence was part of the school grounds, they had meals and clothing provided for them, they had a few communal vehicles, etc. While they didn't have all of the personal space, niceties, or comforts of middle to upper middle class living, it was still pretty nice.

I don't breed dogs, but I know a lot of people that do and there's some misconceptions there.

Believe it or not, thousands of dollars can be a break even cost for a reputable breeder. Good breeders health test their dogs (I can't tell you all of the tests because a lot of them will vary by breed). One friend breeds Giant Schnauzers and I think her rule of thumb is that both parents have good joints and no family history of various significant health issues for 3-4 generations back. You buy a dog from her, she could give you a book on them.

They also rarely reuse the same sire and dam for multiple litters because you don't want too many siblings in the same area - backyard breeders frequently aren't so selective and the more siblings there are, the greater the chance a family wants to show their kids "the miracle of life" and end up with an incest litter. That means all those health tests you did before, someone's got to do at least half of them again for the next litter they plan to have.

I also know a lot of good breeders that will readily take back a dog you purchased from them instead of having you surrender it to a rescue. A friend literally drove from Louisiana to Michigan to pick up a juvenile Corso that she'd sold when the owner decided it wasn't working out.

These people don't make a profit breeding dogs. Every cent they make is poured back into the pups because the breed is their passion, not their living.

You run into problems when a puppy mill or back yard breeder sees that someone else is charging $2,000 for a Belgian Malanois and slaps the same price on one they're selling without making sure they're selling you a healthy dog that's structurally sound, that doesn't have a family history of cancer, hip dysplasia, seizures or a million other health issues that come up from overbreeding.

One major thing that multiple locations allow you to do is attain some economies of scale. If a chain has 5 restaurants in an area using the same menu or overlapping concepts, they'll probably have a prep/distribution kitchen that can do a lot of overlapping base work and ship product out to all 5 kitchens instead of all 5 kitchens doing the same thing less efficiently.

I worked at a casual Italian/pizza place in college that had probably 7 locations and a distribution arm. That distro arm made all of the dough, pasta, and sauces for every single location AND probably every other pizza joint in the city that wasn't part of a national chain.

Restaurants do a lot of pre-work on whatever you order before you actually order it. So when you order a hamburger, they don't just start from scratch and throw together unseasoned beef, spices, whatever before throwing it on a grill. The kitchen makes X burger patties every day, every 3 days, whatever, to make sure they can turn out your food quickly and consistently. Order for your Big Tex BBQ burger comes in, they grab a patty and slap it on the grill, finish off some 99% cooked bacon, etc. and assemble.

The less time an individual branch has to devote to the microsteps, the more efficiently they operate.

I went to Catholic schools through 12th grade and there are definitely inconsistencies with popular perception about what Christian schools teach. First, we were not taught that the Bible was the literal word of God. We did have religion classes, but we studied things like the history of the church, ethics and moral philosophy, world religions, critical analysis of religious texts, and the gnostic gospels. You weren't going to pass religion by saying "God created the earth in 7 days" and rattling off a dozen hail mary's.

When the bible was used as a historical text, we were also taught context and shown independent sources that did/didn't agree with the Bible. One really fun one to learn about was Noah's flood myth and just how many cultures it appears in.

Religion only crept into other classes in that we commonly started each with a brief prayer. It certainly didn't alter the lesson plan. We covered Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution in biology, we covered the big bang in physics, and Genesis Ch. 1 "In the beginning..." was never brought up in either. The earth was not 5,000 years old and so forth.

Catholicism wasn't a major talking point in Western Civ until you got to Emperor Constantine, where the Catholic church starts to make a really big impact on Western civilization and you would be amiss to skip it.

The school took itself very seriously as an academic institution and took an approach of "we're going to give you a top notch education that includes a religious emphasis", not "we're going to let religion steer your education".

People really don't like remembering that food comes from animals, a major part of the success behind boneless, skinless cuts of meat IMO. A lot of people don't want to think about the fact that the chicken on their plate is related to the chicken they see in a book, on tv, or (unlikely) at a farm.