I've gotten a lot of little tidbits from my boss that are interesting, but I just learned something that blows all that out of the water and reframes everything.
The store I work in, a convenience store/pharmacy of medium size in a spot somewhere between the suburbs and the city, pays $50k a month in rent.
Think about how much more you're charged for products than they cost to produce. Set aside the actual Capitalists in the process, they at least facilitate production. Think about how much extra money you've been spending just so that retailers can meet the demands of some company that has a piece of paper that says they own the land.
Apparently in big cities, the rent can get over $200k a month.
Oh yeah, we used to have something like 200 different counties, which meant that almost every little farmer village got to be their own administrative unit. This made everything extremely difficult and so the government in 2004 decided to reduce it to a more manageable 97. Even funnier is that something like 15% of the entire population lives in the county of Copenhagen (something like 600k people) and the greater copenhagen area taking up 1.3 million people living in 18 different counties, which means there is copenhagen and then 17 counties that hate copenhagen.