

The meme is just that it’s a book with a funny-sounding title. Like, “yup, it’s wood!”
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/identifying-wood
If you want to take a look at the book itself, you can probably find it at a local library, or a digital copy can be found here:
https://annas-archive.org/md5/cda044e9fa42876a51bb245e8b3ac251
But it’s really what’s right on the tin. When just given a peace of lumber, it can often be very difficult to identify a specific species. You’re not going to pay for DNA testing for most scenarios where you need to identify lumber. So you have to learn in detail about wood anatomy, using features that can be identified with nothing more elaborate than a hand magnifier. And if you know enough about wood anatomy, you can determine the species with high degree of accuracy. That’s what this book is meant to help you do. Ideally you would be able to be handed a board, a light, and a magnifying lens, and be able to estimate the species. I actually had to do this on some assignments and exams.
It’s worse than us simply becoming poorer. It’s that these places - sprawling low density suburbs - where never financially sustainable to begin with. They never brought in enough tax revenue to remotely cover the expense of maintaining all their infrastructure. There’s just too few people per square mile to pay for it all at the property tax rates people can afford. We’ve only kept things going this long through a few mechanisms:
Letting older suburban infrastructure decay to well past its replacement state.
Relying on growth to prop things up. (Build new neighborhoods and require developers to repave streets and replace/upgrade utility infrastructure in an area.)
Relying on ever higher levels of debt.
It isn’t financially sustainable. It was never financially sustainable. As long as a town can keep growing, they can keep the Ponzi scheme going for a time. But eventually you hit a wall on that and the whole house of cards collapses.