BahRamYou
21hr ago
alright. yeah, like you said it's personal. thanks for talking to me in this semi-anonymous way.
BahRamYou
22hr ago
that seems like a very legal response. Like, yeah, i Know i'm not legally responsable. But I still feel bad. What would you do? not asking for a legal opinion, just your opinion as a bro. let her raise the kid in poverty, give her money forever, or just assume she's a lying bitch?
BahRamYou
22hr ago
Right, you're firmly committed to your prior that she's lying about everything and I'm a naive idiot. So in that case the correct choice of course is to give her nothing and walk away.
But since I'm actually in this situation, I have to think about other possibilities so...
BahRamYou
22hr ago
I mean, if she's actually pregnant and it's actually mine... what would you do...? I feel kinda guilty just running away.
BahRamYou
22hr ago
If there's no baby, great. no problem. I send her enough for the abortion (which is a very cheap there). Maybe she scammed me out of the equivalent of like $20. you can make fun of me for being an idiot.
If it's planned as a a more elaborate scam to get pregnant... you see my problem? or whatever maybe you don't you just want to seem smart and not like those suckers who get conned by a woman into helping her with her kids.
BahRamYou
23hr ago
So you think it's literally impossible that a Filipina could get pregnant from unprotected sex with me? I know there are many scams... but there's also real biology.
Also yeah shut up whatever. (I know you're right but...)
Anyway thanks for your insider advice.
BahRamYou
23hr ago
i'm not joking, she showed me a pregnancy test and we spent enough time together that it's unlikely (though not impossible) that it's not mine.
BahRamYou
1d ago
For what it's worth, she showed me a pregnancy test. Also the way she talks seems noticably different now.
Of course she could be faking the pregnancy test and the talking. I have no way of knowing for sure. At first I thought it was fake, but right now i'm like 80% sure it's real.
What would you do if you sent a woman money for an abortion and she didn't do it?
Mottemen... and women (if there are any???) I need your advice.
This is pretty serious, so I'd appreciate serious advice. No jokes or one-liners please.
Recently I made a trip to the Philippines. Amazing country. Amazing yet terrible. Terribly third world, but amazing people. It's like a crazy mirror-universe version of the US/Hawaii.
Met a girl there. As you do... meaning, I went to a strip club and she went home with me. She was hot, she told me she was taking birth control, and I was drunk and stupid, so we didn't use protection.
Over the next two weeks, she spent quite a bit of time with me. She introduced me to her (huge) family, and her two children (who she had as a teenager). This is the Philippines so that kind of thing is not uncommon. She never directly asked me for money, but always guilt-tripped me into it after spending time with me. To be fair, it was a trivial amount for me but a huge amount for her.
Towards the end, she was becoming extremely clingy. Crying, saying she loved me. Maybe she meant it. I really don't know. I do know that she was messaging other guys, but that's kind of her job. I was pretty honest the whole time that I could only stay a short time and wasn't looking for a long-term relationship. She seemed to accept it but she seemed genuinely sad.
After I left, I got a message from her. Saying she's pregnant. Uh oh... I mean, yeah I've taken sex ed I know these things happen... but I didn't think it would happen to me. She said she was taking precautions, and I believed her because she's experienced. I have no idea if (a) that's true and we just got unlucky (b) she's an idiot or (c) this was a deliberate trap. For what it's worth, she's catholic, but in that super-flexible 3rd world way where you just cross yourself and burn a candle to be forgiven all sins.
Anyway she wants money, naturally. She says it's for abortion pills. She's not asking for much, but I'm worried it will only increase from here if I pay it. I'm also worried that she might be telling the truth and actually have the child. This is a very impulsive, unstable woman. I can afford to give her a little money but don't want to get blackmailed forever. But I also don't want to be a scumbag and leave an unplanned child in a third world country.
...help?
(edit... should I just move to the Philippines and raise a family there? the living there is really cheap so i could afford it. But there's really not much to do there except drink, fuck, and pray)
BahRamYou
2d ago
wait, how do you actually make that work? Do you just tell people to come knock on your door at any time? Do people actually do that?
I'm not very popular even though I do my best to reach out on social networking. If I didn't have a cellphone I'm pretty sure no one would ever talk to me except my fellow drunks at dive bars.
At some point, it's not a question of amassing evidence. It's a matter of actually analyzing that evidence, putting it into context, and making reasonable judgements about it.
I'm not an expert on the prison system, and I'm guessing no one else here is either. So I have no idea how common it is for prisoners to commit suicide, especially under extreme cases like Epstein. I also have no idea how common it is for cameras to fail or for guards to fall asleep on the job, or any of the other fuckups. It does seem to have been quite the fuckup, but then I'm also guessing that real-life prison is not like the super-prisons shown in hollywood movies- it seems like a really boring job and I could imagine the guards just constantly falling asleep/messing things up while they're sitting around all day watching nothing happen.
for context, i'm currently staying in a building that's supposed to have 24/7 doorman/security guard at the front door. But if you come in at night it's really not hard to find them asleep and just walk past them. Sometimes in the day, too.
I could be convinced otherwise! I'd just like to see a breakdown from an actual expert, showing what normal conditions are like in prison, and how unlikely it was for things to go wrong like this. I don't want to wade through thousands of hours of camera footage myself because I have better things to do. If that makes me a sheep who can't think for myself, so be it.
BahRamYou
8d ago
I've heard from anonymous sources that there's a whole service economy for the ultrarich, based around this sort of thing. The basic idea is that their time is very valuable, so they'll pay astronomical prices to avoid ever having to wait or be distracted by petty bullshit. The extreme example might be having a private jet/helicopter to help them travel faster, but it exists for all sorts of minor things too. So they might have a personal assistant who's job is to cue up just one episode of their favorite TV show, then slowly turn down the lights and help them sleep. or whatever else they want.
Obviously some of that is a privilege that only the very wealthy can afford. But it does seem like, to some extent, we should be able to pay for services that help middle class folks do that too. it's odd that we can't. If anything, it seems to be going the opposite direction, where like, even if you pay for premium, it will still insist on showing us adds and doing that sort of attention-grabbing addictive bullshit. It feels like I'm going to a restaurant and the owner is telling us "yeah I don't care how much you pay, you must sit in the smoking section and smoke at least one cigarette. i'm not letting you enjoy my food without a little nicotine on the side."
BahRamYou
15d ago
I just watched "Wheel of Time" and it's so, so bad in that regard.
Like, it's a major part of the worldbuilding that the world is fragmented. Every country has its own description and way of speaking. You can easily tell where someone is from. The main character, especially, grew up in a super isolated small town, and everyone looks at him weird because he has red hair. It's very obvious that his mother was an "outlander" as they call it. Big plot hook mystery what happened there.
Meanwhile that same town has two black women and... no one bats an eye? No one asks questions? Huh, OK. And of course they just happen to be the two women with the most power in the town. In fact, their role has been cranked up even larger than it was in the source material, stealing a lot of important scenes away from the main character.
The same pattern seems to repeat endlessly, with every single person of authority made to be a black woman, amping up their power and authority, and no one seems to question how this came to be. It's somehow both a post-racial utopia where noone mentions race, but also one with extremely clear racial boundaries.
It actually makes things pretty confusing. To be fair, it's a long book series with way too many characters, so I can appreciate how they have to cut a lot to make it work for television. But they put so much emphasis on the black characters that the white characters are left kind of pointless, with nothing to do. They just take up space on screen and make it harder to remember everyone's names.
BahRamYou
23d ago
I agree with you about games, and to some extent TV and books- games take so long to play, and there's so many old good ones, that we just don't have time to keep up with all the new released games. Even if you buy them all to test them out, it's only scratching the surface, which really doesn't do them justice.
Movies are a bit different since they really don't take much time or effort to watch. Especially if you just focus on the big mainstream Hollywood movies, you can just see 1 or 2 a month and pretty much keep up with all of them. But admittedly I don't even do that much anymore... it's just so rare to find a new movie that interests me.
BahRamYou
23d ago
Well yeah I wasn't trying to just pick one at random. But I didn't pick the very largest either.
We could also look at wall street as a whole: 198 income against 856 billion last year.
But of course Hollywood has huge propaganda/marketing value that might be hard to measure.
BahRamYou
24d ago
Yeah, and think about how garbled the movie is going to be after it's been translated and subbed/dubbed into a hundred different languages with all different cultural contexts. There's just no way to make a tightly-written plot under that kind of limitation.
BahRamYou
24d ago
One thing to consider is that the movie industry as a whole is... not all that profitable.
It peaked at $11 billion total domestic gross in 2018: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/ and has gone down since then. Granted that's just domestic gross, so there's also international, subscription fees, merchandise, hollywood accounting, etc... but that also doesn't take into account the cost of actually making the movies. Anyway it's a ballpark figure to show the size. Not chump change, but not a gigantic industry either.
Meanwhile you could compare that to any large corporation. let's say, Citigroup: https://companiesmarketcap.com/citigroup/revenue/ averaging around 80 billion a year. That's one corporation, not even the largest, vs all of Hollywood. In other words, there's a lot of money floating around out there that can finance flops and not care too much about maximizing revenue.
The other point I'd like to make is that, well, we've all seen movies before. Lots of them. Half the audience is barely paying attention to the movie anyway, they're watching it while distracted with their phone or something. So you don't actually need to explain all the detailed plot points of a movie. Especially when it's a typical Hero's Journey type thing, the audience will get the emotional beats regardless of plot holes. It would just be boring to stop the action and explain to the camera like "as you know, there's a special magical place that we discovered by doing long detailed research in the library..." or whatever.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I was thinking earlier like medieval times, where it was less extreme but still gross by modern standards. I agree that most traditional societies are not very sustainable, we just forget about the ones that perish from massive crop failure.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I feel like people take the wrong impression from those stories of historical roads covered in dung. Back then, all humans were a lot closer to nature so they were less grossed out by it. That dung was a sign of wealth. Animals were one of the most expensive things humans could owb, especially horses. In most societies, owning a horse made you a weslthy man. The manure was carefully collected and used for crop fertilizer.
It would have been mind blowing for most historical societies to see a European city with so many horses they cant even pick up all the dung. It would be like living in an oil field.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
what if you're homeless/transient and don't have a driver's license or any other sort of ID? That's the argument that's always been used against requiring voter ID, so I don't see why it wouldn't apply here.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Worth note that North Korea didn't have nukes for a long time, and they stayed safe even though they did a lot to piss of the US and all their neighbors. And they still only have a few shitty low-yield nukes.
It seems like you you just have to be seen as a hard target. NK did it with mountains a ton of artillery. Ukraine was seen as a much weaker target by everyone.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I'm kind of wondering if Ted Cruz knows all of that, and is simply using "meh bible" as an excuse to do what he wants for other reasons... (ie, i'm wondering if Ted Cruz has been compromised by Israeli spies)
It is a lot of bombs! But Iran is also a very large country!
I would highlight the second paragraph that I wrote- in terms of raw explosive yield, Russia has dropped much more than that on a country much smaller than Iran. Ukraine is (IMO) losing the war, but still very functional as a military power. I realize there's a big difference between old Soviet artillery shells and modern JDAMs, but there's also a big difference between Ukrainian infantry huddling in hastily-built trenches on the front lines of the plains, vs Iranian military engineers holed-up in fortified bunkers built under mountains over the past 20 years.
Your math is assuming that: (a) the USAF uses every single one of its bombs (b) all of thoses bombs are delivered instantly. The USAF only has about 20 B-2 stealth bombers, and they all require massive maintenance. Other strategic bombers would be vulnerable to air defence and are also limited in number (c) the US just doesn't care about collateral damage. Most of us care a lot. (d) all lf those bombs hit their intended targets. you said it's "primarily problems of intelligence procurement" but ultimately there's just no way to know all of that for sure. Realistically they would have to do a bit of "spray and pray." Multiple bombs per target, regardless of what Lockheed-Martin's sales reps like to claim. (e) Iran is not able to rebuilt its assets. They can and they will. They will also likely get help from Russia and China if this goes on for long.
In the end, I'm no military expert. But Ted Cruz isn't either. All I know is that Iran is a formidable opponent, and I'm very concerned that we're sleepwalking into a war on the scale of WW2 with none of our leaders seeming to even know the scale of what's going on. Instead they're going off of... bible verses and Israeli propaganda? This is very concerning.
edit: this just came up in my youtube feed: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PEbq0chC6yI "bottom line: the US could almost certainly destroy Fordham [the main Iranian enrichment facility] but it would require significant effort and expense." the video did not consider any other targets.
You've clearly never been there. And you misinterpreted a lot of what I said. so whatever. thanks for trying I guess.
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