rockbier1218
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User ID: 1794
My wife and I are thinking of having kids, but we’re both somewhat on the fence. My wife leans more into the NO camp and I lean a bit more into the YES camp.
Factors to consider:
- I have family nearby but the relationship between them and my wife is not great. My mother in particular is kind of insane. Her family is in a state that’s about a 10-hour drive away.
- Financially we are stable upper-middle class (I work in Big Tech and she has a stable fake email job) but no housing that we actually own (we rent out an apartment my mother owns). My wife wants a bigger place for kids but housing prices are insane (we can afford it though) and I think buying a house at the same time we have kids would stress the budget a bit more than I’m comfortable with.
- I always saw myself having kids but I’m not sure I can really commit to losing all of my independence and free time. I tend to need a lot of down time from my job and I don’t know if I can handle being always “on” with a kid in the mix.
- Seeing some other younger family members in the extended family become absolute pieces of shit as they enter adulthood (lazy, no ambition to get a good job, sit at home on their phones all day, hang out and just do drugs constantly) despite coming from relatively stable middle-class homes and no real traumatic issues has me seriously considering if it’s worth pouring myself into children only for them to end up as human lay-abouts who parasite off of my hard work (honestly seems like a 50/50 chance based off of my extended family). My wife’s only sister is also a horrendous mentally-ill psychopath who is addicted to drugs and hates the world for existing, lives on welfare, hates my wife’s parents for no reason despite them being decent, hard-working, and good people who gave them a good home and lots of love. You likely know this type of person, just human garbage. And all of this despite her parents giving them a good middle-class life in a good school district in suburban America (the easiest place in the world to grow up).
- Terrified of having a severely disabled (like non-verbal autism) child which seems like a tremendous ordeal for little reward.
All of that said, I love kids and wish I could share a lot of my interests and pass down traditions and see the world through new fresh eyes and have a family to give me meaning as I get older. But seeing how it often (seriously, a 50/50 shot in my extended family) turns out horrifically, I’m not sure it’s worth rolling the dice.
Can I solicit some feedback from mottizens on if you have kids, do you regret it, how is it working out?
I have three “projects” going on at the moment.
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I’m getting back into guitar playing after way too much time letting my skills atrophy. I finally bought a high quality electric and a practice amp that suits my needs. Previously I didn’t really play because my wife goes to bed really early and we live in a small apartment, and I like to play at night after work. So this tiny practice amp and electric will let me noodle around with headphones quietly.
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I’m working on losing some weight that I slowly gained over the last 5 years and really since COVID. Started at a disgusting 182 and finally down to 172. Very very happy with my progress, a tiny bit slower than I would like (took 2 months) but that’s probably healthier and more sustainable than a truly deep calorie cut. Goal weight is 150-155 and maybe less depending on how much body fat I still have.
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Finally I’m getting back into writing poetry after almost a decade without. I was really big into the scene during college but simply lost the inspiration and spark as adulthood settled in and those acute emotions of being a teenager and very young adult faded away. Problem is I don’t really have a place to share it, and most of the Reddit-type forums feature some pretty mediocre Rupi Kaur, cliche-ridden garbage. Not to be an arrogant douche but I think I am at least several tiers above that, I published some poetry in magazines back in college and won some awards from the English department, so I feel confident in saying I’m better than average (by no means amazing). In college I had a great group of like-minded people who would workshop but I don’t really know how to find that anymore and most poetry scenes are also bleeding-edge woke :( For now it’ll have to remain something I keep for myself I guess.
Agreed the sequels are not worth your time. I found Hyperion to be excellent and the sequels quite mediocre, surprisingly so.
It’s a tricky one and I think it could easily be argued that Shapiro would have been the better choice. Nate Silver had a ranking of swing states by importance to probability of winning the electoral college, and in both cases whoever wins Pennsylvania has a ~90% chance of winning the election.
Shapiro is popular in Pennsylvania and that’s probably enough to tip the state to the democrats.
But yeah there does seem to be one too many skeletons in his closet and I’m sorry, the IDF thing (whatever you want to call it, it’s at least a conflict of interest) is fucking “weird” and probably should disqualify him from any kind of national office dealing with foreign policy.
I can forgive the testing errors. It’s hard to test every possible thing and I’m sure the developers were under a lot of time pressure to ship “features features features” because tech management just keeps asking for more every year.
But the lack of a canary rollout is unforgivable and would seriously make me question the software running on my machine (if I’m a customer). You can’t even rollout locally to some virtual machines you have in a staging environment to ensure they run before YOLO pushing to every customer? Even if it’s not “code” and it’s just a config you’re pushing, you absolutely must must must stage and canary rollouts. Not doing it is catastrophic incompetence, and I actually thank Crowdstrike for proving the point because now I have cover for a few years to tell managers to suck my dick if they ask for a YOLO rollout.
OP if you are high IQ as you claim, you will stop reading after this post. Unless you have a candidate ready to swap to immediately, as in you are currently having an affair with a high IQ high-class woman who wants to have your babies, you are embarking on a fool’s errand. Or are you very attractive and confident that there are many women willing to sleep with you? In that case maybe your thinking is sound.
For what it’s worth yes IQ is clearly heritable, but my dad was the “smart” one (bootstrapped out of poverty and worked as both an engineer and in finance) and my mom was below-average, in both cases the grandparents were peasant serfs with no more than a 5th grade education. And I am smarter than my father. So it’s not written in stone that your kids will be an exact average between 125 and 110, you might have a me and pop out a 130-135.
Indeed us Americans don’t grasp how rich we are, even the relatively poor among us when compared to the rest of the world. My European coworkers are noticeably poorer and have much less wealth than our US-based employees, working the exact same job and sometimes even lower-ranked. To them, a 100k euro salary is “living like a king” even though it really isn’t and that salary is just about middle class in America these days.
It’s actually odd to me how little their 100k goes in their countries. The average salary is way below, closer to 30-40k, maybe 50k. And yet they still don’t seem to meaningfully be able to stay ahead of the curve and create wealth. It strikes me that a lot of this is due to the tremendous amount of old people that are living high on the hog with generous government assistance (and the required taxes), or maybe just tons of competition for prime European real estate with global capital? I can’t seem to find a definitive answer, it’s odd to me that if you’re making 3x the average salary you’re not able to put a lot away in wealth. That should persist even after taxes, which really are not much worse than VHCOL cities in the US these days.
I’m not sure there’s any lesson to take here other than don’t let openly senile people run for president?
Yeah it was a great move, but was very clearly the obvious one for a very long time, in the same way that telling an ugly fat guy to go to the gym and lose some weight is a great move if his goal is to attract women.
Agree that we’d be way better off as a society if these psychopaths decided to target politicians or shady businessmen or something.
I don’t think these crime statistics really capture the picture. How often are things even reported? In NYC many quality of life offenses have blended so deeply into the noise of city life that nobody will report it because it’s not a serious crime.
If a psychotic drug zombie is screaming at me on the subway platform about wanting to stab me and how he could kill me, is that a crime? Actually yes, it’s technically an assault under NY State law. Will anybody report it? LOL
Repeat this ad nauseam and you see how crime statistics are low but there is a massive degradation in quality of life
It’s definitely odd given his age. You would expect at least some internet profiles somewhere to have popped up by now.
Based on all of the public information, my speculation is that he was simply a classic school shooter type (wanting attention, to remind society of his existence) that decided to target a politician instead.
Hocam is this in Turkey or a western country? Advice will vary based on your answer
It's interesting to read your perspective on family relationships. I couldn't stand to be around my family by the time I was 17 and went away to college, never to return. My remaining grandfather, a similar age to yours, has always been a classic holier-than-thou ignorant religious prick and I also come from an eastern culture where filial piety is THE virtue of all virtues, and as a result everybody bent over backwards to kiss his ass and not upset him. I can't even imagine a universe where I would be in your shoes and missing my grandfather at all. I actively dread every time I have to go to my mother's house to visit him and the rest of my family.
All of that to say, you are lucky to have a family that you will actually miss when you are away from them. In that sense "everything will be okay" is already your reality. The material circumstances will come and go, but being able to carry that kind of family in your heart is already the endgame ideal. You already won, just enjoy the ride.
Good luck to you in Scotland!
Lol that is amazing. Sounds like the most plausible explanation, but maybe even worse because it seems like that should have been caught in a dev or staging environment
That’s a good point, but they have to have some kind of staging environment or slow rollout right? You can’t just release to all customers at once, that’s absolutely insane and asking for something like this to happen even if it’s security-critical.
If what is being is reported is true and they released some unrunnable or improperly formatted file, I can’t even comprehend that level of incompetence. There is a lot of bullshit at my company which is also dealing with many of the issues you’ve addressed in your post, and of course we have incidents, but something so basic being released with such insane permissions would not be possible at my workplace. Of course that’s discounting any malicious actor, but the number of QA cycles and slow rollout that we go through would have caught something like this 5 weeks before it sniffed release.
Something or someone is deeply rotten at crowdstrike. They need to make a big-time firing or I predict that people will start fleeing in droves.
Hot take but in my mind Federer is still the “better” player, at least from an aesthetic and “legacy” perspective.
I think decades from now people will still be reading about Federer’s forehand and watching his highlights, whereas they’ll just read about Novak’s insane trophy case but not actually watch him play.
I think there is a general vibe shift against PMC and woke ideology, but really to me the big factor is economy. Dems oversaw a period of insane housing inflation (other stuff too but housing is just retarded at this point) and people remember the Trump years as pretty damn good in comparison.
Also I really do think Biden as a senile old man is an incredibly weak candidate. If you had an Al Gore or John Edwards type in this election as the Dem nominee I still think they would landslide Trump. I think Biden is just so feeble and weak that the contrast between him and Trump is insurmountable in terms of public perception of strength and competence.
I think if they ran one of the moderate governors like Shapiro or Beshear they would clean up. A lot of people viscerally hate Trump and a competent, clean cut white guy who can win over a swing state and doesn’t have any woke baggage would really flip the tables on the GOP imo.
When was the last time the dems even ran a guy like that? Kerry in 04 is the last one that kind of fits the bill. Put somebody like that against Trump and it’s over.
Of course this is assuming the Dems do the smart thing instead of trying to throw Kamala up there (Political seppuku)?
In a way I think Gass’s response is somewhat rational. If you truly believe that Trump is a unique threat to our political system, why wouldn’t you want him assassinated?
I think there is also some meat here in that if Trump had been assassinated, most of the rest of the GOP would just have adopted his policy positions but dispensed with the insane hysteria and backlash Trump the Character generates. You don’t have to be Trump to win this election and maybe even the next election when the democrats are this incompetent. Trump ideas packaged in a more media and PMC-friendly face would be a political juggernaut, I think.
Hot take but it might have been better for people who believe in his platform for him to have actually been assassinated. Not only would it give the platform a sympathetic halo but let’s be honest here that Trump the Character is uniquely toxic for American politics. His job is done, he’s stamped the GOP in his image and realigned them, but I think his personality is holding them back at this point.
Surprised not to see Tuesdays With Stories here (Mark Normand and Joe List).
Do you not like it or (I’d be surprised) have not heard of it?
Layoffs slowed down in tech I think.
It was really bad in 2023, not so bad now. But all of that is relative to the insane market of 2021.
It’s slowly picking up but is overall fairly healthy relative to other engineering industries. Even the 2023 market was probably way better than the market for industrial or chemical engineers has maybe ever been?
Younger people in tech definitely have it worse, no doubt about that. Even if demand had stayed static there are just way more people studying computer science now so the competition is insane. At the Big-ish Tech company I work at, internships only go to both the best and brightest students from the best colleges but also those with referrals. If you don’t have a referral you’re toast.
It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology. I’ve been feeling the same way but didn’t and still don’t necessarily have enough evidence to really prove the claim. There are small bits here and there, like Shane Gillis hosting SNL again, camera men once again zooming in on attractive women in the crowd during the Euro 2024 matches, people being less afraid to say “retarded” which was approaching “faggot” levels of taboo, BLM withering into almost nothingness, Supreme Court affirmative action decision, etc.
Firstly, do you agree with the claim?
And more importantly, how much of this is driven by Elon’s takeover of twitter? Twitter in retrospect was clearly the cancellation platform par excellence, it doesn’t seem like TikTok or Instagram hold the same “weight” as image and video platforms. There was something about Twitter which had both a radical cancellation faction but still retained gravitas as a place for news and other serious topics to be discussed or announced. This meant that both boomer PMC types and terminally online radicals could congregate and the latter could influence the former. And by virtue of the fact that it was on twitter, it was more “believable” an had more gravitas. And maybe even the text-based nature of the platform prevented us from assessing the accuser in the physical realm. TikTok and IG still have commissars ready to cancel, but no gravitas and you can see who is attempting to be the canceller, they will often look crazy and we can sense their mental illness through their appearance (people like to say women have “crazy” eyes, I think this is probably a reasonable evolutionary heuristic) or how they are talking, gesturing, etc.
Was this the most well-placed takedown in history? Elon clearly did this as a way to knock woke ideology down a peg, even if it wasn’t his primary aim it sure looks to be the most successful aspect of that acquisition.
If your social skills are sharp, you should just go into sales. Any kind of sales, almost certainly you have some car dealerships around you and they basically take any warm body because there are an unbelievable amount of terrible sales people. Combined with your car skills you will likely become a top performer and then have a resume to go to more successful dealerships.
If you’re motivated, a good salesman, and have the knowledge, you can certainly carve out a comfortable life and maybe even quite a lucrative one if you are aggressive and make it an end goal to get to a good dealership. Some of those Finance guys and sales directors at dealerships comfortably pull in 100-200k and oftentimes more.
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This comment resonates with me. I come from a culture where elders are respected almost to a fault, and people are expected to defer to the whims of the oldest people in the family at all times.
This kind of setup was probably fine and maybe even made sense for most of human history, but now that people are being kept alive into their 80s and even 90s with ease, it leads to a lot of material and emotional burden on the rest of the family.
To give an example, I live in an apartment with my wife and my mother is the landlord. My mother charges me MARKET-RATE RENT with the stated reason being to help her support my grandfather and pay for his rent and living expenses. In a previous post I mentioned family planning with my wife, and the fact that we’re paying rent to support my grandfather is a non-trivial stressor on our discussions about having kids. Now what kind of fucked-up arrangement is this? The family unit is sacrificing its future material prosperity to care for somebody who probably shouldn’t even be alive except for modern medicine and is an active burden on the rest of the family?
Until me and my generation, essentially nobody in my family has had to worry about supporting their grandparents in old age (not just financially, but emotionally and in the sense of having to defer to their wishes and antiquated opinions) and often their own parents would be dead by the time they became productive members of society ready to build wealth.
At least from my anecdotal perspective this kind of absurd arrangement of transferring wealth from the young to the very old and infirm (I haven’t even mentioned social security and medicare) is a major cause of declining birth rates. How many more families would we have if people died at a natural age, they passed on their wealth and estate, and the next generation could focus on building wealth and supporting their own children?
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