John Mulaney has a joke about how his parents knew Bill Clinton that way, from all going to undergrad together at Georgetown. Apparently all the women loved being escorted by Bill Clinton, and the men were all jealous.

You described a lot of effort on your end to keep that relationship going. That's what I mean. Relationships require maintenance.

Millennials were peak generation for self-taught tech literacy. We were raised in an environment where the technology was simple and open enough to actually be configurable, all while the prize on the other side of figuring out the technology was rewarding.

The older generations didn't have as strong of a reward for figuring out the tech. And the younger generations have too steep a learning curve to get around things, so they never even learned to try, like the "baby elephant syndrome" phenomenon.

And then they can enhance that business by turning around getting pedophiles to subscribe and pay for in game credits so that they can interact with a bunch of undersupervised children.

With fees capped at 14% and interest capped at 35% APR, a doubling could still be legal if they have 2 years to repay, especially with frequent compounding.

Not that children have the patience to wait 2 years for a return on their investment, though.

People think we're eating chicken abortions but really we're eating chicken periods.

He is his own dad, because he did do the nasty in the pasty.

once you've made friends for life, they stick

People drift apart. Actually making the effort to communicate and meet up occasionally is important for maintaining those relationships. If you're not in the place where you're can stay aware of major life changes (marriage, divorce, kids, major career changes, moves between cities, major illness or injury, deaths in family, etc.), were you really "friends for life"?

Even making brunch plans in my 40s requires consulting a calendar. That naturally shrinks the number of close friends in the mix. I'm closer with my friends who live close than the ones who live far, simply out of inertia, that maintaining those relationships takes less effort.

Low maintenance friendships are the best ships 🛳️

I'm no psychoanalyst but it sounds like someone is insecure in their ability to love and be loved and would prefer to guarantee a balanced reciprocity of low effort on both sides.

I've never really liked "children" in the sense of the age group, but I know a bunch of people who have really great, meaningful relationships between adult children and their parents, so I wanted adult children in my late middle ages and retirement ages.

Now, with my own children, I primarily see them as future adults who I get to watch develop into cool people.

People without financial security: "kids are too expensive and I would be exhausted trying to provide for them"

People with financial security: "I'm having a good time, adding a kid to this mix would really require a step back in my lifestyle."

Paul Morphy, chess genius and sometimes described as best in the world in the mid-1800s:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Yup. Electrical engineering does something similar. The addition and subtraction of voltages, currents, resistance, capacitance, and inductance in AC circuits is basically unworkable without the shortcut of converting the sinusoidal waves into imaginary phase angles and doing math on them, and then converting them back to sinusoidal waves as necessary.

Is it like the Italian American "shrimp scampi" where it's just the words for shrimp in two different languages? My understanding is that "salami" is just the Italian word for cured sausage.

Also, "pepperoni" is an Italian American word for a spicy salami that contains peppers, so it's just a type.

Sounds like an authentic experience of using one of those old landlines.

Well it's not like Japanese or Chinese (or Italian or British or French or Danish or Mexican) chefs stopped inventing new dishes. Tonkotsu ramen was invented in the 1930's. The original Kung Pao Chicken was invented sometime in the mid 19th century, in China. And General Tso's was probably invented in Taiwan and brought to the United States shortly afterward.

Whether a dish is invented in its ostensibly "home" country or by emigrants from that country doesn't actually change the legitimacy of the dish. There's no rule against chefs inventing new dishes, whether they are immigrants or not.

Cookie is already a slang term for pussy, you can skip that step.

Yeah, cookie monster is blue, but this particular shot has so much dark shadow in that textured fur that it's nearly black in most places.

Industrious eye

What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?

There's an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it's not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.

It's a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it's not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.

And I'm not actually disagreeing with you. I think there's probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).