TheHiddenCatboy

Indeed. I do believe that the key to better health is actionable information and a gameplan for how to maintain health. But with the Shitgibbon in office, and his merry band of miscreants running the show, I can’t determine if my smartwatch will give me good readings or not, and ensure that only I get to access that data, unless I explicitly choose to let someone else access it.

Like others have said, nothing we say or don’t say will change what ideas they get. But calling it out makes them at least reconsider being so transparent.

You have a lot riding on a single election in one of the most democratic parts of the country. While I agree that Democratic Socialists did make a push here that could well set the tone of politics for the next 20 years on the left side of America, I’d hesitate to say it with certainty, given how crass American voters can be. Let’s let ZM actually get elected mayor, and let him prove he can get a DS platform passed in NYC before we crown him America’s saviour.

I know this is in jest, but it’s definitely something the shitheads would push. And my answer goes thusly:

No. The Economy hasn’t done a damn thing for me, and it’s done less for my wife. I’m treading water, unable to afford a house or a car on what was once an unfathomable sum of money when I was younger. It has done less for my wife, who relies on my job to keep a roof over her head. You want us to have kids? Reassure us that our kids will have a better life, and stop vampire-squidding us and sucking down every loose dollar.

There’s this possible ending in Cyberpunk 2077 that I think speaks to how Billionaires view the world. The leader of the Japanese megacorp Arasaka is arguably the most powerful man in Japan, more-so than even the Japanese emperor. His company’s security forces includes an aircraft carrier, not to mention endless drones and faceless goons equipped with … if not the best technology on the planet, then the second best. And they’ve unlocked the technology of digitising a person’s consciousness and storing it.

The CEO’s son is a bit of a rebel, trying to undermine his father. He eventually gets very hands-on (integral part of the plot that your character witnesses first-hand early in the game) and bumps his father off and takes over Arasaka. And if you play the game a certain way, you reach an ending where the daughter of the CEO assists her dead father in … coopting the son’s body, displacing his consciousness, and ‘reincarnating’ in the son’s body, to continue his centuries of ownership of Arasaka.

This is fiction, but Cyberpunk is all about assuming the worst of our corporate overlords. I don’t think it’s an overreach.

My wife and I made the same decision. We joke that Octomom had our kids.

8 billion people call Earth home. As another commentor has said, we probably should have half that. Your choice and our choice not to have kids enables that, even if only stupid people reproduce. With how the world is turning out right now, I think we both made the right choice.