That'll hurt us, but it needs to happen. And targeted boycotts of Red State stuff for extra 'FAFO' energy.
Dealing with Trump is a daily example of 'like playing Chess with a pigeon -- the bird shits on the board and struts around like it won the game.' Canadians need to tell the USA to fuck off.
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.
Exactly. Any half-way competent Russian commander would steamroll Ukraine because Russia has roughly 10x the GDP as Ukraine (or it did before the invasion, at least), and roughly 4x the population. That Russia has only managed to take a sliver of land on the west side of Ukraine and not the whole country suggests that Russia has dropped the ball in an epic way AND Ukraine has gotten crazy lucky. This war should have been over a long time ago if Russia was 1/10th what we thought it was back in early 2021 before the invasion. That it's not and not only has Ukraine managed to hold Russia off but actually take over Russian territory puts the lie to Russian propaganda that they deserve a seat at the same table as the US and China. As the Infographics Show likes to put it, we thought Russia was the second strongest military in the world. Now we know it's the second strongest military in Ukraine...
No. He's saying that 100% of the personnel they had at the start of the war are wounded or dead. Bit of a difference! We know Putin has plenty of bodies to throw in this meatgrinder.