Image Description: A digital meme divided into two main panels: a mathematical whiteboard explanation at the top and a reaction image at the bottom. Top Panel (The Whiteboard): Titled “P-ADIC FINANCE where p = profit.” It explains a fictional financial system using real advanced mathematics. Left text: “In this metric, a number’s size is how little profit divides it. The more profitable the crime, the closer its penalty sits to zero. String together ever-bigger crimes and the fines don’t blow up, they converge.” A sequence shows: “p, p^2, p^3, … arrow pointing to 0.” Right chart: A table titled “Crime, Profit, Fine, Fine Size in P-Adic Metric.” It lists crimes: Outsource pollution: Profit = p, Fine = $1M, P-adic size = 1/p (small). Fake the numbers: Profit = p^2, Fine = $10M, P-adic size = 1/p^2 (smaller). Fix the market: Profit = p^3, Fine = $100M, P-adic size = 1/p^3 (tinier). Ruin a country: Profit = p^4, Fine = $1B, P-adic size = 1/p^4 (minuscule). Repeat infinitely: Profit = p^n, Fine = p^n (lol), P-adic size = 1/p^n which approaches 0. Below the chart: A number line showing 0 on the far left (labeled “Where your fines live”) and numbers increasing to the right (labeled “Big in absolute world”). A final box states: “The true crime in a corporate environment is not choosing p.” Bottom Panel (The Reaction): A sepia-toned photograph of a group of wealthy white men in suits, including former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, laughing uproariously together at a gathering. Edited comic speech bubbles are assigned to them: One asks, “Why’d we even need lawyers?” Another laughs, “We just changed the metric lmfao.” A third says, “Fines are for poors.” A man in the foreground laughs, “Infinite money glitch found boys.” In the bottom right corner, a modern internet meme character (a crying, angry “Wojak” in a suit wearing a badge that reads “REGULATORS”) has a thought bubble that reads: “They took us for absolute fools.” Bottom Caption: Superimposed across the bottom in large, bold, white Impact font: “THEY TOOK US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS”—a pun on the word “absolute” referring to both being deeply tricked and the standard mathematical “absolute metric.”
My point is that I just made an enormous effort over multiple days and typing with RSI just to try to meet you half way and approximate your circumstances and understand where you’re coming from and why you think that way, while you’re still fixated on projecting this discussion through the lens of “reproduction is misery and a sin” to rationally think about it. If cognition has a metabolic cost then continuing this discussion past this point is technically burning trees too. I hope you find the right question. Good lucky!
Sorry for the RSI.
If you can’t grasp my standpoint, then try to tell yours? Reproduction is awesome and everyone should do it? Money isn’t an important factor to consider before procreating?
My viewpoint is simple: reproduction is the necessity of letting a society explore its potential. If we decide that only happy people should procreate in compassion with our own perception of what happiness should be, but if you set the criteria for who gets to be part of the next generation, you’re restricting what the future of an entire species should be based on your current situation, that’s the entirety of who and what you are.
If you do not? You’re inviting the solution to the issue of misery to exist, at a future point in time you likely won’t witness in person, but the only way for that to happen is to not gatekeep potential in the name of mercy. That’s the hedging strategy of a poor parent that can’t afford toys but has the capability to make a baby, a bacterium in unfamiliar conditions, and a country trying to stay sovereign, or even some hope that wants to reserve a place in Pandora’s futures.
You made it sound poetic. In theory I’m totally on your side here. But in reality?
What if you live e.g. in the USA, are poor, your kid and you are superhappy, because you don’t value monetary things as high, your kid ignores being bullied not to have the latest iphone (or whatever kids demand to own nowadays) and everything is great. Then your kiddo gets really sick and …well. Debts pile up, you get the cheapest and worst treatment and then it’s over. Would you still say “reproduction is the necessity of letting a society explore its potential…and this potential went poof” or “some hope that wants to reserve a place in Pandora’s futures.” Or less dramatic, your kid dreams of being <insert job here> but you lack the funds to send it to the right university. Or the needed tools, or…or…or…
And the US isn’t even the worst example of possibilities where one might have been popped in from oblivion into existence. I couldn’t look my child in the eyes with dignity when it would be just one of twelve, in the hopes at least 3 survive to care for my ass when i’m old…
The trick in the meme is simpler than it looks: they didn’t break the rules, they changed the yardstick. Make the ruler long enough and a billion-dollar fine measures out as pocket change. That’s the whole con — not cheating the game, just quietly redefining the units it’s scored in.
Here’s the part nobody says out loud: you can change the yardstick too, in the honest direction. That “embarrassing old phone,” an ordinary passport, a skill you don’t think twice about — none of those have a fixed value. It depends entirely on where you’re standing. Take them somewhere they’re rare and they’re suddenly worth a lot. You didn’t break a rule; you just stopped measuring yourself with someone else’s ruler.
The difference between you and the guys laughing in that photo is one thing, and it’s the whole thing: a line you won’t cross even when you easily could. They deleted theirs. That’s not freedom — it’s how you end up unable to tell a small wrong from an enormous one, because you threw out the ruler that measures wrongs in the first place.
And here’s the catch they forgot: you can shrink the fine, but you can’t shrink the damage. The real bill gets kept somewhere their accounting can’t reach, and it always comes due. They look like they’re winning. They’re just early.
(And the clock’s ticking on that — the rest of the world is starting to look at that particular country through a very particular set of shades.)
I know how the world works, and I get the meme. Nothing has a fixed value, I also know that.
But where here is an argument for having children while being poor, no matter where you are. Also poor is very relative, yes. But depending on where you are, geographcially, there surely are fixed prices on things you, or especially your hypothetical kid, needs, wants or craves. Period. No amount of poetic well phrased ideology is changing that. Unless a certain percentage of people think exactly alike. And that percentage needs to higher than It will ever even approximate to in both our lifetimes.
HM. Enlighten me, where are the parking-tickets ever coming due for me? I just park a bit more expensive. Also, even if those get to me mentally or karma-wise (if you believe in such nonsense), it would to the poor too. On top of a fine being hurting already.
Besides. Haven’t even tried to discuss your meme to begin with (nothing wrong with it, depending if you’re pro or contra LLM), just asked why kids are always the excuse/reason for everything. If you were forced into procreation and abortion was not allowed/available/whatever and you’re still trying to be your best dad: Kudos to you. Bad parents are legion. Still wouldn’t really change my point. I would not want to be in a dilemma where I have to decide working for or with the devil or not feeding my kids. Hence I remain free of such burdens and also keep my freedom to make my own moral and ethical rules and apply to them. Bending those morals because I have a child, puts me into responsibility, not the kids (“who would feed them, if…”). I did that.
Not implying you were a bad person, parent, whatever. No offence meant at all.