birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
Maybe this is a tangential ramble at best, but it gives me a moment to take my mind off of other matters.
There are a lot of replies down-thread that boil down to "just have kids bro", that seem to be dripping with a kind of smugness that suggests that it truly is that easy, and any complications that come along with it are speed bumps at best.
I think a lot of people here forget that this forum is wildly unrepresentative of the broader (US) population. By and large the average poster here is:
- Physically healthy
- Extremely high income, and high net worth.
- Mentally functioning, either by being sane, peculiar in a way that can work well in some environments (hello fellow autistic software developers), or wealthy and/or insured enough to be under treatment.
- High in conscientiousness ratings.
All of those things together are a great set of qualities for people who intend to be parents. My father and his wife are like that, and my youngest brother is growing up to be an exceptional young man.
The thing is, my father is dying, and we're not sure if he'll live to see my brother graduate highschool. He's done what he can, but the rest of us are going to have to try and fill a gap in his life that can never be filled. No man can truly know the hour of his departure, but the average life expectancy for men in that side of my family is about 63. I'm old enough now that even though I am in a stable, committed relationship, I simply don't know if I will live long enough to properly raise a child.
On the other hand, you have me, my brother and sister on my mother's side. My mother lacks any formal diagnosis, but she is crazier than a shit house rat. She casually lets it drop that "the angels" are giving her advice these days (though it's generally good advice so we don't fight her on it), she's had a lifetime of substance abuse problems, she's had a history of violence and abuse towards me and my sister, and she's never really been able to hold down a job in any meaningful way.
As a result of all of that, none of us really have any idea of how to be a proper parent. There aren't exactly "how to not stab your own kids" lessons regularly available at the local library, so my brother and I are both terrified of having a child and fucking it up.
My sister has two kids, but she is, more than anything, a cautionary tale. She's not just crazy, but evil in a pure way that almost makes me believe that demonic elements can truly hold sway in this world. She has absolutely no compunctions about lying, cheating, using physical violence, or stealing to get her way, and sometimes she will do it just because she thinks it's funny. Her older child is schizophrenic and has been in and out of involuntary committals since he was a teenager, when he's not being held on drug charges. He's tried to kill my sister and her husband at least once already. I haven't spoken to any of them in many years after she tried to have multiple family members arrested on (false) human trafficking charges and attacking my brother with a brick.
I did my best to raise and protect my brother growing, but it was a case of the lost leading the lost. At present, he's kind of drifting through life working a retail job and living with his dad after a bad breakup. He's keeping out of trouble and keeping his head above water, but only barely.
The difference between me and those two is my father. He met all those criteria later in his life and did his best to impart those values in me. I was already damaged, so it didn't all stick. Even still, I've absorbed the virtues of hard work, tact, thrift, and reliability in a way that has allowed me to carve out a small life where I'm not constantly in fear of going to sleep hungry or without a roof over my head.
My sister got none of that. She's a mess. My one brother got a little of that. He's doing better than her. My youngest brother got more of that than I ever did from a loving, supportive network of family and friends. God willing, he'll do better than I ever will.
I probably won't have children. I'm too old. I found a partner late in life, and she can't have kids due to a medical condition that has rendered her infertile, and I don't really believe there's anyone else out there for me. Even were it possible, I am terrified that I would do it wrong. I don't really have any example of what doing it right looks like.
For people who say "just have kids bro", what do you do when the people like my mother and sister have kids? What do you do to make sure those kids even have a chance? Are they simply meant to fall through the cracks so long as the overall metrics look good? Do you try to disincentivize that from happening in the first place?
On the other side of the coin, what do you do with people like me? I've lived below my means my entire life (no vacations, extensive savings, retirement) so as to not be a burden on others. I've tried to do what good I can in raising my brother, but I have no biological children of my own. Should I be left to rot in my old age, like some of the replies suggest?
What do you do?
birb_cromble
1d ago
I am going to try to be there as much as I can. I know that no matter what happens, I'm going to feel like I haven't done enough, and it's probably true.
He lives three hours away. We've always had a bit of a precarious relationship - he's only been in my home three times in the last twenty years. He doesn't disapprove of my lifestyle, but he doesn't really understand it. There's always been a gulf there that I feel like I've never been able to bridge. I just wish I had more time to keep trying.
birb_cromble
1d ago
My father is still in the hospital. He wasn't doing well after the biopsy so they kept him for observation, only to discover pericardial effusion. They removed 350 ccs of fluid and placed a drain. We are still waiting on results from both the biopsy and the drained fluid.
Every single symptom he has could be explained by an infection, or by metastatic cancer. We're all sitting on a knife edge waiting for the results. He's lost 20 pounds in the last three months.
I had to go back home for work, but I'm hoping to get down again on Friday. I want to see him, and I think he wants to see me, but I'm afraid that I'm going to break down in front of him. He's my father. I don't want to put more of a burden on him that what he has already endured, but I don't know if I'm strong enough.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Civil Engineer II at a national contractor
I work for a company that takes federal contracts. I've been involved in multiple interviews in the last four years.
I can't give you exact numbers, but I can tell you that less than one candidate in 20 who makes it through the HR filter is a white guy.
birb_cromble
2d ago
blistering Scottish accent
What the hell? Tavrosi is supposed to be something like a Thai/Swedish creole.
I guess the elements I liked were the parts where the protagonist had to navigate court politics.
This kind of subplot gets much more pronounced as the series progresses.
birb_cromble
3d ago
It rapidly moves away from Dune. It feels more like CS Lewis than Frank Herbert by the third book, with a little cyberpunk thrown in.
birb_cromble
3d ago
The series as a whole has issues with uneven pacing. The first book in particular is almost entirely setup.
I'd recommend grabbing the book of short stories called Tales of the Sun Eater. It should let you find out if you like the broader setting and writing style without quite so much investment.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I appreciate it, Internet stranger.
I know writing here is just screaming into the void in some ways, but sometimes you need to do that to even know what you're feeling.
birb_cromble
6d ago
My father just got out of a biopsy. It looks like his cancer might be back. They're keeping him for observation overnight, and I'm heading down in the morning if he's physically up for a visit.
I feel adrift. Throughout my life, my father has been one of the only points of stability that I have ever had, and I think he's dying. Every success that I have ever experienced is because I listened to his advice. Even when our relationship has been beset by physical distance, I've always felt that I could rely on him in a way that no one else in my family could offer.
What do you do with a pain so enormous that you can't even feel the edges of it? How can you be there for someone when you don't know what to do?
birb_cromble
6d ago
A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memor
"It's hard so we shouldn't even try" is a pretty common rhetorical tactic that I see on this topic, and I'm going to take this opportunity to address it.
It's a pernicious mindset that argues that there is no value in incremental improvement. It's akin to saying that since you can't shove an entire cheeseburger down your gullet in one bite, you might as well curl up in the fetal position and starve to death. To quote Barack Obama, it's letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good".
The Trump administration, for all its flaws, allegedly managed to deport 605,000 people who were not legally residing in the US in 2025 alone. This does not count individuals who returned to their home country without any state interaction. These 605,000 individuals were deported over the strident objections of institutions all across the country, which attempted to use legal strategies and manufactured public sentiment to stymie those deportations to the fullest extent possible.
You can argue that those 605,000 deportations were bad on the grounds of morality or realpolitik, but it's difficult to argue that they are not happening. You can say that you would like them to happen faster, but you cannot argue that 605,000 is orders of magnitude larger than what had happened from 2020 - 2024.
It's fairly clear that the US has the state capacity to do something here, because they're doing it.
birb_cromble
6d ago
If it makes you feel any better, he could be a virgin and gay.
birb_cromble
7d ago
This has never been a problem before in my life.
Maybe I just need to get fat again.
birb_cromble
7d ago
I do make sure that I do at least 30 minutes of moderate outdoor activity every day unless the rain or snow are too bad, and my basement where I lift or hit the bike sits around 56 degrees this time if year.
If I'm active, I'm fine for about 46 - 60 minutes after I sit down again. Unfortunately I'm a desk jockey for a living, so I have to stay sedentary during the day for longer than I'd like.
birb_cromble
7d ago
You could buy a hacksaw of some kind
For the suppressor, you probably don't even have to go that far. The end caps unscrew, allowing the baffles to come out. At that point, you basically have a tube and some funny washers.
The modal American isn't going to look one individual piece of those and think "NFA item". They're going to think "weird kid trend, like a fidget spinner."
birb_cromble
7d ago
I keep it at 61 during the day and 55 at night. Usually that's fine, but there are some spots where the heat just radiates through the walls
birb_cromble
7d ago
Heard Nassim Taleb say once the biggest mistake people make is working out for too long
My old strength coach used to tell me that you don't get stronger when you lift - you get stronger that night when you're sleeping. There's probably a lot of conceptual overlap there
birb_cromble
7d ago
Does anybody have any good suggestions for staying warm while sedentary indoors? I've lost a lot of weight and the cold is starting to wear on me.
I'm wearing synthetic base layer bottoms, then either a synthetic or wool base layer top. Socks are thick insulated winter socks. On top of that I'm wearing something like a Henley and trousers and a hoodie. I'll frequently wear a neck gaiter and slippers as well.
I'm mostly running into issues with my legs.
birb_cromble
7d ago
He was considering a follow up assassination and/or he wasn't entirely sure what his plans were.
That's pretty straightforward. Thanks
birb_cromble
8d ago
There are several things about Mangione and the events surrounding the killing of Brian Thompson that confuse me. I'm hoping some of you here can provide some serious answers to these questions. I don't necessarily believe in any grand conspiracy theory, but I'm hoping somebody can keep me from ending up believing one.
- If Mangione has a back so bad that he could not fuck, as alleged, how was he speeding away on an e-bike and then taking an unguided tour of God's Country on a bus with shocks that likely haven't been replaced since the Carter administration?
- If Mangione's aim was to evade justice, why did he keep the gun, the suppressor, the bullets, and the manifesto? Getting rid of the bite is trivial - you can literally eat something like that. Getting rid of bullets is easy. Shoving them in a to-go cup and trashing it makes for a search surface so big that police might not find them before they ended up in a landfill. There are a lot of greyhound stops between NYC and Altoona. Getting rid of a suppressor would take a little more work, but should not be difficult; most people probably would not recognize the individual components in a pile of garbage, or tossed into the bushes at a park. The gun would be harder, but without the first three would be weak evidence. "Armed guy with a unibrow" is not particularly unique in rural PA.
- If his goal was instead to get caught and martyr himself, why did he wander all over rural PA first?
I'm still pretty sure Mangione was the shooter, but there are a lot of irregularities in his behavior and the official narrative that make me think they're holding things back from public view.
birb_cromble
8d ago
At the end of the day, the FBI is still full of cops, not woke anarchists. Who cares about how many non-MAGA bombers
That may be true of the rank and file, but the leadership are all political animals, through and through.
Cop or not, would you be willing to detonate your career if the leadership made it clear that the case was a career dead end?
birb_cromble
9d ago
That's funny. My low-key conspiracy on CTE (and brain damage more broadly) is that it's actually far more common than anybody really wants to admit.
Around me, nearly everyone has stories about the normal guy who got a little "funny" over time. A lot of them are veterans or guys who work jobs that officially require hard hats but they don't wear them. I can't rule out things like PTSD or late onset schizophrenia. However, when the arty guy who got out of the army and immediately started working as a framer eventually loses the ability to remember what he had for breakfast or pronounce "penance", I can't help but think something somatic is involved.
birb_cromble
10d ago
Are you reading the original Italian or a translation?
birb_cromble
11d ago
About two years
Back in the early 90s, Aum shinrikyo bought a remote sheep farm in Australia. Not long after, a "seismic event" was recorded in the area, with a few truckers in the area reporting a massive explosion and fireball.
The official explanation was an earthquake. The official explanation ignored that Aum was interested in building a nuke at the time, seemed to be actively mining uranium, and might have actually had the capacity to do so, having recruited some nuclear engineers.
My original intent was the much more personal question. I appreciate that you took the time to answer both.
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